How is player-facing modularity progressing? We introduced the idea of it back in 2015.
TL;DRPlayer-facing modularity is planned and not cut: the vehicle tech team will start on the tech with the Retaliator, with modules possibly arriving later, and not every ship will be modular.
There are quite a few ships that we've promised with it. They're all still going to have it. In the near future, we are putting the vehicle tech team on actually doing the tech to allow this. And we're going to start with the Retaliator. They are simply working on the tech first, and we want to get that functional, and then we will work out when we release the actual modules. They may not be the same time frame. You may get the tech in first and then we spend a quarter or two working on those modules, because they were done quite a long time ago and the seats are not quite to the current standards. So we will do that. The technical issue with it at the moment is we need to have object containers for these rooms that swap out. They need to be items that swap in and out. But we need to have that link between the contents of that room and the parent ship. So on the Retaliator, you have those torpedoes. They need to be self-contained within this room, so you detach it and you can put another room in there. Because if you did that at the moment, you'd just have these two torpedo arms dangling through your recreation room. It is planned. We're still working on it. It's not a cut feature. I see plenty of people saying that we're never doing it. And we'll just do it in select circumstances. Not every ship is going to have a modular feature.
So that touches on how the feature team may have time in their schedule to be tackling some of this stuff, but that might not necessarily align fully. Where possible, we're always trying to line this stuff up, but the company's pretty big and everyone's working on a lot of things at once. So it's not always a case that we can go, OK, cool, the feature team is finished in week X, and then in week Y we just start on the art, because sometimes in week Y we might be two months away from closing out a capital ship or a single-seater or whatever it might be, that we need to focus on, and we can't afford to just up and leave to finish other priorities.