Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

I mean, it's an interesting idea to run with, that Frontier Fighters steamroll their way through some of the other gangs and wipe them out. Again, it's usually that thing, too, of what you were talking about before: to build the experience to the standard of quality that we like to ascribe to stuff, adding those gangs requires support. It requires costumes, it requires voice packs ideally, it requires ship liveries, it requires a lot of stuff that requires other teams to get involved. That's why we usually make the distinction, whenever we're talking on this or in the forums and stuff like that: there's a distinction between the fictional universe and the in-game universe. In the fictional universe, they're probably out still running around, but whether they're represented in the game yet, right now we're not really at a place where we can support putting them in.

Will Weissbaum · Assistant Narrative Director

But as far as down the road, we have plenty of narrative room to have them show up and start having outposts dedicated to them. And I think it's about, oh, now we've had the character art time so that they have really cool bespoke armor that makes me want to go engage with them and loot them. And right now we just don't have that in the schedule.

Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

I mean, you kind of see it with the Fire Rats in the contested zones, how unique they can look, the work that they did on that. It was really awesome and shows basically where it could go. But I do like the idea of actually saying that maybe we fictionally kill off one of the gangs, that Frontier Fighters get a hold of them and stomp them out.

Will Weissbaum · Assistant Narrative Director

And I just want to say, I really feel for all the people who've been following along with the lore that we've been releasing for the past decade and seeing our development in real time. And they've always been representative of our thoughts at the time and our aspirations at the time. But we've changed, we've grown and we've learned stuff. So at one point we were going to have all these gangs, and we developed them because that was what the idea was at the time. And now as we've learned, it's like, oh, we want less, better gangs. And so we've trimmed, pared down to fit into that schedule, or we know how much developer resources it takes to do it to our quality now. And we've had to adjust it. That's not to say that they're cut or gone. They just might not be showing up in the way... We talk about this with the location lore, having to adjust and change to our new tech. And so, yeah, I appreciate how difficult it is to be a Star Citizen lore fan and being like, wait, I thought it was this. And, you told me these gangs were down here doing stuff, and I don't see them. So I know it's tough.