Will scanning ever be skill or knowledge based rather than just holding a button?

Yes and no. So we've gone through different ideas of what it means to be skill-based. And there's some ideas to get it there. But what we wanted to focus on is, again, getting it working where everyone knows how it works. And once we get to that level, then we can maybe add extra things that make a skillful player unlock information better. I don't know what that means yet, because it's still ongoing discussions of what and how we can make it more skill-based. But one of the things that we're bringing in to bring that gameplay into there is scanning is now tied to the signatures and the detection of an object. So if you have a ship far away that's on the edge of your radar and you scan it, you may not get all the information about that object unless you get closer, just because of the emissions that it's making, and it's off at the edge where you can't quite see it really well. So you could see Sean's ship, but maybe you can't see his contents, and you have to sneak up on him so your signatures aren't too far out, so you could scan him to see if he has anything better. So there is a bit of emergent gameplay that comes out of there. But the whole process itself being skill-based is still ongoing, on what that means and how we could deliver it to a player. And again, we're focusing on getting the basic system there, and we'll modify it as we go. A lot of it, too, is we'll watch what players do and maybe add different things for different skill sets.

Yeah, I think there's still a couple layers in there; there's a bunch of player agency now. And whether or not you want to call that skill really depends situationally what it is. But they can focus scan on it. They'll know what the interference is according to the signal of the scan target. So again, if you've got a lot of interference, you're going to want to focus more. And that's, again, a little bit of a skill. You've got to know to do that. And if you don't know to do that, you're going to take that much longer to scan. So that's just speaking of the scanning independently, but with the whole electronic warfare suite, there's plenty of skill involved. And a lot of it has to do with situational awareness and knowing yourself. Checking the ambient levels. Am I stealth? Am I not stealth? Has somebody pinged me? Have I pinged somebody else? Do they know where I am? All those layers of it are the little cat-and-mouse kind of gameplay that I think we want out of this.

And the skill out of that, too, is if you design your ship to be less emission-based and you're aware of how far those emissions can go, that determines how well you could sneak up on someone and scan them to relay that information back, or just go all hands on board and try to take over that ship. But if you have a ship like a Hammerhead that's emitting something crazy, you're not going to be able to sneak up on someone, because you're just loud.

But it's what Chris likes about all of this. It's all about preparedness to go to the thing that you're going to go to and then adapting in the situation. But it is the forward thinking, and a bit the agency that you have to make those decisions on the way in.