Rewarding team play and voluntary cooperation is far more effective and satisfying than enforcing it. In many games, forcing multicrew (or team play) can take away freedom from players, especially those who prefer to play alone, have more control over their experience or who play without a pre-established schedule When multicrew becomes a rewarded option, players who enjoy working as a team feel valued, while those who prefer to play independently don't feel obligated to do so. In the end, a community of players diverse in play styles always enriches the overall experience Around the Verse - Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Engineering Intelligence What advantages and disadvantages will having an AI crew have over having an all human crew? Tony Zurovec: () I wouldn't say there are clear advantages, I would say the devil is always in the details. What you will have is the opportunity as a player to recruit NPCs to handle specific jobs on your ship but when you go to recruit them that's where the details matter. How much are you willing to pay? That will determine the level of professionalism and quality you'll get from that member. If you want a gunner who is especially effective you will have to pay a higher monthly salary and they will have higher expenses. This same scenario exists with players because some will be better at a particular occupation or skill and others will be more capable. What I think you'll end up seeing is that in many cases players will have a ship that is ideally crewed by 6-8-10 people and the player team will handle the Roles they are best at and they will recruit NPCs to handle the Roles they don't want to do at the skill level they can afford to pay for. Francesco Roccucci: This also depends on your interests. There are players who have an interest in piloting, while others prefer shooting and will hire NPCs for roles they don't like to play so much, but at least these NPCs won't ragequit and log out in the middle of a game! (laughs) It's one of the advantages of AI! (laughs) Tony Zurovec: That's true. Most of the things players will do will depend on their ship and equipment capabilities to do certain things; but how good you are at shooting another player depends on your manual dexterity and that is influenced by the weapon you use (which can have less or more recoil or larger or smaller area of effect). NPCs will have a variety of characteristics that will shape how good they are at dealing with all these things the player has to deal with. Francesco Roccucci: Skills will be very important when deciding if an NPC is good at doing specific jobs. You might have two that are more or less equally good at one type of job, but you need to take care of shields so you put one of them in that position... maybe after a certain amount of questing the NPC will start to get used to their job and their skills will improve as well. Then you'll decide if it's worth paying them less by risking more in the beginning to do easy quests with them that will improve their skills. It will be interesting to see how the player uses strategies to balance hiring NPCs with how they can learn and improve. Tony Zurovec: It's another resource to manage, another way that players can differentiate their play style from other people. How do you do that? Do you take 3 poor quality engineers or 1 very skilled one? There are going to be a multitude of ways for you to customize your play experience based on the choices you make in all of these areas. What do you think will be the largest ship that can be effectively operated with a crew of NPCs? Tony Zurovec: There are no real limitations, because of the distribution of responsibilities. It would be more a matter of larger ships requiring larger crews to operate effectively, so the running costs will be higher (on average) than ships that can be operated with a much smaller crew. Obviously you can modulate that to a certain extent with the quality of crew you're hiring and things like that, but there's no limit imposed by the code and there's no reason for there to be, because of how these tasks and responsibilities are going to be performed. Francesco Roccucci: I think it really all comes from the fact that these individual behaviors are being controlled by a captain and each of these NPCs are doing their job. There's no real limit to how many people can be performing their job. If you have 5 seats controlling 5 different turrets there would only be 5 different people and the coordination of those depends of course on what targets they have, who they're going to target, but it doesn't matter if there are 5, 10 or 15 because the code would scale for that by distributing the targets. Tony Zurovec: But as you get into the higher echelons of the ships you're going to need more experienced commanders because they're going to be, effectively, controlling a larger number of crew members and we'll probably model it in a way that if you have an inexperienced Chief Engineer he's going to start to buckle under pressure and start to make bad decisions when he starts controlling more than 4 or 5 subordinates. It's the same thing that would actually happen in the real world. What kind of experiences do you hope we'll develop with NPCs? Will an NPC react differently to me based on my past actions? If I mess up my relationship with an NPC is there a way to repair it later? Tony Zurovec: It's always been our intention to allow the player to form long-term relationships with all of the NPCs in the game. What this means specifically is that you'll develop what we call Reputation in a number of fields - you'll be known for your acts of piracy, or for your humanitarian missions, or you're very medically oriented and you're dedicated to rescuing people and resolving medical crises etc. Are you renowned for your effectiveness as a transporter of consumer goods because you have a high percentage of successful contracts? So there will be these things that come from your Reputation that characters can go to and see how you react, see if they like you or not, see if they want to offer you the initial quests or the more advanced ones, how much they're willing to pay you... There will also be these relationships that I call "many-to-one" that aren't based on your piracy or transport rating, but rather your individual relationship with that NPC. How they feel about you, if you took a specific quest that they offered you... that will be taken into account in a much more significant way than things that they've heard you did for other Characters in the universe. They'll also take into account the Organizations that you belong to. Do they like that organization? Do they hate it? Are they neutral toward that organization? All of these things come together to create a number of variables within their conversation logic and can affect how they respond to you. And then we'll bring these things back to a neutral point if you stop doing them. In other words, if you are an exceptional carrier with a lot of successes and you haven't done it in a day, week or month, then people will stop gossiping about you and you will see that aspect of your reputation gradually deteriorate and you need to keep doing that kind of thing well to maintain your standing in the community. Francesco Roccucci: Yes. For me these kinds of situations are what we on the AI team try to test as much as we can to have all these functionalities: the relationship variables, the attributes... Then we give these tools to the designers and they can use any of these factors. It can be reputation or what they feel about you to create the answer that offers the logic that they want. Also, we are in a pretty unique position because the game can be constantly updated and these characters can get new answers based on state and all this new content that we will create over time and that will make the relationship more fluid and deeper, gaining details, they will mention things that you have done or events that have happened. And if they have a really good relationship with you they may want to gossip about things and share them with you. We can build this up and always have more and more and more. Tony Zurovec: Yeah, and then there are the things that really matter in terms of what missions they'll give you, whether they'll talk to you or not, and then there are also the more cosmetic things like whether they'll make jokes and be light-hearted with you because they're comfortable with you and reminiscing about the past because you've done three missions for them in the past week. Or they might frown at you and be repulsed by your presence or disgusted by you. It's all these things, all these elements, not just how they react specifically to you, but the more subtle characteristics when you're in their vicinity.