What brought on this recent design trend of emphasizing bespoke weaponry on your newest ships?
TL;DRBespoke weapons aren't a planned trend; they were used to control damage output and achieve visuals on the latest ships, with only two more bespoke-weapon cases this year and generic weapons otherwise.
I don't know if a trend is two in a row, but it's an unfortunate trend based on just the last two ships. It's not a plan to just do bespoke weapons going forward. If I think about everything that's coming for the rest of the year, the only other bespoke weapon that is on any ship for the rest of the year is the Perseus turret guns. Everything else uses generic ones.
No, there's a bespoke weapon on one of the October things.
Oh, yeah. So two more for the rest of the year. And those ships also have generic weapons. And it's a two-part answer. Ben can probably talk about the visual side. But from the design side, it allows us to have essentially some level of control over the actual raw damage output of a ship. Because as players know, everyone min-maxes, if you have generic swappable weapons, you have to account for a full size range. So if we take the Meteor, for example, and we let those be generic size fives, I think that would be a well and truly overpowered ship, but their bespoke ones allowed us to have size five weapons that were very constrained and had downsides to keep it in check. And the same with the Wolf: the generic size fours would have made it just a Talon, but smaller.
It's a compromise. It's a compromise between design requirements and balancing and everything, and also the visuals that we're trying to... I think trying to fit generic size 4s on the Wolf would have limited what we could do with its visuals. And I know that's not important to everyone, but it does make up a large part of what we try and do with the game. But like I say, it's a compromise. With the Wolf, we were really keen to be able to have those weapons fold away and compress into the body and give those really clean lines. I think it was quite an important thing for Kruger. And with the Meteor, we wanted to really tie those weapons into the ship itself and make it feel really powerful and really unique, so we can integrate them into it, much like what we did with the Ares ships. Just because they're not generic size 4s, size 5s or whatever, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's never going to be options for other weapons for those ships. It just means that they won't necessarily use all of the weapons that are generic in that size class, but it doesn't mean that you're only going to ever have one weapon for a particular ship.