Yogi Klatt · Gameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience Team

Okay, well, I think there's a little bit more HUD work for the EMP stuff. In the future, we want to move the EMP stuff more into the missile operator mode, but that's not for 3.10, that's for post 3.10.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So to give a bit of context for those that don't know what's going on with EMP at the moment, all EMP items start off by default and you have to manually turn them on. That's because it was a design that we wanted to try out where when they're on, they use a huge amount of power. So by having them on by default, you ended up sort of crippling the ships. You turn your ship on and they would immediately turn off because the EMP just started absorbing all the power your ship needed. So we'd have them turned off by default. Then when you want to use them, you have to manually go turn them on. And that's an awkward step that we want to solve in the future where if you're in an EMP ship and you hit right mouse button or secondary fire in whatever control scheme you're using, it goes EMP's offline. You're like, why is it offline? It's because it's not turned on. So we want to simplify that flow where it perhaps turns it on for you or gives you a prompt of what to actually do to turn it on rather than requiring someone to hunt through the MFDs to do it. And then it's you as a player choosing to do this big energy-absorbing behavior, which means you then have to choose, am I going to charge this up? Or am I going to use all my energy weapons? Am I going to use my power for flying, afterburning? It's a choice you have to make between the two. That's just sort of a background as to why it's like that. And then, yeah, lots of people get confused by it.