Chris Roberts · Founder, CEO and Project Director

That's super important to us. It's fundamentally part of what Squadron has, because it's just you and everyone's AI, and their crew members. So that's dependent on us getting the Squadron stuff to the point that we're happy, and then we sort of bring it across to the PU, which is kind of the same thing that happens to FPS, because it's another level, right? You have the multiplayer aspect where you have to make sure it's synced over all the clients and the server, which you don't need to worry about on the single player. But yeah, we have design, we're starting to build a structure for that. I couldn't tell you where you're going to get your first AI companion on the roadmap. I would suspect next year you're going to see that. Won't be this year, but that is definitely important, because we need to, just on the PU, fill out that world. I talked about this 90-10 sort of ratio, where you want to have about 90% of the world be NPCs, AI, and about 10% be players. And that sort of allows you as a player, if you want to play single, solo, even with your groups, but you want to be PvE or whatever, you don't have to... It's not all about fighting another group of players to fight against or do things with. You can interact with the world at large, whether it's NPCs hanging around Lorville, or flying on a ship, and you're a pirate and you decide to liberate some goods from them, or some AI pirates trying to do the same to you. Because ultimately, as a game, there is a certain amount of wish fulfillment that comes in the game, where no one wants to be the shittest pilot in the world or the shittest dogfighter. And so, therefore... when it's player versus player, there will always be one player that's a loser and one player that's a winner. When it's player versus AI, then there's a lot more chance for the player always to be a winner. And so one thing that AI does is sort of provide... yeah, I get my ass kicked by other players, but I can go whip up some AI pirates myself and feel kind of good about it. And so that is quite important to fleshing out the world, and having also crew that would flesh out some of the bigger ships for you, especially if you don't have a whole bunch of friends to play with or they are not available at that particular time. So it is important, but it's sort of dependent on some of the Squadron stuff we're doing, which I would say roadmap-wise won't be this year. So it'll be next year at the earliest.