Hopefully she's bad ass and memorable and not just a vehicle for agenda pandering.
There will always be an aspect of agenda. Every fictional character is created within a specific cultural framework; desires, background, and conflicts are vehicles for the dominant or subversive ideologies of the era in which the author writes.
It's important that it's not ONLY or JUST that or we step into the territory of didacticism. The character still needs to make independent, believable choices. If they don't and only act as plot devices or walking ideologies it'll distances the player from the narrative's emotional core.
As much as many people want it to be, you can't exclude politics from games when they tell (complex) stories with (complex) characters.
Obviously games like Pong are pretty much apolitical unless you want to make a weird case about the frictional forces between white upper class tennis players playing in front of an all-black background that symbolises the meaningless of said sport and the sheer ugliness of it. (/s)
The whole vengeance genre, for instance, is very much political. In what instances do we tolerate street justice and why? When we don't trust our judicial system? When we think that street justice is quicker and more "just"? When it offers this satisfying feeling of having power over someone? When it shows that we have the moral high ground? Or when we
know that we're acting amorally but still – or because of it – feel good about it?
Such a game wouldn't have the same impact on a player in a society where street justice is just as normal as brushing your teeth.
Personally, I hope, ofc, that there's more to Intergalactic than Neil's personal agenda. But I doubt that Sony finance a hundreds of million dollar project that is ultimately only a thesis game where every character is just a vocaliser of his personal beliefs.
On the other hand, we have Dragon Age The Veilguard where no character was allowed to give any kind of friction apart from the faceless ultra-baddies. And that game wasn't cheap. But not from ND, either.
We just have to see.
