Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Squadron 42 Q&A

Well, I don't think anyone's actually read the Concierge booklet, so you don't get the F8 Lightning until Squadron's out. And our actual idea is there's a few ships that we want to have you play Squadron and if you get to the point in Squadron that you get to fly them, then you get the badge to be able to get that ship in the Persistent Universe. So if you're not Concierge at a very high level, you'll still be able to get the F8C, you just will have to have played Squadron far enough along, kind of near the end, it's sort of a little bit like Wing Commander where you move up in flying different ships as you get a little further on. And if you do that, you'll earn the badge, and I think this probably relates to another question that you have down here, and it will enable you to be able to purchase that in the PU after you've completed Squadron. So the idea is, essentially, Squadron has to come out and then it will be available and then you can either earn it by playing Squadron all the way through or as a thank you to some of the people that have really helped us make this game develop at a really supportive and incredibly enthusiastic level. We wanted to do a couple of nice things to say thank you, because we wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion, we wouldn't be building the game that we're building, we wouldn't be building Squadron to the level that we're building it to without the incredibly enthusiastic support, so that's kind of the idea of the Concierge program is that the people that sort of, you know, really, I don't know whether I say all in, but are more, you know, I mean everyone should, whether it's you just getting a basic ship, or you're doing a lot more, everything's appreciated and it's enabling us to do what we're doing and no one needs to do anything more than the very basic ship, but for the people that sort of go above and beyond, we want to have like a couple of fun things for them, a couple of items that, you know, it's kind of like a bit more sort of cool and flary, not necessarily something you can only get if you're that, because like I said, you'll be able to earn the F8C by completing Squadron and getting to the point where you actually get to fly an F8A in the game.

Exactly, so that brings, that's a good follow point there. This is the F8C that we're talking about, similar to the Hornet F7C. The F8 that folks have been wondering about for the last several years is equivalent to the F7A, it's a military grade ship that's strictly for Squadron.

Yeah, so I mean it's not the A, like the new F7A, which if you play Squadron, you'll also get an opportunity to earn the badge for, and then potentially get one of those in the persistent universe, but they're all, they have military grade equipment, which is a notch above some of the civilian grade equipment, so the Cs, whether it's the Hornet C or the F8C, they're still pretty awesome ships, but they don't quite have the sort of higher grade, more durable equipment that the military A version does. That's not to say in the game that you couldn't potentially figure out a way to get one or get the equipment to upgrade your ship to get there, but they don't sell the military grade stuff on the show floor.

No, they get the ship. - At that level, thank you, you can have a ship. So all the items in the Concierge set up, starting with the top hat and going through the guns and the suits and stuff, are all awarded. In fact, I think if you log in now as a Concierge member, you will be, because the website went live, you'll actually get your flare items on your account. I've even seen some screenshots already where people are in the suit or running around with one of the guns. The monocle at this exact instant isn't supported, but I believe in the patch that we're going to do pre-3.1, where we just want to fix some quality of life issues, the monocle will also be enabled. But you can put a top hat on, I believe, right now. I'm sure we'll see some pictures of that.

Absolutely, so 100%. Both for Star Citizen and Squadron are female and male, so it's 100% part of our development plan. It's just that in the early stages, the concept is to not have to be revising assets, that we do it with one skeleton, which is the male skeleton at the moment, and then we determine exactly what animations, motion sets we want, because even though we've done all this performance capture, there's still a lot of stuff where you're working on the AI, for instance, the combat AI, or you're saying, oh, I need an animation to slide in to cover a certain way. Oh, well that one doesn't work. Let's change it to work this way. And so there's a lot of iteration, especially on the combat animations that you do for the players and also the AI. So from our standpoint, we don't want to have two skeletons that then we have to fix up two of the animations. So we work it on one skeleton until we lock all the animation sets that we know we need for the player and the AI, and then we just make sure that we create the other skeleton's animation set. So definitely you'll be able to play as a female or as a male, you'll be able to customise how your character looks in Squadron, it will carry across into the PU, so you'll be able to carry your character across from Squadron into the PU, and so there you go, yes.

Yes, so there's definitely, so I'll give an example of a couple of things where you do things and you'll sort of earn the badge or the ability in the game, in the PU to get something that you wouldn't have done without doing that. And that also, there are some relationships or things that you can do during the story of Squadron that if you do, it will unlock some missions or content, or people that will deal with you or sell you something in the PU. So the idea is the PU, the Squadron is something that you did in the past, and the PU is sort of in the present. So yeah, it depends. We track your relationships with various crew members or characters you meet, and some of that will have an impact later on in the PU, like I said, unlocking certain things. So we kind of just want to make it fun. And then potentially there's also, we've discussed kind of like a veterans association or group that if you play Squadron, you join that, and then there's potentially opportunities and missions related to that that you wouldn't necessarily get if you hadn't played Squadron. Basically, if you hadn't served in the military, then you don't get some opportunities for jobs, but it's kind of up to you. I mean, it's sort of like life, right? It's like the military guy may not want to join the merchants' guild and trade and stuff. [...] I mean, longer term, obviously we've got a lot of content to build, but our longer term plan, even in the landing locations, is to have places focused on here, like the merchants' guild, and you go there, you have to be a member of the guild, and it's the club for the merchants, and in there you can get specific missions as a member of the merchants' guild, and the same would be for UEE military personnel, potentially subscribers, concierge, like the chairman's club for concierge, and I'm not sure if we have a name for the subscribers yet, but it would be kind of nice to build groups, and then we'll allow organizations themselves to maybe own or rent a place that they can make as their sort of org location, that essentially only lets in people out of that org. So that's kind of one of the sort of overriding goals, and so in the squadron process, playing the game, we want you to be able to earn various achievements or badges that will have an impact on the PU gameplay.

I think the Glaive and the Scythe won't be affected that much. I mean, I think we had some early concepts that they were really cool, but they were also not necessarily the most optimal for performance reasons, and one of the passes was to sort of make some of the ships come closer to the way that Nathan Dearsley built the Scythe, which is also the Glaive really, and so I would say that we're more bringing things closer to that style, and we're still doing some developmental work on things like the kingship and stuff like that, so there's a lot, but some of our very early concepts were sort of more kind of bony, ribby, spiky, and so we still have some of those aspects, but not quite as high frequency because that ends up being problematic, and yeah, the poly count you need for the ships, so we'd rather be using things that we can use a lot of our custom normals and some of the kind of detail and pod mapping that we do that gives you this really great detail. I mean, the ships look like they got millions of polys, but in a lot of cases, that's because it's really smart use of the detail mapping, POM mapping, and the custom normals.

I think it potentially will affect your character as in what he's earned. I mean, the concept that we have is that as you play Squadron, it sort of fills out your journal. Like if you imagined you have a journal from back in the day that you were serving in the military, and as you go through it, it fills out your journal, and then the things that you've managed to do will sort of unlock some stuff in the PU, and you can always look back on it, like your achievement or scrapbook or whatever, and see what you did or what you achieved. But we don't really have, you know, yes, we have more than one ending, but generally it's the, you know, you died, you sucked, you got thrown in the brig, whatever, versus you got to the end of the story. So, you know, in general we sort of assume that you will get to the end of the story, but, you know, whatever you have in the PU is based on what you've earned today. So it's like your journal hasn't been full, because you could be playing Squadron while playing the PU at the same time, and, you know, only be, say, a third of the way through Squadron, you haven't got to later things and earn later things, and so obviously you wouldn't have them in the PU until you got there in Squadron, until you got there in Squadron, and then it would unlock things in the PU. But, so, in that way it will affect kind of things you can get and unlock things, but it's more about your progress through it. So once you get all the way through it and you've done all the things, you'll unlock it, and there are some things you can do that are optional, so you may or may not unlock them or get them later on in the PU.

Well, I mean, I think the whole Squadron, you know, it's sort of a trilogy, it's a three-game arc, is, you know, will be before the, the events will be sort of a little bit before where we're setting the PU. So it will have the same kind of impact, it will be unlocking new things. So kind of what we would do is we would be doing episode two or episode three, we'll also be adding some opportunity or have content that could be unlocked if you've done that in the PU, sort of like the match of it. I mean, we are actually starting right now the very early stages of, we already have, we had an outline of, you know, one, two, and three, and now we're in the process of starting to flesh out two and three. Because our goal would be to get two and three written and then probably shoot all the performance cap back to back. And then once we have episode one out and done, with all the technology there, two and three won't necessarily be, you know, as long a process, right? Because we've had to build all this technology that didn't exist before, we really want to push it, and so we've been focusing on building tools, but once the tools are in place, you know, two and three will, I mean, they're not going to happen overnight, but they will happen a lot quicker than one did.

I mean, it's very similar to the way, say, Wing Commander 2 was from Wing Commander 1, because it built on all the foundation of Wing Commander 1's code, and then we sort of saw what worked in Wing Commander 1 and said, okay, well let's push much more of this story in a bit more of a sort of constructed narrative, more relationship stuff, you know, because in Wing Commander 1 you basically talked to the various wing people that you could have, and you sort of decided who you wanted to fly with, and depending on how you did it, sort of in the missions it affected what the campaign path was, but your relationships with the characters never really developed in the same way that, say, they did in Wingcommander 2, where there was a specific story, there was a traitor, you know, and you have an opportunity for, you know, a relationship with Angel, for instance, and that was mostly because we saw what was really working in Wing 1, and we looked back and said, well, we could take these elements and really push it, and I kind of suspect that that will happen with Episode 2 and Episode 3 of Squadron.

Well, I'm pretty confident, yes. I mean, we already, I think, have a version of Tobii and head tracking working. I don't know whether it kind of, like a lot of times when we go from release to release, someone's got something working, but everyone's focused on the new features, so some old stuff kind of rots because it wasn't, like, maintained, and, you know, there's so many things to fix that that was a lower priority, but yes, I mean, our goal is to have sort of the head tracking, the Track IR, the, you know, Tobii I think we also have done some work and support, and they have. And also, you know, also, yeah, the face wear setup that we have where, you know, the camera can, you know, not just track your face, but track, you know, where your head's positioned. So, you know, and it's pretty, I mean, the game's set up for that. I mean, you know, I know people always ask about VR.

You know, on the VR front, you know, the game's very much built to be VR friendly because, you know, like almost all the UI is diegetic, and the stuff that isn't we're putting more in to be diegetic, and we want to improve the whole diegetic feel.

So, you know, our biggest holdback on the VR is really just we're still doing so much base level refactoring. The engine and the renderer will, you know, be starting on sort of the DX, the Vulcan DX12 kind of refactor as well. And we're doing so much optimization that we sort of feel like we've got to get that done first and, you know, get the base level engine stuff more like finished, not constantly working refactoring. And then we'll put VR, because, you know, we had actual VR support quite a while ago, but of course, again, as we change stuff, it breaks. And then your engine team, you go, are they going to go and fix the VR stuff, or are they writing that new, like the procedural planet system that everybody can experience?

And so that's always been, you know, like the procedural planet system that everybody can experience? And so that's always been, that's kind of what's happened in those situations. But once all that stabilizes, of course, yes, we're going to go and get that supported. And when we're building things, you know, we're aware of, like I said, the diet, you know, like putting everything in the world itself, which is quite friendly for VR or, you know, and moving your head around and tracking the same thing. It's like we track your headlock. And, you know, actually, I don't think we've turned it on on 3.0, but it will be something where you can disconnect where you look from your aim. As a player, we are, you know, the AI can already do that, because that's also something that's potentially useful, where you're, you know, you're a certain way and you can look around. You don't have to, like, move your gun to look at it.

It will be the same based on the [?] technology. I mean, what will be in 3.1 is very basic. It's basically just switching between heads and hair and changing eye and skin colour, which is not the final destination for that. I mean, the final one will be full on. You can change, morph the face. So we're still in progress on that side of the technology. It sort of ties into the kind of head rig that we talked about.

We have this real-time head rig, so it allows us to take any performance and then map it onto any other head. I mean, we can have Gary Oldman driving the Thul, the Vanduul Thul, and we've done that to have fun. And it's one of the things that allows us to do the face wear technology and stuff. So there's still a fair amount of variety, but the final version of that will absolutely be in Squadron. That's the plan, and you'll also see it in Star Citizen, and it's built in as part of the story. So essentially, it is part of your journey to end up in a place that you need to choose what your face looks like, or even your gender.

Well, I think death's going to affect the campaign like death affects the campaign in Wing Commander, which is you die, and then you'll have to go back to your last save point, which is not going to be quite as frequent as you would say experience in Call of Duty or something like that.

Yeah, you're not going to fly 100 kilometers in quicksave and fly another 100 kilometers in quicksave, saving your way through the mission.

I mean, somewhere between demon cells and a more normal experience, but I want there needs to be some investment in achieving things. I mean, in Wing Commander setup, it was always the missions you couldn't save during. The save points were in the sort of interstitials between them, back on the Bangalore. I'm not 100% sure we're going to go to that level because, well, I'm pretty confident we're not, mostly because once we leave and we set on a mission, the way it's structured in Squadron is, it's not one thing. It's sort of one thing that turns into another thing that turns into another thing. What we showed on the December, the Christmas livestream, was only just a portion of what you would be experiencing at that point in the story. So there's some other optional missions or places you could go check out that we didn't do, and also once you get down there and you free Trejo, there's a whole, you know, it goes on beyond that. You fight your way out, I'll call in the advocacy. So, you know, the actual, you know, amount of time that you would invest in that, even if you just went and did that one thing, which is the only thing we did, it'd probably be at least two plus hours, and then you've got the other side, missions, a quest would also add time. So, yeah, I'm not sure we want to be like, you know, have an hour and 50 [minutes] invested, and then you get killed by the last slaver, and then you're like, ah! So we'll have opportunities to sort of save at points, but we won't have it every two steps or every second. Because I feel like you lose, like people sort of lose their reason to play smart if they do that, like I certainly do. I mean, I played through Battlefront II, I do play through the most recent Call of Duty, the World War II, and they look great, but I don't really have, I mean, I just go in, start shooting, and I mess it up. I go, all right, well, you know, I'll try shooting this other way, and I just keep, I mean, I'm just brute forcing it. I'm not stealthing it, I'm not being smart about my ammo counts and stuff like that. So I think we want to balance it a bit, a bit more old school as far as that goes.

Okay, so yeah, and I know this was an issue from the beginning, because the Squadron 42 story is as large as it is and has so much performance and is so particularly crafted. We can't do a cooperative story campaign where basically we let a friend of yours play the role of Old Man, which is played by Mark Hamill, because there's definitely things that are happening in the story that rely on other characters to do their thing. And if you have another player playing it, they may just decide, well, I'm not going to do that, all right, and then all of a sudden everything's going to break down. So our plan, I mean, you know, if you have Squadron, first of all, you'll have Arena Commander and Star Marine available to you to play with your friends. But also, as we go through the game, we were going to take some of the missions themselves, the combat, and then kind of have a kind of multiplayer version of it that you could play with some of your friends, maybe playing some of the other wingmen to achieve the objective that would be unlocked once you've done that in the story. So it wouldn't be for all of them, because some of them wouldn't make so much sense, but it would be for sort of the big battle opportunity. So there's some pretty big, you know, bigger battles or set pieces that, you know, there's a fair amount of AI that are fighting alongside you against a bunch of other AI. And in those cases, we could create some drop-in, yeah, drop-in, drop-out situations for that. It just won't necessarily be tied to the overall, you know, playing it through the story, because, you know, it's just...

At the level of storytelling, we're attempting, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, what happens if you decide, okay, we've got this big, you know, attack, and here's the good guys, and here's the bad guys, and there's, you know, 20 people on each side, but, you know, you make those 20 players on each side, and that battle may not end up the way that you want it to or need it to for the story, whereas if we've got you playing it with a bunch of other AI, we can sort of control or balance that better.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think the newsletter's going to come out today that will basically say that. So what the website that we just launched is just Stage 1, and really that was sort of focusing on separating out Star Citizen and Squadron and then the community, which is basically the RSI side and the store, because the old website, if you went to it, and you're like, okay, I've heard about Star Citizen, it's like this information overload, how do I get the game, where do I go, what's the game about, it's not very obvious for the site, so the site that we've rolled out, we feel like does a better job of that. I mean, I did notice people commenting, going, oh, it just seems the same, but that's mostly because the site's also smart, so if you've already got an account or you're already logged in, it's taking you to the default places that you normally go, like the community section, which of course haven't changed much, right? They've become a little less cluttered because we moved some of the elements of the Star Citizen and Squadron stuff to be moved to its own parts, but it hasn't changed, or the store hasn't really changed either, and those are things, so we wanted to get those sort of, like, hey, the Star Citizen thing seems cool, or I want to get into it, so we sort of focused on that, the beginning, not so much the later store experience of, oh, well, now I want to upgrade my ship, or it's more just like, hey, I've heard about Star Citizen, can I give you $40 to become a part of it? And so that was what the focus was for the current site and also making Squadron and Star Citizen so it wasn't so confusing that you understood, okay, this is a single-player game, this is the massively multiplayer online game, and explaining it and having some tutorials because previously most of the stuff was fans, I mean, basically our fans do a great job of educating and showing and all the streamers do the same thing, which is awesome, so don't stop doing that. But we felt like we should do it better, so it's the first step, but we are absolutely going to be working on the subscriber side, the concierge side had a bit of a revamp, which is kind of cool, the subscriber side, the store needs a lot of work, and then just sort of the community development section again, yeah, we're going to work on that. It just takes time and we'd rather roll out bits as we go along, otherwise it becomes overwhelming.

There will be at some point in the future, so Squadron's a little different because we're not doing our quarterly releases, but we are managing it exactly the same way, so the thing that's really cool about the roadmap, and I know I saw some discussion where people were like, hey, well what about this, and what about this, but don't worry, there's a lot of studies, it still needs to... We're still working on the whole sea guys. Yeah, the whole sea's definitely improved, the only reason why it actually wasn't put in as a task there was because there is a technical issue with the interior grids because the whole sea contracts and then expands away 100%, the art's finished, it's going to be in the game, but the bit where we were contracting and explaining the interior grid, which isn't like, we don't know how to do it, or it's a year task or anything, it's not at all, it just doesn't have a resource currently assigned to do that, and so they didn't want to expose that epic on the roadmap until they had that and then it was done, so that's kind of what's happening right now is that we've sort of switched our development methodology to be much, especially on Star Citizen, to be sort of more date driven, but we've also switched how we're running the teams internally to be much more agile team based, so before we were more pipeline based, the programmers had a list of all the things they were working on, the designers had a list of things they were working on, the artists had... And we still have some pipeline aspects like the ships, weapons, characters are pretty much a pipeline, but in terms of feature development, we've changed it around so we're building agile teams where you have the engineer and the designer and the artists that will be helping and supporting that all sort of embedded together working on the feature, and that is fairly different than how we were doing it previously where a lot of it was the engineer was given... We had a TD, here's the task we need from engineering, they would go and work it, here's the things design needs to do once we get the engineering, here's the thing we need from the artists, and there's communication and friction that happens in that so this is much more about having the small team agile style working, but that does mean that we change how we're utilizing JIRA, which is our project management task tool that we use, from a more... a bit set up more like a pipeline, especially for the engineering design, to more of the team task user story based, which is where we're going to. Now we did a little bit of it last year towards the end, but now we're doing it across, it's going to be exactly the same for every single studio across the company, and everyone's fully on board with that, we have all our senior production right now over in the UK, I think that will be in Germany next week, working and finishing these out, and the idea is that we... because we're updating the roadmap like we did for 3.0 where every Friday was always just a big song and dance because we had things in JIRA, but we were displaying them this other way, and then there was the longer term roadmap, had so much stuff in it that the production was so busy doing other stuff they didn't really have time to maintain it, so it totally got out of date, so they were updating the stuff that was for 3.0 but not later, and it just was a lot of extra work, so we decided we wanted to essentially expose our project management software, the JIRA stuff, to the website, so Turbulent built that whole roadmap tool, it basically takes it via the JIRA roadmap, and we have settings inside our epics that we can say this is a public epic, and then we can put user facing descriptions, and we can even add user pictures, so production development can just, when they set up the epic that they're working on, they can set it up also for the public facing, and it scrubs automatically into it, so the advantage of that is we don't have to manually update anything because there's lots of mistakes when you're manually updating stuff, so everything will just reflect the state of the tool that we're using to manage everyone across the company. Of course we're not showing every single task because there's thousands of tasks, and the information's overwhelming, so we sort of show the very high level, what you would call an epic, or in some cases sort of a saga, which is overwhelming, over quite a few epics. I know they have all these sorts of epics, sagas, stories, tasks.

It's like Joseph Campbell designed the JIRA.

Yeah, so we expose those, and we mark which ones are public facing. We wanted to get the roadmap in people's hands, which is why we went live with it here, but they still have organization work to do because they've got to take the way JIRA was set up before. Some of it's been done, not all of it's been done, so they have to change it around because they've got to organize under the right epics and everything. So in the case where they don't feel comfortable that they don't have it organized properly in this duplicate task, because sometimes there were tasks set up from before, but now we're setting it up on this new one, so in those cases they just choose not to show that epic publicly until they have it in shape, and so you'll see that roadmap will get more things added to it. Of course, things also will move around a little bit as maybe a bit more information comes to light, or how it's going, but that's the beauty of it. It's going to be 100% live reflection of the tool that we use to manage all the tombs, and we're using exactly the same process on Squadron 42, which is going to get me to answer the original question, which is are you going to get the roadmap like that? I can't remember the original question. And yes, we will. If you look on the side, there's a Star Citizen logo. There will be a Squadron 42 logo. You get the roadmap. So once we have the Squadron 42 tasks and epics all cleaned up and ready to go, then we will also turn that on and share it. It may not be done on a quarterly. It may be done on a monthly. I'm not quite sure. We're still discussing kind of the column format for it, but it will, again, scrub live from all the tasks that we have and epics and sagas that we have entered for finishing out Squadron 42.

No, I mean, it's so much bigger and cooler and better. I mean, I had some ideas about how to sort of up the emotional attachment and the story aspects of it, and I wanted to put you sort of first person, and I felt like the technology moved a lot so we could have better looking characters, and so it didn't need to be sort of the old wing command, like wing three or wing four. We filmed actors because we didn't feel like we could get performance into the rudimentary animation for the characters aboard the ship, which is why we had a wing one and two. But it's, yeah, it's, I mean, it's way, I mean, in terms of scope, scale, what we can do, because there's a lot of technology, you know, like the procedural planet stuff we saw we went down to Gainey, which is this moon, we used to be a moon of Odin 1, which is, Odin 1 is now really the coil. And so the opportunity, like when I was first conceiving it, we were, you know, even when we were writing the script for it, we were thinking we were gonna have to sort of hide basically level loads behind cinematics and stuff that you would stream when we're doing it. This is all, you know, gonna, all plays live in the engine seamlessly, and I think in terms of like emotional attachment and story that you're gonna have in the game, it's going to be, I think it's gonna, I think it's going to have an effect on people that they're not gonna expect. So I, we spend so much time creating, you know, sort of arcs and stories for all the characters you come across. So you see a little bit, like, so for instance, you know, one of the scenes in the holiday livestream I really like is the moment where you talk to, you know, Liam Cunningham's character, you know, Captain White, and he's asked you how you're doing and it gets to on his son and you can see the performance. I mean, that's a great actor and he's there and you can sort of see, you know, there's some, you know, there's something on, there's not- Something happened. Yeah, and it's like, you know, there's a regret and there's a sadness and there's, you know, it makes him feel real. He's not just the captain that gives you a mission. And we have that across the board for the crew of the Stanton and a lot of other characters that you'll meet through the course of the story. And you don't necessarily have to engage in these. So the concept is, as a player, you play the game and you sort of interact with people that you want to interact with, you know. Then maybe certain players will prefer to interact with certain characters than another player would want to interact with. And that's actually kind of interesting because that was the Wing Commander one thing. I was always interested that, you know, some people loved Maniac and some people hated him, right? It was like, it was very valorizing. But you know, that was player agency and choice and they just, because they made the choice, there was this extra attachment to it. And for, in Squadron, you know, we've really, you know, everybody has, you know, there's these personal stories and character arcs that aren't necessarily related to the actual story itself that you're going to go on. But as you spend time and interact with these characters, I really feel like you're, they're not going to just feel like, oh, this is an AI character. You're going to sort of see them as people. And then, of course, you know, the story of Squadron, you know, it wouldn't be very interesting unless stuff happened. So there's some pretty, you know, momentous or tragic stuff that would happen. And it obviously will have effect on characters that you've met and hopefully built an affinity for a relationship with. And so I actually think your emotional attachment as you go through the story, you know, is going to be of a level that maybe, you know, has not happened yet in games or has happened very rarely in games. And that will just mean that what you're doing and what the action will mean that much more. So I'm, and I can feel little bits of it now and I can see it and I know all our scenes and stories and, you know, when we finish off at the level that we're doing, I think it's going to be really cool. And it's sort of a subtle thing, but I'm really interested to see how that ends up affecting people.

No, no, no, no. It's throughout. So I mean, you know, I've always wanted to have a game that is basically from your point of view, whether you're on a ship, you're flying your ship, you know, like you're on the Bengal in Wing Commander or you're flying your Hornet. But I also wanted you to be able to be down on the ground running around and first-person, having a fight. And so that's been a dream for a long time. You know, a few members of our team a long time ago, I forget the name of it, something Bounty Hunter, they did it after they did Star Lancer, was kind of that was the idea with it. It wasn't a Squadron Wing Commander style story. But I've always wanted to do that. So even, you know, and if I did another Wing Commander, I would do it this way from a first-person point of view. And so for me, I just wanted to be a fluid story and experience. I mean, it's like, you know, you watch Star Wars, Luke Skywalker isn't flying his X-wing all the time. He's doing plenty of other stuff, running around on foot, having adventures. So the idea that we want is a completely fluid adventure that, you know, depends on the situation and what you have to achieve. You could be doing it flying a ship, you could be doing it on foot, you could be doing it in zero-g, in EVA. And you can be spending time, you know, in your off hours, getting to know the crew. And so there's definitely, I would say, there's, you know, plenty of ship combat and there is plenty of FPS and, you know, weather, you know, I would, 50-50 maybe, I mean there's a lot. So it's very fluid. And there'll be plenty of cases where you'll be in a ship and then you'll have to get out and you'll, you know, be on foot fighting and then get back into your ship and do their stuff. And so I think it's going to be fun.

Yes, most definitely. So we, they do, I mean, other, my past Wing Commanders, we always translated. So, you know, we're building infrastructure in for, you know, subtitles and full vocal, you know, full audio sort of translations. And it's going to, I mean, I'm not 100% sure on exactly all the languages we do. I mean, in the past, you know, there's the standard sort of what they call EFIGS, which is, let's say, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, EFIGS. That's kind of industry, like EA would say, okay, we're going to, you know, EFIGS. So I'm not sure of which one. So they probably all would be translated. You don't necessarily do all of them, you know, the full, because the one that takes the most amount of time and is the most expensive is the one that is the full, you know, it's not just subtitles, it's sound and everything. But that would likely to be French, German, Spanish. And then I don't know about Italian on that one, depends. So it's a lot more in Italy than perhaps, you know. But yeah, so the infrastructure is there to do it. So we're definitely going to do it. But again, that's the sort of thing you do right at the end once everything's kind of locked, because you don't want to be translating stuff that may get cut or gets changed.

We haven't decided yet is the simple answer. So we captured Ian Duncan who played the player in all his scenes. So all his facial and body was captured as he was talking. And, you know, in fact, even for when we showed the IGN trailer, we internally created a third person and a first person version of it. You know, I opted for the first person because it felt more immersive and immediate. But, you know, we've long had the concept of potentially a sort of key that lets you pop out and get more third person set up. I mean, we've been experimenting with even in the first person conversations, having the option of sort of, you know, changing the camera angles a bit more cinematic. So, you know, one of the things we had in the vertical slice is we had these sort of cinematic cutaways. But maybe what wasn't fully obvious to people was that that's all happening, A, in real time, B, your character's there in real time. So we didn't show you, but you could, like, see the, you could go to the cinematic cutaways in, say, the white talking to Wexler in the briefing and, you know, you could have your character walk photo bomb in the back and walk back. And sometimes, you know, QA had done that. But the concept is really that, like, you have the cinematic cutaways and you can basically hit a key to just go back to your point of view. So it's sort of up to you. You can sort of cancel. You can just experience, like, even that scene. Like, you know, there's Ben Mendelsohn and Liam Cunningham, both great actors. So it's like, yeah, I want to see them up close. I want to see them. I want to see, you know, because if I'm looking at it from my point of view, when I've entered the briefing room, I'm not going to see all the detail or all the performance. And so we want the opportunity, so we're going to build a system. That's what we've been playing with, is building a system in that sort of has this sort of cinematic enhancement mode where, like, it will cut in there. But you don't want to deal with it. You just hit a key and you're at your point of view and you can see the scene playing out. And they're all real-time running AI, so if you move over there and break it up, they'll react to you and do that sort of stuff.

You walk away from Liam Cunningham as he is trying to give you your mission briefing?

Well, I mean, I think what we're going to do in the case of, you know, you're in the military, so if you're a bit too disobedient, you end up, so we have you in the brig, you know, in various different situations, which is where you'll end up if you're basically trying to troll the characters in Squadron.

You're saying I'm never going to finish Squadron 42.

CR:Yeah, you may be in the brig a lot.