Richard Tyrer · Lead Game Designer, Vehicle Experience Team

So it's really complex. So we start off with a ship concept, and the teams we work with, the vehicle team and the drone crew, and we work with them on identifying the identity of that ship and what it should be and what it will be in the game. And then according to that, we're building a certain character that we think suits that ship. It could be really fast forwards, it could have really good handling, or it's really slow and clunky. It depends on the ship. So we try and apply that. And then it falls to the loadout of the ship; it can depend on the weapons, or if it doesn't have the weapons to defend itself, what does that mean as well? Does that mean make it really tanky, so it can't fight back, but it can sustain? But all those different things that we have, all the tools we have at our disposal, create what that ship is in the game. And then from that, the players themselves have choices within that ship as well. And we try and provide as much as we can to let the players move the ship a little bit more to that place or that place, depending on what they want. But the ship always has a kind of window that it will operate in, and it might creep into other ships if you have different components, stuff like that, but it's always got that core identity.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And sometimes that's not going to align with each individual player and what they want it to be, and that's not a balance issue, that's a thing that happens when you've got a game with 200 ships.

Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

I mean, there is a good analogy. There was a German World War II ace called Adolf Galland, and he flew the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Me 109. And although one of them was better, like the Focke-Wulf was a lot better in terms of the stats, he actually preferred the Me 109 because it was just better in handling. And it just speaks to the characteristics of the ship. The ship has its characteristics and might not be the right ship for you. Maybe you just focused so much on one ship that your muscle memory is all aligned with how this or that ship should handle, right? But this is why we have different ships, right? They give you different access to the universe. Maybe the handling is different, but then you have a big [garbled] somewhere else.