Some of the unrealistic sounds we hear, such as ships flying by making huge noises in space, are simulated by a sound simulator inside your helmet or cockpit. If you get EMP'd by, say, a Hawk, does your sound simulator go offline with other ship systems? [Will there be ways to turn it off, voluntarily or through damage?]

We don't work on this as much as we'd like lately, unfortunately, but it's definitely something we all want to do. I always think the coolest thing we could do would be you're in a dogfight and you can hear everything crystal clear, you can hear where all the enemy ships are, you can hear your ship, what it's doing, and then all of a sudden you take an unexpected huge hit and it happens to knock out your sound sim module and suddenly everything just folds down to just you in the little cockpit and you just hear everything that is in the cockpit or you're sat on, basically. And then after a few more seconds, it slowly comes back up and you're back to the full soundscape. But for that four or five seconds, it's just you in the little cockpit in space. That would just be the coolest thing. The sound of the ships now is pretty much what we'd imagine sound sim on to sound like. So everything and all the stuff to do with ship sounds and ship combat sounds is pretty much sound sim on at the moment. We still need to creatively decide what the creative direction is for sound sim off. How far do we take it? What should it sound like? And then, to be honest, that's kind of the biggest barrier at the moment.

And then, of course, it needs to be physicalized into a component, which is actually something on the vehicle team. And then those game systems attach to that and then make it puncturable, damageable through external stuff.

There's game balancing considerations as well. We need to adjudicate how much the sound helps you in a dogfight. I hope it does. And then we need to make sure that the impact of having it disabled isn't so great that it actually is a serious disadvantage. Or maybe we want that. I don't know. But that needs to be taken into consideration as well.

It's similar to how accessibility is handled in computer games. You can have arrows telling you which direction certain sounds are coming from if people are deaf, but if you switch that on and you can hear, then it turns the audio off. So you can't have both. I think this is similar to that.