Sean Tracy · Technical Director of Content

I like how they said that rather than 'steal', right? Because it's definitely not stealing. Yeah, absolutely. And if you're not doing that in any industry that you're in... I very realistically compare ourselves against, it's not even competition, but similar things in the same space. The thing I hate doing personally, and I think a lot of people hate doing this, is re-solving a solved problem. This is something that Dennis Crowe says all the time, and I like the way he says it, which is: if a problem has been solved in a very good way, why go through the trouble of re-solving that? So sometimes I say, well, that's kind of a solved problem. Why don't we do it this way, right? Okay, we want to implement whatever it is, a chat system in the game. Okay, cool. There's like 30 of those, probably a lot more than 30. You've got Skype, you've got, not MSN anymore, I'm kind of showing my age. MSN, AIM, America Online. But basically the point being, they've got Slack, Facebook, whatever. So do it the way that they've done it. It doesn't need to come up with a brand new solution. Don't reinvent the wheel every single time. Sometimes it's a solved problem. So yeah, definitely I let myself be inspired. A great one right now, and I still can't understand why we're not doing this, so hopefully you guys post on the forums about this, because I'm going to make a big deal about this right now. You know how cool it is to get into the ships? It's really, really hard to find the damn doors on the ships. If I've not gotten a briefing on a given ship, I have, as one of the tech directors of Star Citizen, been in there for 10, 15 minutes trying to find that door. And to go back to the question: playing Zelda, if anybody's played Zelda: Breath of the Wild, great game, a master class in open world design, super cool. But one of the things that they do really well in these Divine Beasts, and I'm not trying to give any spoilers or anything, is in the Divine Beasts they have this 3D map view that is phenomenal. In Zelda, it's like a 3D puzzle within these Divine Beasts. And in that, you have to know where you are and you have to know where certain switches are within this 3D space. You can rotate the thing around, you even control it, but it's got this great holographic, kind of transparent view with really, really bright orange indicators for different things. And it's not dissimilar to what our targeting stuff already does, but that would be a super nice way to give that map to the players so that I know where my door is. So, point being, I absolutely am looking at other games. And if other people in the industry, or other people in their own industries, don't do that, then they're selling themselves short.

Steve Bender · Animation Director

Competitive analysis. I do that a whole lot, actually, because when we're talking about animation for something or we're talking about a feature and things like this, obviously we have our own ideas and our own visions for this. But as Sean said, it's about seeing if anybody else has solved this problem before and how they did it. And it allows us to say as well, okay, this game did this like this, but we don't want to do it that way. Or, here's an interesting way that they solved this, so maybe we go in that direction, but we give it our own spin or something like that. And you work in this industry long enough, you have people that come up and go, oh, you worked on that thing? Oh, yeah, we saw that, and we were like, how did they do that? We want that, right? So there is a lot of give and take that goes on industry-wide, and people being inspired by the work of others. So absolutely.