Tony Zurovec · Persistent Universe Director

Your NPC crews will basically follow normal 24-hour schedules and stuff. Now, in Squadron 42, it's a little bit different, where you go on a mission, and it's possible, we were actually just discussing this the other day, me and Phil, where we may want to make it such that on given missions you're able to have key characters effectively remain awake, so that you can communicate with them regardless of how long you're actually out doing that, because the clock is always turning and yet your character may be out there for a 16, for a 20, for a 24-hour effective period. And so if you need frequent callbacks from the captain of a given ship, etc., then he may be willing, just like you, to basically put his schedule aside and stick it out with you. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew, this is really on a design basis. They'll determine when it's appropriate to rigidly stick to the rules and when we want to apply a little bit more flexibility to the system. But the ultimate objective will be that the characters within the game will follow a schedule that you would expect to see in the real world. The captain is sometimes on the bridge, sometimes he's in the mess hall, sometimes he's sleeping. The gunners, sometimes they're at their station, sometimes they're in the rec room, et cetera, et cetera. This will have, again, just like we've been talking about with a lot of these things, a lot of follow-on effects in terms of how you go about accomplishing missions.

Erin Roberts · Global Head of Production

Right, and also through that we have states, so if we go to a state of emergency, then all those crew know to go to their positions.

Tony Zurovec · Persistent Universe Director

It almost becomes like the concept of food or fuel or anything else, which is allowing your crew downtime is something that you're going to have to take into account. If you expect to head on out into space and you've got a large NPC crew and you just want to sit out there for hours and hours and hours, then you're not going to want to leave yourself that entire time in a dangerous situation, or else you'll have to worry about crew shifts or whatever.