John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There isn't one answer because it's not the same answer across all the different careers. Yes, some of them are stepping stones, but they're not the sole way of going up that career. For other ones, we see it's not going to be an entirely ship-based career. You may have a ship at one point, but then it may transition to a location-based version of that. If you think refineries now, refining is all done at stations, and in the future we'll have the Expanse in game. And people can do refining now on the station. So is that the starter? Or is the Expanse the starter? It's sort of what you make of it. Obviously, with station-based ones you don't have as much flexibility as you will with the Expanse, and I'm sure in the future we'll have larger refinery ships. But also it's there to sort of gate the progression in some way. If you think of most RTSs, you have your tech tree of maybe not vehicles, but the buildings you can build or the troops you can make. And it's sort of similar to that, in that we don't want you to go straight in at the top, ideally. We want you to build your way through it. But yeah, I'm just waffling now. I completely lost my train of thought because there was a car going outside banging down the road.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, no, I think I get what you're saying. There is a progression intended in many instances. But at the same time, there are situations that we envision in this game where you might want two smaller things as opposed to two larger things. So like anything else in game development, there's really no simple black and white answer to the question. It is a situationally based question. There will be some professions where it'll be a very clear start here, then go here, then go here. And then as the mission feature team develops things, there will be situations designed to encourage use of smaller, lesser vehicles as opposed to big giant stuff.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

With the scope of Star Citizen, there's so many ways you can play it. Play it your way, whatever franchise I've just stolen that from. It's less about hard gating, but soft gating. We don't stop you from doing stupid things. We try and encourage you to go down the preferred path. You have one billion UEC, no one's going to stop you buying an Orion as your first ship in game by yourself and trying to run that. You're probably not going to have a good time. That's why the Prospector's there to help you learn about things.