When you name something like the Galdereen or set something up like the Better Together initiative, why don't you just drill that idea into the ground and come up with every single facet right away?

Well, I think part of it is the hope that we want players to be able to experience it firsthand, that storylines will be developing while they're in the universe. Again, down the road, we want to be able to start making these have more direct influence on the actual players and what they're doing and stuff like that. Basically, if we were to introduce something and then resolve it purely in the fiction, then it's not something that the players get to ever experience. Again, the idea has always been to make this a living, breathing, growing universe. We want to allow for that growth with the players. It's not just something that we're doing arbitrarily on our own; we're creating all this stuff that players are getting to experience in real time as well, which is fun.

I imagine there's got to be some aspect of time management, too. You create a bunch of hooks and then see which ones resonate with the players, which ones don't, and then you take the ones that resonate further. You don't just spend hours, days, weeks developing a thing and then watching it fall flat. Because not everything works.

Yeah. And in general, it's also an extremely collaborative process here between the character team, design. And so we're also a part of a much bigger picture. And I know this is a metaphor that they've used a lot and I love to use, is that we're sculpting. And when you're sculpting, you're basically putting in the very rough base form first, the big general idea, and then you start to dig into the details. And not all those details are coming from us. So for that Tevarin sentiment on Branaugh, we need to let the teams go off and be like, oh, wouldn't it be really cool if their houses look like this? Or maybe they've evolved this way, to give them the breadth to be able to add some of their personality and their vision to the game. So yeah, there's also just giving that little bit of scope to put people in the right direction and then let them also help tell the story.

Yes, the Galdereen also is a good example, too, because yes, we could have sat there when we came up with the name and been like, all right, it's an eight-legged lizard-like thing that has huge claws and massive teeth and a stinger tail and all that stuff, which would be fine. But we kind of intentionally keep that stuff vague because once we have a creature designer, an artist or designer who are starting to actually build that creature, we want them to have the freedom to be able to do what it is they want to do and satisfy whatever gameplay needs they need to have, or combat things if it's supposed to be an enemy-type animal or something like that. And if we outline exactly all of these things, we create an expectation that it is all of these things, then they don't have as much freedom down the road to make it feel as fun or interesting or cool as it can be. So, yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say you really kind of handcuff yourself if you're getting everything too much. That's exactly what Jared was saying: you don't want to have everything just really, really locked in, and then if something kind of doesn't work, or if a design element thinks something else will be cooler, or something in gameplay affects it, right? That's a huge part of this, that this universe is a living, breathing kind of a thing, even in alpha to some degree. So it reacts and it does these things. And I think that's always been the idea with Star Citizen. Also, a bit of mystery is kind of fun because it stokes the imagination. Star Wars to me gets less and less interesting the more stuff we know specifically about it. And that's why the original stuff is cool, because it kind of throws out all these vague ideas that really stoke your imagination. You see things and you hear terms that don't necessarily have context. And not everything would, right? In a real world, you would hear people talk about animals that you don't necessarily know: oh, I've never seen that animal before, I wonder what it looks like, or whatever. And I think that's really kind of fun. And some things we may never describe, right? You may never see one of these things out there in the wild. It could just be something that exists somewhere off on a planet you'll never see or whatever. And I think having little pockets of that stuff makes the universe feel bigger and also does just kind of stoke the imagination.