I have played some Elite Dangerous, and while it is a lot of fun in its own way, the game is essentially each player for themselves, in their own ship. You can multi-crew, but all you have is turrets and the equivalent of snub fighters launched from mother ships. Turrets are made to be as helpful as possible for human players; they are fully and perfectly counter balanced against ship's movements and give you a wide angle third person view of your ship and surroundings. Still the turrets are much better under AI control, since the AI never misses. Besides, turreted guns are a class weaker than gimballed guns (fire in an arc ahead of you), and gimballed guns are a class weaker than fixed guns, so turreted guns are quite weak. The snub fighters are also heavily buffed for players; they have infinite lives since the player only "remote controls" them from inside the mother ship, and the mother ship can build new ones. Despite that, a snub fighter is never as powerful as a full ship, so players rather fly their own ships than the snub fighters. The engineer role is managed by the pilot. You have power allocation between shields, guns and engines, overheating, enabling/disabling equipment for stealth, activating repair bots, power plant overloading, etc, (i.e. everything the engineer role is envisioned to do in SC), but the UI is good enough to let the pilot do all that. The role is really just a simple react/respond role, so it does not require the full attention of a human. There are game mechanics to promote player collaboration, basically giving you rewards faster if you play together, but there are no situations that actually require collaboration. Everything can be done by a single player provided you have a sufficiently large and powerful ship, and any size ship can be fully effective with a single pilot player and AI controlling turrets and snub fighters. In the end, players fly their own ships instead of multi-crew, making the amount of interaction quite weak; roughly the type of interaction we see in PU now. Most real player interaction ends up being the forums and chats, and only once in a while do you play together just for laughs. So, the questions are: Are we satisfied with having the level of player interaction that can be found in Elite Dangerous? Can we do multi player in a completely different way, and if so, how? Can we give CIG some guidance on what we would like multi player to achieve? What are its goals?