Ben Curtis

Yeah, I guess a few of the more recent combat ships have had that sort of visual cue in them. I don't think it's something we're going to do for all ships. It's not like a shift in mentality or anything. It's just a couple of the new ships all felt like it was the right decision to make. I think with the Odin particularly, there was a lot of different references of different contemporary ships that people are familiar with. And one of the things we wanted to do early on was just have things retracted and tucked away.

It's a pretty bold move, because it's a lot more work to make all these retractable.

It's just such a cool moment. It is a moment in itself when they actually deploy and show the fangs, or teeth, as it were.

We don't have an Anvil ship anywhere near this size as the kicking-off point, so it's an opportunity for: what is Big Anvil? What is Anvil today?

I think as well, there's two very clear different visual states: when it's retracted and then when it means business. And obviously when it's retracted, you are limiting your defense capabilities, but that's where things like the automatic turrets come in. And then when it's time to party, that's when everything comes out. And with a ship of this size, we could wave it away with lots of 'it makes it more efficient, everything's tucked away, it makes it a little bit more efficient to fly,' but really it was a visual decision that we made early on with the vehicle, when we started having those very early conversations as to what we wanted the core visuals to be. That was one of them.

Just a cathartic moment, I guess.

Whose catharsis, Alberto? And what are you trying to get out?

No, just to describe a moment of power.

I remember when I first saw that picture in a meeting, I went straight to Alberto's desk and I was like, can I have that right now? And it's now my desktop background, because it's just so sick. I remember when you first showed it to me, I came over to your desk, and I think you talked about how it was kind of hiding in the asteroid belt and then it would pop out. And we talked a little bit about how in the Arctic you see these really large ships that are icebreaker ships. And it's just insane. That's a great picture for it.

And I think that's one of the core things with the concept art as a whole. There's obviously things that we want to show to really show the details of the ship and what that ship's functionality and loadout and everything else is. But then there's also pieces that we want to do that just set the scene and set the atmosphere, and give an idea of the dream of what we're trying to achieve. So, yes, some of these pieces might be more art pieces than... I remember me and you had a big conversation about this. I'm not going to say it was a heated conversation, because it wasn't, but there's things that we wanted to show that really put this in our universe, and then there's things that we wanted to show that were kind of like a little love letter to concept vehicles as a whole, because this being almost the end of an era with concept vehicles, a lot of work went into it. And from a concept artist point of view, delivering those really cinematic shots at the end of a long period of working on it is kind of part of the payoff.

Bay-wise, it is six small... metric small, and one medium hangar. And that's to the actual metrics as well. So it's not like the pads are designed for specific vehicles. Anything that's designated for that metric can fit on them.

Because people had seen the three side doors, so they were like, oh, that's going to have some hangars. But what they won't have seen is the larger hangar.

We'll get to the larger hangar inside, but yes. Six side hangars, three on each side. Big enough for Hornets and stuff, obviously.

Oh, easily.

Cutlasses?

I think the Cutlass is small.

You'll be able to fit Cutlasses in.

It has been quite interesting to see, because from that early image and the hologram that's been above Area 18, people have been able to make assumptions, but I've seen so many questions about how the hangars work, what they're going to do, and someone's like, has it got fly-through hangars? And I'm sat there like... can't say anything, but this is getting me hyped.

Although it looks like it's an entire room, what you're actually seeing there is the walkway that you saw at the top of the hangar. That's the sort of scale we're talking. Like I mentioned, at the bottom of the hangar, there's basically a conveyor belt that connects to the torpedo control at the top. So behind what you're seeing in that image there is the cargo grid, and what you're seeing to the left there, closest to us, is an actual constantly rotating conveyor belt. So if you want to load torpedoes, you take them from the cargo grid and put them on there, and they'll then make their way to the actual torpedo control room where the tube bays actually are, to be taken off and then loaded into the tubes to be fired. So on either side there's a constant rotating thing, so if you need more torpedoes you can just take them straight off the grid, straight onto there, and it goes up to then be manually loaded.

We've mentioned this is a multi-crew ship.

It's definitely a multi-crew ship. If you want this thing to be efficient, then you will need it. Can you do this by yourself? Yes, you'll get a good workout running around the ship.

You'll get 20 shots out of the torpedo tubes, and that's it, instead of it being ready to go again as soon as it's fired. Because at the end of the day, as long as there's someone there feeding it, it can just keep going.

More multi-crew roles than just sitting in a turret, although we do have a lot of turrets.

We have a lot of people just sitting in turrets. We have 23.

Well, me and Alberto were counting them before. We had to keep recounting to make sure we had the right ones.

It turned out we're not good at math.

No, we're terrible at it. We're absolutely atrocious, and we made the damn thing. It was 15 manned and eight remote, and that's just turrets, not to mention all the other things people can do across the ship.

But those remote turrets still have to be operated.

Yeah, they are remote turrets. There's an entire room dedicated to that.

Plus 2,000 just for the elevator.

All right, so there's 6,000 in the hold, and then the elevator, if you want to leave cargo on the elevator, that's another 2,000.

Yeah, and that's an elevator that goes down and up between the medium hangar, at the back of the medium hangar.

Do we have an image of that? Because right now you're telling me there's an elevator that holds as much cargo as the Ironclad.

The elevator is this part with the straps.

So see the chevrons at the back? That's the elevator that goes up and down at the very back of the hangar.

Is that red light at the top the ATC thing you were talking about?

Yes.

See, that's the scale, right? We showed that side shot and it looked like it was an entire room. It's not an entire room. It's literally the catwalk that you're seeing on the left and right.

And when we went into this and got the initial brief, it came out that we were doing an Anvil ship, and it's like, yeah, cool. And then we got the brief and it's like, okay, this we can work with. And then through each point of decision we made, we were always looking at it like, this is our ultimate ship for this purpose. This is what I would class as our end game. Obviously, we need to make it. Obviously, we need to deliver it. So there's got to be compromises somewhere. But we did our best to always look at it and think, right, how do we make the best we can? And this is what we tried to do. And when we get into production, we get to see whether or not we can achieve it. But we put a lot of discussions and decisions into trying to get this thing to be something that we can be proud of.

So I thought that since you're driving a destroyer of worlds, you should be able to dispense it democratically or not. But in some ways, you should be able to communicate to your crew what the plan is.

Yeah, this is the equivalent of our briefing room, but taken to the next level.

It's a bit more lyrical, I guess.

With a ship of this size, it's going to be crewed by a huge group of people. And obviously, people aren't required to be there, because at the end of the day, people are having fun. But it gives orgs and groups a location to meet and gather and discuss what they plan. I think it's safe to say this is an org ship.

This is a ship you leave and you don't come back for a while.

Well, you take your ships to this ship to then go off and play the game.

So front and center, obviously, is the commanding officer, captain, owner; it's the person in charge. Off to one side, they have their head of security. So obviously on a ship of this size, someone needs to be in charge of just making sure the inside of the ship is running the way it's meant to be. And to the left side, obviously, there's an XO to take over when the person who owns or commands the ship needs to go off and do something else. In addition to that, there's a cool little feature that we added to the actual commanding officer's dome. So if you need to have private, confidential conversations, just like how in real life you'd have proper meeting rooms for it, the captain has a way to actually generate one themselves on the bridge to have that conversation away from everyone. Well, it's a reflection of those times when John asked me to come into his office and close the door behind me.

You've literally made the 1960s Get Smart Cone of Silence.

The idea was, if you are captain of this vessel and you need to have a very confidential conversation, but you are in the middle of a battlefield, it needs to happen there and then. You need to be able to make that decision, have that conversation and get on with it.

33. That's bare bones.

How many operator turrets were there? We're talking bare bones, not even working at full efficiency. That's not even saying there's anyone feeding the torpedoes. That's just to man the operator seats. That's the sort of numbers you're talking about.

I feel like when it comes time to balance a ship like this, that's probably the biggest thing. If you can coordinate 33 people together, it's like you deserve to just be, you know, the Norse god of everything.

It's like whenever you have a large group of people playing games together, there needs to be someone who is doing a little bit less of the interaction, but managing everyone and actually getting them all to coordinate. It's like anyone that's ever done raid leading in any sort of MMO. That person absolutely isn't putting out the highest DPS in the group, but they're taking a step back and watching everyone while doing it.

They've literally made the 40-man raid.

Pretty much, yeah.

Yeah, and that's exactly what I was about to reference. It's the 40-man raid experience, but it's you with your org, your friends, going out and having that gameplay for an evening.

And having your capship to run. And the best part is also, you have different specialities, right? Because you need fighter pilots, then you need turret gunners, then you need engineering, then you need the guys that actually coordinate the entire crew, and probably more than one guy at that point, because it's going to be very difficult.

Raid leading is a really unique skill. Whenever you play MMOs, there's only ever a handful of people that are even willing to do it. And they choose to do it because they enjoy doing it. But it's a very unique set of subskills. Anyone who is a raid leader or has ever been in a raid will understand just how different it is as a way to play the game.

It's like the epitome of sandbox emergent gameplay, really. It's a role that doesn't necessarily get put in by the game design teams, but it has to exist.

It's like Raid Leader is your class.

So it does have a docking collar. And then also, it's kind of hard to see, but we added some exterior walkways and channels that you could walk through.

Oh my god, the sense of scale. So when Lee was trying to sort the navigation for the ship, we didn't want it to be too simplified. We want people to be able to go onto the actual exterior, but at the same time, we didn't want loads of issues with the grids and the physics issues that we sometimes encounter. So we ended up trenching all of the exterior walkways, basically behind mesh. But it's grated mesh, so you'll still be exposed to the elements, but you don't have to worry about debris or stray shots hitting you. But it meant that we had, to be blunt, an entire level's worth of navigation for the designer who primarily did a lot of the layout for the floor, Lee.

So you're going to be walking around the exterior of this?

Well, you've got to, because just to maintain some of it, you're going to have to go out and do a lot of the repairs. And there's alternate routes for when the power goes down on the inside, like the staircase on the conning tower. And obviously, it's a full staircase, so you get some sort of idea of just the scale of it. The first time I saw that, I immediately thought of the Midgar tower in Final Fantasy 7, when you have the choice to either run up the giant staircase or go up the lift.

To be blunt, it's for someone who wants to do a lot of cargo. They want a ship that's relatively durable, and they like Drakes that have lots of guns. Because Drake ostensibly market this as a cargo manufacturer, but we all know what Drake tends to get up to, so sometimes the cargo's not as legit as it should be, or maybe the cargo is cargo you've got to deliver pain to other people. But yeah, it sort of caters to that. And externally, at least, I think it's pretty true to the concept. We did make some changes to it. Dan begged for an extra entrance into the top of it.

Yeah, traversal was such a massive thing for this ship versus the concept, I remember. And with the signage as well, I remember when we worked on the Polaris, one of the key pieces of feedback was that the signage wasn't as good as it could be. And obviously we went back and edited that a bit, but with this ship...

We had the stairs around the other way as well, didn't we?

Yeah, the stairs have flipped. I believe the elevator was added as well. When we actually got it in and started running around it, once we actually started putting the blockout together, we made a few changes just so it felt a bit more natural, because there was a lot of back and forth and hard 90 and hard 180 degrees that people were having to do as they were walking around. So we softened a lot of the corners, put 45s in. Like here, the wall got knocked in so this became an open area, which I think really helped differentiate the different decks, which is obviously something that we tried really hard to do. You should always know roughly where you are, and when you're in a modular kit, because this is one of the most modular ships we've ever made...

That's developer modularity. You always have to specify: there's player-facing modularity, and then there's the method in which we make our ships.

Yeah, so when we talk about developer modularity, what we mean is the asset pack that you use to author the vehicles. So let's say you have a wall that's two meters long. It doesn't make sense to model every single wall two times, in the same way that if you were to make a car, you wouldn't 3D model every single wheel again. You'd want to duplicate it. So we have this base layer of modularity of our assets underneath, and then we sit on top of that these extra assets that make each of the spaces feel different. And it was really important for us to make it so no matter where you were stood in the ship, you didn't feel lost and you were able to quickly orient yourself. I get the first time you're in it, it's a big ship, you're not going to know exactly where you're going, but it shouldn't take long to establish that.

A sense of exploration though, isn't it? The first time you enter a ship, you want to explore it. You don't necessarily just want to be like, I go in it and I know exactly what's going on. So I think that's part of the charm of these bigger ships, that you do need to explore them a little bit. Obviously, like you say, having navigation is an important user experience thing that we need to try and improve. Obviously, we've got the minimap as well, which helps a lot with that sort of stuff.

You shouldn't have to rely on that.

You shouldn't have to rely on that. As you're heading towards engineering, even though you're in a corridor, you want to start seeing those engineering-y elements bleeding out into the room, so it doesn't feel too stale. And then when you get up to habitation and stuff, you want things to be a little bit more clad, a little bit more refined.

There are some issues with them. Drives me crazy. I love it when the first time people see ships, all the lighting's broken. It's brilliant. It's broken. It should be being fixed. It infuriates me as much, if not more, than everyone else.

So you're saying it's not a design intent?

There is design intent in there. We lit the Ironclad to be quite moody. I think one of the issues is it's starting in emergency mode, so it's lots of flashing red, which is absolutely not the intent, not what we planned for, unless your ship is in an emergency state. There's lots of light panels around the ship to be able to put it back to how it should be. Unfortunately, that isn't a particularly user-friendly way of getting your ship to look how it was intended to. But yeah, there's a bug. Unfortunately, it didn't make the cut for 4.8, but it should be getting fixed. It's not unique to the Ironclad, though. It's something we're fighting with.

Yeah, it's every ship.

We've been told a couple of times, more than a couple of times, I'm afraid, to make it less cute, because it was really, really cute. We tried to make it as small as possible, like Sam did, obviously. And we had to make a proper effort to change the aesthetic in order to be less cutesy and more pitbull, and less pug, I guess. His concepts were really cute.

The other one had really big eyes. One had floppy ears and stuff. Not even exaggerating, there were parts of it that looked like there were floppy ears. When Chris first saw it, he just sent me a Minions gif, and I'm like, I don't know how to take this. Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? And then we got to the bottom of what he was after and adapted it. And I think it turned out great. I think it's amazing. I think it's super Drake. I think one of my favorite bits is just the size of the engine. Engine versus overall dimensions is perfect for it.

One of the keys of the aesthetic that we wanted for the ship was that you're not riding a ship, you're riding an engine.

It's no different. I've been at this for a long time now. And the short answer is you just can't. These aren't the guys that work on performance and stuff, and their work doesn't get held up by somebody else's work. Not if you can help it, anyway. Sometimes it does. But sometimes it is so ridiculous where these bugs come from and how to fix them. This isn't a terrible bug, but for the two days before release, we couldn't update the TIFF files. We'd submit a new TIFF and it just wouldn't update. That's why there's a map in the show hall that says the Drake Peeble right now. And we're all just looking at it going, we seriously can't fix the Drake Peeble on a map? We know it's there. We can't fix that. There's just other more important things to deal with right now.

It's like Groundhog Day as well, because we had the same one. There's a paint that's gone out. The thumbnail's slightly wrong on it. And we update it, submit it, come the next day, it's still broken, and you check, and all the work's been done. It's just that Groundhog Day moment, and then you realize that it's not actually our fault.

It's all triage. You do the best you can, you try to get as much as you can, but at the end of the day, the only alternative is 2017 and 3.0, and you end up with nothing out for nine months, and we swore after that that we would never do that again.