One of the more common criticisms of multiplayer gameplay right now is that if you've got four people on a Connie doing an ICC mission, you're getting four times the number of mobs but you've still got the one ship. Is Item 2.0 the first step towards balancing that out?

One of those balances is, in the old system, you had a bunch of items and then the HUD and other systems try to figure out how they can talk to who, and it was kind of a mess. So when we went to item 2.0, we said we're going to get rid of that and we're going to do something different. We have these things now called controllers. We have these things that are the actual items. The controllers are basically the interface, how the player will communicate to the items on his ship. So if you want to adjust the power, you have to gain control of this energy controller, and that energy controller will talk to the individual power plants to make sure they're doing what they need to do. So what that means is the guy in the turret, he could observe the energy controller to see the status of everything. And then if Kirk's in the pilot seat, he has that energy controller, he could change stuff dynamically, and the guy in the turret could see what's happening. So you can have a guy in the shield station who's monitoring what power is doing because someone else is doing it while he's messing with the stuff. So you'll be able to now see what you're doing when you have these multi-crew segments.

And then speaking of the future, when we get to maybe getting systems like repair finalized, you'll be able to monitor and then choose how to repair things. Hopefully the best solution would be, you can physically go to where that section is in the ship, rip out the damaged or malfunctioning shield generator, pop another one in there, and then you're good to go.