How has PES affected development, design teams, props artists and so on?

Yeah, well, I think right now it's still so fresh and new that we were finishing off Task Force 3.18, and now that we're picking our head up from getting a lot of these live must-fixes done, now we're starting to look at, okay, how does this change missions? How can we create beacons? Clean up the world and everything. Now, Chris has been talking about this for a while, but now some of our dev teams can actually breathe and we can start working towards this. So whether it be creating bins that you can basically throw away and then that deletes items from the world, or even if a big event happens and then ships' wreckage are there, and now you can go and salvage that. I think those are some of the interesting things that will arise, but then I think it'll really change the way that we're doing missions mostly. For props guys, they're still going to be building the props the same way. It's not going to really change our art. I think it'll change our art... Right now, a lot of the things that we do in ships and we do with art is we basically bake it in, make it look lived in, and what we'll do I think in the future is basically clean that out, and so you'd be delivered a fresh ship and then you dirty it up, you make it look lived in, just like you would do if you just moved into an apartment or a house or something.

I think there's another thing too that we're slowly discovering. I mean, you can imagine this is going to happen, but until you have it in your hands... You're right on the mission side, that's going to change a lot, because just as a player, your approach to a specific mission will be able to change. Let me throw an example. You have a mission to go somewhere, you could prepare for that mission by hiding a ship in a cave nearby and then that allows you to escape, or things like that. This is not something that would be possible before because you most likely would lose the ship because it would get cleaned up by the vehicle manager. Whereas now you can actually leave stuff in the game world to help you in your mission, right? So whether it's supplies or whatever in preparation for it, or a PvP event, same kind of thing, right? But also I think what we don't grasp just yet as far as an effect on the design teams is the fact that you get free persistence on items would allow gameplay loops that are built just by an object existing. Currently, if I add an item to a player ship, it's not necessarily going to persist because it gets cleaned up, recycled, whatever. But now that it persists, you could actually imagine gameplay loops where you attach a beacon marker on a ship and that stays with it until it's found, right? Allowing you to track the ship. And that's just free because you get persistence of all entities, and even in shards, right? So you find a ship abandoned in the game world, but it has a tracker on it, but you don't have the tool to find it. So all of that stuff will sort of come naturally and influence, I think, mission design, prop design and stuff, and modulate how we build the game world. I really see all these discoveries will show up once we actually release it to more players. And we'll realize that there are some things that we planned that would be difficult to build or would require engineering and systems to be built, that might just be almost done already. So I think that's going to be the effect ultimately. I'm hoping for it.

I think the cool thing about it, having played it a little bit, is it increases kind of a density of content and the element of surprise when you go to a location to do a mission, but then you're going to stumble on something else. Maybe there's this wreck to salvage or something. And it's really interesting because it's essentially not only free content, but it's content that grounds you in the reality of this game and kind of tells a story by itself. And it's not a story that was curated by us at all. It was a story, like you said, Jared, created by the players crashing around the track, or these type of stories. So I think it adds a layer of depth to that universe that is super interesting.