What is the status of us being able to either slave turrets to pilot control, use AI components to operate them, or hire NPCs to man them?
TL;DRNo timeline can be given; manned turret gameplay has to be made good first before slaving, AI components or hired NPCs are added, since automating turrets now would undercut feedback on manned turrets.
So an exact timeline, that's something that we can't really give right now, because of all things with iteration. The biggest roadblock actually with any of that is getting the actual manned turret gameplay into a really good spot first. So we've put these cool turrets on a number of our ships. We've got a lot of gameplay plans for making multi-crew matter, even if it is just a hired NPC, even compared to anything like a slaving rig or an AI blade. It's getting that manned turret gameplay where it needs to be first, and then start giving the other options to be like, hey, you don't have to have all your friends online all the time, so here are these other options that you can triage things down with. But it's making sure that the core experience is fun before we start adding those in, because otherwise it'd probably just short-circuit that whole experience.
And of course, we want as many people in the turrets as possible now. That's how we're going to get the feedback we need. That's how we're going to get the metrics we need and stuff like that. To automate them right now, this very moment, would actually undercut our efforts in making manned turret gameplay better.
Exactly.