Are planets static? Do they evolve over time, and if so, how do they do that?

Yeah, they absolutely will. We were just talking about the economy, which is obviously a huge catalyst for the evolution of any given location. We want to make it where you can land on a planet and I want to convey that it's uncomfortable, that you are in a dangerous place and that you should probably watch yourself. It's my job as an art director to visually clue you in to things like that. So we're setting up the architectural styles, like I said, to convey some of that. Now, the next question would be weather and stuff like that. I absolutely hope that we will have various weather on different kinds of planets, obviously. Yeah, absolutely time of day, too. We were just talking about this whole time of day with Sean Tracy, actually, and going back and forth on the ramifications of it. If you think through it, there's a lot of dominoes that fall when that happens. There absolutely will be a time of day, because you want to be able to go to Terra at night and do dealings in the dark, or go down...

And that's actually an important point, which is it's not just a cosmetic effect that we're applying. I'd separate it into two ways that planets evolve over time. There's the short term, the 24-hour cycle. We've talked before about how there's this economic simulation that's going on in the background. It's basically running a simulation with, give or take, 10 million NPCs. The values that are thrown out of that simulation wind up informing, affecting what the player actually sees. It takes things like the population, the per capita wealth, the employment rate, the landing zone GDP. All of these things wind up getting factored into what you see when you actually land at one of these things. And so as GDP, as employment, as these things start to increase, you can actually see ripple-through effects, like we were talking about the other day in regards to the addition of smog to some of the environments. As a planet starts to produce more goods, the amount of smog can increase. The number of blue collar workers that you might see, given the type of product that they're actually producing, may actually start to increase. Depending upon whether or not they're creating higher end products or lower end products, it may affect how many tourists, how many businessmen you actually wind up seeing at this location. But then going back to the smaller scale, the 24-hour stuff: if you wind up landing on a planet in the middle of the day, the shops will be open. You'll tend to see security guards within the street. You'll see, in general, kids frolicking, et cetera. If you wind up going to that exact same destination in the middle of the night, then some of the shops may well be closed. We haven't actually discussed it in this panel yet, but there will likely be some sort of compressed time schedule. We don't know exactly what that will be, but in general, a day in the game will most likely not equate to a day in the real world. And what this means is that within some multi-hour period, you'll actually be able to watch a planet go from day to night. So if you arrive in the middle of their night, you may have to either elect to wait some relatively small portion of time for the shops that you're after to open, or you may have to pursue alternative means. You may have to go to the shady arms dealer at the back of an alley, and you may have to be willing to put up with his inferior selection, his higher prices, because you want it right now. There are a number of ways that we're trying to basically make these planets feel like they're alive, as opposed to just these static entities where you go, you restock your ship and then you head back out into the universe. You will see significant evolution, both in terms of the NPC constitution, in terms of the missions, in terms of commodity prices, in terms of some of the atmospheric effects and stuff, in terms of what types of weapons, ships, et cetera, are available on that planet, and what the constitution of the NPCs is in terms of criminals versus businessmen versus all of these other types of things.