Is the plan for most or all large ships to be made with FPS in mind? Many of us do not want flying FPS levels, but real starships.asked by Tarkaros

Well, it is part of the gameplay, so the potential for FPS is everywhere, and we have to kind of allow for that because different people have different play styles too. You want to board a ship and take it over by force. That's part of our gameplay. If you want to avoid that, then don't hang out with pirates.

And you also need to have things built in to help you repel those boarders and stuff, like we were talking about, the Gyromite thing, door control.

Coming at it from a perspective of FPS levels, there's an element of that that is about supporting the FPS gameplay, but there's also the element of just determining what it's like to move through the ship. And what's realistic for actual life isn't really that realistic for game space, because you don't interact with that space the same way. You don't treat the same distances in the same way. If you model out a room one-to-one and put it in CryEngine and then walk around, it will feel very cramped. It will feel very different from how it actually feels to be in that space. So you can't think about it in the same way of, we build out a blueprint like architecture and then expect it to actually work. You have to actually take into account the distances at which players interact with things, the field of view that's available, the walking speed. These things all come into account, in addition to the potential that somebody could be shooting at you.

When we say flying FPS level in space, I'm talking about the technology. It's that technology, not that we've designed an FPS level that's meant to go around. I would say FPS is a consideration, but it is not the driving force behind your material.

It's always about what makes sense for the ship first, and then only after that is it a question of how do we make this nicer for shooting.

Yeah, we wouldn't add a wall to impede going down a hallway just so you could peek around and shoot, because you want to still have traversal from one side of the ship to the other really smoothly.

The really apropos example would be the Caterpillar, which we just had the deep dive about, and that did include a consideration for FPS, where we moved the catwalk over to one side. That helps you have visibility on the people moving through your ship. It gives you the crossfire if you find yourself in that position. And it doesn't really cost you that much in terms of cargo, because we do still allow you to fill that space, because you have the catwalk, which can't be occluded by cargo, so you still have a way to get through the ship.

I even think it can open up a little bit more opportunities, just because of the tractor beam set that you had on it, where now, instead of having to worry about pulling a piece of cargo or some object into the ship and having it run up to that center catwalk in the middle of the hull, now it's all the way to the opposing side of where the cargo would be loaded in by the tractor beam. So you do get a much better clearance room for bringing things into the ship, for rearranging the cargo in your ship and making sure it all fits, as opposed to having that blocker right in the middle of the ship.