How has PES changed the player experience so far in 3.18?
TL;DRPersistent servers mean players now find a lived-in world with stacked items and left ships rather than a pristine one, and developers are learning how to adapt missions and gameplay to it.
I think in terms of the player experience, the major change is really that in 3.17, the servers recycle quite a bit. Either if it's a 30K crash or a simple restart, then the world comes back to fresh and vanilla. So AI get back into their position. Game world is all cleaned up. There's no more trash anywhere. And so I think the first player experience change there is that you start coming to servers that have been lived in, right? So things happen, like people stack stuff in areas, they left ships in areas you can find. And Salvage... I think Salvage being in the patch has been great because it showed the potential of that feature coupled with persistence. So I think that's the number one change, is that you no longer come to a pristine world. You come to a world that's lived in. And I think that's a defining element of our MMO, right? We're slowly turning more and more into what an MMO should be. And I think persistence is the number one thing. So that's how I think the player experience has changed and will continue to change as players get more creative about what they can do.
Yeah, I would agree with everything that Ben says and then add to it, even from a dev standpoint, we're learning what we should do, how we should change missions, how we should create gameplay or missions that would feed on some of the stuff that's been left around or cleaned up. So we're doing internal looks on it, but then I'm excited to see what players will do with how to break the game.
The first thing we know is that even on PTU, the engagement from people that have access currently has been great in finding ways to break the shards. So that's been the part of the development cycle, I think, that's been the most interesting for us anyway, once the technology was built, was to see it run and then seeing how... oh, now we have some zones that get hot because somebody dumped an entire C2 of boxes somewhere, and then, oh, we didn't plan for this loading mechanism to support it, right? So it's already fun, right, to see what can happen when the game world actually persists.