Is there ever going to be voice recognition or voice commands in the game, like VoiceAttack, where you can issue commands and your shipboard AI will do things?
TL;DRVoice commands are hard to integrate well and would need to be reliable and user-trained, but Banyard says it needs more exploration and hopes the game gets something like it.
Yeah, it's one that actually came up quite early on, and we looked into the VoiceAttack thing as well. And it's a hard one to actually interleave properly into the game, because I think the reason why VoiceAttack works so well is it's very, very customizable. There's a lot of UI devoted to that. And it's just a lot of engineering, I think, to maintain a system like that. It's something I think we need to explore more, because I think it does have its advantages. And it is kind of fun. I totally get the idea. How much we need to be actively involved... I think, as you said, it's almost like a gameplay or a system design thing, because it's another control mechanism, and it won't be suited for everything. For it to work, I think it has to be trained properly by the user. It's very difficult to get stuff to work just out of the box. I think that's evidenced by how much money has been spent by the likes of Amazon, Apple, et cetera, on getting that stuff to work in the real world. If you're relying on it in particularly twitchy situations in the game and it fails you, it's like, well, that's a mission that's been put out. You've got to fail at some point with it. And I'm very aware of that. So we'd have to get it pretty solid before we would roll something like that out. But I hope we do. I can definitely see... this is what we associate with the future in a way, and we kind of have it now, but we'd expect it to be far more accurate in the time that we're trying to model. But it's a tricky one.