Are the Vanduul the only major threat in the game, or will we see others?
TL;DRThe Vanduul are a large-scale threat, but players will mostly face smaller factions like the Nine Tails and other humans, and no new big swarm-like enemy group is being prepared.
The biggest threat right now is me trying to land a plane.
It's a very dangerous concept. It feeds right into humans being a huge threat in the game, because everyone's flying around with massive weapons on their ship, willing to mess people up.
When we showcased the vertical slice for Squadron 42, I think one of the most surprising aspects of that was that there wasn't a Vanduul in sight. The antagonists of that level, at least, were other humans. People, the danger of people.
We're definitely focused a lot, when we're talking about what you're going to come up against, on this idea of factions, a much smaller kind of plane. We have the Vanduul as this big imperial-level threat, and there aren't many things that come at that blanket level of scale. But there are the much smaller, more faction threats that you're going to encounter system to system and stuff like that. On the micro level, you have the Nine Tails operating out of GrimHEX, and they're a major threat when you're in that area. And we're working on developing them more, and how it's going to go and how you interact with the other gangs that you might run into while flying around Stanton. So as far as the introduction of another big group that's just going to swarm and cover everything, we're not necessarily gearing up for that per se on a day-to-day mission scale. It's going to be more about getting your reputation and how you interact with these local factions. I think it's going to be a big thing.