I'd like to know what your current ideas are for the Planet Side Module. Will we just have the ability to land and explore the planet, or will you have in-depth interaction with the environment. ex: If it's a city environment, will there be shops/bars and such that we could use? Or will that be released in the later game stages?Chris Roberts, you the man!asked by SnipedUNoob555
TL;DRThe Planet Side Module would let players step out of the hangar into one or a few environments with shops and bars, serving as a testing ground that eventually rolls into the Persistent Universe.
All right, thank you very much for that. No, the Planet Side Module is essentially, we'll be opening up a bunch of the interactions that would happen down on the planet to everyone in the community to play with.The idea is, when you're in your hangar, there's a door in all the hangars to the outside world, you can go through that door, you would step out, and you would be in a planet side environment. We may debut with just one, or we may debut with a couple, and you can wander around in the environment, there would be shops where you could buy stuff. You could go to a bar where you could talk to people and ultimately in the game that's where you would look for missions or meet other players in the bar.The idea of the Planet Side Module is to test out and work on the functionality of all that which would happen once you land from space. So you will definitely have the ability to wander around and have some in depth interactions and do all that. Then as we go along, we would be adding more functionality and action to it, and then as the Persistent Universe is rolling out, there will be more areas to explore.The planet side stuff is one of our biggest tasks because there's a lot of them. We've got something like 450 different landing locations right now that we're talking about, and then you've got to build all the environments and the contents. So we're really working pretty hard on how to do that in a way that matches up to our quality of fidelity, but won't take 400 years to build.I think we've got a pretty good solution that uses a combination of unique stuff, some more modular stuff, and we are longer term researching some kind of procedural stuff to help build out and flesh out some environments based on criteria the economy system feeds in. And the Planet Side Module will all be testing grounds for that. Eventually it will just roll into the Persistent Universe.Think of the hangar as the hub, the hangar will get you to the dogfight, it will get you to the planet side, and then ultimately, it will get you into the Persistent Universe.