Without rehashing the entire presentation, for folks who maybe haven't seen it, what is Master Modes?

So Master Modes is basically our way of fixing the combat in the game but also allowing the ship experience and the ship roles to kind of fulfill themselves. So early on in the combat we tried several things which the community knows about. We tried to patch on things to help combat, to help fix it, and none of them really worked. So we looked at what's the fundamental problem with the kind of combat and the ship geometry that we have in the game right now, and the common denominator was speed. But we didn't want to come up with a way which was, right, let's just blanket cap the speed because if you go too fast, it breaks the game. We just didn't want to do an overall kind of cap, because there's still so many things you're doing in Star Citizen beyond combat. You spend a lot of time traveling from A to B, and the distances we have in the game are crazy. We travel millions of kilometers all the time in the game.

And I do want to clarify, when you say speed, you're saying high speed.

Yes, high speed.

Too much speed. Because I think from a layman's perspective, from an outsider's perspective, for those of us who watch racing and watch combat movies like Top Gun and everything, more speed seems to be a good thing. It seems to be the thing that makes stuff exciting, makes stuff visceral. Everybody likes bobbing and weaving through canyons as fast as possible. But you're saying too much speed actually hurts the combat experience.

Yes. So if you're traveling very quickly, the distances you cover in that amount of time become really large. So if you're having a dogfight with someone and you're flying a thousand meters per second, within a very short amount of time you could be three or four kilometers away from your target if you turned around, and then you're flying back towards each other. And then you basically repeat the action and you start firing at the nose of your opponent. And that's not really fun, because it makes it really hard to balance. It makes it really hard for the weapons to make a difference, the different types of weapons we have in the game. So the goal for this was to bring the combat closer and to make it much more about kind of outmaneuvering your opponent. So if you can get the edge on your opponent and you're trying to do this and that, move around each other, there's going to be key moments in this where you get an advantage and you can use the distinct weapons you've chosen, your special loadout you've chosen, and those things will be an advantage but also be disadvantages too. But we want it to be about those moments where you really engage in combat and it becomes about outmaneuvering your opponent rather than this kind of slingshot, nose-on-nose combat we've kind of been used to.