Currently, marine seats on ships feel underutilized. Will they have unique functions in the future?
TL;DRDrop seats already protect against G-force ragdolling, which they want to make less binary, and dropships still need more health to survive the drop before players will use them.
Assuming this is drop seats. Yes, they sort of do already, but it's sort of an underutilized or unnoticed feature, in that we do impart G-forces onto loose actors within ships. So for dropships, if you have 20 people crammed in the back of a Valkyrie and the pilot does a hard turn, you're all ragdolling and falling over. It doesn't happen really as much as we want or the way we want it. It's very binary at the moment, like big impulse happens, everyone falls over. Whereas the way Chris has talked to me about it is your gravity generator on ships, which is not yet a physicalized item but will be, sort of lags in its compensation of gravity. So rather than being too much gravity, everyone falls over, it's hard turn, gravity's failing, everything starts getting loose, and if it continues, then people start, not necessarily falling over, but almost like EVAing inside the ship because the gravity cannot keep up with the force and the directions. So then being sat in the seats, you're not having to deal with any of that. But the counter of that is we want to make dropships be more utilized. At the moment, they're probably not tanky enough. They don't have enough health to survive the drop-in versus other ships, so we've got to bump that up to get people using them.
Dropships are literally the living manifestation of putting all your eggs in one basket.
Yes, they need to survive the drop for people to bother using them, so it's a sort of cyclical thing.