Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

Kind of answered your own question.

Will Weissbaum · Assistant Narrative Director

Yeah. The Frontier Fighters switching into a pure enemy faction: I know some people aligned with them and they wanted to keep working for them, but our idea was always to have them as an ongoing enemy faction for the rest of the story we're telling this year. And going forward, not every faction that you encounter in the game is going to be one that the players can actively work for. There are these purely hostile factions, and we need them for gameplay reasons: as the reputation system slowly evolves, we want a similar experience for players, who can always arrive in a location and have someone to attack or who is attacking them, without having to worry about how the reputation system is going to change how they behave or the dialogue lines, because there's a high cost with that. We do want to have some reputation-based gameplay where the player's alignment will affect the outcome or how they experience these things. But that's going to be much more controlled.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It has to be within reason. It has to be within technical reason. It has to be within feature reason. It has to be within time, the amount of time that we can invest into creating different variations. Everybody that's ever played a video game that has branching storylines, you can only have so many different branches. Otherwise, it just goes on and on and on and it becomes impossible. I say that, and then Baldur's Gate 3 was like, hold my beer. Shout out to Baldur's Gate 3. But even there, there are limits. Limits in time, limits in technology, limits in functionality and our own desires. We're not making a game where you can do absolutely every single thing in the universe. We learn every week the game that we want to make. We evolve, Chris evolves, you guys evolve, we all have different ideas every week, and we start to think this is the kind of game we want to make as we see players react. And it's not to say that maybe someday down the road you're not going to be able to join space Nazis. I don't say no. That's my point. But at this moment, where we're at, no, that's not something we're really looking for.

Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

But again, going back to the conversation about the guilds that we outlined in the Road to 1.0 thing, there is going to be a criminal guild. If you are looking for that type of underworld, working-for-the-dark-side type characters and interactions and factions and stuff like that, we have that. You will be able to work for those people.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You can be criminals. You can be pirates. It's just a question of how far into depravity we look at.

Will Weissbaum · Assistant Narrative Director

An early version of the reputation system had a lot more factions that you're working for. They were going to be very localized, so that as you traveled from planet to planet, you were starting to build your reputation up. And it turned out that level of complexity wasn't delivering on the experience that we wanted. So we have pared back, so that the factions will ideally have larger differences from each other, so that you're not just shuffling back and forth between 20 identical delivery companies. For 1.0, we want each company that you work for to have its own vibe, its own voice. And those are going to be the ones for you to grow along with, from system to system. So a lot of the factions that we previously thought were going to be Pyro-only or Stanton-only are going to expand out into the other systems, so you can have a continuous experience as you travel through the star systems. And so I think a part of that is limiting who you're going to be able to grow that reputation with. We're going to have local factions and local people that you can still get paying jobs with and do small mission chains with, but you won't necessarily be earning a permanent reputation with them that's tracked and affects other people. So it's going to be a lot more focused and hopefully deliver a more in-depth experience for those factions that you do work with.