How are the Tevarin and Xi'an character concepts coming along? Have they changed much since the last time they were shared?
TL;DRXi'an characters have moved from concept into modeling, with open questions about size, ships and clothing, while Tevarin concept work lags behind; this is not confirmation of appearing in Squadron 42.
Actually, the Xi'an is coming along quite nicely. It's past the concept stage and into modeling right now and looking really cool. We're doing a lot of stuff on that. There's some work being done on the facial rig and how that all animates and how that looks good. It's the challenge, of course, with non-human characters. Once you get to facial animation, it's not quite as straightforward as a human. So we're working on that right now and making sure that they have a really unique look and feel. They won't just be a human in a costume, right? These should have a unique way they animate, the way they look and everything. So there's some exciting stuff happening. One of the things that Jeremiah mentioned is, with the Xi'an, for example, there are some things that do come up when you have characters who aren't the same size. That's actually something that we are actively discussing. What do we do? How do we deal with this? Because it's one thing for them to be featured in Squadron: here they are and they do this thing and that thing. It opens up a whole bunch of conversations about, okay, well, what happens when they're in the PU? Can they fly every ship? How do we account for this if they're not the same size? And obviously, what clothing can they wear? Yes, it is a big can of worms right there.
And that is not a confirmation that they're showing up in Squadron 42. He was giving you an example of a scenario.
The Tevarin, on the concept side: I think the last time we worked on it was quite a while back, around the Prowler. When we released the Prowler, we did some concept support on that. It has taken a little bit of a backseat on the concept side. We wanted to flesh it out even further. We have a generalized look, but we were like, okay, I think this needs its own specific time. And the Xi'an was a little bit higher on the priority list. So we kind of focused more on that. So the Tevarin race is a little bit behind, but the Xi'an is definitely moving a lot further along than the Tevarin.