Richard Tyrer · Vehicle Technical Designer

Yeah, so it basically works up to a certain point. So in combat, there's a thing we call combat geometry, and it's how ships interact with each other. And at a certain speed, this falls apart, and it becomes basically a nose-on-nose fight. If you go towards each other, you just fly by each other. Jousting, yeah. Then basically, by the time you've looked around, you're two or three kilometers away from each other again, and it repeats. So what we want to do is bring that combat closer, and you have to slow things down so it works at a much closer distance. And then we can work on a much more accurate weapon system for different velocities of weapons, so the weapons can have their strengths, and missiles become more effective outside of these ranges so you can cover there. And it just allows us to control what the combat looks like and make it much more interesting, so that it's much more about the geometry and trying to get an edge on your opponent. And then once you get the edge on your opponent, being able to accurately win against them. But it's a challenge to get there. And bringing the speeds down just allows us to keep the distances close. And then you can use the different ships we have in the game for the actual different purposes they have, rather than just everything going quickly by each other all the time, where basically you're shooting at a very small point. It allows people to get an edge on their opponent, and then you can face them and you've got a full-face ship to shoot at, which we didn't really have before. So it's about moving the game towards that style of combat and allowing all the systems we have and all the weapon types we have to make a difference and matter, because at the high speeds everything just becomes about high speed, and the differences don't matter as much.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's something we've been working on behind the scenes for quite a few months. We're going to probably say quite a few times today 'bringing the speeds down', but we're not going to explain how we're doing that here, because we could spend a whole hour or a whole separate ISC talking about what we're going to do, so we'll save that for another time. Yeah, the goal is to have those slower combat speeds because that improves combat. But then we've got another plan for not crippling traversal around the universe, because we're not just going to go, oh, ships are only going to go 300 meters a second now. Bam, tough. We are aware that combat is just one aspect of the game. There's a whole lot of traversal that needs to not be hindered by that. So we'll talk about it more in depth another time.