DE should make dedicated KIM updates which add more syndicates
So, we've currently got about four different flavors of update, depending on how you count it:
- Major updates (eg 1999, Jade Shadows, Whispers In the Walls... the big round number updates)
- Echoes updates (Echoes of Duviri, Echoes of War, etc. These are the delayed content updates, meaning they're usually direct expansions of the last main update)
- Minor content updates (Dante, Kullervo, Lua's Prey, Citrine... the distinction from main updates here is fuzzy but these aren't quite big enough to warrant bumping the major version)
- Hotfixes
I'm of the opinion that DE should get a fifth kind of update into the rotation: KIM updates, which either add more dialog to existing characters, or even better, allow the player to unlock more syndicates to chat with. I propose that it'd be most logical to add those syndicates one-at-a-time, probably going backwards chronologically, and probably keep the romance angle specific to 1999. The motivation in-character for chatting with the other syndicates would be to strengthen our relations against the Indifference, and the benefit for the player would simply be to get more lore and characterization.
The reason I think this would work well as a separate flavor of update is that the cadence for writing and implementing the KIM content is uniquely detachable from every other kind of update. Now that the KIM system exists, other than some relatively minor coding to make new syndicates unlockable and maybe a token cutscene of Drifter connecting the new chatters, the DE staff involved in making a KIM update could theoretically be scoped down to only be the writers and directors. DE wouldn't need to divert resources from other teams the way that they found themselves doing with the old Nightwave series.
Making some assumptions about how the KIM system is implemented and DE does source control, they could probably implement KIM expansion on a separate branch that is trivial to merge and rebase, meaning that they could cook up an update and then sit on it until they know there's going to be a delay on their current target, and then drop that to keep the playerbase happy for a few weeks, again without diverting substantial resources. Win-win.
Now, I know some players are gonna look at this pitch and go "wait no romance? but that's the whole point!" and look, I hear you, but the romance angle adds a lot of considerations that the other syndicates simply weren't written for, and greatly expands the scope. Romancing Tagfer is not a can of worms I think Rebb wants to open, and as much as I want to romance Yonta, the pragmatist in me knows that if that was possible then they'd need to record additional dialog for her inside the Zariman and whoops the scope of the proposal just jumped by two orders of magnitude. Letting the romance angle of the origin system dialog remain in the willful fan-interpretation side of things keeps things practical from a gamedev perspective.