Will AI in the game, such as NPCs found in stations and towns or even wildlife, follow and use the same survival requirements that players currently do? Will AI get hungry, get thirsty, have to heal?

Absolutely. This is basically exactly the stuff Andrew is working on. And this way creatures will also be the same. Creatures will use this stat system; they will get hungry. Humans will get hungry. They will have to find some food. Of course, we are not doing the same simulation where you have the bar and stuff like this. Based on your flow, if you are working, imagine you're really an airplane pilot for real. Then you get hungry. It's not that you say, oh, bye guys, and you just leave the cockpit and go eat something. So you can sustain these values and you can do it at the right moment. But we will basically have these needs that need to be fulfilled to perform better. If you are super hungry and super thirsty and you're fighting, you're not going to be as efficient as if you are fed and at full energy. Do you want to add some more stuff on the design side?

No, I think that pretty much covers it. It's just a simplified simulation; we definitely don't want to use as many resources on the server side as the player does. The effect is going to be the same. The guys are going to have needs, basically. They're going to have hygiene needs, food needs, drink needs. So they're going to try to cover this. They're going to try to find a place in their environment to [cover them]. If not, they'll try to find a place outside of that: can I travel a bit and then find what I need?

And I think sometimes we tend to think backwards, in a sense. Those systems also help us drive the behavior. It's not just that we want to support it because it's cool for everybody. It's cool to have that one because, first, everything works consistently. The same things that happen for the player happen for the AI. The AI is actually running the same code as the player. It is a sort of player on the server, in a sense. Of course, there are some adjustments on the state machine based on the needs that we have, but the state machine is the same. The systems are the same. They're just the actor in terms of the game. But really, that one also helps us drive realistic behavior. Otherwise what you do is just run randomly, you go eat something and stuff like this, but then it's very hard. You lose the context, and that context you need to put somewhere, and at that point you put it in the same place where the player has it, and then it works the same, and it looks much cooler.

I think what you said about... the reason why the player doing the same thing is so useful is because we've got this third-person player, and therefore things are driven through animations in the exact same way that they will be driven for the AI. So that behavior just falls out of the same systems, which is really useful. Although there are always tweaks; there are some slight differences, but a lot of it is so similar that you get that benefit.