Can you explain why we place turrets the way we place them? On many ships they are not really in optimal placements, like the Starfarer back turrets, the Freelancer turret that blocks the cargo entrance, the Constellation turrets, et cetera. Why do we do this?
TL;DRAwkward turret placements come from older concepts made with less thought, and ship style or starter-ship status; the team would ideally revisit some, and John guarantees the Freelancer turret will be addressed someday.
Three very different answers to those things. Part of it is the old concepts, where those things weren't really thought about as much as they are these days. We just go, we want a turret on the top and the bottom, that would give great range of fire, done. Whereas these days we do a lot more at the concept stage of putting cameras in the turret positions and going, that doesn't look as good as it should do, it doesn't cover where we want, so we'll change it, and then Paul will work with the artist to adjust that. Generally at the design brief stage it'll be: it needs to be five turrets, ideally one or two pointing this way, one or two pointing this way, and then we leave it to the art guys to pick a combination of what can hit those goals and what looks best. The Constellation ones, they're not great. I don't think anyone's a fan of them. It's also a starter ship.
Constellation is a starter ship? Well, it's one of the ships you can start Star Citizen with. It's one of the ships that you can get a game package with.
Those turrets are also sort of part of the style of the ship. If we change them to be something that was significantly better, you ruin a lot of the aesthetics of the ship. The Starfarer rear ones: the old flippy upside-down turrets didn't work well, which is why we spent a lot of time on the Valkyrie lower ball turret, where you stay the right way up. You gimbal with the turret. That makes the experience much nicer. Ideally, for ships like that, we'd want to go back through them and change them. There are some other considerations we need to do for that.
Are you committing to that, John?
In an ideal world, we'd love to do that. We learned a lot during the Valkyrie, and that should be put back into the other ships. The Freelancer: those are always supposed to fold up into the ceiling. We will do something about it someday. That one I will guarantee.