Elliot Maltby

There definitely was a theme, sort of mixed between gameplay mechanic themes and also telling the story, I suppose, of the Ninetales attack on these platforms. Luke would probably be the best to talk about how he tackled that side of it art-wise.

Yeah, so the theme that we discussed with the creative director Ian, that we really wanted to bring home on this first island, is really this Normandy beach landing experience. You come out of the shoreline. You're there, explosions are happening. The fight is immediately intense. You're trying to push up. We're fighting uphill. We had the mortar section that we just went through. So it's really like, we're here, it's not a stealth approach. You're getting tossed into it straight away. And I think that really defines this first couple of areas. And then we'll see what the next area has entailed for us.

When you're designing encounters and missions, you always want to try for nice, what we call, peaks and troughs, where there's points of high intensity that then chill out. Because if it was constant high intensity, it gives you a different feeling and experience compared to ones where it's like, okay, now we can breathe, we can gather up, we can sort ourselves out.

So it was actually... I've seen a lot of discussion about it online, and I know everybody has their own opinions about it. I think there's drawbacks and benefits to doing it. Simply put, when we decided to remake Siege of Orison, within an instance, we wanted to see whether we could create a curated experience for four players. A linear mission flow that utilised not having any outside influence inside a mission, really for the first time, in Siege. We wanted to see if we could craft that in particular, and see whether we could pull it off: what we have, what we don't have, what we'd like in the future to perhaps make things like this, or things with a bigger party size.

And like I say, we could have made a bigger platform and increased the party size, tried to curate it for that many people. But we settled on four. We wanted to start with a group of four for this. I know it's not very similar to the old Siege.

I mean, the old Siege was completely unbalanced. We had no way of limiting it. So when we had built it originally, it was designed for 30 people. And then they found an issue where... Originally, we used to have two DGSs running on one server, and we found when we did Siege that they were fighting for resources. So instead, we were like, well, let's just have one DGS per Amazon server. So we did that. And then we were like, we can up the player count then. And then obviously that's when Siege came out, and we'd upped the player count to like 100 people. So it was instantly unbalanced on release. So it's nice to finally see it in a balanced form.

Yes. We've skipped the idea, originally in Siege, where you had to fly your own ships up here and try to push your way to the barge. And instead now we let you take the shuttle and get straight back into the action, and there's no chance of anyone being left behind because all the ships have been taken and all this sort of stuff.

What you can do as well is if you come here to the Cutlass on the left, then we can actually see a little bit of the narrative world building that we've done as well: the Ninetales have used this Crusader barge to just Trojan horse their way into Crusader. And we can see that they've used all these containers and that a lot of the stuff came out of it. And that's also why this final boss battle happens at this barge, because this is that stronghold that they flew into. So now we are sieging the fortress.

Yeah, so this barge was actually my pride and joy of the old Siege. This was the thing that I got to make, the old warehouse. If there's any old-school players in the chat, they'll remember it.

The OG barge you made with the fire on it as well.

Oh, yeah. We made a version of it that had fire in the final area of that thing, but VFX said it was too costly at the time, so sadly, we never got to put out the en fuego version. But we did decide to change the layout of the barge quite considerably, and I think it is significantly, significantly better than what we had before. It's now a sort of maze to find your way over to where you'll find the final boss. And then that final boss room is a completely different thing to what it once was. It's a whole designed boss fight, so hopefully everybody enjoys that, but we'll wait till we get to that bit.

Yeah, so when we do some missions like this, we try to go at it and be scalable, so that as we build more and more systems and more and more locations, these missions can populate into other systems and always give players something to do. So our first delivery was that. It was something that was scalable, that was fun and open, that players can sort of choose how they come at it. However, we definitely want to keep adding to it and have things like Shubin asking you to go mine their mining claim. They own this mining claim. They own these pieces of rock. They've given you exclusive rights and they want you to go there and mine it for them. We want Battaglia back and we want her to have missions where she's sending you to go do scouting missions. So you don't have to mine the rocks, but she goes, I need you to find me 10 rocks that contain iron. And in the future when crafting comes online, it's like, I want you to find me 15 that have a quality over the value of 400 or something like that. So we definitely want more variety in our industrial missions, because what we've got right now is the base level, it's the foundation of industrial missions. It's the idea of: this location wants a bunch of resources, you choose how to get them. You use whatever tools are at your sandbox control to do it, whatever tools Torsten gives you, and then you look inward for the fun.

You mentioned Battaglia. We're working to bring Battaglia back, hopefully, later this year.

We are. We're working very hard. I have been reviewing the stuff we've been building for it and it's very fun.

We've experimented with mission givers however long ago, and then they fell to the wayside because of other priorities and stuff like that. But being able to bring back mission givers will be a nice new addition to that kind of stuff, because you can only look at a mobiGlas so much.

So we introduced the new industrial missions and basically inside of that is salvage and mining. So what happens is a faction asks you to gather resources for them and bring it to their location. So they'll ask for sort of X amount of iron, X amount of corundum or whatever resources we have in our game, and the player is tasked to retrieve them by any means necessary. So the main way that players will engage with this is via the mining and refining loops. That's the most obvious. However, players can also purchase these and turn them in, or players could pirate other players and steal them and turn them in if they didn't want to engage with that mining. So they're kind of like this open Lego box and you choose how you build the mission yourself. You kind of go, okay, I'm going to do it like this or this. We also did other salvage ones. So we introduced FPS salvage, and by FPS salvage, I don't mean FPS hull scraping. I mean we give you actual missions that require you to gather components off of the ship, whether it be shields, weapons. We have missions that are like, hey, just go get me a bunch of size zero weapons or size-this weapons components. We have some bugs with it that we're looking into and we're trying to fix, to allow you to do the existing salvage claim missions that Adagio offer, so you can do those, pay for the salvage rights, salvage those ships, and then put them straight into the resource gathering mission if you so wish. We also put time into trying to do a simplistic intro for these, where the player is sent to a cave near the outpost where they have to drop off, and asked to go in and find one little gem of Aphorite, right? And the same thing with the salvage, we give you this first ship so you can understand it and how it works. Just so it's a better onboarding experience for new players who haven't ever engaged, or 'I'm a combat fighter, I've never done this. How do I do it?' So we can give them the tools to understand if there's fun.

That's one of the reasons why we have the signatures now for the caves.

Yes. That took a while to get working, but we figured it out.

And it was Dec who figured it out overnight.

Yes. We had this cave and we had a signature, so when you're going around scanning for it, it'd pop up. And the marker was never there, and the radius was set somewhere like four million. So four million miles away you'd see the cave, but it never popped up. For, I don't know, it's not been there since I've been here, so a good six, seven years. And then Dec looked into it and was like, the marker was set to be invisible. And we're like, fuck. Yeah, we fixed it. Game dev, it's just fun.

Everyone is aware that obviously the progression in our game right now isn't there. 100%, the way we're going with reputation is that as you grind it out with whatever factions, you get rewards, like new blueprints to craft, you'll get skins, items, and also new missions will unlock via that. That's the ultimate way. So if we think about the industrial missions, as you start crafting through that, maybe they give you the blueprint for making the mining heads that you currently have to purchase. They give you blueprints to make mining bags that are empty, and bits and bobs like this. And in the future, they give you the blueprints for actually being able to make the ship to engage with that kind of gameplay, or improve your ability in that kind of gameplay. Going from a Prospector to a Mole, things like that. So 100% it's something that we want. It's something that we're trying to take baby steps towards, because we want it sooner. We have a full design, but the full design is harder to get to. So we do, as the memes you've said, tier zero, tier one, all that. So we'll do baby steps towards it.

Yeah, no, it's something that we want to do. There are plans, just plans. We want to have it so that we can have missions spawn dynamically based on this. So if you leave your ship outside anywhere, we can have an intelligent system that goes, right, this one's going to be a salvage claim. It's not going to be every ship; for performance reasons, we need to just clean some of them up. But there will be ships that we go, okay, right, this one we're going to keep and we're going to assign: Adagio are going to sell the rights to it, or a player is going to get a mission that takes you directly to it. Because obviously, apart from just a forceful cleanup to help with performance, we also can utilize players via missions, paying you to have you clean the game up for us. One thing I would love to do, because I keep seeing it on Reddit, is when people go to a shop and there's a load of bottles around the shop, and they all pick it up and put it in the bin. And I'm like, I want to make that bin work so much.

We had a system for that planned, where you actually get rewarded for throwing trash into the bins. It is on hold.

Chris is always very into systemic solutions instead of artificial rules for stuff. We have cleanup rules because it's a necessity for where we are in the game's development. But he has talked repeatedly over the years about wanting, if somebody leaves a ship, that should become a salvageable thing. If somebody's leaving trash, there should be gameplay to pick it up, what you just said, and put it in the bins. He would much rather design systemic solutions that the players can engage in, in order to maintain the performance of the universe, rather than these artificial rules that just come in and magically make things disappear and stuff like that. It's the amount of conversations that have happened over the years about cleaning up bottles and putting them in cans, and salvaging ships that are abandoned or wreckages that are left over and stuff. It's all there. It's just like anything else. It's finding the time and the resources.

So Star Citizen is a living and breathing world. So the ultimate plan, the plan that we're aiming towards, is we'll have systems that have different security rankings, right? The idea that we talked about at CitizenCon was Stanton is a high-sec system and Pyro is low-sec. So because of the current implementation of law, and we don't have the law ships coming in and responding as we want in Stanton, right now players can pirate in Stanton with little to no consequence at all. It's the exact same as Pyro. There's little to no consequence at all. So what we want to go towards is, say you're going to, I don't know, craft something, right? And you need X amount of this really rare material, right? It's in abundance in Pyro, but it's not in abundance in Stanton. The idea is you can mine in Stanton, but it will take longer. And it's quite likely that you're gonna be safer because of the law system; when we evolve it, you'll be safer, but it's not impossible. You can still get pirated, you can still get attacked by players. You could even still get attacked by AI pirates, right? Whereas if you go to Pyro, the goods will be in such abundance that it's easier to find, but it's so much higher of a risk for you to get attacked by AI or players. So the answer is, ultimately, there's always going to be a risk of being attacked by another player or an AI. The difference will be per system, it will be either higher or lower, so you can make an informed decision. So in Stanton, you're meant to be pretty much safe, but it's not going to rule out the fact that you're going to get attacked.

You're meant to be more safe than you will in Pyro, perhaps not as safe as you would in Terra.

Exactly.

The short answer to this, and Elliot, you actually acquitted yourself very well there, thank you. The answer is the law system is not where we want it to be. That's essentially the slug line, the 10-cent version of that. There will always be conflict. There will always be some chance of having your day rained upon, just like there is in real life. But if we do our job right and we continue developing the game the way that we want to, the systems that we're still waiting on (remember how long we waited for server meshing), if the systems we're waiting on come online as they're supposed to, eventually this will grow into a place where those changes in security and everything are obvious to the players, and you will be allowed to make those decisions for yourself. Do I want the high risk, high reward of Pyro? Or do I want the safer, more secure experience of Stanton? It's never going to be as simple as PvP players or PvE players or Care Bears or griefers or whatever pejoratives you want to throw. It's never going to be that simple. It's not that simple in real life. We're not aspiring to build something that simple, in black and white, for Star Citizen. So it's just one of those things that's hard. It's hard to always picture where we're going based on where we are and where we've been. But I actually think we've been rather consistent in this messaging. The question says that we're not, and I think that's more about people hearing this part and not that part on any given stage, or people regurgitating this part and not that part, or maybe there have obviously been times over the years where we haven't been as clear as we should have been. It's a mixture of everything. But the goal has always been the same: a living, breathing, diegetic universe of risk versus reward. Where do you want to go and how do you want to play? We intend to cater to as many different groups as possible. I think Rich Tyrer said it two years ago: we're not a PvP or a PvE game. We're an everything game.

We just want to have areas where you feel very protected, where the security has very short response times and is able to arrive in time before you explode. So those people that are not that into PvP, they have the AI protectors helping them.

Yeah, so contracted, I'm not too sure.

I'd like it as well. I've got a question about that.

You want to unpack them as well?

Yeah. One of the problems we have, sorry, we're going a bit off. One of the problems we have is, so you know when we did the Alliance Aid event, right? And we had the cargo missions, and we had to give players 8 SCU boxes. That's because I want to serve an average player ship size, and 8 SCU is currently the average player ship size. So what I'd prefer to do is go, hey, here's 200 SCU you have to do, and then they use your system and go, okay, right, I'm going to unpackage and repackage. And then I can choose it for the massive Raft I've got, compared to I'm going to move 200 1 SCU boxes because all I've got is a Pisces or something.

Well, good news. So there is a system already in place. So the design is already written. It's just waiting for some engineers to be able to start working on it, which is allowing us to actually split larger boxes into smaller, or even combine smaller boxes into larger boxes. It comes with a fee. That's at least the intent as of now. So we want to give the possibility on the actual station inventory level, that you use it there to repack your boxes into smaller or bigger boxes.

Yeah, no, we are. We are. We're working on... We split it up into three. So we do courier, delivery, and then hauling. And the idea and the separation between them is: courier will be one-handed items. So I don't want to say a burrito, but an example would be a burrito that you can put in your backpack. A two-handed box, which people who played this game a while back might remember, the little two-handed boxes you walk around with. So that's courier. Then delivery is how we bridge the gap between courier and hauling. So delivery will start at one SCU box and it will go up to a total of six boxes of one SCU. We don't go above the one SCU size, which will help bridge that gap, and then players can do the hauling. When I say it links them, it's not that you can't do hauling until you've done a bunch of courier and then a bunch of delivery. We'll offer them all straight away. But the idea is, if you're a new player and you've only got the Mustang or a smaller ship like the old Aurora or whatever, you'd start there, you'd earn money via doing this gameplay, and then you'd rent a new ship or buy a new ship from New Deal or whatever.

I still want same-location delivery missions.

Mentally connected, also coming. So the DCs, the distribution centers: one of the things we're going to do for the delivery pilot missions is you're going to get missions to move boxes between the wings of the same DC. So you get your little vehicles, load it up with boxes and truck on around, and then take them off again.

We have a bunch of missions, like the courier ones, that, I don't want to say died, but broke when we did 4.0. The systems changed and it was quite a lot to get back. The racing missions are also one of them. It's kind of a multifaceted thing to get them working. It requires a little bit of us, a little bit of engineering, a little bit of UI, to get it all together. However, we also want to look at the experience of it. One thing that we found really frustrating, and I know players did as well, was: I get my ship, I fly 30 minutes to get to the racetrack, I bungle out on the first fucking corner, and then I'm like, right. Let's get that flight suit, let's reclaim that ship, let's wait. We want to try to get a nicer experience for racing missions than what is currently. Ages ago there were all these talks about having some form of a little landing bay right next to the station, maybe a little med zone, boom, boom, back in the ship, round the track. Because yeah, we want racing in, but we also want it to be fun and accessible.

Did we rewind to the conversation me and Torsten just had a couple of minutes ago? Same thing, I'll go over it again. So when we do an event, we make it for everybody. We want it to engage every type of player we have, because we have so many different types of players. And one of the fun things about events, and we saw it with Alliance Aid, is all of these people from different walks of life coming together, right? Everyone being in this station in Levski, running around, all doing their little bits, whether they're going out to go murder a load of Moraine Gang, or maybe they're transporting goods. So with that, we look at the average ship size that's owned by players, and the SCU comes out around 8 SCU. So we sometimes go lower than 8, sometimes we stay at 8, but we don't want to give really big boxes, because then some people can't engage in some form or fashion. But that's only a temporary thing we're doing until the system Torsten was on about comes online, where you can choose the size of your box. Because that means in the future, when we do these missions, we're just going to tell you how much SCU we need at the end destination, and how you split that up into box sizes is completely up to you as the player doing this.