How will the upcoming armor rework make armor choice more diverse? What benefits are planned for players who wear light and medium armor in PvP and high-end PvE environments versus heavy armor? (Currently, the movement bonus obviously doesn't typically offset the damage reduction of heavy armor.) And with crafting armor coming, what's the progress on armor functionality, such as armor roles like tank, recon, heavy scanning and so on?

So progress is going great. Finished. That's it. It's something I'm actively working on, and we've had multiple reviews to decide which stats I'm actually going to be able to play with. Because one thing we don't want to do is ruin the game, make it unbearable, by just making things worse. So there's lots of things we're doing to improve things as well. Design-wise, I think we're like 90% there. I've just got to pitch some of the non-systemic perks. The perks you get for wearing a full suit of armour and stuff. Because most of the perks are actually quite systemic, so the stealth suit, actually each piece blocks the emissions of your body and stuff, so you have to have the full thing and then suddenly you're stealthy. But the perks where you have to make something up, I don't know, being able to...

Let's say if you have a full stealth suit, you might get a massive bonus to hiding your emissions. As an example, something that makes sense within the context of the armour.

Something that's more than the sum of its parts.

It's the more gimmicky things, I would say, but I don't really want to go into it because I've not pitched them. Our main aims with the armour refactor are to give players reason to wear flight suits, lights, medium and heavy armours, give players reasons to wear the combat versus utility armors, because that's been a big distinction now, the two of those. To give players a reason to change armors based on their intent, and that's the specializations we were talking about at CitizenCon two years ago. So I'll go into some of those later. And then give individual armour pieces a purpose so that arms aren't just useless cosmetics and stuff. Each piece of the armour has stats with it that you don't get with the others. So for me, and I think for you as well, the most important thing is nailing those weight classes.

The feel of those weight classes. Last time I heard it was about the legs and you get mass reduction, right? So if you have heavy legs on, then your overall mass gets reduced because it's easier to walk and things like that. You don't just become instantly a tank because you've got the thing on. It's like, cool, I've got these legs. I don't want to be weighed down too much. I want to be able to move faster, still more heavy, but that'll have other offsets.

Almost like an exosuit. It's just the support that it gives. Right now, we have this funny situation where if you were wearing entirely heavy armor, you had a full backpack on, all the attachments, and then you took your leg armor off and you just had naked legs. In real life, you'd crumple under that weight. But in the game now, you are faster because you weigh less. And that's obviously something we want to get rid of. So if we focus in on that, the way we're going to make lights versus mediums versus heavies and flight suits very different and actually a choice you make is damage mitigation. We're going to up the damage mitigation on mediums and heavies to give you a higher TTK.

Beyond what they are right now?

Beyond where they are now, yeah.

It's obviously offset with crafting and the improvements that come with weapons.

Yeah, so me and Dec, who was on crafting, are in this interesting situation where obviously you only have between 0 and 100 to play with and we're having to meter out and share the percentages we can go up. So I can go up to this and then crafting will take you up to this. So that's an interesting thing to have to take into account. The combat crosshair, which is primarily going to be on combat suits and helmets, so not everyone is getting that anymore, which is kind of the way it's done right now. The ability to have your MFDs cast to the visor, which I think everyone has right now when they sit in the ship, that's going to be for flight-specific helmets. And ship handling as well will be impacted by wearing medium or heavy armours. So that means that your inputs are slower. So if you make a hard turn, it will take it slower if you've got medium and heavy armour on. And g-force tolerance as well will be lower in those suits. So you'll pass out quicker. We're also increasing the g-force tolerance in things like the combat and racing flight suits, so it's not all just a negative. FPS radar, when that comes, that's going to make a huge difference between the weight classes for a start, because bigger things, they're noisier, you'll hear them on your passive radar.

A good example is combat helmets are seen as the default right now because they're the main archetype that we have online, but that will make more noises and emissions, so you'll get less feedback, but then you'll obviously be quiet and less picked up by radar and scanning and things like that.

Yeah, if you wear lights, you'll all have the same strength radar, but being light gives you the ability to get so many meters closer before you're picked up. And we keep alluding to this, but I'd say the most important feature is the mass mitigation. And that affects the weight affecting the player. You weigh more, obviously, the whole thing together weighs more, but if you have heavy arms and then heavy core and heavy legs, and then you've got a railgun in your arms, right? That'll be fully supported, no added weight to the player. But then if you start taking pieces off or making them a lesser weight, the percentage that those arms can take will get less and less. If you take your legs off, it doesn't matter what your arms can lift, because your legs are still taking the weight of that thing completely.

It's very nitty-gritty, this, obviously, but we still do have high-level archetypes as well. So things like having medic armor and things like that. This is in the weeds, but we also do have the high-level ideas of different combat armors. We have the scanning armor and things like that. What is it called? The hunter armor? Hunter armor and things like that, which obviously are way better at scanning and things like that. So there's some very high-level, easy to understand stuff, and then you have this stuff, which is down in the nitty-gritty weeds of it.

Reducing the amount of times you're going to see somebody in a hospital gown carrying around a railgun. So if you want to be able to keep a railgun up and on your shoulder and use it, you're going to need to actually increase the mass of your armor in order to have that support system to make it possible for you to carry it.

And finally on the weight class, right? Because this is what we're talking about. Weight classes, they span all of these archetypes. You can have a heavy medic, maybe. So, EVA. Controversial, maybe. EVA will be removed from undersuits as it is now, so everybody has it, and put on some but not all flight suits and cores, and we'll be introducing an EVA backpack for those who don't have EVA built into the suit, or if you do have EVA built into your suit and you just want more fuel and more oxygen, you can also put that on as well.

You're basically adding a whole lot of choice. Basically a whole lot of tactical decisions between what you wear. It's not just going to be about rule of cool. You have to understand the situation that you're going into and the best loadout for that situation, not just bringing the right weapons.

If you know you're going into [unclear], you might want to bring people with more medic suits, for example, because you know you're going to have to heal each other more and things like that.

So that's weight classes. There's a difference between combat and utility. That's a big difference. And that's mainly down to the mass mitigation, which you'll have more of on the utility. That'll mean that combat armors are lighter to start with, right? But the moment you start loading them up, they get slower. Whereas utility armors start heavier, and then the more you load them up, the more they can take. So you kind of keep the speed you're running at with those. Whereas if you streamline yourself in combat, you'll always be faster.

I assume there's different types of utility armor then.

Yeah, there's loads. Which I will jump to now then. Flight suits. We've got racing flight suits, amazing g-force resistance, really good environmental resistances. So if you're racing in a car on all kinds of planets, you'll be fine.

And I hear that the flight suits getting their g-force resistance is not necessarily a far-away thing.

No, I think Yoga's working on it very soon. But they have no radar. They're super stripped down, no EVA and really poor damage mitigation, because they're basically just kind of leathers. Combat flight suits, which do have EVA, they have better damage mitigation, bigger inventory, but slightly reduced g-force and poor environmental resistances, because they're made for space. Then you've got the combat armors, you've got the assault armors, which make up the majority of our armors right now.

If you want to put new stuff out, you've got to have a crosshair at the minute, otherwise it doesn't feel as impactful. But obviously that'll be revisited when we get more archetypes in.

Yeah, it's definitely our biggest section of armors we currently have. And these are the pure combat armors. They've got the best at absorbing damage, good radar for fighting humans, but they lack EVA. Creatures too. Anything with an emission of IR and EM. But it's not resource. They do not have resource radar, so you're not going to be finding mineables with those. Stealth armours, again, we've talked about, they've reduced emissions and sounds. The hunter armors we've talked about is the only combat armor to have EVA, and it has an amazing radar for finding people. They'll see you coming more, though, and it has less damage mitigation. Utility armors. Right, I'm going to actually breeze through these because I don't want to spend too long, actually. Right, medical can scan health. So when you do a scan, it will show you the health of people around you and various other things, and it can locate downed players from much further away, specifically, that's its thing. So if you do a scan, you're going to pick up the downed players that you wouldn't normally pick up just by IR and EM. There's engineers, and they can reveal the positions and health of components. And resource specialists, these are like the salvagers and miners. We have an amazing resource radar. And hopefully we'll reveal details about mineables that you would otherwise have to go up to and scan, from a distance.

So you can be on the surface or whatever, send your ping out and see the things. You don't have to go to it.

I'd say it's more for it being in caves, where there's that kind of distance. It's still a distance to go, but if you scan and then focus on a rock that is 50 metres away, you might get some more information than otherwise you would have to. And then you've got the Explorer, which is like the jack of all trades. It's got kind of good utility. It's got the crosshair. It's got good environmental resistances and it can scan resources. Its damage resistance is fine, but it's not a combat armor. And then you've got all the other kind of very specialist things. You've got EVA, heat, cold and radiation, and they hopefully speak for themselves.