Samples of line-of-sight velocities and metallicities for hundreds individual red giant branch stars in Milky Way satellite galaxies have been obtained in the recent past thanks to wide-area multi-object spectrographs on 8 m–10 m class telescopes. These samples have greatly improved our knowledge of the large scale metallicity properties and the internal kinematics of the Milky Way satellites, uncovering in several of these systems the presence of multiple stellar components, velocity gradients and allowing more accurate mass determinations.

With the current instrumentation this kind of studies are already challenging at the outskirts of the Local Group, limiting the variety of galaxy types and environments that we can explore at a similar degree of detail.

With its 42 m diameter, the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) represents the project for the largest ground-based optical-infrared telescope in the world. In this contribution I discuss results from simulations I have carried out on the feasibility of intermediate resolution spectroscopic surveys in the near-infrared CaII triplet region for large samples of individual red giant branch stars in galaxies at the outskirts of the Local Group and beyond.