NOTE: I expect, because of my previous posts, or perhaps because of the games I'm referencing in this post, that people are going to see this in the light of being PVP versus PVE. I don't think that necessarily applies. In a large scale game, you might have a large org that does a lot of PVP that is supported by many players within the org that focus on PVE activities. You can be a PVE player in a PVP game if the game is big enough, and this game should be big enough. For that reason, try to avoid seeing this post along a PVP/PVE axis. That's not the intention. You can have PVE in a sandbox game. You can have PVE activities be quite valuable even if the game itself allows PVP. It would be this: To what extent is Star Citizen intended to be a sandbox game (like Rust, Ark) versus a theme park (like Destiny 2, World of Warcraft). This question matters to me, and is perhaps what most determines whether I want to continue to support Star Citizen. I LOVE sandbox games, particularly PVP sandbox games. I have thousands of hours in Rust, Ark, Atlas and Eve Online. They are all fantastic games. I generally am far less enthusiastic about theme park games. I did like Destiny 2, but the end game couldn't keep my attention. I can't play a game where my objective is to collect items by running through challenging but ultimately static dungeons. Developers simply cannot create enough content to keep my interest in such games. It takes the dev team dozens of man years to construct a new dungeon, and I get bored of that dungeon in 10-20 hours. It can't keep my attention. Sandbox games on the other hand never get dull, because they're always different. A game like Rust presents you with new and unique challenges every wipe. There's always new villains, and the villains are always different. Sometimes the challenge getting enough wood to start your desert base. Sometimes its disloging unruly neightbors. Sometimes its a heist where you seek out the biggest richest base on the map and attempt to rob their loot rooms. The game is always new. I want that for Star Citizen. I want Star Citizen to have a never-ending end game based on emergent high stakes interactions between players. Piracy, base raiding, major fleet battles, territory control... I want a kaleidoscope of game mechanics where my current objectives emerge from a unique mix of many different game elements rather than hand crafted content generated by CIG. I want my objectives not handed to me by a mission system, but instead as a natural consequence of the state of the game. The problem is, that the way I see it, there are two directions that CIG is pursuing. CIG seems to be driving towards sandbox like content with Persistent Entity Streaming (Persistence is the fundamental technology that all sandbox survival games are built on on, Ark, Rust, Atlas all make good use of persistence). CIG is also driving towards generated theme-park style content with Quantum. Persistent Entity Streaming will enable to the kinds of resource dispersion, widgets that operate in real time (like furnaces in Rust), ad hoc player creations (bases)... the kinds of cornerstones that all sandbox survival games are built upon. Quantum will generate a lot of varied semi-unique missions - likely very low quality missions. Its like a theme park ride generator that generates rides of questionable quality. I am not confident that Quantum will add much to the game, both for mission generation and for the game's economy (I favor a player economy). I may be wrong on that, perhaps Quantum's value will be in NPC events like having an NPC ship show up at your base to trade or something, not through its ad-hoc mission creation or hordes of bots to compete with if you want to do any trading. Perhaps there's value there that I just don't understand, but I remain unconvinced of Quantum's value. I hope it doesn't dislodge or draw resources away from the kind of gameplay that you find in sandbox survival games. So... that's kind of what I'd like to know. To what extent do they intend to hand craft content, adding little pieces of gameplay similar to what you'd get in say Squadron 42? To what extent will the game instead be based on objectives stemming from the state of the world itself, as exemplified by survival games like Rust or Ark? I firmly believe the sandbox approach is superior, and I'd like for the game to really embrace that as a core vision. Canned missions - no matter how good - lose their appeal after a while. I'd like to see that minimized.