Dave Haddock · Narrative team

No, they're absolutely rigid bound. Have to adhere to every word that we write. Narrative is king. Yes. No, no, no. I mean, again, the important thing to bear in mind, particularly with the systems and the star map stuff, a lot of these systems were conceived of a while ago. A lot of the systems were even built when we didn't know that we could actually do a planetary landing. The original idea was that you had landing zones and stuff like that; there could be little action bubbles that you could land at, but the idea was that space was the playground, and the planets had designated landing zones that you could land at. Now that the technology has allowed us to realize the entire planet at an incredible level of fidelity, we've been changing our approach to stuff, because now we want to have gameplay that keeps players on planets and lets them explore and do all sorts of really cool stuff. When we were coming up with a lot of these systems originally, it was based off of that idea that we're not going to be able to explore these planets, so keep it very simple, or single-biome type places. And now that we're able to expand it, it's much more fun and satisfying for people to be able to explore these things. So we're modifying it as we go. I mean, we're doing what we can to try to minimize the retconning, so it's not like this was a hellscape nightmare world of acid and now it's like unicorn central, which requires a complete rewriting of your understanding of what that planet was. So we're doing what we can to try to minimize it, but there is definitely going to be that. And again, as we've been looking at Pyro, there's been a push to shift some of the atmospheric compositions to make them slightly more breathable, maybe not toxic, that type of stuff, because it's more conducive to creating a better gameplay experience. We've historically always tried to be very cryptic where possible about stuff, like specific but cryptic, just to give the other designers and environment teams and artists and gameplay people the opportunity to build the game and feel like they can make the most fun experience, and then we can help support that.