Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Alpha 3.2 Feature Survey w/ Chris Roberts

How are we doing? Pretty good. So this is the first of our quarterly releases. And I have to say that things are tracking really well. I know there was a fair amount of skepticism out there. But we're pretty confident that we're going to make the 3.1 release. Our burndown tracks exactly to the date we're looking for and everything. Of course, there's always a couple of last-minute things that could have just messed it up there, but no, we're feeling good. I think we're going to have a strong PTU release today. We'll do another one tomorrow. We've put a lot of work into the telemetry. We've still got more work to do, but in terms of us being able to look at the performance both on servers and on clients and also on clients out in the wild. So some of our Evocati members can do a capture and then we can look at exactly what was happening on their machine. And it's really useful because for us in our QA environment, we don't see a lot of the stuff that happens out in the wild. We've got a pretty big QA department, it's just under 70 people. Still, they're not going to do the same thing that thousands of backers do and all the crazy stuff. And so having the data that we can just automatically capture. So we've put stuff in that if the server starts to dip below a certain frame rate, it automatically just starts capturing a few seconds of the performance. And then we can take a look and see where the time has been spent in the routines. The same on the clients. So that's helping a lot. We're building some more telemetry in terms of various sort of things that people do so we can see what people are doing in the game and how it's working. So that's been sort of a behind-the-scenes effort that we've been working on. And I think that's helping with our ongoing performance enhancements. So 3.1 is definitely performing better than 3.0 and that's going to continue on as we work on some of our more long-term things we've talked about, which the object container streaming will help with memory. We've got asynchronous spawning that we're getting closer to have working properly. It's quite complicated to get working because the game was just built to create things on the main thread. People program things assuming they can touch anything at any one time, which you can't do when you're on multiple threads. And it's such a big code base that it requires a lot to retrofit it or change things out, refactor them to be a new thing. But all those things will make... so for instance, you play and some AI spawn in right now, there'll be a hitch because they have to load in and there's a stall on the main thread until everything's loaded in. But long term, that will go away because they'll load in the background, when they're ready the main thread will be notified, and then bam, they'll be turned on. So we're putting all these things in place. So I'm feeling really quite good about it. We've added some new features like the service beacon stuff. There's been a lot of UI improvement and polish I think people have noted, and little things like the procedural ground... I've noticed quite a few people posting videos and liking that, which is good. And we've tried to work in some things to improve interdiction and stuff like that. And so generally, it's going pretty well. It'll be our first one. And I know we've got to earn the belief or the trust of everyone. We say, okay, we're doing quarterlies. We actually do quarterlies. So this one will be a good step. The next one will be a good step. So it's going good.

But one of the reasons why we're doing this show here, because the best way to do this is, as we've planned out a roadmap, but obviously you check in where you are when you get your release out and say, okay, this is what we're going to do for 3.2. This is what we're going to do for 3.3, 3.4. Are there things that we want to fix or change that we didn't foresee when we first did this roadmap? Are there things that we want to address for quality of life or things we could do in the game to make the gameplay right now feel better? Because ultimately, the amount of functionality that we have actually in the game right now, if it all works together and works well, is more than a lot of released games. I mean, Sea of Thieves just came out and we have more variety of missions, a hell of a lot more ships, a bunch more stuff that you can do. And a lot more area to play in. But they spent a lot of time polishing some of their basic stuff. I know people complain that they still want more features in that because I think that's generally gamers, like, I want more, I want more all the time. But we've been talking internally about, Star Citizen is not a sprint. It's a marathon. Yeah, it's more than a marathon. It's like a walk around the world. But yeah, there's definitely things in terms of the gameplay, if we work on and fix, performance is obviously one, but just being able to play with your friends and get together easily with some of the stuff that comes with the multi-crew ships that we haven't finished off properly yet. I think the base gameplay can be a lot of fun because it's kind of a fun sandbox. So we've been discussing maybe, or not maybe, definitely putting a little more focus on some of the near-term features or improvement of the features, as opposed to always focusing on the next big feature we're trying to get in. Because if you looked at 3.0, we put a vast amount of things into it, but we didn't spend enough time making sure the base stuff was working well. So what you had was a whole bunch of new features, but a lot of stuff that used to work in 2.6 or before that ended up not being as good or being broken. And so we've been fixing a bunch of that in 3.1, but we've still got more to do. So we've got things that we want to address in how it feels when you fly around. The IFCS and the flight model still has a bunch of work we want to do, the feel of FPS moving around, again, same stuff. So it's a long-term slog. So right now, we're taking a look at it and going, okay, what for 3.2 that we didn't foresee that maybe we want to spend some time working on? And then just reassess some of the stuff that we're doing for 3.2 and then maybe move a couple of the bigger things off to 3.3 so we have more time to do some sort of quality of life or kind of fixes or improvements to systems right now. So that's the phase we're at. This is what we'll do every single... we sort of do it as we're coming up to the release. We're assessing it just to make sure all the teams are aligned. Our new production process is working really well. We've factored into a much more team-based agile scrum and our velocity in terms of fixes and resolving issues is much, much better. I think we've resolved something like 8,000 during 3.1. And I think it was like 15,000 for the whole of 3.0, which was basically a year. And our velocity is 120 issues resolved a day versus the 30 or even 20 that we had during 3.0. So I think the teams working together, because we really work to try to put everyone together, not like, here's the programmers, here's the designers. It's like, okay, you're vehicle feature team one, you're vehicle feature team two, you're the gameplay team, and you've got the designers and the engineers and the artists, and we're actually putting them all together and we're trying to co-locate people so the teams are oriented in the various studios. We're not having them spread between time zones as much as we used to. And I think it's really helped in the turnaround and also the energy and the morale of the team. So generally, it's early days, but we're feeling pretty good about the velocity and trajectory we're going to do.

So that's why we're sitting here, and the discussion I had with my brother Erin, who was just out here, unfortunately got on a plane yesterday evening, otherwise I would have put him in the seat instead of me, is that we were talking about, yeah, look, we really should spend some time on the quality of life issues. Perhaps push back a couple of the bigger feature stuff so we can do that. But if we're doing that, why don't we ask you guys, why don't we see what's interesting to you? Because for us, we have our ideas, but there's hundreds of thousands of you guys out there. And I think in terms of what is more interesting, what are the things that you want to do? I still remember back in the very early days when we did our survey of what profession people would be interested in. And of course, I'm just always thinking, well, because most space sim games have been very combat oriented, so you're thinking, okay, it's being a pirate or a mercenary or maybe even a trader. But I think it was something like 70% of the people wanted to be explorers, right? So that was a surprise, but that's cool. And then we're like, okay, well, we need to put gameplay in to allow you to do that, and it did affect where we went. We went a different way than say something like Elite or No Man's Sky where they procedurally did everything, but one of the reasons why we went with the procedural tech to build the worlds to the level of detail we did was we thought that micro exploring, that idea of making landfall on a planet and discovering the mountain or the lake or really getting into the detail, would be something that would be great. So we're still working towards realizing that, but you can already see it with the three moons that we have around Crusader and Delamar, and in our upcoming releases, it's obviously going to get bigger and wider, but that sort of affected it because we were thinking about, okay, we want people to be tactile and get out there and explore. And so, yeah, we thought it would be really useful to have a discussion about things that we've identified that we want to improve for the immediate experience and then also get some feedback on the bigger long-term professions. What's interesting or what's the most important to you guys. Mining has already been in progress. It started at the beginning of this year. I know in our roadmap it says scheduled but it's actually been in progress. That should be changing in the next roadmap. I don't know if it'll be this Friday, but the one afterwards. But we've been working on that. That has a lot of infrastructure issues in terms of making sure the resources are mapped on the planets and we can persist them across instances and we can generate it and handle all the stuff. So we're making very good progress on that. And I think it's going to be a very cool feature that people will be really happy with. So that's definitely 3.2. But in terms of some of the other ones, we would like to know priorities, because if we're going to add some stuff to 3.2, it's a zero-sum game, we're going to have to shift some other stuff out. So what's more interesting? Is repair more interesting than salvage? Is it more interesting than refueling? Those kind of things. So that's the point of this sitting here.

Well, it's you and your friends, you're heading to a destination, and first of all, you need to share the destination and also everyone jumps at the same time. So when you're traveling there and someone gets interdicted, you get pulled out all at the same time. I think for multiplayer gameplay or playing with your friends it's super important. It's been on our horizon, we've discussed it, we've implemented elements of it, but we haven't managed to finish it off because there's always been some big new massive shiny thing that we're trying to do. You'll see on a couple of things here we said: getting in with your friends, playing together, doing stuff together. How do we make that simpler, easier? Because we have elements, little bits of it, but it's not nearly as friendly or as polished as it can be. It's all halfway solutions that we've said, well, this is a temporary thing. When we have the new shiny thing, it will be great. So now is the time to say, okay, let's not keep deferring this, right? And this is actually something that I've in general made a direction this year, which is, one of the problems that we have in Star Citizen is that we constantly are thinking about when all this is done, it's all projecting into the future. Well, when we have all this, it'll be great, right? But we basically are operating a live game, as you said, right now. People are playing. We have people playing hundreds, thousands of hours even in some cases. And they've got a lot of patience. I mean, you really do, because there's a bunch of issues and quality of life things. Shout out to our streamers. And so, yeah, it's like, let's recognize what we have, which is a live game. Make sure the live experience is as good as possible, and then we're adding on all this extra functionality and content as we go. But don't forget, I think with 3.0 we rushed to put so much stuff in that I think we did ourselves a disservice and essentially released something that was lacking polish or had broken features, and I don't really want to be doing that going forward. And so one of the things that we were looking at is, in terms of chatting with your friends or getting together with them and all joining together in the same place and making that easy and making that accessible, or going to places together like the quantum linking, they're all things that we should spend some time on to make sure it's well and polished. And a lot of times on our features, we put the base stuff in and then that team's scheduled to do some new feature. But of course, there's always bug fixing and polish and then maybe enhancements in the features, or you see people use it and you go, oh, we can make that better. Well, that all takes time and you have to do it. So where's that time going to come from for the teams? And so that's kind of what we're focusing on.

I do want to mention, because I'm looking at the chat while we're talking, the vote is not do this or this. These are all features that are going to go into Star Citizen.

Yeah. So to be totally clear, these are all things we are definitely going to do. What we're interested in knowing is what's the most important things. Priorities. That helps make us priorities. We're actually going to try to do all this stuff and maybe get it all done for 3.2. But we have to have a priority list because we will have to at some point make a call. If something's running behind, something would have to get pushed. And so what we're really interested in is what are the most important things for you guys, because that really helps us in terms of ordering what our teams work on first. Or if there's a conflict between two things, who wins?

Well, okay. Well, first of all, even in 3.1, we've done some interdiction improvements to make sure that when you get interdicted, the AI are close. So it's not like someone's 10 or 8 kilometers away, because in 3.0, it was just a fixed number. And the fixed number was determined by the biggest thing, which was the scenario that I think had some asteroids. And so it had to be a big distance. So now the distances and the arrangement of the ships is more dependent on the kind of scenario you're getting pulled out into. And we've always planned to have a quantum jammer, which was going to be an item which could either be on a ship or it can be a sort of mine or a buoy that you could put out. And so we actually implemented that for AI. So the AI ships in 3.1 that interdict you, one of the ships will have this item. And I think it's not in the PTU right now, but it will be by the time hopefully we release next week. You should be able to see which one is actually jamming, and you have to disable it or destroy it, and then you'll be able to jump again, right? Or get far enough away from the jamming signal to be able to do quantum again. So with the interdiction improvements, we need to finish off the item functionality, make it available to players to equip the component, or deploy or launch a buoy. So in 3.1, we don't have the buoy. We would have the buoy in 3.2. We have a very simple version of the component, the item, in 3.1. It would be a much more sophisticated one that pulls more power. Obviously if you got the power, you could see maybe the EM signal of the ship would be much greater, and you'd be able to go, okay, that's the one that's jamming my ability to use quantum. And then we're also going to enable it so players then can deploy this and pull other players or AI out. And so that's going to be kind of fun because, if I'm a pirate, I can deploy it and maybe I don't catch players, but I can catch AI-generated cargo haulers. Attack them or go and take their cargo. And then we have another feature that would tie into this, which I think is the service beacon thing, which ties into another one we're talking about, but we'll also want to make AI ships be able to also do our service beacon responses. So you could have a nice feedback loop where a player puts a quantum buoy out, captures an AI cargo hauler, who then generates a service beacon help request that brings in another player or another AI. And that's a core gameplay loop. I mean, if you play Freelancer or you play Privateer, the whole point is there has to be some risk or challenge to get to locations. And obviously in more dangerous areas, you get paid more for your cargo or whatever, but then there's a higher chance of being interdicted or attacked. And so we need to make that gameplay loop of going from point A to point B challenging, right, but not annoying. So in 3.0, definitely annoying. 3.1, I think it'll be better. And 3.2 is, again, focusing on that core, because that is the core gameplay loop in a lot of space sim games and space trading games.

So it's not just new tech for the interdiction. It's actually an increased variety in the type of scenarios.

Yeah, no, definitely. So again, we'll be building more fluid scenarios, making them more emergent, and there's a feedback loop between what AI and players do. And so I think it would make the world just feel more alive and more things going on.

Well, we already have service beacon work on the 3.2 roadmap. So what we're talking about is some of the stuff we did, but also, like I mentioned, AI being able to also generate service beacon requests, which creates a really nice feedback loop. In general, I think we've decided that we need to spend a little more time on the usability and focus. The first use of service beacon will be in 3.1, which was nice. We moved it up from 3.2 into 3.1, so I know everyone had a lot of teeth gnashing when bind culling went out of 3.1, but the service beacon stuff came in, which I think is going to add a little bit of gameplay, but it really is going to come alive more in 3.2, and will include things like the ability to be able to rate: yes, this one's a reliable service beacon person, or no, they're a bit sketchy.

The service beacon system is new for 3.1, and even though 3.1's only been in PTU for a couple days, many backers won't have experienced it as a system yet.

And I think in some of the past releases, it wasn't functional. So I'd have to check. I think in the PTU release that will be happening today, people should be able to be using the service beacon. But yeah, it's a very, very new thing. But it's kind of cool because it's basically the first stage of player-generated missions, and the whole service beacon system is basically a player contract manager. It's like, hey, I need you to do this job, whether it's help me, I'm under attack, or it's take me from point A to point B, or escort me from point A to point B, or eventually take out this person, or whatever it would be. This is how players will enter into contracts with other players, put jobs and missions out. Also probably how they'll be able to, like, you can hire some people to help you do this big run, which you'll make a bunch of money on. And then some of your costs go to the people you had to hire to help you to do the run. And so the service beacon is the infrastructure that allows that. And we're building on top of it. And it's very critical, I think, for the player interaction, we're talking about you with your friends or interacting with other players, achieving stuff either together in cooperation or in some cases you could be in opposition. But I think very much a good focus of Star Citizen is the idea of you and your friends going and doing stuff together. Whether it's against AI or it's against players, it's kind of up to you. But I think our big focus is, yes, this is an online game. How can me and my friends go and have fun together?

I'm just imagining that somebody is going to end up creating a Star Citizen Yelp to start reviewing people in service.

Well, that's actually the idea. So the service beacon is going to have that. So it's going to have the equivalent of the Yelp ratings or the Uber ratings, where you can rate both the person that's responding, taking the contract, and the person that's giving the contract. So it'll help to have that: if someone basically does a honeypot deal, you give them a zero-star or one-star rating, and you see this person who's offering a contract and their rating's one, versus someone offering a contract whose rating is five, you're going to take the person that has a five rating.

Yeah, so we've always had a plan, and this was true in Privateer or things like Freelancer, that you have non-player organizations or guilds, like the classic ones of the Merchant Guild or the Mercenary Guild. And so we have those, and we also want to have a level of associations, like the Wayfarers Club, almost like AAA in space. And like you have here in America with AAA, they have services that come out and they'll tow you or whatever. And also if you go to certain places, they'll give you discounts, because they pre-negotiate a discount. And so we actually want to start to put the infrastructure in for the various guilds and associations. So in 3.2, it will be the very beginning of that. But as we go through, we'd build much more of it up. And so what you would do is you would essentially earn some money or pay with your UEC to be a member of this guild that you would pay your dues to. But you get benefits for it, like for instance, jobs or missions that maybe you couldn't get somewhere else, or you could get help in a way that you wouldn't normally get it. Or you get discounts in areas. That's sort of what we were talking about for the Wayfarers Club. So it's the beginning of that. And there will definitely be quite a lot of these that would be focused on different... like I'm sure there'll be a salvagers organization. Various different ones in the world that you can... there's an ex-military one you could join or whatever it would be. So we want to start to put that in to lay that infrastructure, because it's quite important for, I think, the long-term gameplay.

So yeah, that stuff we were talking about in the Aegis Vulcan promotion wasn't just flavor copy.

Yeah, nothing's just flavor copy. If you read it in the fiction stuff, we're usually thinking that at some point that would actually exist in the world. That's the whole point. So the writers do really nice fiction stuff, but a lot of that fiction stuff is specifically seeding what we want to do long term. So don't just view it as fiction. It is highlighting where the game will go.

Yeah, well, I think this has been a massive complaint and feedback for a long time. And we've always been sort of, yeah, yeah, when we get the full Spectrum integration, then we'll get it all. And basically what we've said was, look, we've just got to focus some time on this now. Because, yeah, you want to get in with your friends and you want to get in with your org mates or whoever you want to do it with, you need to have an easy way to do it. And right now it's not so easy at all. So we want to spend some actual time on our back end and on our front end side to make that process easier, and be the beginnings of what it ultimately will be. Because, yeah, let's make it easy. Too many people tell me, it would be really easy, I would like it much more if I could only get in with my friends reliably.

Yeah, well, we've talked a long time, and one of the reasons why we did the whole Spectrum setup on the platform is the idea that we're going to unify the friends list and all the rest of the stuff that you'll make on the platform side, and it can also be replicated down on the game side so you don't have to maintain parallel lists. But basically the chat feature in the game right now is the chat that was in from the very beginning. We spent no time on it other than just fixing it if it breaks in the game. How does that work with your list of friends or groups? And so again, along with getting together with your friends, getting into the game, having an ability to chat with them in your various setups or groups is super important. And it's also a precursor to the FOIP stuff that's going to come in with 3.3. So we want to get it in there and make that easy. Because right now, everyone's in a general chat, which is cool. And even that's still, like I said, the implementation of chat that we had before we even did the PU.

Yeah, well, so one of the big things is that obviously we want to be selling everything in game: ships, ship weapons, ship components, all the rest of it. At the moment in the game, because we've got a limited amount of real estate and we don't have the big landing zones in, we don't have the big planets in yet, we don't have places to sell ship weapons or ships or any of that stuff, because we don't have stores set up for them and we don't have the room for it. Now we will have physical big stores and displays as the landing zones come in and all the rest of the stuff. But we haven't done the shopping kiosk functionality, which will allow you to have a kiosk in the shop, and you could go through a bunch of ship weapons or even the buggy or something, and you can see it there and say, okay, I'll buy that, and then it can be delivered to you. But it doesn't need to be displayed in the store. So it would give us the ability to allow you to buy a wider variety of items. Basically we want to get rid of the Voyager Direct store online on the platform. The goal is that's going away and all those items you buy in the game. But we can't do that until we can have a location to sell them in. And up until now, that's sort of been waiting for the landing locations. But really, if we can get some of the kiosk stuff in, we can make that move sooner. And I think it would be good, because one of the things we want to do is the ability to upgrade, and it'll come in one of the later features we have here. We want to make the components of your ship much more meaningful. This whole Item 2.0 that we've talked about, there's a whole infrastructure for it, but we've got to finish it off properly for you to really realize and understand and see the benefits of it, and one of the components of that is being able to buy bigger and better stuff. And so the shopping kiosk will allow that to happen sooner rather than later, because otherwise we're kind of bound by real estate, and then we're bound by when we roll in the planets and the other locations, which are kind of dependent on object container streaming et cetera. So we think that's a good way to get some of this possibility of gameplay in the game sooner rather than later.

I would say this is probably the biggest missing element of the core gameplay mechanic of venturing around in space, is that we haven't finished... so we have the infrastructure for Item 2.0 and a lot of the bits are there, but not enough of the stuff's in there that the user can realize it. So we already had wear and tear in the 3.2 roadmap, so wear and tear is definitely part of this, but really where it comes in is the effect of, say for instance, I'm running my engines, my thrusters hot, right? I'm overpowering them, I'm putting more power to them so I can boost them, so I can turn a bit. For that time, I'm turning them, but they're running hot. So as they're running hot, they're becoming overheated. As they're becoming overheated, there's a chance that they may misfire or they could even have a critical failure. The more they're overheating, the faster the wear increases. Wear also affects your chance of misfire and overheating. Because you need to have downsides to doing things, right? So everything's a trade-off, right? So what we don't really have that's that effective in the game right now is, you running your ship should have to be making conscious choices. Am I putting my power to the shields because I'm in combat, but then I'm not able to put as much power to my guns so I can't recharge them as quickly, or I can't put as much power to my thrusters to superheat the plasma to eject the gases to thrust me around. And so what we want to do is focus much more on making that whole holistic aspect work. That also has the issues, the downside, the wear, that then means that that item, as it gets older or gets worn and you're not fixing it up... if you've got a damaged item and you're not repairing it, the chance that it can misfire or just have a critical failure is much higher, right? So what we want you to do is, you've got your ship, you've been out there, you're in a fight, you've got to take it back, you're going to have to repair it, make sure that equipment's in good shape. It's like if you don't do an overhaul of your jet engine every so many hours of operation, you could quite likely fall out of the sky in the real world. Well, we want you to have those same sort of calls. And if you overuse it... in the real world, you thrash your car all the time, on your brakes all the time. Well, at some point, your brakes are going to fail if you don't replace them, right? So we need to make sure that that whole loop is in there and it has effects and players can feel it. And so there isn't any case where one player can just say, oh, yeah, well, it doesn't matter. I've got so much power. Everything's powered and everything works perfectly. We want a sort of trade-off in the ships, even big expensive ships, that you have to make decisions on your resources. Am I doing this or am I doing that? And there's always a pro and a con for both of them. And then also having Item 2.0 finished up properly means that the multi-crew behavior that you can do is much more. So one of the things in, say, a Constellation versus a Hornet is the crew could run around and be fixing up components as they're failing, and that would enable you to last longer in a fight or out in space. So if you're getting hits on your shield and your power plant is putting out energy to try and keep the shields up, that's a strain on your power plant. The power plant would have, at some point, a misfire opportunity. If it misfires, one of the fuel rods in the power plant goes. Power plant now has, say, four fuel rods, so now it goes to 75% power instead of 100% power. As a player, you could go and change the subcomponent of the fuel rod out on it and then get it back to 100%, right? And the same for other items; they could have fuses and stuff. And so we have these subcomponents. We've got the art even for them. But having that whole loop hooked up, you can go and do stuff. I mentioned Sea of Thieves at the top, and it has some much smaller stuff. You're in a fight and a cannonball comes into your ship and there's a hole in your ship, and if you don't put a plank on it and you don't bail out the water... I mean, that's cool, right? Someone's there driving the ship. Someone's down trying to bail out the water. Someone's firing the cannons. And that's what we've had as our design from day one, back in 2012 and '13. And I sort of feel like we need to finish it off properly instead of talking about it, and get it done. So that was a big drive for me, because I think it will provide a vast amount of fun and gameplay and challenges and trade-offs and discussion for everyone out there.

Yeah, we have ship combat. No, it's basically, we have all these great space wrecks, but unless there's some other player there waiting to ambush you, there's not a lot of a challenge in it. So the idea has always been that some of these wrecks could have some outlaws or pirates waiting to ambush you. And it creates unknown risk, challenge, and it's also just kind of fun for us to use another part of our... we've got a very full-featured FPS game inside of our full-featured flying-around-in-space game. And you don't really have an opportunity to use it that much outside of playing other players. And ultimately, the goal in the Star Citizen universe is to be 90% kind of AI environment, 10% players, and the problem with player versus player stuff is that there's always a loser in that case that's a player, right? So there's someone that's pissed off, but AI don't get pissed off when they get shot in the face. They don't get pissed off when they get blown up in space. And so I think it's very important to have a lot of AI or environment encounters, whether it's in space or down on the ground. So as a player, even not that great, I can, like, yeah, I took that pirate out, or yeah, I'm a badass, right? And I may not be nearly as good of a pilot as the guy that's obsessively or the girl that's obsessively playing 30 hours a week and can snipe me at a kilometre or whatever. But it allows people to have fun because combat to a certain extent is one of the core mechanics. And so I think we're missing in the PU the ground combat aspect or shipboard combat aspect, and so this is the first aspect of it, and obviously it's definitely always been on our plans, but we kind of want to try to make a bit of a push for it just to have some challenge and variety when you're down on these moons or these large amounts of area that we've created for you to explore. Let's have some challenges, let's have some risks down there rather than just looking at the sunset or the sunrise.

Yeah, I don't hate PvP. I just think what you want to do is have a game that allows for both and allows people to choose what they're more interested in. I mean, that's the service beacon stuff and all the rest of stuff. And so I'm hoping that we put a structure together, and the way that we're doing it, it will allow for both types of play. I kind of view what's going to happen with PvP is it's going to be more player organization driven, and they'll be fighting over resources on this vast amount of land that we're now creating with these very detailed procedural systems. So I sort of view you're going to have individual players that are playing lone wolf style, small groups of friends doing stuff together cooperatively. I could see them being more PvE focused, like let's go and adventure and do stuff and we have fun and get attacked by AI pirates or whatever it would be. And then the bigger orgs on a player basis are fighting over resources and various aspects, a sort of player PvP. But it allows people to choose what they want. And a smaller group could join a larger player group and be part of this bigger battle, or org versus org. So I think we can have all those in the game. And I'd like to do it in an organic, holistic way. So I don't want people to only be in a PvP server or only be in a PvE server. I want it to be: this is the world, and it's up to you to play and choose your challenges.

Yeah. So we've actually, we don't have it on the list here, but we've talked about trying to get some racing stuff in for 3.2 if we can make it. Definitely in for 3.3. The other thing, which is sort of going to the playing of now in the game, is that we've decided that we need to make sure that we give love to Arena Commander, we give love to Star Marine, we give love to Murray Cup Racing. And so we're in the process of looking to build dedicated teams to focus on that. Because the problem right now is that we did Arena Commander because that was, okay, let's get the dogfighting working. And then we did Star Marine because that's, let's get the FPS working, and they're all feeding into the PU. So all the people that were supporting and doing that do PU stuff now. So essentially we just fix up stuff in Arena Commander and Star Marine, but we're not really adding new content, polishing and keeping it up there. And we sort of feel like we need to have some dedicated scrum teams: you're the Arena Commander team, you're the Star Marine team, and we're adding new levels, new challenges. Because for me, the long-term vision for what we're doing here in Star Citizen is, yes, you've got the PU that you're adventuring in, but Arena Commander is where you go to practice, so you don't have to risk your stuff. It's also where you can go and you're on a certain level playing field, so you can say objectively who's the best dogfighter in a way that would be maybe hard in the PU. And the same for Star Marine and the same for the Murray Cup racing. Now, we're going to have racing that will be embedded in the PU that you can do, which will be really kind of cool. But the idea is I want to make Arena Commander and Star Marine viable ongoing game modes that have updates, that have new content. Because I think sometimes you may just say, you know what, I don't have the time to get into the PU and do a big mission with all my friends, but maybe I just want to get in and see how I do on the leaderboards and have a quick dogfight or get into a quick Star Marine match. So I feel like we've done a disservice by getting these game modes up and running to get a mechanic working, and then once we have, we're just like, okay, it's in the PU now, we don't worry about it. So we are definitely going to do that, so do look for stuff that we'll add for racing; that is on our agenda. Only downside is, unfortunately, good resources don't grow on trees, so hiring the people and getting them up to speed takes a bit of time, but it is a goal for us to have dedicated stakeholders, and that's all they're doing. They're not getting distracted to fix something else in the PU. So look for that to be happening towards the later part of this year.