Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

I believe it was a conversation with design. They had built a series of missions that were supposed to build up towards the release of the Pyro system. And so there was that initial thing of, oh, you can pick from these three, and then suddenly they wanted to make it shift to two, so we had to look at their outline of how they wanted to do things and figure out, all right, well, how can we phase it from three to two? And basically hit all of the markers that they needed to hit and then tell a story that could be fun. Again, the goal was, hey, Pyro's coming out. We want people to go to Pyro. So how do we incentivize people to go storming into Pyro? And it's been one of the things we'd actually, years ago, talked about, a similar thing for XenoThreat as well, of them taking over the jump point station and then fleeing into Pyro. And so it was basically, the Navy gave you the go-ahead to go in. So it was a bunch of missions for players, but it was the same type of thing: figure out a storyline that would ultimately culminate with the invasion of Pyro. And so we circled around this idea of the Frontier Fighters being a much more hardline version of CFP, basically. And then, in talking with design, came up with this hook of turning them into the villains, basically. So turning Frontier Fighters into the bad guys, hence why you had to fall into CFP or Headhunters.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And I'm glad I asked that question because you answered exactly what I was hoping you were going to say. Looking at the questions in that thread, I think sometimes there's this idea that everything starts with narrative, that everybody else in the company has to do what you decide the story is, and that's not the case. This is a collaborative thing, and many, many, many people have a voice. Not me, or we'd have Jalopy. But other people have voices where they say, we would like to do this, and that's something that happens quite a lot. Designers come and say, we would like to make this kind of content. We would like to do something like this. Can you help us find a way to fit that into the universe that you've created? And that's a big part of what you guys do day in and day out.