Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

I would say yes.

Richard Taylor · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience

Of course.

Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

Of course it has a future.

Elliot Maltby · Lead Mission Designer

We've got to sound more confident, guys. Come on. Yeah, racing's got a future.

Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

Racing has a future. But really, the Master Modes tuning patch, of course, affected the current racing tracks that there are. The speeds got a lot slower and so on. And so some of the tracks right now might not work as they did. But the level design team, for example, also asked, hey, should we adapt the racing tracks now? And we're like, we're not completely done with our Master Modes changes with the flight model development, so maybe hold off on doing extensive changes for a while. But racing, I mean, we're celebrating ships, so of course we invested in racing. Specifically for the racing community, we added something to the flight model back then that was addressing the lack of certain acceleration when you're not using digital input devices and so on. So yes, racing is really important to us. And actually, today I got a question from Knabel, one of the German podcasters, YouTube streamers. He asked if we could add smoke pots to racing ships. I have not discussed it with anyone, but I think the idea is really, really great. Just putting this out there. Rich, say more about racing.

Richard Taylor · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience

It's definitely got a future, because I come from a racing background. I've done a lot of sim racing and I'm a big fan of racing in real life. And that's the key thing with Master Modes: it's going to allow us in the future to give more freedom to allow the racing variants to excel at racing. And that's something we're really keen on. Because one of the issues we've had in the past is balancing the combat experience with the flight experience and the racing experience. If you have a really good racing ship that can use all its guns at the same time and everything, it can suddenly be the dominant force in combat, which is probably not intentional. So we're looking at ways where we can balance that, so we can allow racing ships to be the best handling ships or the fastest in a straight line. And then basically, as Yogi said, it's about the tracks as well, because the tracks are where you're racing. So it's important that they're designed around the current flight model. And as we've made a lot of changes, we need to now take a step back and look at what tracks are going to make the most out of the handling that we now have in the game.