Richard Towler · Lead Game Designer, Vehicle Experience

I think we always want to make it perfect. That's the problem: we'd love it to go out in a place where we go, right, we nailed it. But I don't think we have. But that's part of it being a very complex game to balance. This isn't just moving a few things and the numbers work out and then the balance works. There's so many different systems and so many different things. Even having a different amount of thrusters on the ship, or them being in a different location, or a different power plant setup or a different cooler setup can really affect where that ship fits. So even though the numbers look right, until it goes in the game and it fits with everything else, it's really hard to know where that ship fits. So I'd say we're pretty happy that we don't think we've particularly broken the balance of the game, which is basically what we said before, but we wanted this release to go out where we really haven't done anything majorly wrong and broken everything, and it creates a foundation. I wouldn't say we're really happy with how each individual ship fits or how each individual component or kind of weapon fits yet. We've still got a lot of work to do on that. But as far as the foundation goes, I think we're pretty happy. But as I said, we'd love it to be perfect, but it takes a lot of time to do this and a lot of testing as well. A really big part of what we do is there's a lot of testing, and then we can look at the data to back up some of the feedback we get and everything. So it takes a long time to get together and just figure everything out, because there's so many systems that come together to create what that ship is in the game as well. And it goes for the radar scanning system as well. We've got a lot of intended balance for that, and that requires every single component on every single ship to be set up how it's intended to be. And that's just not the case right now. But we've been building a team to do this. So there's lots of stuff to do and we're cracking on with it.