What do you want people to understand about ship audio [when they walk away from this show]?

Shut your eyes. And then when you hear the sound of a ship, you know which ship that is. You know which manufacturer it is, you know the voice that's used in that ship, that that's from that ship and that manufacturer. So that's the dream scenario, that we get what's called an earworm. It's something you memorise and you know is the sound of that ship. I can make many references from other films and games, but fundamentally that would be the dream scenario. You close your eyes, you know that ship's behind you. And indeed we have to do that with 360-degree audio. You need to hear it first before you see it. So that's the dream scenario. And that's a whole topic in itself, how we're going to be bringing bespoke sound to each manufacturer, how we're going to play with sound in order to... how do we achieve the sound of luxury leather compared with the sound of a plastic tractor seat? How do we do that sonically? There's absolutely no time to talk about that. But we do want to grade the sonic experience by the price of the ship and the quality of the ship, the weight of the ship and the function of the ship. But the most dreamlike thing for me: shut your eyes and you know what you're listening to.

That includes ships that you're in and ships that are flying past you.

I want people to know that we are listening. There are a lot of suggestions that people come out with, like ship horns, and we have talked about it. Actually, a better example would be ship flybys. We actually pushed the priority right up for that because we really wanted that. I know that the community really wanted that too. We are listening. We're here to improve the experience for you on audio. We want these things too. Sometimes it does just take time, and we are blocked by other things. We do need code support for a lot of stuff, but we discuss a lot of the things that were asked today internally, and we are changing priorities for things like the flybys, for instance. It just takes some time.

Yeah, I would say again the fact that this is a live service game, and our work constantly comes out and we get to see the players' reaction, it's a pretty nice feeling. It's very validating, and seeing the positive feedback gives us more motivation. And when we see things like 'I really like the engine-on sound' or 'when you land the ship', it gives us that extra motivation to keep the standard at least at that level or push it even beyond, so people experience those nice moments time and time again.

If you compare the ship audio experience where it was a year ago to what it is now, we want to do that again next year and again. So we're just constantly pushing for quality.