The game provides Crew feedback for Jara and Carter in response to various conversational beats. An icon (or set of them) will appear that present the tenor of Crew member reactions (green for positive, red for negative, grey for mixed/neutral). I like to read these reactions to get a feel for how I’m navigating these relationships, but I’m often frustrated by the UX when I do so.
(Note: I’m playing the game on PC (with a controller), but I suspect these behaviors are identical on all platforms)
Here are my suggestions to make gameplay UX more immersive:
The menu should always open to the Your Crew section for the current POV character. (Right now it seems as if it always opens to Jara, even when Carter is the POV character).
The Crew member displayed should further default to the last Crew member to provide feedback (e.g., if you were just talking 1:1 with Chovak as Carter and it resulted in Chovak’s impression of Carter being updated, then Chovak’s impressions should display first).
If multiple Crew impressions were updated as the result of a single action (such as some of Jara’s bridge decisions elicits), then either select the ranking officer’s impression, or just use the current system and start at the first one.
Consider hiding the feedback for the non-POV character altogether. It feels weird to view Jara’s crew impressions when playing Carter and vice versa.
In this way, the game menu will feel like it is aware of what the Player is doing, increasing immersion (“Carter” won’t be viewing “Jara’s” feedback (either at all or, at least, not by default)), decreasing button presses by removing unnecessary menu navigation.
I disagree to hide the crew impressions of the non POV character.
On the contrary, I would want a full dossier page for all NPCs with easy to browse bio summary, instead of showing only the last impression in relation to Carter or Jara.
It should be listed by NPC name and if you select one NPC character, it should show their dossier page with a history of how they develop their opinion about Carter and Jara over time, but also what they suggested or did in order to provoke the players decision.
Examples:
This is of course something someone on the net wrote in a wiki unrelated to the game (apparently not knowing that it could also be completely different depending on player choice), but it should be in game and only show stuff relevant to the game related to the players choice, in the typical LCARS interface.
Nice idea! I would certainly like to see a Dossier page as an extra feature, perhaps as a drill-down on each NPC regardless of which POV character you’re playing.
To that end, I think we can have a “both/and” experience, rather than “either/or”.
My suggestion to hide the non-POV-character reactions will focus the experience for the player by reinforcing their awareness of which role they are currently playing. It’s not intended to detract from the “metagaming” or “complete narrative” aspects, which your Dossier idea heightens.
By adding NPC dossiers as a separate page (which is readily accessible from either POV character’s menu) we can satisfy both kinds of players.
Imagine how much simpler it will be if there is just one page of reactions (the one for the current POV character) but then each NPC has a button on their profile that will drill down into their full Dossier (including all the reactions from both characters in chronological order): simple, elegant, and as detailed as you could want, without forcing all that extra detail on the player when what they usually want is clarity about how that latest reaction changed their relational stance with a given NPC or set of NPCs…