After the release of the 300 series as the first customizable ships in Star Citizen, what lessons did you learn, and how will you apply them to the next customizable ship?
TL;DRThe 300 series taught them about cross-studio coordination, technical art limits and what players liked, and a similar customizable ship costs about a ship's worth of effort, but they say they are committed to doing more.
So it was a really interesting experience, I think, for all the departments that were involved in it, because it was almost cross-company, across every single studio that we have in CIG and Turbulent, to pull it together and deliver it. I don't think there's many features Star Citizen has where it touches every single studio that has to pull together. Normally there's a couple of studios and then one might support, but we're all working on it at the same time. So we learned a lot about cross-studio, cross-time-zone communication and planning from that. We learned a lot on the art side of the technical limits of what we could do. Something we wanted to do was proper interior material customization, and we didn't have the ability to do that. So what we did was these seats and beds that gave you that experience, and we made the interior of the ship sort of respect all of those various combinations. We tried out all these interesting interactive props; they took a lot of time, and I think they were actually one of the most popular bits of it. What we thought would be really popular was the paint, but it wasn't as popular as other aspects that we had done. So we learned what people liked, what people wanted, got a huge amount of feedback from the community on it. In terms of manpower, doing something to the extent of the 300i again is equivalent to another ship in the pipeline. So when we choose to do another one, you sort of have to bear in mind that it's that block of time. It's not like a one-week task to knock out a few paint jobs and these items. There's a lot of time and a lot of people that go into doing that.
Presumably the second time would be faster, more efficient than the first time. Because the first time is always about all these lessons that have to be learned, quite honestly, the hard way.
Yeah, it would absolutely be more efficient.
Still, though, it's a pretty sizable outlay. It's not to say that we're not going to do it. We absolutely are. We're committed to it. We really like this idea. I know Chris is behind it. It's just a matter of finding the right place, the right time, the right situation in order to bring it back. Definitely got plans to do more of it.