In the walkthrough we saw a chessboard-patterned table. What kind of gameplay will there be around that? Can we even play some kind of hologram game on it?asked by Michelle Rovinska
TL;DRThe chessboard table is a break-room holo chess game that also hides an escape route into the ventilation, and John Crewe confirms only a playable something that might look like chess, not an exact recreation.
Well, I wanted to obviously have a break room in this ship. I wanted some sort of elements of just, you're sitting off and you're relaxing and playing some chess. And we were just thinking of this holo chess. And as I say, Chris actually mentioned having this holo chess as well. So we were talking backwards and forwards about it. This is how it came up: we could implement this little holo chess game that you can just sit off with your friends and play a game of chess. The actual holo button in the middle, once pressed, goes into the floor and then splits in half, and then you see the ventilation system underneath, which you can then escape into. So it's kind of like a multi-functional table, really. So not only is this a cool little bit of chess that you can chill out with your friends with, but it also gives you a bit of an escape point as well, which is what Chris wanted, and I thought it was really cool. It's that bit where, as I say, again to reference the Millennium Falcon, it just goes down to fix the hyperdrive. It was just that little element, and you get to see all the guts of the ship as well, which is cool.
When we do ship concepts, we have multiple gate reviews to get all the departments that are working on, or are going to work on, this ship to sign off on it, so nothing crazy comes from art, like, oh, this ship's going to be all tank treads so it can roll in any direction, and animation go mad. And as soon as we saw that chess table come up, we were like, that's going to be one of the questions. If it's not in the Q&A, someone's going to ask us that. And Chris talked at great length about how, when you're doing these huge quantum travels, you saw it at CitizenCon last year, where we did the quantum travel from ArcCorp to Hurston, how long that was. That was enough time to put another demo inside that quantum travel. And that was just two planets in the same system. Chris wants all these little mini games for you to do to pass the time, because there's big amounts of time that you're going to spend just in quantum travel, and you're probably not going to want to sit in your pilot seat for that entire time, just sitting there going, oh, I might just sit here just in case I get interdicted. You're going to want to get out of your seat and go do stuff around your ship. So all these little mini features are things that he wants to have just there for you to pass the time with.
So is that you confirming that we're actually going to have a playable chess game?
I'm confirming you're going to have a playable something. Might look like chess. Can't guarantee it will be a one-to-one recreation of chess.