Why do we sometimes choose a new vehicle over something from the backlog?
TL;DRNew vehicles are often chosen over backlog ones because of size, scope and gameplay, since older ships need costly concept reworks and may lack gameplay to support them, though backlog ships aren't being abandoned.
A lot of the time, it does generally come down to size and scope. And it's gameplay as well. A lot of the new vehicles come with new or updated gameplay. And it's a lot more time-efficient to do that in a new vehicle than it is to go look at one of the old backlog ones, which probably at this point need a concept pass as well. Concepts are another finite resource that we need to manage. Not that we want to never do those backlog ships. We do. They just come with a larger cost, with all the things we've learned over these years.
Because they were originally designed with older metrics, with older ideas, older processes.
Well, look at the Carrack as a prime example, right? The original concept, the interior did not fit inside the ship. To try and get everything inside that ship, it was never going to happen. So we either cut scope on the ship or we increased size. We had to take it back to concept. But then the concept artists have a situation where they're trying to preserve the old ship while also adding everything that's needed, and it is arguably more difficult than doing a fresh concept. And we do want to get the vehicles out with the new features, the small gameplay loops. It's not that they're never going to get done, but certain time boxes, especially if a gameplay team says, we're going to have this feature ready for this quarter, we want to try and have a vehicle ready to go out with that feature.
A lot of the older vehicles do have gameplay ties now. We've sort of got through that backlog of ones that don't have gameplay tied to them. So things like the Starliner: yes, we could do it, but there'd be nothing to do. We don't have VIP transport... well, it's not VIP. We don't have transport missions. We don't really have NPCs getting on and off our ships. So again, we'd do it, spend a bunch of time on it, and if the gameplay team hasn't done their work, or if it's just not a priority for them... Server meshing or doing Starliner.