Alex Marschal

So for me, this is something I've got to get approved by Chris, so don't take it to heart, is basically for me, light armor, I would like it to be that light armor is very fast on the ground and heavy armor is very slow on the ground. And in EVA, just because of the boosters and everything like that that the heavy armor can have, because of the extra power supplies and these types of things, it would be faster in EVA and the light would be slower. And the medium is supposed to be kind of the jack of all trades, master of none. So that's the way we'd be pushing it, and even with heavy, maybe you don't go prone, but in other ones you can go prone. Heavy, you'd be able to carry more, some more grenades, not more weapons, but more gadgets, and then obviously take more of a beating from a combat perspective. But you'd definitely move slower and you'd definitely feel the difference in running around. But Alex, do you know when we have those coming online, or are we aiming for like 2.7, 3.0 or something like that?

I think that's more towards 3.0 overall, because they would need to be built on the character side. We need to make the code implementation on that and also the balancing, which we shouldn't forget about. So I think that's more longer term.

Chris and I get to say, oh, we want everything, and then Aaron and Alex are, no, you don't get everything.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. We were just talking about this. So there are base features that we feel are missing. So the first one would be stamina, so you can't run forever. And there's breath associated with that. And even oxygen, so basically you can't be running all the time. It's also, from an oxygen standpoint, it would be fixing people being able to go outside in the PU completely naked, so they would be out there for X amount of seconds and then die, suffocate. So there's limb damage penalties that we're working on as well. So basically blurry vision, your stamina gets decreased the more hits that you take in your legs or in your core. And then your recoil and stuff like that increases when you take damage in the arms, those types of things. Then from there, we're also pushing on the knockdown, the drags, the revives. So when you're in the Persistent Universe, you don't have a respawn. Well, you do have a respawn, but you're going to lose a hell of a lot of things to go back to a different state. So this would give the players a chance to basically respawn or have somebody save them. And then what are some of the other big ones? We just went through the list.

I think you covered...

Yeah, adjusting in cover. And then getting vertical cover working, so the up and over an object. Let me see, what else?

Well, also on the tactical side, what you mentioned before with the different armor types that we have eventually. So they would be matched against each other, and each of them has different advantages, disadvantages, hit reactions and so forth. So I think all these things that come in over time just build towards getting the FPS component more and more tactical.

Yeah. We definitely are very aware that it needs to slow down. It is very, very fast. And also, obviously, if we completely took out respawning right now, then players, I think, would be working a lot slower. They might group up a little bit more. The fake teammates, where, hey, you and I, we group up and then we'll figure out when we're going to shoot each other in the back kind of thing. The fake allegiances.

It's really just the score right now. Yeah, for now. Basically, that went in, I think Luke Pressley did a pass on it pretty close to, I want to say, two, three weeks before we went out, and then even then we need to adjust the numbers and adjust the timing of how long it takes to shoot him in the butt.

It's basically base values right now based on our internal tests, and then we just get all the feedback from the community, see how things are tracking there in addition to the internal tests, and then figure out what the good values are.

Exactly. So obviously with Arena Commander, the first version that went out and how long it's taken to get to the point it is right now, it took them quite a while. But now, obviously with our team size being grown, we have a live team that is solely focused on Star Marine and Arena Commander and basically the Persistent Universe from a short-term release schedule, and then we have other designers and coders working on more of a long-term release. So the space stations or planetary outposts that you guys have seen when Brian talks about those in Around the Verse, those kind of things. So we have our short-term teams and then we have our long-term teams, and then it's just Alex and I trying to plan out everything, make sure that the goals are aligned with Jens and Steve Bender.

Personally, I would love that. I would go for the pink unicorn one. Alex would agree with that one. I am serious. To me, it's like beating the player with Dan in Street Fighter. That, to me, is the ultimate insult. You got beat by a pink unicorn and a 40-year-old man. At least for me, yeah, I want to be able to customize it. I want to be able to not only do color variants, but also do I want to have cloth or a cape or that kind of stuff.

What about decals?

I think it's some of the stuff that we've talked about, but I don't know if we're going to do like snow variant on a weapon versus tiger skin or those types of things. I think that would require some investigation from Toby's standpoint, our lead weapons artist in Frankfurt, and then Josh, who's the character art director here. It's something that I think we've briefly talked about, but right now we're more worried about building up the content library and then from there being able to adjust it.