Will individual planets have unique terrain? How will this contribute to gameplay?

So Chris you want to kick that one off?

Chris Roberts (CR): Yeah, no, I mean, that's one of big focuses we've shown little bits of it when we've done the CitizenCon presentation. We showed some ecosystems in what was … we called the "Homestead Demo" but it had rocky, mountainous areas; open desert plains ... we're planning to have a lot more ecosystems and variety than we showed in Homestead. The concept is that they would have their different challenges in terms of longer term weather, even wildlife or resources that would be there.

So it's pretty exciting and we're building the toolset to allow the artists and the designers to have fun and … You watch Star Wars and you go "Okay, yeah, it's Hoth. It's the ice-snow planet. And Endor's the forest moon or whatever. And we're definitely going to have different planets, moons even, that would have those sort of different feels. And in some ways maybe have more of a variety of ecosystems because obviously Star Wars tends to be very like "Here's the snow planet. Here's the forest planet." And I think that would be cool.

And I think longer term we're hoping to make it so there'll be gameplay and challenges related to the actual ecosystems themselves. And we could even see a point where you could crash land on a planet, and you have to get a distress beacon out, and you've got to survive for a little bit of time before someone comes and rescues you. And so you got to maybe hunt some wildlife or find some water to drink or find some special type of mineral that you need to do to repair your ship.

Tony Zurovec (TZ): Yeah, but that's the important thing, which is that the environmental variability is not just cosmetic: it directly benefits the types of gameplay that we'll be able to have the players engage in. Everything from reduced visibility from snowstorms, sleet, fog, etc.; impaired navigational capability from sources of radiation: all of these different types of mechanics come together and allow us to present new and different challenges.

We can force the player out of their ship to actually walk or drive across the surface of the planet because there's something that throwing off too much interference so their ship, in close proximity to the planet, can't actually navigate how it normally would. And a variety of things like that.

So all of this variation on the planet is not only going to present you with a lot of just visually different looking scenarios and stuff, but it's going to greatly increase the types of gameplay that we can put out there.

Todd Papy (TP): From a player's standpoint I think of this as "natural gating" or … versus traditional MMOs or something like that where "Oh, you're not level eighteen you can't go there." Like this is our natural way to gate players of "Oh, you don't have the right equipment to go into the extreme cold or extreme heat or radiation or something like that." So it's a way for us mess … to take tools away from players that they might be used to, whether that be the radars or affects the way sensors work in their ships, or even like the flight.

And I would say that's one of the reasons we're doing all this systemic approach, right? So, in terms of you as, say a character or a human being in the role that you are playing, like you need to breathe oxygen. So if there isn't an compatible atmosphere you would need to have an environmental suit. Or perhaps you're in a place that has too much radiation: you need to have some shield from that. Or there's really bad wind storms so … sand storms ... so during that you'd have to find shelter.

So we're trying to make it systemic so that when we build the environments it just works. As opposed to we just program specific actions based on you being in this area but not with the right equipment. The equipment allows you to survive the environments. Essentially. And so you should … if you're going to explore you should probably ...

Have the explorer suit!

Have the explorer suit, have the land vehicle: all the things that let you get down close because, like Tony said, there may be case which was what we were showing or hinting in the Homestead Demo was that ... the idea is there'll be areas you'll not be able to fly your spaceship to so you may have to get out on foot or get out and use a ground vehicle. Or sometimes you'd have to land and take shelter. So there's all these great sci-fi where you see the approach, like Aliens, and they're going down to Hadley's Hope and they go through the buffet of the atmosphere.

So we're all going to try to get all those aspects in there and really give detail to the different locations. So even though we may not have a billion procedurally generated moons or planets, we'll have a huge … we'll have a very large amount of actual planets and moons that have a really well constructed set of environments and ecosystems that should be challenging and interesting to explore.

That's the part that's most interesting to me which is unlike, even more so than in space, we'll have the capability at the local scale to be able to change the environment such that, yeah, scanning is more difficult, or force you out of your ship, or finding an area - planets are enormously large things and so since we're not going to basically just have the magical button that you can push and all of a sudden things are revealed to you - it's like if you're talking about things hidden in plain sight then just the sheer size of these things. And then once you start to add in forests and mountain ranges and snowstorms and fog and rain …

Well you think how long it's taken us to explore Earth, and there's probably some areas …

They're still finding pockets of oil and everything …

Right.

… else. That's exactly it.

Yeah. And so there's seven billion of us here. So, yeah absolutely.