How do you feel about the [new] flight model right now? It's in massive testing with Michael Smith's team; how is that going?

So in the current game, I think we've got a really good flight model. But it's lacking some of the levers that we want to pull to make the ships feel different, to do the light fighter to heavy fighter, but also not just fighters, to make our large ships feel like massive ships that you're really pulling through to turn and move the ships around. So I do think our current flight model is really good and it's a really good testament to the team, but we've learnt so much since we've introduced it. But I would see the new flight model as not just how the ships fly, but it's the overall flight experience that's going to change drastically. So we aren't going to rush out there and just put out a piece of the new flight model and not have the rest. So we're looking at this as: as soon as you take off in your ship, that is the flight model starting, and then you go all the way to the full new quantum experience. And that's going to be the new flight experience, really. So it's not just a flight model and how the ships fly that's going to change. It's the entire flight experience that's going to come as one package.

And even that is just an ingredient, right? Because it's also the bullet speeds that will change the weapon behavior. Let's even describe it more broadly; that's what adds a lot to the experience as well there. And there were again a lot of discussions just the last couple of weeks around what we can do to actually improve the feel, because CR wants this very cinematic combat that we are now getting closer and closer to. And that's the reason I would even describe this as our red line in our iteration over all the flight experiences, flight combat and flight changes that we have been doing over the years. We always try to aim for what CR was envisioning, and there was always some information that we got additionally, and then we could improve a bit more on what we actually wanted to achieve. And I think we are now getting close to where we would get the CR seal of approval here. And especially, we did some tests last week with some weapon changes that will not make it into the game the way that we tested it, because we are not ready for that yet, but we will do a step in between for that. That is increasing the ranges for weapons and slowing down the bullet speed. It gives already a more cinematic approach to all the battles, or all the fights, and it helps also tremendously with... even though with lower speeds it might sound a bit contradicting, but actually with lower speeds we have a more agile combat, because we have to bring [ships] closer together. You are able to dodge bullets more than you were previously. The goal for these changes is to have an agile combat in a closer range, which is exactly what CR wants for this game. And then with all the flight changes that we are working on, we are moving slowly into that direction. And the reason why we have to move slowly, and it's not a negative thing, it's something that we learned last year, when we did all the changes at once for engineering gameplay in one PTU cycle, and we learned, no, that was a bit too much. So what we are doing right now is we do these increments now. I think we talked about that in some of the other SCLs. We have a very focused view on what we change, and we can iterate, or we gather data untainted from all the rest that we did. So we know exactly, when we put something out, all the feedback that we receive is around that topic. For the next patch, it will be... so we did some armor adjustments based on the feedback on the armor release in the last patch, because we only released the armor changes in 4.8. We will do some bullet speed changes, bullet range changes. So we will get feedback on that and then we can iterate over that. And in the next patch, there might be something new for flight behavior, combat behavior.

I think the 'it's always around the corner' problem is, for Star Citizen, it's all interconnected. If you change flight speeds, you have to change projectile speeds, lifetimes, shields, and there's a lot of ships and there's a lot of content, and you have the PvE side, so you've got to do all the AI side as well as coping with the player side. A lot of this work was done in Squadron a long time ago, and compared to Star Citizen live, it's a very constrained scenario set. We know exactly what the player's going to be doing or should be doing, against who, in what formation, and you can quickly iterate there. But when it comes to bringing that over to Star Citizen, you're 10, 50, 100 times the amount of work there to get that same experience at a larger scale. It plays really nicely. Everything gels together really well, but we can't just piecemeal parts out without some big drops, like we did with engineering, where it was too much and then the feedback just goes everywhere and it's disjointed. So it takes a while to roll that out.