One of the charms of the original Wing Commander was that there was this one ship, the Scimitar, that almost nobody wanted to fly because it was widely regarded as slow and underpowered and obsolete. Granted, the team doesn't have the resources to deliberately design a flyable 30th century Edsel for Star Citizen, but have you thought about including stuff like that as, say, NPC background ships, or maybe having the lore categorize as 'marketing failures' ships that got rendered obsolete in their original function by evolving game mechanics?asked by Jacknife
TL;DRYes, they want to add less popular, older or background ships to the lore, but it's a question of fitting them into the schedule; ships are also being given lineage and aged.
Short, short answer. Yes, absolutely. In fact Dave here has done some of the early ship stuff down back to the Zeus early on.
Oh right. Right, right, right.
It's more a time of... a point of, how can we work these into the schedule. We also kind of have this idea that our existing ships are going to age. You'll have the 2943 Aurora that is the model that is 5 years old, someday 10 years old. We, as we mentioned in another question, we are going back and saying, "Okay, here's another ship that would've existed back then." So de-aging, or re-aging existing ships is an option.We do want to build more and more ships into the background of the lore. As we get to the point where ships kind of go directly into the game, rather than going through this whole concept sale, proposal idea we can do some more 'less popular' ships that won't sell.
Right, right.
I will also note that for the example of Wing Commander though, and this is the power of lore, the Scimitar... everyone hates the Scimitar, everyone who played the game remembers hating the Scimitar. The Scimitar is bad. It's only bad because one of the characters, several of the characters, repeatedly tell you it's bad in the game. It's actually the second best ship in the game.
I kind of liked flying the Scimitar.
Yeah. It's the guns, you have a constant recharge...
That was the big mass driver one, right?
Yes, it's the one with the mass drivers. It's so much more pleasant than the Hornet, and I have an even easier time with it than the Rapier.
Right, right. Yeah, I mean it's also important to note that I mean like, you know, an old ship and a new ship are basically equal in difficulty to create. You have to go through as many steps. Whether the ship is 50 years old, or is supposed to be the new cutting edge thing, sort of from a production standpoint they're basically the same, it requires the same amount of work. So it's, you know, I think right now we're being a bit more, like Ben said, we're being a bit more surgical about what type of ships we're coming out with.
But that is part of why we give ships a lineage. It's never just... sometimes it is, "Here's the totally new ship," but a lot of times, "Oh here's the Retaliator, and it has a hundred year history with the UEE."
Right, right.
We're kind of planning that in.
Yeah.