What kind of jobs can we expect to see?

Well, one thing to keep in mind when we're having any kind of discussion about jobs is, I'll use terms like a mercenary or pioneer and things like that, but there's no real formal concept of an occupation within the game. What you do is largely dependent upon what you want to do, what your skill set is, and what your ship and other equipment allows you to do. And the reason why I mention that is because there's a lot of areas of gray, again, between some of these different occupations where, in certain cases, what I would call the rescue occupations start to sound awfully similar to a mercenary. Where I kind of personally draw the line is mercenary missions, to me, I usually categorize as those that are paid gun for hire; they involve combat. This could involve anything from you being tasked with destroying a particular ship, securing an area of space, assaulting a particular space station. And one interesting thing about that is when you accept a mission, it's not necessarily of the type that you accept a mission and then that mission is gone and no one else can join in. Some missions, those geared towards multiple players, whether you actively join a group or not, you may wind up finding that you have the exact same objective as other players within the game. In other words, I basically outfitted my ship with a lot of weaponry. I've got some incredible armor and shielding, and I'm looking to basically make some money by doing some combat missions. I see that there's a pirate base in the far reaches of a particular system. I accept the mission to go try to quell the pirate menace in that sector. And so do 12 or 14 other players. And you're paid according to what your contribution to... Another thing just on the mercenary side that they tend to be involved with a lot is what I would call more defensive missions. Basically protecting things, protecting a space station, a particular area of space. This could involve escort missions to protect freighters that are traversing through dangerous pathways. They also tend to do a lot of retrieval missions. This could be anything from rescuing a kidnapped politician to retrieving an ancient artifact that's been stolen. Maybe it's on a ship. Maybe it's on a particular station, et cetera, et cetera. Another occupation that is one of my favorites, I categorize it as rescue. And this is kind of what a lot of people would consider a medic, except it differs from a pure medic in that you're not necessarily always trying to heal people. It's more you're looking to help, you're looking to assist, but not necessarily in a combat-oriented way. So this could involve anything from trying to evacuate scientists that are on a space station that's close to a star, and that star has now got a lot of totally unpredictable solar flare activity that's knocked out their shielding. Parts of the space station have collapsed and so you need to dock manually. You need to infiltrate the base. You need to basically free these guys from rooms in which they're trapped, at which point they'll jump onto your ship and then you can transport them back to safety. At the same time, these rescue missions might involve patrolling an area that's heavy in battle and quickly trying to tractor beam pilots that have ejected from their ships. And again, as Chris mentioned earlier, these pilots that are in the midst of these big battles could be NPCs, could be players, could be a mixture of both. And you're basically trying to pull them into your cargo hold, get them back to safety, and you're paid according to how many of these guys you actually retrieve.

I think the important thing to point out is that it's not like in a lot of, say, MMOs where you pick a role and that's what you're going to be. You're going to be a wizard or you're going to be a warrior or something. Essentially we're going to have lots of different jobs and missions and stuff you can do and it's kind of up to the player what he wants to do and also how he's equipped his ship and how he's equipped himself. So you could one day be taking mercenary missions on, the next day taking a rescue mission on, the next day deciding that you're going to take a transport mission on and take goods from planet A to planet B. You could then decide that you're bored with all this law-abiding stuff and become a pirate. It may be hard to go back into the well-policed areas if you become a known pirate and do some of the other jobs. But essentially, the idea is we're just thinking of lots of different things for the... It's up to the players to decide what roles they want to do. And we're also looking at doing roles that are non-combat oriented. So obviously things like mercenaries and bounty hunting are all very combat oriented. But there's other ones that should be less combat oriented, like the rescue ones.