After watching the CitizenCon demo, will there be alternate options like diplomacy, bribery, etc. to gain access to mission sites without having to murder locals right off the bat?

The point of the whole game is to, as much as possible, put a system in place and then allow players to craft their own unique solutions through the world, as opposed to what you see in a lot more linear games, where there's really only one solution, one way through a particular obstacle. That doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to negotiate with every character, but some of them certainly you would be able to. At other times, brute force will work best, but there will be many other options for you to solve a given problem. We're trying to inject as much in terms of the ability for players to craft the game to something that's actually appealing to them, and having that still work as long as it's logical within the confines of...

I think the other thing I'd say is that what we showed, there's a whole bunch of stuff that we're doing that we talked about, like reputation, factions, which would dictate whether an AI on the ground is friendly to you or not friendly to you, or whether they would let you use their landing pad. You would request it and maybe I could use it, or maybe they wouldn't want you and they would shoot at you. Obviously, in what we did, the sand nomads had essentially camped around the distress beacons to waylay people from space coming to find out about the distress beacon. That's part of a mission component, so that would be one of the things in the mission: recover the distress beacon, like the Javelin, would be a template, but then there were different additional layers on top of it. One of it could be outlaws or pirates, or in this case sand nomads, are basically using it as a honey trap to waylay people to get there, but there may also be other aspects to it that would be potentially different that could be layered on top of the kind of scenario of a crashed spaceship emitting a distress beacon.

Besides the characters themselves, again, given the whole sandbox style of gameplay, it's always possible that you could do things, exploit the system such that you can change their behavior without directly interacting with them. For example, in the case of the sand guys, you could remotely detonate something that draws their attention away from what you want to get to, and then you could basically sneak in. So we're trying to put as much of that stuff in place, again, so that it increases the potential for the player to really craft their own unique solutions, which we think in the end is going to not only give the game a lot longer legs in terms of how long you're willing to play it, but it means that everyone's going to have their own different experience, even when they're playing fairly similar occupations.

And to be clear on the subsumption, that's kind of what the longer-term subsumption stuff is doing. It's not there right now, right? So that's why we would have maybe shown some more stuff if we had all that done there. But we're working on that. That's actually Tony's primary focus, working with that along with the AI team and the mission team to really flesh out that part of our...

It's a much more complicated undertaking on the technological side to make everything systematic as opposed to just crafting a linear solution. If we wanted to do that, then we wouldn't have needed to change many of the tools that we got when we licensed.

If we weren't, we'd be done already, probably.

That's exactly it. Or at least close to being done. We're trying to put in place systems that we're going to be using for many years to come. And that permeates really all of the big-ticket technological items that we're doing: we're designing for a decade-long run or whatever here, and not just to basically solve the short-term problem and get it out the door. That's not what we're doing at all.