TL;DRCargo and things like Prospector bags become individual entities that can be detached, stolen or moved between ships, and anything you can get access to, such as by sneaking aboard, can be taken.
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Rob ReiningerAssistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services
As long as you can access it, whether it be through their cargo grid, getting into their ship somehow, if you can disable the ship without blowing it up and can get in, sneak onto their ship, you can maybe get off with some valuable packages. So yeah, and I guess one of the things that we kind of missed talking about with the refactor here is that the way that the Prospector bags, for instance, were set up was that they were all kind of part of the ship, right? It was just an animated pod, but this will set us up to allow us to detach those for other people to come and pick them up, taking them to a refinery so that the mining ship can keep going. So it is kind of all-inclusive. It's just an item like any other item at this point, whether it's attached to the outside of a ship or placed inside of a ship.
It's kind of cool. And for clarity, when that first started even getting discussed within the team, within the first five seconds, people were talking about how cool it would be to run a heist and break into someone's ship and take their stuff, or force them to give you stuff because you've threatened to blow them up if they don't. That is 100%.
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Chad McKinneyLead Gameplay Engineer, US PU Gameplay team
And on the technical side, if I could just clarify a little bit, previously cargo and cargo grids were really just some data and some persistent representation. And we're changing it to be represented as entities. And for anyone that's not familiar with game dev terminology, an entity is this really generic term for just something that a player might see in the game. So what that means is that the cargo boxes, those Prospector bag things, these are going to be things that we have a lot more ability to allow to simulate independently, so that they can attach, detach, you can interact with them individually. So that gives us a lot of leeway to open up new gameplay opportunities like actually stealing the sacks and putting them onto your ship, or putting them inside another ship, or just getting creative and letting the players do very interesting things. But yeah, a big part of this is just making them actually interactable objects in the world individually, as opposed to these static fixed things.
TL;DRThe event is started manually by developers and not even scheduled yet; the eventual plan is for in-game actions and player activity to drive it, possibly before calendar scheduling.
It is started by developers. It's not even automatically scheduled. That's actually another step that we want to take, allowing it to be put on basically a calendar with a date and time on it. That was supposed to be the next step, but frankly, all that Tony has been able to talk about for the past few weeks is wanting to make it so that it's triggered by things in-game, potentially. So that schedule might get a little bit flipped up. But it is definitely intended that eventually some form of in-game actions will cause these to happen, be that increasing the piracy level in an area to the point where Nine Tails thinks that they have a shot, or even just doing missions for them to the point where they get enough resources as an organization to build up the fleet that they need to do these kinds of things. And that's for all world events in the future. That is the plan, that eventually these are all driven by that simulation of what's going on and player actions.
If it is where you were set, then you stay there, yes. It does not do anything to affect you there whatsoever. That's not to say that we never will, particularly if in some distant future there's a time when they actually take over that station; that might have some ramifications for people there that aren't friendly with Nine Tails. But for now, no, you will log back in right on that station.
So there's an opportunity for some juicy game starts. Just log in casually, have a fun Persistent Universe experience, and you're in the middle of a giant PvP event.
Which has some knock-on fun potential gameplay of, I need to hire someone to come in with some big guns and rescue me. And that sounds awesome in some ways, or terrifying.
Short answer, yes, absolutely. Long answer, there's a series of Confluence pages with — to be clear, the current mo.Trader app is not even tier one, it's tier zero of what we want to implement for that — just plan after plan for how to expand upon that in gradated bits to include player trading. There's talk even of having it be that there might be shipping times on that, that you might hire a shipping company, and then players could be that shipping company. So yes, absolutely. Player trading of items between each other is planned to be supported. What exact form that ends up taking will be determined when we actually start to put the pedal to the metal on that next step.
TL;DRYes, reputation is planned for illegal and outlaw gameplay too, with data already being set up, though no release timing is given beyond watching the roadmap and an upcoming CitizenCon talk.
Absolutely, definitely. And I'm not even saying that as a far-off, super distant thing. I literally spent yesterday setting up some data for it. When it comes out will be a question mark; keep your eye on the roadmap, as Jared is so fond of saying. But there is planned support for pretty much any kind of gameplay in the game with reputation. The idea is that whatever you guys enjoy doing, we want to support with that reward system. If that means hauling cargo from place to place, there will be reputation for it. If that means shooting people along a trade route as a pirate, there will be reputation for that, both good and bad. If that means stealing Big Benny's machines and going and building weird Neolithic monuments on a moon for some reason, I'm sure narrative would have a problem with it, but there might be a reputation for that with some weird organization. So yes, there will be reputation for illegal things, for non-violent things, for all kinds of things.
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Rob ReiningerAssistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services
And we've talked about Pyro quite a bit. It's a big thing, right? And that's more of an outlaw system that's going to be coming online. So it's definitely going to be more relevant as we get into that. But yeah, as for now, design-wise, we're building out the structure behind the scenes of how this is going to work in the game. And that's actually something we're going to talk about in a bit more detail at CitizenCon.
TL;DRReputation is planned to affect buying and selling, including prices, taxes and access to items, and is described as fundamental to progression; losing standing won't remove items but may block repairs or replacements.
Absolutely, absolutely. That is one of the core... There's a portion of reputation that is one of our very public, very core plans for it. There's perks. You've seen a very small amount of that with the bounty hunter reputations, where you get a little bit more in mission rewards as you rank up with certain organizations. This would fold under the expansion of that into many more varieties and much more interesting perks. That's actually one of the simpler ones, frankly. It might be a specific shop, if it's a little mom-and-pop store, where you've got a really good reputation with that specific person, or it might be company-wide, if there's like Garrity Defense, then you can get all of those various stores. But yes, absolutely, when you're selling, taxes and all of that could be affected by reputation in certain areas.
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Rob ReiningerAssistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services
Yeah, buying and selling. We talked about hiding things behind reputation, so you've got to be X reputation, you've got to be a private with us in order to buy our weapons. It also ties into subscriber flair as well, right? We've always talked about wanting to put a subscriber shop in there. So guess what? Subscriber is just a reputation that is a boolean, on or off.
When we say, oh, this thing will give you X item, it generally will more give you access to X item, and that's why when you fall below that rank, we aren't going to take that out of your inventory, because that's just rude, frankly. It's that the item might decay to a point where it is broken or needs to be repaired or something. You won't be able to get it back in working order until you are above certain reputations, or get a replacement until you're above that.
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Rob ReiningerAssistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services
As we move forward with the game, obviously, wear and tear is going to become a much bigger influence on your gameplay. Right now, we do a lot of things with ships where we basically just give you all brand new stuff when you claim insurance. Eventually, the intent is that your parts are wearing out. So if you lose your rep to have access to it, you may not be able to get it repaired by them, or you may not be able to get another one. I can't express enough how fundamental reputation is to our progression system. It is huge, and it's going to be tied into as many things as make sense, but in most of the stuff that we work on, it's going to be a factor.
TL;DRRecovering lost special items like subscriber flair is in the plan, possibly by returning found items to a home location, but no schedule exists and it depends on priorities.
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Rob ReiningerAssistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point. Typically, the players are just doing character resets and then getting their stuff back. Reclaiming it, like we have talked about: if you lost it, maybe at some point somebody could find it, right? And then it gets returned to your home location, where you can go and pick it up. There are talks about how we can do that for some of those key items, like the subscriber things or the things that you paid real money for, or the special stuff, right? Your special mount, so to speak. But yeah, it's in the plan. I don't know when that's scheduled, but it's an evolution of the shopping experience for sure. And I know next year is going to be much more economy-focused as we get the Quanta tooling integrated into the game more and more. That's where I would like to see that happen, but it's all going to come down to priorities.
I also should clarify, for XenoThreat, we are going to directly reward you some stuff at certain reputations after the event is done, but that is something that we do not plan to do long term.
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Rob ReiningerAssistant Director, Systemic Gameplay Services
That's a one-off. So that's a good point. Right now, we're doing it in an undesirable way, where we're going through the analytics data and going, ah, who's actually completed this? And then attributing those things to the accounts. These are things that we want people to be able to, one, acknowledge: yep, cool, I'm going to this place and I get it, and I did it and I know that I did it. Whereas right now the backend just goes, yep, you got it. There's not a whole lot of messaging. Once the inventory is localized, I go get it. We've got plans for that as well. But yeah, so hopefully it'll become more fluid and more tangible in-game experiences with the reward stuff that they're doing now.