We've heard that there are new Pirate Swarm improvements coming with Alpha 3.7. Can you run those down?

Yeah, so some Pirate Swarm improvements coming already for Arena Commander. And actually, just a rework of the waves. I'll run down basically the list of things that have happened. So, first of all, we've rebalanced the difficulty curve over now 10 waves. It used to be, I think, 15. It was 12 for a time, but now it's 10. And we've rebalanced that difficulty curve not only with just the AI, but with your wingmen that are coming in and against certain ships. So you can complete this in a starter ship all the way up to kind of the biggest ship, and it should be a challenge through the whole thing. But it should be a ramp-up of challenge. And this is something that we're really, really trying to balance in now. And it's actually tricky, because it's a balance of not just the actual loadouts of the ships, not just what ships are coming in, but how many and how good your wingmen are that we bring in during certain waves. So it's a bit of a juggling act, really, to get that balance correct. One of the other exciting things is we increased the playable area. They're much bigger now. So again, the ships are moving a lot faster. People needed a lot more room to maneuver. And the other thing they needed was not to run into a wall. I've not been to space, but in all the movies I've seen, there's not a lot of walls in space. So the idea was to make this a soft boundary. It's a little more like other games where you'll go over the boundary. You know it's there, but you don't run into it like you've just run into a building or something like this. So that's a little bit better. And again, it just gives you a warning that you're outside of the range. Eventually it'll kill you if you don't come back in. So again, it plays a little bit nicer. Now, I say we increased the playable area in all the maps. It's not actually true. It's only on one of the maps right now. So in Dying Star, that's the one that's a lot, lot bigger. There's a reason for it, and it mostly has to do with the map itself and the assets that were within it. It was really easier to make Dying Star quite large, but on Broken Moon, everybody knows that that's not an actual planet, right? We haven't put a real planet within it. I mean, like a digital planet, one of the actual PU planets; it's actually just this hemisphere that, if you carried it around, isn't actually circular. It just looks nice.

It was built before procedural planets.

Well, it was built like the first actual playable level. Hangars were first and then this level came in. So it's about one of the oldest levels we have. That one was a little more tricky. So we started scaling it up, basically. LODs are a problem, and then you can actually really notice that that planet isn't really a planet. So we want to make some improvements to that map too. We will increase the size, and the obvious thing is, okay, just put a planet in. And that's what Chris has been saying, so we'll probably go ahead and do that. So we will make those changes to Broken Moon as well, but I think the boundary changes are also within Broken Moon. So that's nice stuff.

So the boundary changes for Broken Moon don't just apply to Pirate Swarm, they apply to any other...

That's right, any other mode that's within there. And again, this had a lot to do with the ships moving around a lot quicker. Added more ammo in the missile drops, so that was a little bit of a frustrating thing, that the missile drops weren't giving you enough ammo. You'd run out instantly, and it's a rewarding and fun sort of thing. We didn't want to have Arena Commander feel like it's super restricted ammo, super restricted weapons. We want them to play. We want them to not save too many of their missiles, too many of the things like this, because it's not that type of game. It's a little more arcadey than it is like a survival type thing. The other thing, a lot more ammo in the ballistic pickups. When you had the lower-sized weapons with just this high refire rate, you would run out of all your ammo. So that was another one. Speaking of the UI building blocks, we added objective hints. Not even hints. It's real direct: go do this. One of the big pieces of feedback that we'd get from Arena Commander, or just generally for the game, is that readability of what actions I need to take is a little bit hard. So we make it very obvious. And now that we've got building blocks, we can kind of do all this stuff. We added more ships across the waves and some different ships. Also, repairs are available a lot sooner. This has to do with it being a little bit more challenging now, that the repairs need to be available a little bit sooner, otherwise it's just kind of frustrating. I can run through the ships, but I think it's better that you guys play it. And then the biggest change actually is in the last wave, wave 10: after a bit of a delay, we're going to spawn 10 friendly Merlins, but there's a Hammerhead at the end. Now, a Hammerhead is a tough ship. It is not easy, and it's not meant to be easy. It's a boss. It's just this little boss fight, basically. But you've got a chance to take out that ship on your own. But after a short delay, you're gonna get 10 Merlins on your side. And this is the thing: a lot of people, they'll spend a little bit of time with the Hammerhead and they're like, okay, I give up. The shields are too strong. There's not much I can do. But we wanted to give you a little bit of that sense of 'I'm not sure you're going to make this one', and then bring in those Merlins. So it's pretty exciting at the end. It's a nice climactic end, because, again, I found the waves before, though they were fine, it just was pretty flat in terms of an excitement kind of curve. So at the end of it, we get a good climactic event, and you take out this Hammerhead. So generally, that's pretty much the improvements for 3.7. And again, this was just a small set of people. We think it's a lot more fun than even just bringing in one or two of the stronger ships. It's a little fun, especially with a Hammerhead, to see a lot of them little ships going, because when the Hammerhead's going, you've got the turrets going, you've got everything. It's pretty exciting. And we wanted to make it a little more exciting, but we've got to wait for another release to do it, give a little final cinematic at the end too.