When you get into that common area or landing zone, can you carry a gun into the landing zone? And if so, can you use it?

Yeah, this is actually an interesting one. It was one of the first things when I came on to the project. The original plan, as I understood it, was that the landing zones were originally going to be combat free and then there would be segues. You could take a subway to a more dangerous area. And I wound up talking it over with Chris and he liked the idea of basically trying to expand the concept to give a lot more freedom and flexibility to the players by allowing them to actually carry their guns into any of the landing zones, with all of the design baggage that that's going to involve in regards to fixing a whole slew of problems that come up. But the basic effect that we wanted to get, the ultimate objective, was that we're putting a lot of time and effort, obviously, into building out all of these cities. And the first time that you go to one of them, it's just going to look absolutely spectacular. You're going to be blown away the first time you see ArcCorp in person or Terra Prime or a variety of other areas. But the problem is you start thinking forward and thinking, well, the third time, the fifth time, the tenth time that you actually visit that, no matter what we do with the NPC AI to basically look like a living, breathing world, when nothing out of the ordinary can ever happen, at some point it starts to feel boring. You lose that sense of tension, of anxiety that you get when the unexpected is possible, when, even if it's unlikely, combat can occur. And so we wound up making the design decision to go ahead and allow guns. And what this is going to wind up doing is when you go to a planet in the daytime, there will wind up being a variety of security mechanisms in place to prevent this from ever getting out of control. But that will be scaled according to how much security we want in a given area. In some places, a major hub, a Terra Prime, something like that, there will be so many security guards, there will be security cameras, there will be automated turrets, and they're so advanced that as soon as you try to pull a weapon out in a given area, you'll immediately be stunned, you'll wake up in the hospital, you'll be fined $500 and they'll tell you, quit being so bad. But what we like about this, though, is, one of the original design thoughts was, well, maybe we would just deactivate all of your weapons when you actually landed on the planet. And the problem with that is we would no longer only be able to prohibit combat within the area that we really wanted to make secure, but that would prevent combat from occurring down the dark alleys where it would actually be nice. And so in this case, when you wander on to ArcCorp, we'll wind up having mechanisms to discourage that type of player against [player] stuff from getting too out of control, but at the same point, if you arrive on a planet at night, you look around, there are very few security guards, the normal shops that you want to go visit are closed, and you're looking to restock your ship. And so you know that there's an arms dealer, and he's at the back end of a dark alley, and you walk down there, and you actually hear a door creak open behind you, you will turn around and you will look, because the last time you did that and you didn't, somebody actually stunned you, took all your money, and you've remembered that ever since. And so in this case, having the potential for combat is going to keep you on your toes. It's going to make you always be paying more attention than you would if we just blanket restricted it in its entirety.

But it's also going to be specific to, like, Terra, you're not likely to get mugged when you're in the nice areas. If you go down the blocks, down an alleyway, then perhaps someone will try and mug you. Or if you're on Nyx, where it's basically a pirate base or city or whatever you want to call it, then yeah, there will be much more rough and tumble. I think, just like anywhere, you could probably walk around certain areas of cities without a weapon on you and you'll be okay. You just know if you're going to go to the more sketchy part that you better be ready to defend yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. It'll vary from planet to planet. It'll vary from hour to hour. Like in the middle of the day, the streets of New York are very safe. The streets of New York become a bit less safe at night. The back alleys in New York are probably dangerous, definitely dangerous in the middle of the night. And so what you've got is a whole lot of shades of gray as opposed to just a Boolean, yes, you can engage in combat here or no, you can't. One other thing in regards to preventing griefers, because obviously this is the type of thing where it sounds very good in practice and all of a sudden you get one or two guys that want to screw with the other players and it snowballs out of control and a whole lot of players' gameplay experiences are ruined because of a few bad apples. And so we've got this concept where every time you land at a landing zone, whether you go through the public landing zone or your own personal hangar, just like in the real world, you have to pass through customs. And at customs, there's the concept of whether or not you're actually authorized to carry a weapon into that area. This is also where they would turn you away if you've been banished from that planet. And so if I were to wander over on a planet that actually had a concept of law and order, this might not apply at all to Nyx, where if you go in, you just need to mind your own security. All bets are off. But if you're in a place that's actually got some level of security, like I said earlier, if it's Terra Prime, as soon as you go to pull your gun, there's going to wind up being an automated turret. It's highly accurate. It's going to stun you. That's it. There's no chance. But in a variety of other places, ArcCorp will probably have a little bit lower-end turrets. They're not quite as accurate. They don't actually fire until you fire on someone else, and then only if they don't actually have their weapon pulled or they haven't actually fired at you. And so if you wind up shooting unarmed people in a secure area and you wind up getting caught, then on these planets that have this concept of customs, what you'll wind up having is your license to carry would wind up being revoked, such that the next time you actually come to that planet, and this would probably persist for some number of real-time hours, you wouldn't be able to carry a weapon. And so there's a real penalty applied in terms of, I was able to inflict some pain or damage or whatever to another player, but I'm no longer able to do that. We've instantly flipped a switch and you can't do that for another 24 or 48 hours. And this actually puts you at a real disadvantage because for the same reasons, like now imagine having to walk the streets of New York late at night...

The other thing is that, since we can't have all the players all in the same room at the same time, we instance stuff. So we matchmake the instancing. So one of the things we will definitely do in the algorithm is we will try to separate griefers into griefing balls, if that makes sense. So you can grief each other if you like to grief each other, but not necessarily others. And it's actually quite easy to do. I mean, the system that we have, it works the same way in space, but also done on the planets, is you basically go in and out of containers, which is the instance. And so we're always putting you in and out when you go to a new area in space, or the same would probably happen in a big location planetside where you would go into the concourse, and the concourse would be its own area where there'll be multiplayer, and you'd be leaving. So we can decide who you see. Are you seeing your friends, seeing your enemies, people of similar skill levels? And so that's another tool we can use to essentially make everyone's game experiences [better]. But I mean, I think the real thing to point out is that we definitely have PvP in the game and players working together in co-op, but as we've said, there's 90% AI to 10% player population. So if we have a million people playing the game, there's going to be 9 million AIs running around simulating in the economy. Because of that, you can also extrapolate that there'll be huge amounts of encounters that will be AI based. So you'll be fighting AI pirates, or if you're a pirate, attacking AI traders or whatever. So there'll be a fair amount of co-op versus AI, which is what I think, if you take a look at what everyone's doing right now in the game in Arena Commander, a fair amount of everyone is playing Vanduul Swarm and the single player or the co-op modes. And then there'll also be the player-to-player options in the game. So even though we will try our best so players can't grief other players, there will definitely be threats and stuff that will be legitimate for you to fight. So a mugger tries to mug you on Terra and you pull your gun in self-defense and take him out, that's fine. You're not going to get in trouble for that. So we're going to have lots of opportunities for you to have fun action and tension in places besides just the player-to-player. And we do allow the player-to-player stuff. And sometimes people think about, oh, well, you're going to have a gun planetside, well, aren't I going to get griefed and so on? And that's really not the purpose. The purpose of being able to have the weapons down planetside or doing the EVA into a derelict ship is really for those environmental encounters, which, I mean, there's been some really cool fan videos that have been made about that kind of stuff. It gives you a sense of what it's going to feel like. And so we're pretty committed to making the world feel alive and reactive in terms of things that you can do and the places you can do it, so you don't just go down onto a planet and it's basically a glorified 3D shopping interface. So I think that's the only thing I was going to add to that.

Yeah, no, and that was the original design rationale. We didn't want to ever have the landing zones turn into something that you've seen 100 times before and nothing changes other than the cosmetic effects of the AI. So you'd see the activities change and you'd see more businessmen because the economy is booming and you'd see more criminals when the economy is doing less well. But if none of that can ever directly affect you, except insofar as commodity prices and the missions and stuff that are available, you're going to lose that entire effect of ever being on edge, of ever being anxious because you kind of screwed around a day ago, you shot another player, and now for the next 24 hours, whenever you land on that planet, you're no longer allowed to carry a gun. And if you pushed it farther, if you actually skirted the rules and a friend of yours actually got into that planet and he gave you a gun and you tried to continue the griefing, well, now we basically register the fact that you had already had your license to carry revoked. Now you've been caught griefing, killing a player in a law and order type of area again. And so now we basically flip a switch, and you're literally banished from that planet for the next 24 hours. And so whereas you could still grief, you would not be able to grief for very long.