Medical gun shooting medical lasers Salvage gun shooting salvage lasers Cargo gun shooting cargo lasers Mining gun shooting mining lasers Repair gun shooting repair lasers Cutting gun shooting cutting lasers Combat gun shooting combat lasers $350 million, and this is the limits of profession gameplay? Exactly how is any of this going to be applied to multicrew in the future? Or is multicrew simply "3 people shooting profession stuff instead of 1"? We had more complex game design documents for profession gameplay over $250 million ago. I wonder what "improvements" the next $350 million will bring. But I guess those unified 1st/3rd animations are really paying off, allowing for a wide variety of interactions with objects. I guess ship pipelines, modularity, UI building blocks, and a multicrew framework are really allowing for a wide variety of ship gameplay. 8 years of fantastic suggestions, CIG's own design documents.... and all gameplay has devolved into just shooting everything. The fact that hundreds of small indie games have managed to do significantly more complex, involved, interactive, and engaging gameplay mechanics, suggests to me this has absolutely nothing to do with money, workforce, or time. Let me guess. This is all "tier 0" and the REAL profession mechanics are just around the corner. I'm sorry, but the "evolution" of mining suggests otherwise. Tier 0 mining was shooting a mining laser. Tier 2 became a reflex skill-check mini-game while shooting mining lasers. Tier 3 became 3 people shooting mining lasers simultaneously. And Tier 4 will apparently be gun attachments so you can scope down your sights faster mine faster. All the people saying the medical gun wasn't going to shoot from a distance. Well, now we have it. It shoots medical gel from a short distance. I was making jokes about salvage turning into "shoot salvage laser at ship to salvage parts". Not only was the joke sadly right, it apparently will be worse. The "parts" will just be magical salvage "stuff" that magically goes into containers. And then repair will take that "stuff" from containers and apply it back to repair ships. It is a 2-for-1 special, simplifying 2 professions into 1 all-encompassing Bro-shooter game design. The fact that ship gameplay is seemingly mirroring FPS gameplay versions of these professions is probably the worst. Is this really the epitome of fidelity and immersion? Shiny looking graphics with copy-pasted game design for every facet of the greatest space sim ever? Are graphics going to be the only difference between SC and No Man's Sky or Everspace? If so, when do we get our sandwich guns, so we can shoot food lasers into our mouths?