Can I hire NPCs to crew a ship that I personally will not be on board?
TL;DRZurovec doesn't think sending out unattended, NPC-crewed ships is likely, since it would pull focus from the core game and become a roll of the dice, though much later features might be revisited.
That's another one that's been discussed in the past, as far as you eventually having the capability to have a guy transport something from point A to point B. Would you eventually be able to actually own a shop, et cetera? And at least as of right now, I lean predominantly towards this: if we're going to have this type of detailed world, I want the player to be a part of it. And I'm less interested in trying to turn the game into something completely different. In other words, if you think about that concept and follow it through to its logical conclusion, what it really means is, and there are a lot of games that do this, where this is what I mean by controlling a fleet or something... Citizen or something like that. The only way those types of things really work well is if you have a lot of other bits and pieces of information and levers you can pull, et cetera, on the part of the player, to allow them to do that efficiently, to do that effectively, to actually make that a game. And the problem then becomes that it just starts to defocus us. It pulls us away from where we want the real impact of the game to be. And so I don't think it's likely that you're going to be sending out unattended ships, because then it just becomes a roll of the dice, right? We're literally just saying, 'What's the overall aggression level here?', and you basically flip the switch, and it says, 'Sorry, that guy got destroyed.' And you're like, well, did you have a fun time? And you say, no, I didn't have a fun time at all. And then you would say, well, why wasn't I informed of what the threat level was along there? Okay, so we'll give you that capability. And then you want to be...
Right, it's a whole other beast.
That's exactly it. It very quickly becomes a whole other beast. And I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that this game is already extremely ambitious. And as ambitious as it is, we're also, in a number of different areas, trying to keep the design as focused as possible so that we can get these other features out to the community quickly. Then I would say the second pass is really going to be more refining, balancing, getting everything feeling really good. Once that's all done, much farther down the road, you can come back and say, 'Hey, now that all of that stuff is done, what can we explore now?' And whether it would be something like that, or owning stores, or stuff along those lines, we would basically bring up the next tier of features and figure out which ones were going to be of most interest to the player base, which ones were going to give us the most bang for the buck, and then move forward as appropriate.