John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I don't know what you're talking about. So we'll talk about the Merchantman briefly, because we discussed how we want to do the backlog of capital ships. So we want to start with RSI, because doing the Polaris first helps reduce the amount of work needed for the Perseus and the Galaxy. So those three will likely be a chain of dependencies from each other.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Kind of shared assets.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, there's a lot of shared assets between them. Obviously, the exteriors are quite different, but you do an RSI hull kit or corridor kit, floor kit, doors, beds, and it all gets reused across them, maybe with some slight material differences. So there are a few things that are problematic with the BMM. Firstly, everything is unique. So it's not like we do one corridor kit.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

It can't be modular. It has to be unique. Nothing on the ship can be modular. Every corridor, every room.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Everything's unique. So the amount of time investment...

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

I mean, there's some chairs, but even some of the chairs we couldn't reuse because of the shaping of the room.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

It's all moulded, right? There's lots of bespoke geometry.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So yeah, we had a lot of people on there. We had some unfortunate people leaving who'd been here quite a while, so we'd lost a lot of that team knowledge, and part of it is rebuilding the team. Obviously, again, like we said, you don't get new staff members and go, hey, welcome to the Banu Merchantman, here's a completely bespoke thing that does not follow any of our existing art guidelines. And all the time we would have put into that would be just for that ship. We get no reuse from it. So yes, we will do it again. But personally, I think the time is better spent on other capital ships, to get people up to speed, and then we can start putting people back on it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of love within the team for the Merch. I think there's a lot of excitement there for it. It's just making sure that, again, like we said, the team's set up to succeed with it, and we can actually deliver it to the standards that we expect.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

Can you imagine training new people on developing a brand new art style for a ship? I genuinely think the Merchantman is going to be one of the hardest ships we ever do, just because of all the additional factors involved: the scale of it, the fact that nothing is really reused, it's all unique moulded, all the rooms, all the floors, it's that cool art style.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

It's a different style of modelling as well, right? In terms of our actual discipline of how we make ships. It's more like traditional vehicle modelling than it would be hard surface. It's hard surface meets organic, and it's weird.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

We'd worked on that process, and we had a good process in place, and it was just unfortunate that they chose to go off and chase new adventures, and we wish them the best of luck, and it was a big loss to the team. That initial pre-production was done and it's there. We just need to get to the point where we can still deliver our current line-up of ships we want to deliver, and we want to be able to do it justice. It just takes a bit of time.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

And keep on top of the bug backlog.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

We're constantly supporting other feature teams. There's a lot of work for the tractor beam, there's a lot of work for salvage, other features coming online that we have to support, and all of them are time. Lots of time investment from our side to actually implement them in the ships.