Chris Roberts · CEO / Game Director

I'll tell you. It's a big focus. It's a big focus for me and it's a big focus for Tony. And so, to be honest with you, I know people think it's all been taken over by the FPS, because I guess that's what's going to be next, so people see the communications for it. But most of the design work that's happening at the high level, and most of the designers, are working on those kind of things and not working on FPS or even some of the combat mechanics. Yes, we're working on balancing for the various ships and working on stuff for the FPS, but we're working on a lot of stuff for what you're going to do in exploring, what you're going to do on the science stuff, what you're going to do with the medical stuff, repair, refueling, harvesting, mining. So we have plans. We've shared some of those. We've got some tech that we need to deploy for some of them, like mining asteroids. We're going to do voxel asteroids. And so you'll be able to mine away and do all that kind of stuff. So we have that. We have a ship called the Endeavor that is pretty damn cool, and we will be sharing that with you very soon. I've been working with Tony quite a lot on the various roles, but you'll be able to do everything, depending on the configuration, from farming to being a hospital ship to being a space observatory and a discovery thing. And so there's a lot, there's a big focus in the game. I want to have, yes, there's going to be combat and it'll be really cool stuff, but I also want lots of stuff that isn't combat focused. I think that's kind of one of the things that makes it feel like a real world. It also makes it feel inclusive. So you'll be able to go and do a lot of non-combat stuff, and you could potentially avoid combat. In certain roles, you may be able to entirely avoid combat, and then some will just be an occasional hazard of the job or whatever, and then some people can seek it out. So I wouldn't worry so much about just seeing things about FPS. It just happens to be, because we need to get that, because it's a fundamental step. It's not like, oh, we decided we just want to tack on FPS. We were on CryEngine. It's always a first-person engine. Even from the very beginning, when I showed my tech prototype in 2012, that was running in a first-person engine. It was the character sitting there, and you were looking at his eyes, and he was moving the joystick, and he had actually climbed into the ship and was flying it. And so the locomotion, moving around in the 3D space environment, it just so happens the FPS thing is that you can have a weapon and shoot people, but the moving around, the interacting with the environment, doing all the rest of the stuff, that all comes out of the first-person engine. So we need to get those fundamentals working properly, which is what the focus is, which is why you kind of see that right now. But longer term the idea is to make Star Citizen be like the real world. It's sort of up to you. Yeah, you can go into the military and go off and fight in wars, but you don't have to. You can go into a much more peaceful occupation and still do well and have fun and have plenty of things to do.