I'm not sure they actually need to make it very fun for a long time per say, it feel like it should quickly become something your AI crew would do for you.
One can only hope that they will listen to people who actually like fun when they will get feedback on it. ( yup I'm thinking about how how Frontier tend to do the opposite )
Frontier's game design is a trainwreck of its own. But at least they're already at the point of having such a thing, even though I'd seriously like to ask their designers what they were even thinking on quite the number of topics.
You seriously hope that "the AI" will do the manual loading for you, when you've grown tired of it after the first couple of times?
First: What is the "AI"? Is it an actual AI routine, controlling
actual NPC characters, who manually load the ship? If so, who's to program this AI? The people who haven't gotten a non-hostile NPC with any form of non-scripted behaviour into the relased prototypes after five years? The people who haven't developed their prototype's networking into a state where it would even support the actual game in a MMO capacity after five years? The people who haven't managed to release the basic cargo mechanic as part of their prototype within five years? The people who, since 2014, haven't managed to send their prototype builds through a delta patcher instead of requiring you to download some 30GB for each and every update?
That's only the feasibilty concerns from a technical POV based on what they delivered so far within the current timeframe. Next are game design concerns: What does waiting for AI controlled NPCs even improve, when they take +/- just as long to load the cargo hold as you would manually? A twiddling-your-thumbs-and-watching-netflix game mechanic? I thought you
disliked how Elite's game design goes about things?
What's even the reasoning for such an approach? Developing a technically demanding game mechanic for manual cargo loading, only to then have to develop a
loading-AI as a subsequent requirement, because players will arguably not want to spend too much time on the manual cargo loading mechanic you already spend many person days to implement?
Or does "AI" just stand for a menu, that let's you select the type and amount of cargo, press a button and it'll automatically and instantly do the Tetris playing for you, putting each piece into a place in the cargo hold? Maybe with a diagram, where you can manually drag and drop your cargo around? Much more reasonable from a game mechanics PoV, less costly in terms of development. But then, "AI" is a poorly chosen and very fuzzy buzzword to describe something else.
Just throwing the term "AI" at a potential game design issue however, is a very naive approach. Developing a feature doesn't work that way. And very unfortunately, what comes out of CIG so far, is hardly a more tightly specified design doc than "Subsumption AI is gonna handle it. Here, watch a 30 second clip of one our our high res assets ponderously approaching another asset. Here's some rousing music to go with it."
Terrific.
They'll put all of this into a released game before 2030? With their current track record of timely delivering a stable, well optimized software that sports the features they've promised, from the start, off handedly throughout dozens of hours of TftC and during their other talk shows and during all of their convention talks?
