John Crewe · Vehicle Director

At the end of the day, it comes down to priority and scope and resources, which is fun, boring management stuff that I have to deal with on a daily basis. The vehicle team, and I think I've talked about this in the past, we work to an 18 to 24 month ahead of time schedule, and we get fairly locked into that. A lot of the other teams in CIG are a lot more agile, so to speak, but we have quite a long lead time because these ships take a long time to make. And if there's any artists in chat, they will know that chopping and changing on a weekly basis is just terrible for your concentration and getting into the zone of doing things. The worst thing we can do is go, hey, you're working on an Aegis ship for three weeks. Oh, by the way, now you're working on an Origin ship for three weeks. Oh, by the way, now you're working on a Drake ship for three weeks. So wherever we can, and there have been exceptions in the past, once we start a ship, we see it through to the end of release, and we don't tend to start ships now in production without fairly firm guarantees that the gameplay is going to come with them at the end. That was different way back in the past. We would just work on a ship. We'd ask for the gameplay. If the gameplay wasn't there, we'd shove it out. Example, Starfarer. That's not how we want to do things these days, and hopefully people have seen that over the last, I don't want to say, three, four years, where we deliver ships with their gameplay, because it improves the experience for everyone. So a lot of those big ships that have less standard gameplay, I can't think of a better word. I'll say the Endeavor because everyone's banging on about the Endeavor in chat. It's going to be very hard for me to try and convince Todd or Tony to go, hey, stop working on Pyro, let's do farming or let's do science. And even if I could do that, that would still be many, many months away. Same for the Orion. The Orion, whilst it's a mining ship, is not planned to use the current mining system. It's going to use a much larger scale version of it. So putting it in game now to try and mine the current space rocks we have would be like trying to scoop up peas with a shovel or something equally bizarre. Again, it would not do the ship the justice it deserves, having waited that long.