NPC ship variation

[The Dweller]

There is a criminal lack of variation among NPC ships. As best as I can recall from my last login in 490 BCE, only the ATR, Rescue and PP assassin ships had unique paintjobs. Every other ship uses a bland dull default paintjob. When running the mission "Eliminate criminal: Braben" you end up fighting yet another default Viper and not a chrome gold Cutter with 50 extra wings and antennas sticking out all over the place.

My fingers are getting numb from pressing "next page" browsing all these ship kits and paintjobs we can buy for A*X. Why not make NPCs sport them too? They would also get to advertise them this way.

Has this ever been brought up? Wasn´t there also a line in the recent patch notes that the NPC Powerplay agents get a new look for their ships?

[Agony_Aunt]

Yeah, they mainly have the default layout. On occasion, they do have different paint jobs though. Saw a green Type 6 the other day.

[The Dweller]

Originally posted by Agony_Aunt:

Yeah, they mainly have the default layout. On occasion, they do have different paint jobs though. Saw a green Type 6 the other day.

Was there any context to this? I can´t recall a single civilian ship daring to venture outside these boundaries although "green Type-6" somehow rings the bell. Must´ve been an emergency biowaste collector somewhere around Deciat.

Special-purpose vessels with distinct paintjobs are really cool. Average-Joe ships could use some paint and kits, too. Forza Horizon does this with AI opponents by turning them into a decoy of a real player and applying whatever paintjob that player had on their car to the AI driver car (provided any such paintjob had been applied by the player to their version of the car model in question; otherwise, it comes in one of the default colours).