Item 2.0 ship systems and weapons: finalizing Item 2.0 functionality so items can overheat, misfire and suffer critical failures, and deeper functionality for upgradeable items so they make a marked difference to a ship's performance. So this is the big 'my Hornet won't perform the way your Hornet does' thing?

I would say this is probably the biggest missing element of the core gameplay mechanic of venturing around in space, is that we haven't finished... so we have the infrastructure for Item 2.0 and a lot of the bits are there, but not enough of the stuff's in there that the user can realize it. So we already had wear and tear in the 3.2 roadmap, so wear and tear is definitely part of this, but really where it comes in is the effect of, say for instance, I'm running my engines, my thrusters hot, right? I'm overpowering them, I'm putting more power to them so I can boost them, so I can turn a bit. For that time, I'm turning them, but they're running hot. So as they're running hot, they're becoming overheated. As they're becoming overheated, there's a chance that they may misfire or they could even have a critical failure. The more they're overheating, the faster the wear increases. Wear also affects your chance of misfire and overheating. Because you need to have downsides to doing things, right? So everything's a trade-off, right? So what we don't really have that's that effective in the game right now is, you running your ship should have to be making conscious choices. Am I putting my power to the shields because I'm in combat, but then I'm not able to put as much power to my guns so I can't recharge them as quickly, or I can't put as much power to my thrusters to superheat the plasma to eject the gases to thrust me around. And so what we want to do is focus much more on making that whole holistic aspect work. That also has the issues, the downside, the wear, that then means that that item, as it gets older or gets worn and you're not fixing it up... if you've got a damaged item and you're not repairing it, the chance that it can misfire or just have a critical failure is much higher, right? So what we want you to do is, you've got your ship, you've been out there, you're in a fight, you've got to take it back, you're going to have to repair it, make sure that equipment's in good shape. It's like if you don't do an overhaul of your jet engine every so many hours of operation, you could quite likely fall out of the sky in the real world. Well, we want you to have those same sort of calls. And if you overuse it... in the real world, you thrash your car all the time, on your brakes all the time. Well, at some point, your brakes are going to fail if you don't replace them, right? So we need to make sure that that whole loop is in there and it has effects and players can feel it. And so there isn't any case where one player can just say, oh, yeah, well, it doesn't matter. I've got so much power. Everything's powered and everything works perfectly. We want a sort of trade-off in the ships, even big expensive ships, that you have to make decisions on your resources. Am I doing this or am I doing that? And there's always a pro and a con for both of them. And then also having Item 2.0 finished up properly means that the multi-crew behavior that you can do is much more. So one of the things in, say, a Constellation versus a Hornet is the crew could run around and be fixing up components as they're failing, and that would enable you to last longer in a fight or out in space. So if you're getting hits on your shield and your power plant is putting out energy to try and keep the shields up, that's a strain on your power plant. The power plant would have, at some point, a misfire opportunity. If it misfires, one of the fuel rods in the power plant goes. Power plant now has, say, four fuel rods, so now it goes to 75% power instead of 100% power. As a player, you could go and change the subcomponent of the fuel rod out on it and then get it back to 100%, right? And the same for other items; they could have fuses and stuff. And so we have these subcomponents. We've got the art even for them. But having that whole loop hooked up, you can go and do stuff. I mentioned Sea of Thieves at the top, and it has some much smaller stuff. You're in a fight and a cannonball comes into your ship and there's a hole in your ship, and if you don't put a plank on it and you don't bail out the water... I mean, that's cool, right? Someone's there driving the ship. Someone's down trying to bail out the water. Someone's firing the cannons. And that's what we've had as our design from day one, back in 2012 and '13. And I sort of feel like we need to finish it off properly instead of talking about it, and get it done. So that was a big drive for me, because I think it will provide a vast amount of fun and gameplay and challenges and trade-offs and discussion for everyone out there.