Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Mission Feature Team

It's our favourite, the complexity and the story and how we've taken that one simple story and tried to make arcs within it. Obviously they're expensive to make, time and such, and also crafting that kind of story. I'd say that's our first attempt at it, and we're going to get deeper and deeper. But yeah, we're all desperate to work on ones like that. The introduction now, or soon to be, of abandoned rest stops... So Covalex Gundo is supposed to be a cargo depot that blew up. And it was crafted by designers and such. It doesn't bear any real resemblance; it doesn't look functional. So we're taking the rest stops, and the abandoned ones have not only the bit that players can walk around, but they have a workers' area, huge, and lower decks. So you can imagine an abandoned one of those that you get to walk or EVA around will provide us with so much scope to do a huge investigation mission with so many arcing stories. And the building block system that we have, I think we've talked about it before, but having an email system or something so you can actually go and log on and flick through the history and see if there are any bits that stand out that will just lead you on investigations that could be dead ends or could be where the mission is supposed to lead you.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Now, when you say expensive, that's usually seen as a money thing, but in game development, it's almost always time and resources.

Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Mission Feature Team

Time, resources, yeah. Obviously, we have to work with writers on the story, and if it includes recordings or even facial capture, that means we have to do it right the first time, because otherwise you miss one line or you decide to change the design. You can't change the design once it's been recorded, because that means getting that one person back in to do a few lines, and that's money. But that's also then time. You have to schedule that.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's a much bigger investment. This much time and this much resources can get us one PI mission, or it can get us 10 other, I'm just picking a number out of the air, cargo missions and delivery missions and combat missions and PvP missions and stuff like that.

Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Mission Feature Team

I'm sure that that answer will be a recurring theme in here. Yes, we could do that, and we will do that, but there's so much more low-hanging fruit when it comes to content that we will probably focus on that first.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's a balancing act. You do a bunch of this, and then you do one of these.

Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Mission Feature Team

Yeah, and we get to have the fun. We get to do that one.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I see a lot of conversation about that PI mission.

Luke Pressley · Lead Designer, Mission Feature Team

It was supposed to be deeper than it was as well. We were going to lead them off on a trail as well, into space. So sometime in the future you'll probably see that.