Talk to us about the sub-items for ship components, the bits even smaller than the components like coolers and shield generators.
TL;DRSub-items are swappable parts of ship components that deteriorate and tweak performance, with the number depending on size and quality; the speaker defers to design on details and expects them to feature in ship combat.
So, sub-items. These are the parts of the ship items that would deteriorate over time. You're going to have your different ship items, and you might be able to swap different grades of ship items that have different performance abilities. And then these sub-items again allow you to further tweak their... This is very design-led. I don't know much about it specifically. We make them pretty, they make them work. But these are the things that you are going to be able to swap in and out. Depending on the size and the quality of the ship item, the sub-items, you might have two, you might have three, you might have more. And because, again, we do things from single-seater fighters all the way up to big capital ships, these are a consistent thing that will allow you to tweak your ship's performance, be it your shields or your power systems.
They behave as stat modifiers, basically, I think, but in a sort of cool dynamic way.
And then that gameplay of being in a ship with your friends and something blowing, and one of you has to run down and, mid-combat, rip it out, find the others, pop them in. I think that's certainly going to be fun. That's what I'm excited for.
I think it's going to be a big part of ship combat, actually dealing with failures in your ship items and sub-items and the like.
One of the things that I've really been enjoying about playing Sea of Thieves lately is when you get into ship-to-ship combat, somebody has to go down below and start patching holes in the ship and start bailing water out. This will be our much more complex and driven version of that.
Yeah, and the combinations of sub-items, ship items and ships is huge. With the ship items alone, you can swap these things in and out, and how you combine that stuff is going to give you a lot of different functionality, I guess.