It’s also important to consider that what 3.0 meant a year ago is a shadow of what 3.0 means today. Back then, Planetary Tech would have offered a fraction of the freedom that it does in 3.0, and most of the numerous infrastructure updates going into it now did not exist. [WL: Edited previous sentence for clarity] Roughly speaking, the approach was that we’d be able to deliver four roughly built, predetermined, pre-scripted, landing zones. The reality is that those would have been rather limited, and ultimately, somewhat of a variation of what Area 18 ArcCorp is today in terms of features and functionality.
Today, 3.0 is about delivering an entirely explorable solar system with the backend services to make it dynamic. It’s about giving us the city and planet building tools to create for you the rest of the universe in an intelligent, scalable, efficient, and compelling manner. It’s about the first step in giving you the tools to create player outposts and communities. It’s about the streaming tech to allow you to take off from one moon, fly across the system, and land on an entirely different moon, the driving a freaking sweet buggy out of the back of your ship to race around the entire planet... all without a loading screen. It’s about giving you the ability to buy what’s on the web inside kiosks. It’s about usable turret gameplay, and Items 2.0 so you can customize your own ship with new components. It’s about picking objects and cargo so you can haul commodities across space as a trader and merchant. It’s about gutting a singleplayer engine to support thousands of players. It’s about infrastructure that we needed to develop because there are no off-the-shelf solutions for building an immersive experience like no other.