Tobias · Senior Level Designer, Persistent Universe

This comes down a little bit to what we have talked about, how we add more content to our planets, and that obviously will help with this in general as well, because in the future we could have, for example, caves where you can drive in but you can't fly. And that obviously helps, where you would be like, oh, I need to buy this ground vehicle because then I can visit this place without danger, because it could be somewhere you can access with a vehicle but can't access without one, because you would freeze or, depending on the location, it would hurt you. That comes back again to what Andreas mentioned just now, where we're trying to figure out how to fill all of this, and that's why we don't have as much variation at the moment. We have a few different caves that we place, and in the future we want to add other sorts of caves, like ice caves and all that stuff. But until we do that, we obviously first need to figure out how to actually fill a universe. It's quite difficult. It's a big challenge to fill a universe as a level designer.

Andreas Johansson · Lead Level Designer, Persistent Universe

Also, for example, and maybe I'm speaking a little bit on behalf of other departments, when you have things like weather effects and planetary effects, you can have electric storms on a planet that basically ground every flying thing for the next 500 kilometers, but you still want to go in there, right? Then you have to get in a vehicle and you have to drive there. That's not necessarily level design, but this is the interplay of different departments and different elements of the development that can help create a unified experience, where we could provide the location the player has to go to, but the only way to get there is through the interplay of atmospheric systems and where the front's moving in, for example. So there's stuff like that. And like Toby said, of course, caves. You want to go into a cave and you can't fly in there. Walking might be too dangerous because it's full of dangerous gas or heat or whatever. So you get in your rover and you can drive in for X amount of distance, carrying all your equipment with you, for example.

Friedrich Bode · Principal Level Designer, Persistent Universe

Yeah, or a heavily fortified base on the planet's surface that has tons of anti-air missile batteries. So you are either very, very heavily protected against that in your ship, or you drive in with a tank, which probably makes more sense.