Anything else you're excited by?
TL;DRRoberts is excited that voice and face communication should let players hail ships and use squad channels in this release, with most earlier crash problems hopefully sorted, while multi-crew won't be fully there in 3.6.
I'd say the other thing, which we don't call out as big of a feature, but the FOIP and VOIP stuff. For this release, finally, you should get to the point where you can hail other ships. So when you're out in space and you see someone, you can talk to them. And you will have a separate channel to talk to your squad mates or teammates and stuff. So I think there was one patch where we had the FOIP and VOIP and everyone had a great time, but then we turned it off because we were getting crashes that were kind of hard to track down. This release, we should have most of that sorted out and taken care of. So I'm hoping to see a lot more use, because the feature's great as long as people are using it.
Right, and in this functionality, there's loads of areas where we want to start expanding the use. Service beacons are one, where it's an implied contract between two players, and so it makes perfect sense that if you're requesting fuel or requesting combat assistance or whatever it may be from another player, that you want a dedicated communication channel so that you can tell him the specifics of what you're after. A lot of focus is how can we make...
...players work together better? How can they communicate better? Because in an online game, playing with other people, that's the fun. Not necessarily just doing it by yourself, or else you'd just be playing a single-player game, right? So the FOIP and VOIP is an example, but there's a lot of stuff like the multi-crew. You and your crew will have to operate a ship. So you're in combat and fires are breaking out, or you've got to replace fuses that are broken or fuel rods that have gone out. Your crewmates can run around and keep the ship going in a way that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And that's the advantage of a multi-crew ship versus a single-seater ship. We're working as hard as we can to get all the bits in place, so all that sort of starts to work. It's not going to be quite there with 3.6, but there'll be still more stuff happening with that.