Dave Haddock

So, high level, what was it, three years ago, we had introduced this concept of regen. So it was basically a fictional way to justify why players are respawning. Came up with this lore behind it of the Ibrahim spheres and imprinting and stuff like that. And actually did it in the timeline of the fictional universe. So it happened while players were playing. We introduced the tech. We kind of showed how the Imperator and the other people were reacting to this type of thing. But now basically, for whatever reason, the efficiency of the technology has been failing. Spoiler, it's not affecting the players, but for the majority of the NPC population, the efficacy of the regen tech has been dropping significantly. So basically death is now becoming a thing again. They thought they'd conquered it, and now it turns out that they're not. So currently the UEE and the Imperator are basically trying to scramble to figure out a solution, to research and science their way out of this predicament, to hopefully try to restore the tech to its former glory.

During the run-up to it, the tests and stuff, as much as they tested the technology before it came out, once you increased the sample size to several billion, it started really quickly showing the cracks. And all of a sudden all these people who thought they had their imprint safely stored away in a hospital, because everyone went out and got their imprints to protect them, it wasn't until they put it to the test months later that they realized that the imprints had gone bad. And so it's kind of like these small incidences of, oh, this whole shipload of people got into a wreck and none of them came back, that's weird. And then it started piling up to the realization of, oh, this technology is not as dependable as we first thought.

And you kind of ran into the thing too where people were starting to effectively get kind of cocky of, oh, it doesn't matter, I can go and fly my ship into a wall and bounce back and everything will be okay. So not only is the sample pool increasing, but people could start abusing it, basically over and over and over again. And again, that could kind of raise the failure rate.

Yeah, so it turns out a large percentage of the population doesn't take well to imprinting. Maybe they only have one imprint, maybe none. And just like the player population is the part of the universe who owns spaceships and goes on these great adventures, they're also the part of the population that takes really well to imprinting, for the most part.

And this is a story that, obviously, we've just introduced with 4.1. This is a story that will continue to be revealed, and players will have more interactions with it as the months go by later this year.

Yeah. So, as we had talked about in one of the Inside Star Citizens, the idea is we're introducing these ongoing storylines. And so this is the inciting incident for what we're calling our B story. So the threat of the Regen Crisis is kind of looming, and it's moving pieces around the board, whether it's corporate interests, government interests, stuff like that, to make decisions that the players will get to see as they go throughout the universe.

That's literally what the whole Mine on the Line is for: this is the reason you're going to these Hathor places, and the reason you're searching for these minerals, is to feed into Rayari.

Yeah, and there's going to be other ways that we're going to start tying into this stuff a bit more, where players are going to be able to see the ramifications of it in the universe.

And hear NPCs discussing it.

Yes, you'll start to see more NPCs coming online. Again, I bring up Ancient Sail's question because the answer to that is essentially the same as the answer to the first three questions of the show. It's basically those development resources need to become available for us in order to manifest this stuff more fully into the 'verse. We'll have some chat later on about how we're going to do that. It's one of those things where we shouldn't stop creating story. Just like anything else, we shouldn't stop adding mining to the game. We shouldn't stop adding salvaging or combat or whatever. And the tools that allow us to make those things better will continue to develop as each patch goes on. The tools that will allow us to tell our stories better will continue to evolve as the patches go on.

I mean, they're doing a lot. It's mostly the thing of, the effects of what they're doing are probably behind closed doors. They're happening in other systems and stuff like that.

Again, we are limited to the Stanton and Pyro systems right now.

Yeah. So they're certainly up to a lot, trying to incentivize corporations to find a solution and incentivizing the population to help the corporations and scientific research and finding the resources and stuff like that. It's just, again, it's a player-centric experience. So obviously we're focusing on it.

I mean, the UEE is putting a lot of resources into trying to fix this crisis. But the player isn't necessarily going to a UEE research lab to see what they're doing. We're coming up with ways that the player can participate in this Regen Crisis.

And without spoiling, you will be going to some research labs in the future. They may not be UEE research labs, but we've heard what Rayari is doing. You're going to start seeing what other factions and corporations are doing to attempt to address it.

Yeah, and the reason why Rayari has all these funds to spend on those rare resources that players are excavating right now is because the UEE is putting extra funding through Addison into researching how to fix this crisis.

It's more like they're experiencing a crisis firsthand, and... how to phrase this. We're going on a journey, and we really wanted the players to feel like they're part of this unfolding. And so whether there's going to be concrete answers or solutions at the end of this, we're going to leave it up, because you're checking in with us halfway through. So it's kind of a delicate position.

Not even halfway through. We barely got the first chapter of this out.

Well, and it's, again, that idea of, like Will said, that players are experiencing this as it's happening. So we're starting to lay a groundwork of story continuity, which is I think a really exciting thing that we haven't really been able to do much before. We've been having a lot of Simpsons cycles where the status quo gets reset, but now we're actually establishing that if someone starts playing the game in three months, their experience of things, when talking to somebody who's been playing it this entire time, is going to be a little different, because the people who've been playing this entire time go, oh, well, you should have seen it, and da-da-da, there was this regen tech and it used to work and now it doesn't work, and blah, blah, blah.

I mean, this year's focus on doing these regular patches, monthly patches, has really been interesting to us from a narrative perspective on how we can tell our story. Because previously we were doing the quarterly patches, and stories were unfolding over a much greater amount of time, and how the players experienced it was very different. But now we have a much more regular cadence, and so slowly doing these little crumbs as we go and building into something bigger and bigger.

We had four patches in four months: December, January, February, March. With Invictus being in the middle of May, there's a six-week gap instead of a four-week gap there. And then our plan is to continue on: May patch, June patch, July patch, August patch, September patch. So you'll see drops of this going throughout the year. So that's all part of this content-driven, less feature-driven directive for this year.

You mentioned earlier when you introduced regen and the Ibrahim spheres, it was in time and place three years ago. These are story moments of where we are now in our sliding timescale. These aren't things that just repeat.

Some of the stuff, I think, we had things like Siege of Orison, which were single events that we would repeat because it was a fun game experience and stuff like that. So I think it'll probably always be kind of a balance of that.

Like Mine on the Line is kind of an evergreen location. It's not an event. It's a permanent addition. So we're trying to balance between these story moments that you're experiencing right now with repeatable content that will live on.

That's not different than any other MMO. When you play the level 10 quests, they happen much earlier in the ongoing saga, but they're always still going to be there, playable. So this content is designed to always be there.

Yes, I think for the most part.

In the groundwork that we're laying with this new content, even if there's a story mission attached to it, we're taking the content itself and figuring out how to reuse it in a repeatable, playable experience. So there might be more event-type stuff coming this year, but anything that we do, we're hoping to build into it so that the players will keep getting to enjoy and have fun with it.

But I think what Adam might have been asking is, is this the 1.0 story or is this something else? This is something else.

This is our 2025 storyline.

And to his question, why? Why tell a story when you're in alpha?

Well, part of it is this is giving Narrative a chance to be in alpha as well. We've been learning so much in these past four months, now that the mission tools are in, now that the streaming content tool's in, that we've been able to really ramp up how we deliver. And you're going to be seeing that more this year. And we've run into issues that we've been able to sort out with this earlier content and explore as we build up to our 1.0 content.

And it's a thing, too. We've been working with the designers and stuff like that. Part of it is that giving the narrative wrapping to why you're doing something makes the doing something a little bit more engaging. So part of it is, again, in this push for greater engagement in the experience, let's add a story to it. So it's not just, hey, we introduced this thing, go have fun. There's a reason around doing it, driving players to go play. Why not add another layer?

Yeah. And I think it's a little bit of a thank you to the players who are playing it right now. You're playing in alpha, you're experiencing our game in development, and as part of that, you're getting to experience the Regen Crisis, which players who hop onto the bandwagon three years from now won't. So, good for you.

We were charged, from a design side, they wanted this person who would take in a random collection of resources from the player, who didn't have a set style or anything, because basically this is like tier negative one of crafting almost. When crafting comes online later on, you'll be taking those recipe lists and you'll be filling them and you'll be putting them into your own crafting station. But those things aren't ready yet. But we still kind of wanted that gameplay loop for the players to start experiencing it: go find materials, bring the materials, turn the materials into a thing. And so this is the person who's doing that through this trading shop. And so we were thinking of who would do that. And we had been really wanting to get aliens, because Star Citizen is supposed to be populated by aliens, so we've been waiting for that opportunity. And so we kind of asked, and we're like, maybe?

And of course, like the answers at the very beginning, we have to implement it as far as we can with the tech and resources that we have right now. Obviously a fully PCapped Banu running around, we're not quite ready to do that because those resources are tied up with other stuff.

Well, I mean, we PCapped him. He is fully PCapped. But the animation rig, the walk cycle, the full custom rig for a Banu, is something that hasn't been made. Again, even the sculpt for it was relatively quick because there had been development on it, but not a real intensive, game-ready asset made.

I think some very ingenious people found a way into Wikelo's room and discovered that Wikelo wasn't quite all there yet. So for those not in the know, he's currently a head and a torso that sits behind his desk talking to you. But that's going to develop more as we get more time to put into him. And hopefully one day he'll be walking around his emporium interacting with you, as our long-term goal.

Because he's also a fabricator. He's not just a collector. He's also producing his own items, and these rare resources are something that he desired. Or maybe someone else wanted to trade with him. There's several excuses. It's also partially, metagaming-wise, the timing of his release is with the Mine on the Line event. So we wanted something to tie it together with that.

And it's the intention with each patch that the things that he's looking for and asks for will change. In fact, in 4.1.1, we're introducing guild scrip, a different physicalized currency that players will find throughout the universe. And he'll accept those.

Yeah, it's also important to remember too that, and this was one of the beautiful benefits of him being a Banu, he's kind of eccentric. So to me, the thought of him going, hey, I want you to bring me like 30 Pips cans, some Carinite and a burrito, made sense for him, because he's kind of weird that way.

I mean, even for a Banu, I think he's on the eccentric end of things, because he's living alone out in human space without a Suli.

And for a little behind the scenes, one of the suggestions of the person was, for vehicle rewards, you should be able to turn in one of the ones you've stolen and get it like this. Because we actually did look into that. We ran into a technical issue where the freight elevators couldn't destroy an item. So you load something in the freight. We actually tested. We actually intended to do something like that. You'd load it onto the thing, it would come down and come up with something else. But it kept coming up with the existing item, and you just kept duplicating stuff. So we inadvertently created our own asset duplication thing. So that aspect of it was not able to make the initial release. But it is something we're still looking at. And for what and how it will be implemented, you'll find out when it's ready. But again, it's another example of: we're thinking the same things they're thinking. We're having the same conversations they're having. And the answer almost always to why didn't they just do that is the thing we needed to do that wasn't ready. And if we waited until every single thing was ready, we wouldn't be running a live environment in the middle of our development.

I believe it was a conversation with design. They had built a series of missions that were supposed to build up towards the release of the Pyro system. And so there was that initial thing of, oh, you can pick from these three, and then suddenly they wanted to make it shift to two, so we had to look at their outline of how they wanted to do things and figure out, all right, well, how can we phase it from three to two? And basically hit all of the markers that they needed to hit and then tell a story that could be fun. Again, the goal was, hey, Pyro's coming out. We want people to go to Pyro. So how do we incentivize people to go storming into Pyro? And it's been one of the things we'd actually, years ago, talked about, a similar thing for XenoThreat as well, of them taking over the jump point station and then fleeing into Pyro. And so it was basically, the Navy gave you the go-ahead to go in. So it was a bunch of missions for players, but it was the same type of thing: figure out a storyline that would ultimately culminate with the invasion of Pyro. And so we circled around this idea of the Frontier Fighters being a much more hardline version of CFP, basically. And then, in talking with design, came up with this hook of turning them into the villains, basically. So turning Frontier Fighters into the bad guys, hence why you had to fall into CFP or Headhunters.

And I'm glad I asked that question because you answered exactly what I was hoping you were going to say. Looking at the questions in that thread, I think sometimes there's this idea that everything starts with narrative, that everybody else in the company has to do what you decide the story is, and that's not the case. This is a collaborative thing, and many, many, many people have a voice. Not me, or we'd have Jalopy. But other people have voices where they say, we would like to do this, and that's something that happens quite a lot. Designers come and say, we would like to make this kind of content. We would like to do something like this. Can you help us find a way to fit that into the universe that you've created? And that's a big part of what you guys do day in and day out.

Kind of answered your own question.

Yeah. The Frontier Fighters switching into a pure enemy faction: I know some people aligned with them and they wanted to keep working for them, but our idea was always to have them as an ongoing enemy faction for the rest of the story we're telling this year. And going forward, not every faction that you encounter in the game is going to be one that the players can actively work for. There are these purely hostile factions, and we need them for gameplay reasons: as the reputation system slowly evolves, we want a similar experience for players, who can always arrive in a location and have someone to attack or who is attacking them, without having to worry about how the reputation system is going to change how they behave or the dialogue lines, because there's a high cost with that. We do want to have some reputation-based gameplay where the player's alignment will affect the outcome or how they experience these things. But that's going to be much more controlled.

It has to be within reason. It has to be within technical reason. It has to be within feature reason. It has to be within time, the amount of time that we can invest into creating different variations. Everybody that's ever played a video game that has branching storylines, you can only have so many different branches. Otherwise, it just goes on and on and on and it becomes impossible. I say that, and then Baldur's Gate 3 was like, hold my beer. Shout out to Baldur's Gate 3. But even there, there are limits. Limits in time, limits in technology, limits in functionality and our own desires. We're not making a game where you can do absolutely every single thing in the universe. We learn every week the game that we want to make. We evolve, Chris evolves, you guys evolve, we all have different ideas every week, and we start to think this is the kind of game we want to make as we see players react. And it's not to say that maybe someday down the road you're not going to be able to join space Nazis. I don't say no. That's my point. But at this moment, where we're at, no, that's not something we're really looking for.

But again, going back to the conversation about the guilds that we outlined in the Road to 1.0 thing, there is going to be a criminal guild. If you are looking for that type of underworld, working-for-the-dark-side type characters and interactions and factions and stuff like that, we have that. You will be able to work for those people.

You can be criminals. You can be pirates. It's just a question of how far into depravity we look at.

An early version of the reputation system had a lot more factions that you're working for. They were going to be very localized, so that as you traveled from planet to planet, you were starting to build your reputation up. And it turned out that level of complexity wasn't delivering on the experience that we wanted. So we have pared back, so that the factions will ideally have larger differences from each other, so that you're not just shuffling back and forth between 20 identical delivery companies. For 1.0, we want each company that you work for to have its own vibe, its own voice. And those are going to be the ones for you to grow along with, from system to system. So a lot of the factions that we previously thought were going to be Pyro-only or Stanton-only are going to expand out into the other systems, so you can have a continuous experience as you travel through the star systems. And so I think a part of that is limiting who you're going to be able to grow that reputation with. We're going to have local factions and local people that you can still get paying jobs with and do small mission chains with, but you won't necessarily be earning a permanent reputation with them that's tracked and affects other people. So it's going to be a lot more focused and hopefully deliver a more in-depth experience for those factions that you do work with.

I mean, it's an interesting idea to run with, that Frontier Fighters steamroll their way through some of the other gangs and wipe them out. Again, it's usually that thing, too, of what you were talking about before: to build the experience to the standard of quality that we like to ascribe to stuff, adding those gangs requires support. It requires costumes, it requires voice packs ideally, it requires ship liveries, it requires a lot of stuff that requires other teams to get involved. That's why we usually make the distinction, whenever we're talking on this or in the forums and stuff like that: there's a distinction between the fictional universe and the in-game universe. In the fictional universe, they're probably out still running around, but whether they're represented in the game yet, right now we're not really at a place where we can support putting them in.

But as far as down the road, we have plenty of narrative room to have them show up and start having outposts dedicated to them. And I think it's about, oh, now we've had the character art time so that they have really cool bespoke armor that makes me want to go engage with them and loot them. And right now we just don't have that in the schedule.

I mean, you kind of see it with the Fire Rats in the contested zones, how unique they can look, the work that they did on that. It was really awesome and shows basically where it could go. But I do like the idea of actually saying that maybe we fictionally kill off one of the gangs, that Frontier Fighters get a hold of them and stomp them out.

And I just want to say, I really feel for all the people who've been following along with the lore that we've been releasing for the past decade and seeing our development in real time. And they've always been representative of our thoughts at the time and our aspirations at the time. But we've changed, we've grown and we've learned stuff. So at one point we were going to have all these gangs, and we developed them because that was what the idea was at the time. And now as we've learned, it's like, oh, we want less, better gangs. And so we've trimmed, pared down to fit into that schedule, or we know how much developer resources it takes to do it to our quality now. And we've had to adjust it. That's not to say that they're cut or gone. They just might not be showing up in the way... We talk about this with the location lore, having to adjust and change to our new tech. And so, yeah, I appreciate how difficult it is to be a Star Citizen lore fan and being like, wait, I thought it was this. And, you told me these gangs were down here doing stuff, and I don't see them. So I know it's tough.

So, again, this new story initiative just started this year, and we're still in the fourth month of this year. So it's not like we've...

Well, technically, I think we're in month two of the storylines.

I would say with the start of Pyro, with the Fight for Pyro. So we're really only four or five months into this initiative. But the missions have all been very combat. The story has been very combat-focused. Even Mine on the Line, the regen thing, the first thing you do is go to a big central sandbox where you're forced to fight with a bunch of people.

Yeah. From a high level, actually, the B story, the science story, the Regen Crisis story, is actually the non-combat one, because it's science, it needs resources. And the Frontier Fighters one, which is the A story, that is obviously much more focused around combat. But within each of them, obviously, there's going to be opportunities to do both combat and non-combat. Again, I think a lot of the systems for combat have already been proven out. So I think, you'd talk to the mission team, but I think they're a bit easier to set up. So it's faster to iterate on adding a lot of combat stuff versus mining stuff. But as far as I understand it, the hope is that we want to have a very nice balance between the two, that if you don't want to fight, you don't have to fight.

Supply or Die, which was kind of a refrain from that A story, a little denouement where you take a break and we introduce things, could be done completely without combat. You were able to mine your way to completion and get all the rewards, or salvage your way to completion. Now, what other players allow you to do, that is the universe that we're making. But it was not exclusively combat-oriented. There was a path for combat, a path where you could avoid it. I think we'll see more of those things as we go on, providing alternate paths to things. As the Regen Crisis continues, there will no doubt be opportunities for some major combat. But there will also be ways to contribute that are not.

I mean, still the two main storylines that we've talked about in the past: they're at a bit of a crossroads right now. There is a community of Tevarin who've left the UEE to form a new Tevarin homeworld and try to reestablish their culture and really embrace those roots. And then there is a new Tevarin movement about taking their culture and assimilating into the UEE and finding their new place as UEE citizens, and fighting for their status of equality and really having a place in it.

Like genuinely going, hey, we're going to make a real effort. We're part of this, we've been a part of the UEE for a while now, let's really make a go of it. And so, yeah, it's the two of them kind of...

At odds with each other. And I think there's this desire, now that the war is so long past, of returning Tevarin culture back into the mainstream, with Esperia's release of these Tevarin fighter ships and other forms of Tevarin culture, which are now being revitalized. It's kind of an interesting combination of humanity and Tevarin working together to bring back these elements of Tevarin society that were lost.

I'm very excited when we finally get around to the Tevarin, because they're my favorite group.

I mean, just moving up the food chain, it's audio logs. Ultimately we want to get to be able to do video logs, all that stuff. Because again, the datapads are great because they're easy, they're relatively cheap. But again, part of the thing with this year has been creating greater engagement. And one of the main methods for doing that is having characters that you're interacting with. And so even if it's a one-sided thing, as far as an audio log or a video log or something like that, you're still reacting to a person rather than just reading text on screen.

Folks have already seen, obviously with Wikelo, comms calls are coming back. You're starting to see some visual comms calls and people being able to talk to you and deliver some exposition. Folks who are playing 4.1.1 on the PTU now know there's elements of that creeping into 4.1.1 as well, with some of the new mission content that's available, where we're able to have these comms calls come and talk to you. You just mentioned audio logs. I think I'll go ahead and say it is our intention to add audio logs to the game before the year is out. I'll give us a big window there to implement it, but we do want to make it so it's not just picking up things that you have to read. It's things that you can actually listen to and hear to help tell that story. And as we showcased in ISC with the performance capture episode just a few weeks ago, we want to be able to get some of these broadcasts on screens in landing zones and be able to push out story elements to you that you don't have to go and find yourself. We're committed to trying to make that work this year, we're committed to trying to make audio logs this year, because we are very serious about our desire to tell these stories and improve the methods in which we tell the story.

I mean, yeah, the change to the new loading screen alone has just given us a nice opportunity. Just a little bit of narrative. Again, it's text reading, which maybe is not as exciting, but the branding team has done an amazing job of doing the art for them.

Things we can do this year without requiring too much feature work, without pulling too many resources away from finishing out Squadron 42, and without introducing too much instability into the PU. Like I said, it's all got to be managed. It's all got to be balanced within the whole, but we are making those efforts.

Hi @Kenge84, it will probably be on a case-by-case basis. Pretty much as we actually start building out the specific systems and incorporate what we've learned thus far as far as gameplay and tech advances, we'll probably be adjusting the lore of the systems to accommodate. The goal is to still keep to the original spirit of the tone/character of the system (so it's not a total retcon), but to make it fun. It's also important to note, which Rich brought up in the final CitizenCon presentation, the original lore for all the systems was built around the idea that you wouldn't be able to land on the planets, so hence why there's an overwhelming amount of thoroughly toxic planets or mined out husks. We were trying to make it sound unappealing to land there, but as we're now able to explore them, we're probably going to be walking that back a bit. But again, it will probably be on a case-by-case basis.

Dave