What kind of discussions are we having about how to fill travel time and make it compelling, so it's not just people sitting in a ship watching starlines go by for 15 minutes?
TL;DRTodd Papy says travel time depends on ship type and floats a pitched idea of optional anomalies to investigate mid-travel, but says they are not planning to act on it right now.
Well, I think it depends on also what type of ship you're in. So if you're in a multi-crew ship, if you think about the Millennium Falcon, when they're doing these long hyperjumps, they get up, they do other things on the ship, they check on how something's working, they go and do other things. It's the same thing from a capital ship standpoint. What they never show is Luke going to Dagobah. And so from a single-seater fighter and even from multi-crew ship, we're talking about different possibilities. I've pitched an idea where along the way you're going through probability volumes and, for example, you haven't done something for X amount of time. You haven't had a story mission. You haven't had a combat. You haven't had anything else. And instead of it being like interdiction where it wholesale pulls you out, it's "I'm getting an anomaly up there. Do you want to go investigate it?" So basically, if you think of open world games, a lot of the fun of it is going from point A to point B. And I think from our standpoint, quantum travel, when we first were looking at it, obviously it was around Crusader and basically around Yela and the moons there. And then when you take it up to now you're traveling from Crusader to Hurston, there needs to be a time... It could be construed as penalty, but it's basically a travel time, that it takes a certain amount of time to do that. Just because, again, if you're traveling with goods, we want you to basically have the ability to possibly be interdicted.
Now, you did say one of the things you're pitching, so I want to clarify.
It's basically something Tony and I have talked about, and even Chris is aware of it, but basically we're not planning on acting on it right now.
I do like the idea, if I'm allowed to have a personal opinion on that, of not just the interdictions that force you to come out, but by providing sensor data, the anomalies, enticements to come out, where you have to make that call like, oh, I've heard people find great things on these anomalies. It's like, I really want to check that out, but I've got perishable goods or valuable goods. And if I pop out, somebody can see me.
It could be a good Samaritan thing. It could be a trap. It could be all these different kinds of... I think we call them ECM missions, but they're basically just different missions that show up in front of you, and sometimes we use them during interdiction, but it could be other aspects where you're coming across and maybe there's some asteroids there and you want to go and mine them, or you want to go and do something else, or scan them and then be able to sell that information. But that's where I would like us to go. If we did any sort of adjustments, I think Chris basically wants it to be like movies where you see the hyperspace jumps. And then when you take the jump points, then that's a different type of gameplay. That's more like whitewater rafting or something where it's a lot more active.