So the fact that there isn't a way to officially plug in with the other side in Xenothreat isn't indicative of some future design direction? It's just that's not what this one was doing?
TL;DRNo, it isn't indicative of a future direction; the opposite, since the team tries to give every playstyle something interesting to do, including playing the bad guy, and wants this across the game.
Not at all. In fact, it's actually quite the opposite, because as is always the case with Star Citizen, you see this with so many things that we did with Xenothreat. With Xenothreat, we kind of started out with, okay, we're going to have capital ships, so any player with bombers, they're set. And then the concern was, wait, a lot of players don't have bombers. How are they going to contribute? What if I've got a Hornet? And so we introduced the concept of, great, we'll have a lot of support, light fighters supporting these ships, and you can basically make the Idris retreat and therefore win that battle simply by taking out all those light fighters. And so all of a sudden now, whether you've got the heavy bomber, whether you've got the light fighter, you can contribute. But that still left the problem of, well, what if I'm not the kind of player that wants to do tons and tons of endless ship combat? What do I get to do in this Xenothreat thing? And that's where we started thinking, hey, let's have this whole salvage aspect where the Javelins come in, you're basically restocking them. So now someone's got to go out and basically get the materials. And of course, we've got to have a little bit of FPS combat on that. But then all of a sudden that forces you into that FPS mode. So we start looking and thinking, what if I actually do like the ship combat, but I want to be able to contribute to the restocking and not be forced into that? Well, you've got transport ships going back and forth, and on occasion, you'll be asked to defend them. And if you successfully defend them, you basically wind up generating as much restocking benefit as if you were to fully salvage one of those derelict ships. And so the point I'm making is, regardless of what exactly you want to do, what you find interesting, we try as much as possible to make sure that there's going to be a sufficient diversity of interesting things to do such that you'll have a good time. And so right at the very top of that list would be, sure, a lot of players are going to, on occasion, want to be able to play the part of the bad guy. Some other players will want to play the part of the good guy. And some players, like if you think about, without going into too much detail, the Nine Tails Lockdown, when you're actually trying to deliver those supplies, are you trying to simply take out all of the pirates in that area, basically remove the threat, or are you basically just trying to transport goods in and take advantage of the sky-high prices that are temporarily being paid because no one else can get through that blockade? And then if you're one of those guys trying to transport those goods through, all of a sudden, there's a real need for you to hire, via service beacons, other people to protect you. And so you've got escort potential. You can basically be the guys helping to lock it down. You can be the guy helping to eliminate the threat. There's many different ways you can come at this particular situation depending upon what interests you. And that is ultimately where we're trying to go all across the game.