Is there going to be a radiation mechanic (possibly including solar flare) that could impact play in a variety of ways? With both natural and man made (dodgy reactor?) that would cause damage or death potentially to player or assets?asked by Madrun Badrun

Yes! The answer is absolutely yes. Early in the design for the FPS mechanic we were talking a lot about EVA, what advantages or disadvantages different suits had, one of them was a radiation protection rating that would limit your ability to stay in EVA permanently so you can't just float around forever. So we have the concept of life support, but also the idea of radiation that could build up over time to a toxic level. Different types of suits would be rated differently for different types of radiation. We've also talked about, on the Arena Commander side, different hazards that you could have, both in the gameplay environment but also in the PU, things like nebulas, solar flares, and other kind of time-sensitive or system impacting natural hazards, like what you're talking about.

And another thing we kind of, I'm just imagining now, if you turned up with your suit at a particular area, a nebula or an area that had a particular gas cloud that you were surrounded by, and you believe that your suit is able to combat that kind of area, and another person flies in and they're trying to get into your area, but they get totally wiped out, those kind of things are going to be really cool, just to make sure the player is on their toes of knowing what different suits do, different areas and different environments and how they can kind of affect your gameplay.

Yeah and one of the mission types, cause we've started talking about the concept of the mission generator, or the instance action sphere generator, and some of the mission types we've talked about have been, oh, there's a disabled constellation that is floating towards the sun and it's not under power but there's a high radiation level, so you have very limited time windows in which you can interact with it to try and reconstitute it, rescue it, or just go to hell with it and let it fly into the sun. So yeah, definitely something we're looking at, cause I think it adds a cool level of immersion and gameplay moments.