A lot of folks are looking for an experience in Arena Commander that's much closer to what they can do in the PU, so that they can practice without the cost of insurance and replacing their ships. What are our plans and thoughts about making Star Marine and Arena Commander closer to a PU experience?

Well, we've got a lot of thoughts on that, and we've started some stuff internally, and we're really hoping to get this in front of people sooner than later, and a lot sooner than you might think. So, Arena Commander, let's start with Arena Commander. Arena Commander is great, again, I sort of said petri dish. It is the core gameplay of ship combat in Star Citizen. Let's say it's a portion of Star Citizen. It definitely isn't all of it, right? And then you've got Star Marine, which is yet another portion. But then you've got other things within it: again, flight within atmosphere, flight near the ground. You've got, again, different weapon types, different ranges, and things like this. And right now, neither Star Marine nor really Arena Commander, as a standalone product, well represents what Star Citizen, to me and to a lot of the developers, I would think just generally to everybody, really represents. Because Star Citizen is the whole of all of those. It's the whole of a ship. It's the whole of a character. It's the interchange between the two of them, whether it's characters within ships, whether it's characters fighting ships, whether that's ground vehicles fighting air vehicles, air vehicles fighting. Again, it's all of that. It's a mixed arms game. It's a combined arms game. If I was comparing it, Star Citizen is not Call of Duty. It's definitely not Gears of War or anything like that. It's much more akin to a Battlefield. It's much more akin to PlanetSide or something like that, in terms of the core combat gameplay. I'm not saying the economy and everything else. I'm just talking about the core combat gameplay, the pillar that I'm in charge of now. So, yes, there's economy and everything else. So the concept here is, if you could basically take 30 minutes, and I would bring somebody off the street and I'd go, okay, I'm going to show you what Star Citizen is in 30 minutes, right? I kind of don't want them to go load up the PU, because right now if I go load up the PU, even as a developer, I wake up in Port Olisar, I get out of bed, now what? And a brand new guy, if nobody's saying go to the ship terminals, get a ship, go do a mission, go do some mining, whatever, it'll take some time to get into it. And by half an hour, maybe he started mining at that moment. Now, some of us don't have as much time. We really need that 30 minutes to be an adrenaline-filled experience. Like if I could take 30 minutes of the PU in the very best case, like everything went exactly how we want it to be set up: we've got people here, we've got people here, they've got these vehicles, they've got these vehicles, this is the scenario that they have to go in. That would be an enthralling and exciting experience to me. And that would more represent what Star Citizen ultimately really is and what happens within the PU. So the best thing we can get is getting combat to work within a sort of round-based, objective-based, scenario-based game, like it works in the PU, basically. So give some reasons for a lot of the stuff to exist. Again, I'm rambling a little bit, but the Ballista is a great example. Right now, cool, in the PU you can go grab that Ballista, you can cart it over to one of the planets and kind of sit in it and hope somebody flies by, and eventually lock them on and shoot them down. That's going to take some time, and maybe you get a minute or two of excitement and it's over. I want to give reasons for these things that we've created to exist, really. Again, they would really have a big part in that game mode, like the Ballista, for example, or a Valkyrie, for example. Those things are really, really meaningful in those sort of setups, and they all have roles, and I think those roles, in a lot of cases, haven't really been pushed. They haven't really been identified that clearly or proved in that sense. So, again, the Ballista being a really powerful anti-air. How? Show me. Show me it happening, right? And again, it will take some time for that to happen in the PU, but I think putting something together that's kind of the combination of Arena Commander and Star Marine makes a lot of sense.

Building a microcosm. If the Persistent Universe is the macrocosm, taking Star Marine and Arena Commander and turning it into a microcosm, a condensed version of what you could experience in the PU.

Yes, but without massively changing the rules, right? Everybody's going to come into it with a certain set of expectations in terms of how it works already in the PU. Now, because of the concept of, again, Electronic Access being a simulation, yeah, we could probably get away with changing a lot of it, but we don't want it to be a different game. Also, we don't have the resources to actually make a whole separate sort of game, and that's one of the difficulties with doing this. I think that's going to be a very interesting idea to research.

I think the other thing as well, when we look at that, is that if we make it more representative of the PU, it's more efficient on the development side as well. We're looking at designing these systems that are feeding the PU, going into Squadron. And if these systems are all being utilized in that same manner, then it helps us make better decisions. Because if we're trying to make, oh, well, the gunplay is not very good in the PU, but it's great in Star Marine. Well, that's not what we want. What we want is that Star Marine is representative of what the PU is. And then we know that if it's good in the PU, it's good in Star Marine. And that's why, when we talk about, say, the Good Doctor, for example, trying to have a bit longer lines of sight. Or when we've released attachments, so scopes, so you've got more view sight, you've got longer ranges. So I think that's something that we absolutely want to go towards, that Star Marine and Arena Commander are more reflective. Like you said, that five-minute adrenaline-filled junkie section, or I always call it the trailer of the PU. It's all of the condensed good bits, where we say, okay, this is what it could be. Like the microcosm that you said. And then that gives us, from a development side of things, that any feedback that we get, anything that we want to change, any balance that we want to work towards, we're using those resources efficiently across all three products. Not just, okay, we're doing this for Star Marine. Because then you get a really dangerous balance where we're dealing with multiple different SKUs. And to be honest, that's not what we want. We want it to be good across all three. So that's definitely something that we've discussed previously.