Why the choice to go towards space-drag-style SCM combat? One of the unique elements that Star Citizen had was the full six-degrees-of-freedom speed limit, with acceleration being the defining difference between ships.
TL;DRSix degrees of freedom was not dropped; the speed limit was only lowered, because internal blind tests found players preferred fairly low combat speeds, which are thought to help combat.
Did we drop six degrees of freedom? Did I miss a memo?
No, we did not drop six degrees of freedom. I mean, ideologically or theoretically, you could say, yeah, we clamped down a lot of the stuff, but the flight model in Star Citizen always had a speed limit, and we're still having the speed limit. We just made it lower. And with the boost phase, where the draggy stuff comes from, we made it a little bit more dynamic. The thing is that we actually tested what fun combat engagement speeds are. So I think 18 months ago, I did a blind test. I invited people from PPT and from the VGPU team and just had them play PvP scenarios in Arena Commander, but I turned off the acceleration, the G meters and the speed meter. So they didn't know how much they accelerated and they didn't know how fast they were going. And guess what kind of speeds they liked most? 120 meters per second. And I thought that was too low, so we basically pushed it up a little bit further. But I'm pretty, pretty sure that these combat speeds we have right now, that they're so low, they're actually helping the combat geometry and the fun in the game a lot.