One of the things we talk about a lot per quarter is the polish or quality of life. We're trying to inject as much as we can into each quarterly release. [What's coming in 3.6?]

A really cool thing for me on the vehicle side is we've brought back the acceleration throttle. So we talked about this at CitizenCon. It's essentially a throttle that controls your acceleration, and thrust directly drives how maneuverable your ship is.

Because the variable thrust was my suggestion. Previous design was cruise control: you set the speed you want to be at and then the ship tries to achieve it. In the real world, I don't get in my car and set cruise control to 20 and then 30 or 50 or 100. I use the accelerator and I'm adjusting the power that my engine's putting out, which is the equivalent of the force that my thrust is putting out. And also if you're flying an aircraft, you're not always at 100%. So I wanted to have something that was more first order, so you'd be more affecting the thrust, which was the original design and setup, which is what we had at CitizenCon. But then in the playtest, in combat, which tends to happen, everyone just basically has it at 100%. So we had a debate, and I was like, okay, well, I'll let you guys go with this. But then there's other reasons to be able to have the adjustment. And then I was like, look, why don't we have both? Insert appropriate meme right now. Because there's no reason why you can't set, OK, here's what my limit is and here's what my thrust is.

You can do some really nice little things with it. You can do soft landings. Just reduce that thrust and you just gently pull out rather than slamming down.

Speaking of soft landings, the new VTOL hover mode. We all want to make a game that reminds us of what we see in movies, which is there's a little bit of a wobble and it moves around. So below a certain speed, if your ship has VTOL, it switches into it. You have this sort of hover mode that's pretty cool.

Instead of this weird-looking motion we have at the moment where you're strafing around up-down, you're more accurately tilting, rolling. If you pitch forward, you'll move forwards. We've slightly changed the way shields work in 3.6. I won't get into the deep details of it. Essentially, it allows the behaviors of the shields to come through. So at the moment, most ships come with two of the same shield. But if you wanted to change them to have two with radically different behaviors, before 3.6, they just sort of summed their behaviors together. You just end up with this weird hybrid that didn't have any character. Whereas now, if you put one that has really fast regeneration but low health and the complete opposite, you will notice those behaviors from those two shield generators. That's really cool. Unfortunately, a few things aren't going to make 3.6, so Defender's moving to 3.7. It's our first Banu ship, and we tried to apply our current pipeline techniques to it, and it really didn't work.

We don't feel like it's getting there. We're not pushing it out there, because I think that's one of the defining... it's quality. That's what we want to do. So it's OK when we're putting stuff out that we're iterating on. There's definitely stuff that we're not happy with, but we need people to play and give us feedback. And also some things, like we talked about making the UI good. We still have to have UI in the game, so it's better to have some older, slightly broken UI than no UI at all. But in the case of something like a new ship, no, we don't want to put out the ship unless we're happy with it. Going forward, we don't want to rush features or content.

All of us want to make it perfect before we release it, but at the same time, we want to keep giving the community a reason to come back and play the game on a regular basis. So you're trying to find these intermittent points where this is a complete game experience. We can ship that, then we iterate, then we iterate, et cetera.