How will I as a player be able to contribute to that living, breathing universe? Do I have to formally accept jobs in order to progress, or can I just fly around, see the universe and step into interesting situations I encounter as I see fit?
TL;DRPlayers can either formally accept missions from a terminal or NPC, or simply fly around and take or ignore randomly occurring events, in a simulated universe that works even without other players.
Yeah, there are actually two different types of missions that I kind of categorize. One is the type that you formally accept. You go to a TDD or something and you basically say, I'm looking for this type of mission, and you look through the list and you basically sign up, or you talk to an NPC and effectively get the same effect. Then there's all the stuff that's just randomly happening around you as you fly throughout. I've got my ship, I'm cruising through. I mentioned a little bit of this earlier when we were looking at the solar system map: all of these transitory events that can pop up on your radar screen. There's a freighter under attack by pirates. There is a pilot that has gotten into a conflict, he's had to eject from his ship, and he needs to be rescued and basically taken back to a space station. So there's a large amount of stuff that will be made available for you to basically accept or ignore.
Yeah, I mean, there could be no one online but you and it will still be a fully functioning, breathing universe, where NPC actions cause reactions from other NPCs. And so I think the design's pretty good in a way that there will always be interesting content available for people to experience. And it's not really scripted. It's sort of emergent from the actual simulation of the universe.
Yeah, and it kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier in regards to that whole symbiotic relationship, where you may have a player or an NPC, and because of their own personal motivations, they decide to do something. And maybe that goes well, maybe it doesn't. And so now they need help or assistance, or you may be tasked against them. For every mercenary that basically signs up to protect a freighter as an escort and get it safely from point A to point B, there are going to be other players that are going to view that as an opportunity. They're going to look at that freighter loaded with that valuable ore, and that's going to be extraordinarily appealing from their pirate-minded point of view. And so what you've got with such a diverse set of occupational capabilities is a lot of possibilities in regards to aligning players against themselves at times and having NPCs add to the mix.