Once the PU is live will we be able to take jobs on board NPC ships? I want to be able to learn as much about the Xi'an, the Vanduul and any other species that are out there as I can, and one of the best ways to do that might be as crew on a ship.asked by Lytspeed
TL;DRRoberts says players will definitely take jobs, and crewing NPC ships as a gunner isn't ruled out but isn't settled, depending on the job board and AI design still being worked out.
Well you'll definitely be able to take jobs in the Persistent Universe. The initial thinking was you would take jobs for people in your ship - they ask you, "oh, we need you to take this many tons of goods from this planet to that planet" - and also you could get hired to be a pilot of a ship. So, I'm not sure whether we're necessarily thinking about letting you sort of be, "okay, I take a job as a gunner on a ship," but it's kind of a natural extension of being a pilot of a ship, so that potentially could probably happen. I mean, NPC AI and intelligence has been set up in a way that you would... you know, you could a player on a ship and the pilot of the ship is an NPC. So that's not ruled out - it would really sort of determine [be determined by] how our mission and job hiring board would happen, and then also how we would control the meta-AI of the NPCs. So, you know, if a ship itself has its own persistence and it goes from planet to planet, back and forth, and it would have a crew, then maybe you could crew it. So that would be also kind of a question that I would be fleshing out with Tony [Zurovec] because we are right now in the middle of doing a lot of the more fun aspects of the high-end AI design for the Persistent Universe.