I think this would add a lot to the game. It would use the same architecture, in theory, as missions where you don't take your captain or play as one of your crew, which may be a natural evolution of the tech that will allow BOs to be promoted to player captains. (Ie. the models will all be playable and there will theoretically be a skill transfer from NPC to PC.)

This seems to be a requested feature and one perk of it is that it allows BOs to matter more for things like STFs.

Let me just spitball a way to take this further: what if you could leave a BO behind at a social location and cut over to them via a single load screen to do banking and other activities? Or have missions that involve splitting between locations? The BO would be unusable for away teams and ship staffing and would have a saved location that they are "stuck" at until the ship returns there to "beam them back aboard".

This would be fantastic.

There are lots of missions where you do stuff on the ground, then beam up and do space stuff, and then back down.. back to space... etc.

That didn't happen on the shows. The away team went down, and if the ship got into a fight, the officer on duty did the battle, like Scotty did often in TOS, and that episode where LaForge was in command and had to separate the saucer to go back and save the away team.

So missions where you're having to fight without your captains abilities and perhaps whatever BOs you took with you, because your planetside and the 2nd officer is in command (maybe he has some basic abilities you could use in those situations)

I like that. It reminds me of party-splitting in some Final Fantasy games--you might even have to select who stays where, and tailor each team to the duties they'll likely face at that location. It would encourage people to have diverse BOFFs beyond those typically used in away missions and in manning bridge consoles.

I can see where this would be a challenge for them to do in a clean way, though. While switching models should be easy... if the game doesn't remember our action bar layouts, for instance, we'll all be pulling our hair out every transition.

That's kind of a bummer. I hope the wait isn't too long after the release of UGC.

One of the things I want most out of the UGC system, more than making new missions, is to develop new interior maps. Specifically, if there's any way to create your own ship layouts. The pieces we've seen so far in our ship interiors (all interiors, actually) make it seem like they're pretty simple block pieces where the hardest part would be getting them to align where they connect (which shouldn't be that hard if there's some sort of grid system they could align or snap-to). If we could somehow be able to replace wall sections (like change where the door piece is on a room), that would be another big bonus.

Having a "split party" system would force players to utilize more of their reserve bridge officers as well.

DotA is Defense of the Ancients Its more or less a real time strategy resources battle game.

Here's a question along similar lines, if we can do hide and seek, will it be possible to hide active players/npcs on the map?

*Original Poster is Crit by Dev Post for 500,000,000.

DotA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OzWIFX8M-Y

big fan of this, as they feel rather useless

How close is this to something like the NWN 1 toolkit? Can I script actions? Place triggers? Have transit locations? Is it tile based?