Jonny Jacevicius · Assistant Design Director

I mean, it's a big change, right? And people are always initially going to be resistant to it. And I think that's very, very natural, because you've been playing a game for such a long time and it's such a big change that you're going to have to relearn a lot of the things that you've already learned before. But ultimately, again, this was another thing that has come around from us playing the game, especially in combat-focused scenarios in Squadron, and going through and going, hey, we feel like change needs to be made. So just a very, very high level of what master modes are: essentially you have navigation and SCM, two modes that you switch between, and they have very defined purposes with how you fly your ship. And what this has allowed us to do is in SCM, which is essentially your combat mode, we've made it so the combat is able to be a little bit tighter, because we've got a bit more control over the ship speeds there. That combat is a lot more personal, a lot tighter, and we felt that it made for a much more visceral and a lot more personal experience with whoever you're fighting. And obviously that's translated to player-versus-player combat as well, which again, we've been testing internally quite a lot. And it's avoiding situations where you're able to essentially exploit the flight system to constantly play chase and not really have a proper one-on-one combat with someone, and you're constantly running away. So we felt that it was a positive change as we've been playing the game.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think from my limited experience with it, it gets more exciting the more players that get involved. It's certainly fun 1v1, but when the furball starts... When I'm seeing the battles with like 15 people involved, 25 people involved, it keeps them all tight and compact. And literally the screen can be filled with ships this way. It's a much more visceral experience.

Jonny Jacevicius · Assistant Design Director

It's a game changer. We've got such beautiful ships. We've got amazing VFX that when you're shooting at someone, you typically in the past haven't really been able to see, hundreds of meters, if not kilometers away from people. It seems a real shame to not be able to see some of that stuff. You're basically just interacting with the UI. So this bringing you closer together is just a much better feeling experience, in our opinion.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So master modes on track for 3.23?

Jonny Jacevicius · Assistant Design Director

At the moment, yeah. And we want a lot of feedback. And we will get it, I'm sure.