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FPS AI combat: the first stage of getting combat AI into the Persistent Universe, introducing the risk that an AI could be waiting to ambush you on a distant moon or in a hulk drifting in space. When you say FPS, we're talking about not in the ships, since we obviously have [ship] combat?

TL;DRAI enemies are meant to wait in wrecks and on moons to add risk and PvE challenge, since the aim is a mostly AI-driven universe where players don't constantly lose to other players.

Chris RobertsCEO / Game Director

Yeah, we have ship combat. No, it's basically, we have all these great space wrecks, but unless there's some other player there waiting to ambush you, there's not a lot of a challenge in it. So the idea has always been that some of these wrecks could have some outlaws or pirates waiting to ambush you. And it creates unknown risk, challenge, and it's also just kind of fun for us to use another part of our... we've got a very full-featured FPS game inside of our full-featured flying-around-in-space game. And you don't really have an opportunity to use it that much outside of playing other players. And ultimately, the goal in the Star Citizen universe is to be 90% kind of AI environment, 10% players, and the problem with player versus player stuff is that there's always a loser in that case that's a player, right? So there's someone that's pissed off, but AI don't get pissed off when they get shot in the face. They don't get pissed off when they get blown up in space. And so I think it's very important to have a lot of AI or environment encounters, whether it's in space or down on the ground. So as a player, even not that great, I can, like, yeah, I took that pirate out, or yeah, I'm a badass, right? And I may not be nearly as good of a pilot as the guy that's obsessively or the girl that's obsessively playing 30 hours a week and can snipe me at a kilometre or whatever. But it allows people to have fun because combat to a certain extent is one of the core mechanics. And so I think we're missing in the PU the ground combat aspect or shipboard combat aspect, and so this is the first aspect of it, and obviously it's definitely always been on our plans, but we kind of want to try to make a bit of a push for it just to have some challenge and variety when you're down on these moons or these large amounts of area that we've created for you to explore. Let's have some challenges, let's have some risks down there rather than just looking at the sunset or the sunrise.