Jonny Jacevicius · Assistant Design Director

Yeah, so obviously we had an interaction system that has evolved a couple of times, right? And it evolves through necessity and where the game's at and where we feel like it needs to go. We used to just have the super, super plain interaction. Do you remember the old use thing that was in the middle of the screen? And looking back on that now, it was quite inappropriate, because you would hit use and hope that it was the correct action that it did. Is it going to pick it up? Is it going to open it? Is it going to close it? What's going to happen? So that obviously wasn't very clear. And as the game evolved and the items and the way you interact with items got more in-depth, and you could do three or four or five or six different things with the same item, the necessity came to basically have a selection there. So that's basically where we ended up with the system that is currently in Star Citizen at the moment, where we've got the list. Now obviously, playing with that for such a long time, we eventually got to a point where we were saying, we could definitely do better here, and it's something that we've wanted to do for quite a while. So that's where the player interaction experience comes in, where we are now condensing this down into one single use action. But unlike the old use action, you get a verb that essentially tells you what it is you're going to do. And that also ties into default item action. So I could look at all of these items on your desk, right? All of them might be very different from each other. Your laptop might be like the old-school use action, which would tell me that I'm probably going to hop down and start typing on the laptop. That folder there might be more like a pickup action, or an inspect action if it's something that's like a datapad, if there's an iPad on the table or something like that. And that allows us to basically look at all of these different item types that we've got in data and say, this is what we think the default item action for this thing should be. But again, in ISC, something really cool that we showed off is the ability to customize that as well. So we're not getting rid of all of the big list of actions that we previously had that were quite difficult to navigate through, especially in situations like combat. Combat is obviously something that we've seen a lot of in Squadron. You can envision how that generally goes. And again, through the game evolving comes the necessity to change it, right? I just want to look at a weapon on the floor and hit go. I just want to pick it up and use it, right? But as I was saying, we're not getting rid of all of the other actions that you can do with the items. It's just that they are tucked away behind a wheel. For the people who want to customize this experience or use the other interactions on specific items, it's all there, and it's in a slightly cleaner format with the wheel, so you're not accidentally clicking something on a condensed list that we used to have.