Tony Zurovec · Director of the Persistent Universe

NPCs are actually going to play a huge role in getting the game where it needs to be. When I say that, I mean if you think about a world where it's just players, you could have a lot of interaction, you could have a lot of combat, you could have guys forming alliances, but the piece of the puzzle you'd be missing is that at any given time, when we're sending you off to do this or you've made a decision to do that, we wouldn't be able to guarantee that the other pieces on the board are set up properly. In other words, you accept a mission to go into deep space and recover a satellite, and maybe the designers have set things up so that, well, on this one you're being paid a very high price to go out and do it. And so we want to make sure that the danger you face for taking that on is appropriate. And if we had to rely on players to always be the counterparty in one of these transactions, we wouldn't be able to do that. Sometimes you'd take on a very lucrative mission and you'd run into nothing and you'd be bored out of your mind and you'd scratch your head and go... Well, it kind of goes back to what I was saying before, where it would feel very arbitrary: sometimes I take on a mission for very little money and I face tons of challenges in order to get that pittance. Other times I take on something that offers me a fortune and I don't run into much of a challenge at all. And so for us to properly balance everything, we need to be able to rely on NPCs to fill in the blanks as necessary. Now, that doesn't mean we can't intelligently pit players against each other at times, and we will absolutely aim to do that. If you're a miner and you're going out here, well, then we're going to have a pirate organization, and they may know where there are a lot of miners doing their business. And when you actually go over to that pirate base, assuming you've got enough reputation that they'll talk to you, et cetera, et cetera, then they may want you to go prove yourself by picking on these poor hapless miners over there. Meanwhile, there are miners on the other side. There will be a lot of this player versus NPC, player versus player, player versus NPC and player. Ultimately, it's all just different colors on the palette with which we're going to be painting these different scenarios.