We mentioned browsing different shops on ArcCorp. If we don't have persistence on the planet side, does that mean we also don't have persistence for something like player inventory storage yet?

Absolutely, and that's why I mentioned it. So you will be able to browse, you'll be able to get a sense of how the interface is going to work, how you'll actually see rifles and ammunition arrayed within the personal weapon shop and stuff, but you won't actually be able to buy them, store them in your inventory, equip them or anything like that.

No, never. You'll never be able to do that. Just for show. No, I mean, I think it'd be important to point out that that's sort of the next milestone. So the first one is the one we're talking about, the social module, where basically you're there in your hangar and you can have some friends visit you. You and some friends may or may not be able to wander around ArcCorp. You can at least go out to ArcCorp, walk around, get a sense of a planet-side location, get a sense of what the shops would feel like and what the environment ultimately is going to feel like. And then in the next stage of the Persistent Universe, one of the parts of it would be more of the persistence, being able to buy and sell.

And exit the planet. Exit the planet, ideally do quantum travel, possibly. I mean, obviously we're not going to have finished effects and stuff for the wormhole travel, but once we've got those pieces of the puzzle in place, nothing prevents us, other than the lack of final-quality art, from allowing you to transition to other systems.

I mean, I think our goal is that we're going to have the social module now, sort of middle of the year-ish is going to be the next stage, which lets you buy and sell, and you can leave and perhaps fly to another planet and land on another planet, and then what we'll do at the end of the year is sort of like a mini version of the Persistent Universe, with not all the functionality we're going to have in the Persistent Universe and certainly not all the content, but I think we're talking about potentially, what, five systems?

Yeah, well, we've been aiming for five, but we were really talking more in the way of unique art sets and stuff. And so once we're actually talking about reutilizing, taking advantage of some of this modular functionality, we've recently started to expand our horizon. And so it's possible we could be in the, call it the mid to high single digits. And another reason, in regards to being, call it somewhat conservative, in regards to how many planets we're aiming to do, is we're actually aiming to do probably one of, if not the most visually ambitious, which is Terra Prime, which is just mind-blowingly gorgeous. But it's also a tremendous amount of work. That was one where Chris took a look at it relatively recently, and basically it got bigger. Shocker. It's actually an interesting one because Skelton and myself and the team at Behaviour and some of the other guys that are involved with that stuff, we were basically doing Terra Prime, but we were trying to keep the sum total effort... I mean, all of these art sets, all of these first-stage cities, basically, like right now Terra Prime uses what we're calling this super modernism architecture. Building the first of those takes quite a bit of time. Utilizing all of these pieces and then adding what Skelton referred to earlier as the hero art pieces to basically customize an area, that's considerably quicker. And so what wound up happening in terms of Terra Prime is we were aiming to keep it within the same ballpark in terms of overall implementation difficulty, effort, etc., as some of these other planets like ArcCorp at Stanton or Nyx. And basically Chris just pointed out how this was one of the largest, if not the largest, trading centers within the known galaxy, and therefore it made no sense for it to adhere to those same limitations. And so what we're really doing now is basically...

To clarify, the city size was always huge and it's massive. I mean, it is like massive. It's like seeing a huge metropolis, and it's really awesome and very coolly detailed. And at some point in the future, I think we'll probably share some of that. The issue is more about what you did on the planet side. So to try and scope some stuff down, Tony and Mark were trying to confine the action to basically Terra Tower. And for me, I felt like I wanted to have more of a texture at the beginning. So we definitely want the feeling of the world's busiest spaceport there. And then you probably want to have another area, which is the rundown... it's called the Blocks. And so then you would land and then you could go to Terra Tower, which is like your sightseeing, the beautiful edifice with all the high-end shops, and then you could be around the spaceport where you would do more ship-related things that would also be appropriate for that, because before, trying to put some ship-related stuff inside Terra Tower just sort of felt weird.

We were basically trying to squeeze... What's happened is Terra Prime has gone from something where we were trying to take a large concept and put it into, I wouldn't say small, but a practical package so that it wouldn't wreak too much havoc in regards to the schedule. And basically, it's now become more epic. And this is not something that's going to be done, as Chris pointed out before, on every planet. It's just that Terra Prime really is a special case. And as a special case, it makes sense to put in the amount of effort that it takes to do it right according to all of the original concept and game background.