Richard Tyrer · Vehicle Feature Team

No, it's a good point. It actually came up from one of our playtests: what happens to racing, because the actual speed of combat was probably just not enough to make racing feel exciting. And then it's actually had a fundamental impact on the choices we've made with the design for master modes, to make sure that racing works. So we've got boost now, which works outside of the actual combat mode. It might work a little bit differently, but we're going to have boost outside of the combat mode now. And that's come specifically from racing and the needs of racing. Because, as I say, we're building lots of different worlds now where racing is possible. We're actually doing a lot more support for it now, to build it officially within the game, because it's come from the community. They're the ones making all these interesting levels out of the worlds that we build. And now we're going, right, we're going to start making this as part of the actual game. So we have to support this. A big part of master modes was the roles, and we want the racing ships to be, well, racing ships. So they're going to go very quickly still, they're going to be light, they're going to be agile, but you're not really going to want to do combat. Even if they come with weapons, you're probably not going to really want to take them into combat. But the balance for us is making sure they're quick enough to escape, but there's still that risk there in combat.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So we might get some of what I'm talking about through components and tunings for racing-specific ships, and then the boost change that you were talking about.

Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Feature Team

There's a bit more to it though, right? Because the SCM mode is supposed to be the high performance mode that you're in, but racing doesn't work well when the velocities are too low. And there are actually some sequences from the Squadron team as well where they want racing-like structures, right? So we are looking at this very deeply. The thing that might change, or what we're currently testing there, is whether or not the capacitor systems have a little bit of a different power output. So where you can, for example, regenerate your boost pool in SCM within maybe 10 seconds or whatever, it will take considerably longer when you are in the nav mode, but it just frees up a lot more potential to do fast racing. So you basically select: do you want to go fast and take care of your boost pool, or do you want to risk going into the slower speed but then get rewarded with a higher boost regeneration? It will be along these lines. This is currently in testing. This is actually the thing we wanted to check last week, where the builds were busted. So there's no definitive answer how that will look, but we'll figure it out. It will just be part of the normal testing iteration.