John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think we touched on that in the previous questions, that we are going to make sure they all have equality in terms of gameplay functionality. And yeah, they do have some issues at the moment, but those ships are definitely not underplayed. We look at the stats regularly, both from an ownership and a playtime perspective, and the combat ones and the mission completion ones. Again, that would tie into one of the future questions about what triggers a rework. But for their issues, they are certainly not being ignored, both internally by us and by players.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, visually with the ships as well, I think we've got quite a diverse range of manufacturers, and that can mean that not every manufacturer necessarily has to have the same aesthetics, but they should all match the same... And there's definitely ships that haven't been touched in a while. And there's no getting away from that. As a team progresses, technology progresses, as our pipeline progresses, we always try and learn from the last ship. If we didn't, we'd be stupid. So we're always learning. We're always trying to push to get things done more efficiently and to look... Yeah, there's no other way of doing it. I want to make stuff pretty. That's what we do, or at least what we try and do. And to probably butcher a phrase somewhere, it's easy to be taller when you sit on the shoulders of giants, or whatever the phrase is. Every time you're learning, every time you're pushing. And yes, that does mean that some of them don't quite match the visual quality we want. And it's something we do want to unify, but it's part and parcel of making a...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There are kind of two things at play here. One is that most games don't operate a live environment in the middle of their development. So this process of building ships, and each successive one learning from the lessons of the other one and getting better as you go along, is a normal aspect of game development. That's not just normal, it's how it's supposed to work. You're supposed to get better at this as you go along. It's just that for most normal games, that period where you go back and you bring everything else up to quality happens behind closed doors. When the game releases, hopefully, if everything works the way it's supposed to, you see everything at the same quality at the same time. We don't have that with the model that we use. Things have to go out as we learn things. And then the second thing is, one of the things I'm quoted saying quite often is, for everybody that's in the chat right now going give us the Banu Merchantman, give us this, I'm like, no, you don't want it now, you want it later, after all the lessons have been learned, after all the kinks have been worked out. The longer it takes to make some of these ships, the better they ultimately end up being. So it's an interesting situation that we're in with Star Citizen, because we operate this live environment during the course of our development. But yeah, as we've seen, we've remade the Freelancer four times, I think. We've remade the Constellation a couple times. I think our commitment to keeping these things updated and bringing them along with everything else has been shown. It's just a question of when is the right time to do it. If we do it now and there's still lessons to learn, we've got to do it again. So let's learn our lessons, let's refine our process as much as possible, and then every ship will have its time.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And that is one of the luxuries of working on the project and using the model that we do, that we can be super reactive to new techniques. And if we work out something that is easier and better and looks better, then we would jump on it. And I have worked on projects before where you could be coming right up to GMing your game, and it's like, oh, but if we did it this way, it looks 10 times better and we can do it twice as fast. Too late for that. You can't do that now. And you've got to just write it off and use it for the next project.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Again, to echo that, it's such a unique position. In other games, where you get it on launch day, you're super hyped, but for some reason you don't like this thing and you're petitioning for developers to change stuff, they're already nine months down the road on the next thing. Nothing's going to change, whereas we actually have the ability to react to things here.