Or he may actually be referring to the question he asked! This isn't a feature we've planned, I don't think we'll have a court room/house. We're thinking if you get caught then there's a bounty on your head, and you're physically caught, you appear in a prison like we've discussed, we will try to cut out the due process side of things like the hearings etc. We are going to have a sort of player-driven tribunal system, but that's not as much for the law-breaker stuff, although that could partly be involved, but it's too early to say. For now I'll say that's not a V1.0 feature.
I would say that for now and for the forseeable future we don't plan on having a weapon big enough to damage or destroy a planet, though that may change down the track. I would say for now at least that the chances of damaging a planet will be pretty much zero, unless we create some sort of in-game event, like a meteor or something, but that'll be more of a game-master style event.
Yes, I agree with that, and part of the design of the FPS is to prevent you from doing that. Not sure if the FPS demo showed off the detail of this, but for example you can't just run around then pull up your gun and fire off an accurate shot, that's why we model fatigue in the game. It's the same idea behind not being accurate at all from the hip, but with iron sights that improves significantly, then again when you're not moving and are rested. We're really trying to model these things to what would actually be the case. Down the road we'll show more stuff that shows this off, while still remaining fun. So there'll be a middle ground between COD style of play and Mil-Sim style play.
I'm not really keen on base achievements that are sort of abstract, so what we're going for is more in-fiction stuff, like there might be a little snow globe from a planet or settlement you've visited, or similar items, like fish to go n your tank, or a little model of an iconic building from Earth etc. So if you become a bad-ass ace in SQ42 you might have a little medal collection to add these things to in the PU. So yes, but more in-fiction stuff.
Yes, your helmet will be customisable. In fact it's less so much your helmet, that's more a display, but the equipment you're carrying dictates what you see in your HUD, much the same way that the equipment you have on board your spaceship will dictate what you can see there as well. The model we're driving towards is you plug different systems in (armour/smart weapons etc). Currently in AC everyone has the same HUD, but in 1.0 (or shortly afterwards) the different ships will have different HUDs, like the Aurora will have a more simple/basic HUD than a more sophisticated combat ship. Auroras might be able to track just one target while the Hornet might track 4. But you can upgrade your radar package etc etc to augment that. Longer term it'll have everything to do with your upgrades that you apply to your ship, but it'll apply to FPS as well. Very customisable is the answer I guess.
If the question is, say, if I'm in a space battle and some players and I board a ship will that be instanced separately then the answer is no. Inside one instance which would include space-ships AND FPS, now we'll have some network optimisations that might separate these scenarios, as we upgrade to AC 2.0 for multicrew ships as well as introducing the FPS module, but they are generally planned to be kept in the same instance.
Definitely the actions of players in the world and economy will affect the AI. I've given the example of a factory needing 10T of ore, either a player or some AI can take that mission, they get attacked by pirates, the ship doesn't make their delivery, the factory doesn't make goods! It might put out another mission with protection, either hiring other NPCs or Players to escort the ship to make sure the 10T or ore gets through. All the AI have cause and reaction stuff that happens, whether that's something a player does or an AI does. SO a players action will have results within the economy. So if you're making a blockade, the economic nodes on the planet might hire more defences along with the original transport mission to help deal with the blockade. OR if you're doing the blockade, you could hire players or AI to help out.
I don't actually know about that, we'll definitely have an AC style simulation that'll happen on say an Idris corvette, but I don't know about the Bengal. We'll probably just want you to figure it out in the PU. Hope that doesn't kill your buzz!
I definitely think there'll be all varieties of "job-boards" which will be able to be generated or hosted by organisations, with the same sort of structure. Kind of like Uber-esque, you can put yourself up there, and get rated on how well you did etc, so that version would be applicapple pirates or "non conformists", and various guilds could have their own boards, which might require indoctrination to be a part of, to have access to on your mobiglass.
It's a little early to answer that question as there is a lot more to do. I don't know, I don't have a brilliant answer, there are a lot of hard parts. Technically, there are a lot of challenges involved with taking a really robust 3D engine like Cryengine and adapting it so that it work in our setting (Much greater scale than FPS usually, and greater fidelity of network traffic handling). The hard part creatively is infusing my feeling/idea/vision of the game across a large team. Since we've been backed to a level that we weren't expecting originally, we've been able to do a lot more of what I'd imagined might happen down the track sooner, but that introduces the challenges of building and growing that team, figuring out how all our groups and studios work together economically and to generate the best content we can. The goal of the game is to not be 2nd best to anything, so we need to always be "ON", never getting complacent. I think I could better answer this question when the game is done, but those are the current ongoing challenges.