Otázky o Earth 2 a jej budúcich plánoch vývoja

I’ll start off by saying that I haven’t looked at this project for a couple of years. As a long term Star Citizen backer, and seeing the enormous challenges CIG face/faced with the SC/SQ42 projects, I already had many reservations in regards to the claims around Earth 2.

So it has been a couple of years, and I saw that YouTube video of what looked like some basic landscape demos, with no gameplay. All this has done for myself is raise questions:

1. How is this planned to be networked?
   • Is this planned to be one big mega-server? Regional mega servers? Or smaller shards?
   • How many players are to be expected within a shard/server? Will a single player be seeing thousands of others?
   • What are the plans for server tech?
   • As a SC backer, replication tech and persistence are very interesting topics. Is there any news on how this will progress and be implemented?
   • Just to add to all of this, is there any proof that any of this is going ahead? Is there any tech demos yet on the multiplayer aspect? Or even any official videos with project leads etc. talking about future plans and how they plan on implementing?
2. What is the gameplay vision for this “game”? Has this been officially spoken about anywhere?
   • If this has been spoken about and I’m just not seeing it, what can players expect to actually do?
   • Is there a feature roadmap available? If not, why?
   • How is traversing long distances going to be handled? In both manual player travel, and any potential automated systems?
3. Time sinks -> What are they?
   • This falls under the gameplay category, but what are the planned time sinks to keep players engaged? Or is this all about “making crypto”?
   • Is there a story? Seems like a missed opportunity if not, like wtf happened to Earth 1…
4. Art styles -> What is the artistic direction E2 is going for? This is extremely confusing for me, in a landscape demo it seems to be going for Unreal Engine “semi-realistic” asset art style, then I see a post from a dev on the subreddit of some shit looking cyberpunk(?) ninja that doesn’t represent the shown world at all, and wouldn’t even fit in a cyberpunk setting either.
   • On this, wtf is that font and applied glow? Was this put together in 5mins on GIMP?
5. When can we expect to see an actual playable version of this 3D open world?
   • This falls back into the roadmap question, but just to be more precise. Has this been spoken about in an official capacity yet? If not, why?

Basically, I’m just wondering. Outside of buying useless bits of fake land for real money, and getting an almost equally useless crypto back. What is the point of this? And where is this even going? I remember when I last looked at Earth 2 a couple of years back, these were all questions getting asked with no answer being provided. Through my admittedly limited research on the subject, I haven’t found these to be adequately answered yet, especially answered officially, so I’m coming here for some form of insight.