I still want to know what the idea is for handling fauna planetside. Given the scale of things, it seems pretty steep to do everything manually, but procedural creature systems have been pretty bad in the past. How do you plan to create enough diversity and variation in life forms across the 'verse?

I'm going to make the artists deal with it.

I think a lot of it is going to be handcrafted. I think there will be a procedural element to it, but I think a lot of that's going to be helping create variants of those initial handcrafted versions. We'll be able to do things where we can swap out maybe different heads or different arms or different tails or different appendages or whatever that is. But just like we're doing with our landing zones, our landing zones are also handcrafted. So I think that the creatures or fauna, whatever you want to call them, the wildlife should be the same. So it's going to be handcrafted, a lot of it. And part of it is I don't want it to look like Spore. Spore has some really cool tech in it, but it has some really bad looking creatures in it too, to be frank, right? It's obviously a game where the players are making them, right? But whenever you procedurally generate stuff, you're going to have stuff that's going to look bad versus weird or versus distinct. Something can look distinct and maybe not look great, or it can look weird and not be appealing.

I think another thing as far as procedural tech goes is without artist input, a lot of times you just get a homogenous look. And it's just all kind of centered around the mean. You just get this group look, and yeah, there's some variations, but nothing has a lot of character. It's not compelling.

Exactly. And that's kind of what I was saying with the landing zones too. If we have a landing zone that's very specific, we can use other properties like Star Wars, which is probably the most iconic for a lot of people, where you've got Hoth, and Hoth has Tauntauns and other things that are going to be on it. It's got Wampas, right? And then you've got Endor, and it's got its own kind of thing. And then you've got Tatooine, it's got its own thing. And we want that. We don't want to just say, let's just randomly generate things on each one of these planets and just see what happens there.

And I think a lot of that comes down to the workflows of creating those things. So the reason that's not really even something that most people would consider as possible is because usually the amount of time that it takes to make one of these things, it takes a while. So if you can work on tools, you can work on systems for the asset creation, for the content development, you can usually scale the power of having the handcrafted input. If you can put auto-rigging systems in place, if you can put really simple interfaces to animation and these kind of things, have good behavior systems from Subsumption, you can scale up that content pretty well. But we won't go the full procedural route, because ultimately we have our directors here for a reason and they need to have the input on those specific creatures, and we won't end up with a T-Rex with alligator legs and whatever else.