Yogi Klatt · Senior Gameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience

Firstly, that kind of approach is contradicting what we want and the general idea of energy weapons versus ballistics. But the other part of that is that our weapons do not have a shield damage property. It's the other way around. Our shields have a damage type property and every weapon dishes out damage of a certain type. Can be distortion, can be physical, energy, and there's a couple of others. And the shield has absorption and resistance values that counter that. So even if we wanted to do that, we couldn't do it right away. So this is nothing we can do for 3.14.

Mark Abent · Lead Vehicle Engineer

There's also coming along, which we want to do and talk about more, probably another point with the physicalized damage, our ship destruction. It's kind of arcadey still. Everyone knows it. I mean, we had it since the first AC. You hit the health pool of a critical part and the ship's dead. We, and I'm sure CR has also mentioned many times in the past, don't want that. We want it where you could damage certain sections and the ship could still be functional, but it doesn't just die. So we've also been talking for other systems like insurance, what does it mean that we indicate that a ship is in a bad state? Maybe all the power plants are gone or certain parts of the wing just make it inoperable, so the ship is basically dead but not dead. So once we get more aligned on what those critical areas are, we could reduce the arcadey death explosion. And that will get rid of those instant builds where you just ram a bunch of health and then it dies. So the problems that we're seeing now are going to be different problems in the future. It's just those things that we keep repeating, too. It's those incremental steps to get us there.