Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

Well, I posted about my feelings concerning Master Modes about a couple of weeks ago in Spectrum. So in general, I'm very happy with the progress and what we achieved, because the swap to Master Modes meant that we had to update all the ships all in one bulk. So we could not really stretch this out to multiple releases, because our data system is not able to have two different tuning values or two different ways of keeping ships balanced at the same time. So we had to squish all the ships, and just to be clear, we have about 140 different ship records in the game. So we had to update them all and take the other related tech from Squadron, like the new aiming system, the way the weapons work, the gimbaling system and so on, plus part of the UI updates, and squish this all into 3.23. Now, we knew before that this was a pretty tough ask, because it's just a lot of work. So overall, I'm really happy with the progress. Of course, there's a couple of, let's say, balance issues. There's a couple of balance offenders, of course. But we don't need to say it's perfect. We never said it's going to be perfect on this release. But it builds a far better foundation from which we can iterate faster going forward beyond 3.23. What about you, Rich?

Richard Taylor · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience

Yeah, that's basically where we're at. It's about moving towards the better foundation for the future of the game. So it's been really cool to get here. But for us, it's just the start of this, but it's been a really cool journey. I mean, this journey started for us, wow, like three years ago, I think? Yeah, it's about three years ago, maybe more than that now.

Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

It's been four years. I lost track of time.

Richard Taylor · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience

So we got together and we looked at stats and went, right, what do we need to do to make the combat experience good, but also the general flight experience good. We came up with lots of things, and Master Modes was one of the ones that evolved as the prominent feature that we were working on. It's involved so many teams and so much feedback from all across the studio. So it's been an effort not just of myself and Yogi, but lots of different teams and lots of different people that have been waiting on this some of the time that I've been here. So it's been really good to see it out there. It's been a big push at the last minute because, as Yogi said, we've got so many ships and every single one of them had to be updated to make this work. So there's a couple of things that we didn't catch probably, but that was expected given how many records have changed in the game. But we believe it's a much better foundation, and we're excited for the feedback as it's coming in, and also for the future as well, because it's going to evolve massively over the next few releases.