How do you feel about the current state of the engineering gameplay system, and where do you see it going over the course of the next year?asked by Boldheart

So essentially engineering is something that we're always looking at and making adjustments to. I'd say the current balance isn't necessarily where we'd want it to be, which is why we're continuing to iterate on it.

The standpoint right now from an engineering perspective, I think, is to let everybody know that it's not where we want it to be. It's not the finished product. The intention with engineering, like we've always wanted it to be, is for it to extend the life of your ship. And with that comes the opportunity for players to engage in further activities to be able to do that. I think right now the balance of fire is probably a bit underwhelming with what we want it to be. The problem that we have trying to achieve the true full scope of engineering is that there are other features around it that need to come into play. But I think that we will definitely be balancing engineering over the next year to make sure that we are getting that tuning right on the base functionality. And like I said, when the new flight model comes in, engineering will be the way that you manipulate and utilize your ship, both from a single-seater all the way up to a capital-class ship. So there's definitely things for us to do there. But at least that's the current standard. But I know that you wanted to take us through some of the future.

We can elaborate on a bit more. So let's talk about soft death a little bit. So when you're fighting specifically AI ships, the soft death tuning is also, I wouldn't consider, where we want it to be. And what I mean by that is right now, there's a high likelihood that they would just explode. So we want AI ships that you're fighting to explode if a component goes critical. But then you also don't want a ship to be dead in the water and the mission still requiring you to take it out. So we'll be adding a few more callbacks on a mission point to be able to understand certain scenarios where it will consider that ship no longer part of the mission requirement, which I think will help. Another part of that is once the ship is soft-deathed, we want to be incentivizing more dynamic content. And what I mean by that is cargo manifests right now are also built through the mission. So obviously that's not very scalable. It requires every mission to be prescribed explicitly in terms of the manifests, whereas really we want that on ship archetypes. So basically when you come across an AI ship in the wilderness, that will have its cargo manifest, and that means we can create more dynamic scenarios. We're also going to be looking at the bug on the MFD screen. So when you scan that ship, you'll get more of a comprehensive and legible readout, again, to further give you the information you need about whether you want to...

You want to be able to go into combat, fight an AI ship, and some of the ships might be worn and heavily worn, poor components, and then they blow up. But some ships should also, like you said, soft death, and then you should be able to use that as part of the reward for that mission and be able to go and salvage it, take its components. Does it have cargo on board? And obviously radar should be able to give you some of that information and be able to play the game. That's where we want it to be. We're not there yet, but I think that's still a good vision for us to work towards. The development needs to be faster. We need to get more iterations into the players' hands. I think nobody's happy with the pace of development that we want to push towards on these iterative features, and it's definitely something that we're going to be moving towards. And that's coming back to Mission 2.0. The reason why we're investing time into Mission 2.0 is to help make the development faster, so that we can focus the engineers not on helping the designers to fix mission bugs, but come and help us iterate on engineering. We're well aware that we want to be improving on that front, and it's something that we will do.