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A star system will typically only have a few planets in it. Does that mean that if you're not at one of those specific landing zones within a system, you're going to be on a ship the rest of the time?

TL;DRPlayers won't be stuck in ships, because modular space stations built from common components are being added for large first-person battles and varied mission settings beyond the controlled landing-zone combat.

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

No, that was another thing that we started addressing four or five or six months ago, which is we wanted the ability to do a lot of first-person battles in environments where we'd have a little bit more flexibility to create exactly the type of environment that we wanted. So as we were talking about earlier, we have combat on a lot of the major planetary landing zones, but it's in a controlled fashion for the majority of those areas. Some areas are large enough. Terra Prime, for example, will have another area that you can transition to called the Blocks, where it's much more unchained in terms of the level of violence that you can actually encounter there. But that's not going to be the case for a lot of landing zones. And so what we wanted was the ability for you to have these big raging first-person battles according to whatever dynamic missions we were creating to basically provide you with content. And so what we wound up adopting was just the concept of these space stations. Mark will talk a little bit later about it, and we're doing the exact same thing for space stations that we're doing for the cities in regards to building these things out of all of these component pieces, so that we can quickly create a variety of different space stations that will suit a wide variety of different mission needs: medical facilities, research facilities, mining stations, military outposts, et cetera, all from these same building blocks. There will be a lot of custom art that will basically help to give these things a very custom feel, despite the fact that there's a lot of commonality in terms of the external space station components and such.

Mark SkeltonArt Director

Hero props.

Tony ZurovecPersistent Universe Director

Yeah, hero props. That's exactly it.

Persistent Universe Panel›2 - A Living, Breathing World·
Published on this date.29 Jan 2015