Gareth Bourn

Yeah, we had it in the downed relay. You had to cut the emergency thing open. But we found that at the time, not many people were carrying a multi-tool, because that was the only thing in the game you could do with the multi-tool, right? So why would you know to have it? But now that more people are using it for mining, and as Dan says, the tractor beam may come along sometime in the future, more people are going to be carrying it, so we can put it to good use. Because we found that people would get to that point in the relay mission and then be like, what? I don't have one of these. And then they'd just abandon it.

It's a very, very real consideration. Now that FPS mining is online, more people are carrying around multi-tools, but it does shine a light, to your point, that some of this stuff needs to become more ubiquitous before we can develop content that will really use it. So the more uses we give to the multi-tool, the more likely people will have it on them.

I think it's also a matter of building a lot of content that encourages people to get a multi-tool rather than forcing them to get one. So you encourage them, where they can figure, oh, this is an access point. If I had had a multi-tool, now I could open this thing and I would get some big reward out of it. Or you might see someone else in your team has a multi-tool and they get all the cool stuff. But I think it's a bit brutal if we just force people, as in you have to quantum travel all the way there, get down to the planet, fight some NPCs, and at the end of the mission, you do not have that one tool to finish. That can be very frustrating. I mean, of course, it would be nice to have a few of these missions. But that should not be all of them, because it's painful for the player.

I think the closest one that's coming soon is exactly as you said, specialized mining equipment. Right now we have one mining laser for ships, and that's all it can do. It does one thing, it does it well, but there's no variation there. We want to add more variation to rocks, and automatically we want to add more variation to the lasers you can equip. So if we add a rock that has a resistance that, let's say, goes over 90%, the current Prospector will not be able to scratch it. It cannot pump enough power into it in order to break that rock. The idea is to provide a laser that will lower the rock's resistance, and it will be able to then transfer enough power to break that rock. Obviously, it's going to come with some downsides. It's either going to cost more, if it's better, or it's going to cost the same, but then it induces a lot of instability into the rock, so it makes the process harder. You might have another laser that makes instability very low, but then it raises the resistance or raises some other parameters. Then it could make the time it takes for the rock to charge up and actually fracture correctly a lot longer. I think there's a list of 15 parameters we have right now between the rock and the laser that we can play with and combine in different combinations to create something interesting. But this is down the line for us. Also, we're looking into having something a bit more short-term. A laser is long-term: you make an investment, and that is the laser you have for that ship. We'll have something more short-term. Think about how the MedPen is for FPS, where, oh, this happened, so I react to it. I use the MedPen, I get a bit of health back and I'm good now, I can continue. Consider the same with the mining laser. We can have a thing where the rock is about to blow because you messed up. Or let's say you had a lag spike, because it can happen. It's a very common occurrence for the players. You had a lag spike and suddenly now you're in the red. We will have some consumables that you activate on the laser, they get injected into the rock, and it kind of diminishes some of that, or makes it decay a lot faster for, let's say, 30 seconds, or doubles the power of your laser for 20 seconds. So you're able to temporarily boost your mining capabilities using these consumables. The problem is you can only have so many equipped, and you have to choose which ones you equip based on what you expect you're going to find. So if you're going to mine this type of thing and you know it has these problems, bring consumables that are going to help you in that process.

Well, I think what I got from that is that we're not done with mining. We got ship mining, we got FPS mining. We're not just leaving them behind. We're going to continue developing this feature, continue building it out.

One other thing, I forgot to mention this. I would say maybe further down the line, but not by much: we're looking into refining. It's not mining, but it's what you do with the spoils from mining. So you take this raw ore. Right now you get this mixed material that doesn't pay that well because it's mixed with everything. You have impurities in there, inert material. You have diamonds mixed with gold, mixed with Quantanium. And you want to separate them, because if you have each of them clean, 100% purity, then you can sell it for way more. This is where refining comes in. You can go to a refining station and create a refining job that gets processed over time. Some of them might take five minutes. Some of them might take one week. These happen while you're not online. You can log out of the server or go do something else. The station will work for you. Obviously, you'll have to pay the station. And then after a bit of time, you take your product back, and hopefully you make a run to another station where you get to sell it before you get shut down and your cargo gets stolen, which is a different problem. But we're only doing the refining part. Other teams are doing the getting-your-cargo-stolen part.

Yeah, it all bleeds together with missions. So when you can refine, there might be someone who's after a certain refined resource. And then, of course, you've got things like interdiction to interrupt your journeys and steal your cargo. It's world design, isn't it? It all comes together and builds into something beautiful.

Moving forward, we want to do an overhaul of the UI, so that it's clearer in there. So you've got things like, I think I touched on it earlier, recommended party size. Perhaps if something requires a tool, it mentions that you might need that tool in some clear and easily decipherable manner. And of course, just adding more missions that you can share. So the missions unlock as you go along. And as you say, we've got those Northrock bounty missions at the moment. So you could take those as an example: as you progress through unlocking harder missions, you might find yourself going into ones where you really need a party, so that you have that experience of, oh, I've hit some kind of cap here, so that I can make use of mission sharing in an interesting way. Things like balancing the amount of rewards you get, because at the moment, obviously, we've made mission sharing missions out of previous missions, and the rewards are kind of capped to one player at the moment. So a lot of people are finding that they're mission sharing, and then they're like, oh, there's only a small amount of money to give you. Sorry, buddy. So we need ones with nice big payouts, nice big juicy ones that people can look forward to doing with their orgs and all of that sort of thing. It's an exciting feature. So moving forward, we need to expand on it: iteration two.

Oh, that's sad. [...] But we look to fix them. These are bugs that we really want to smash. And as long as the community continues to use the Issue Council and help us out with that, we'll be sure to thwart all of these issues.

The last time you and Luke were on, you guys made a good point about how the missions themselves are actually dependent on multiple subsystems. A mission doesn't exist in its own ecosystem. A mission is a set of goals, but some part of those goals needs this system to function, some part of the goal needs that system to function. And the mission itself can be fine and can be functional for weeks if not months, but then when an issue happens with one of these subsystems, a part of that mission breaks, and it's actually not mission related at all. It's related to one of those subsystems. So when a mission like a Pro Tem mission breaks, one week it can be because of this system, and another week it can be because of that system, and in another patch it can be because of another subsystem. So while they always manifest in a similar symptom, the causes can actually vary from patch to patch and even from instance to instance.

Yeah, very eloquently put, I must say. That's exactly it. That's one of the really interesting things about Star Citizen. A lot of these things happen behind closed doors. We make a mission, test the mission, we get feedback, we get to improve it. But during all of that time, you guys also get to play the game in alpha. So you get to experience this ebb and flow of development firsthand. And it's really helpful, because you guys get to send us these issues too, issues that may have been missed, issues that only happen when there's 50 people on a server, all of these kinds of things. So moving forward, we love to find these bugs.

That's one of the reasons it's so important to continue to submit to the Issue Council, even if you see what seems like the same issue. Your cause may be different from Dan's cause, which may be different from Gareth's cause, even though the visible symptom is the same. Because these things touch so many subsystems, your individual occurrence may lead us down a whole different path.

It helps us prioritize too, because if enough people are reporting the same issue, we've got an internal review process where we look at the feedback that's coming in, and that helps us when we're doing our quarterly planning, and when we're doing feedback reviews and feature reviews in general. It helps us look at what the most egregious issues are, especially as we shift towards this quality of life focus. What are the things that are the most bang for buck? Well, let's look at what the feedback is and use that as a tool.

Next up development-wise, we have a couple of prototype new entrances. So we have big sinkholes that you can fly the ship into. We have larger, more cavernous entrances that you could drive a ground vehicle into. We had those a little while ago, but, talking about all of the different teams you need, we hit a little tech hitch where we needed real-time probes, because obviously our planets do rotate, and the time of day changes organically as they rotate. So we needed some tech to make sure that the entrance to the caves wasn't pitch black during the day, because we could only light it in one certain way at the time. But moving forward, we'll be able to have it dynamically change as the planet rotates, and we'll be able to introduce these much larger entrances. Then with server-side OCS coming online, we can have more of them, and we can have them much bigger and deeper. We've got these room archetypes that we already have that we want to expand upon. You might find some with some structures inside, some that are more lived in. Moving forward, we'll have AI combat inside there, which we're also working towards. Of course, that'd be really cool, because I've seen lots of videos online of people shooting their guns and really enjoying the reverb and all of this stuff. So I imagine it would be really chaotic having a nice big fight in a big central hub of a cave. And the VoIP as well, the way the VoIP reverbs inside. You're going to be working with your team, trying to fight the AI inside and everything like that. Just really expanding upon it. As Dan said a few times, it was a toe in the water for caves.

One of the things that I would love to see in caves, I would love to see them become more dangerous. I would love to see that every step you take, you have to be careful. You don't know what's behind the corner. I know we're far from that right now, but I want us to get to the point where we have critters in there, stuff that can bite you, stuff that can jump at you and stuff like this. And when you hear a sound, you don't know what's coming. You're like, oh, was that it? Or is it something else? That's where I want to get, where people are in the dark alone and the flashlight starts flickering.

Yeah, fauna. I'm super excited for fauna in caves.

One video I saw that I really enjoyed was speaking to the danger of caves. A group was mining the FPS harvestables, and I guess they didn't do a very good job, because there was a reaction, and it exploded, and then they ragdolled away. It was funny. I was like, wow, you've got to be careful, man. There's a skill here that you've got to master. It's kind of a combination of the two: caves and harvestables all coming together to make a really cool experience.

So when we come to plan for a release, we may have a mission giver for a start, or we'll have a new location, and that obviously entails us coming up with a mission for them, or a mission that suits the lore of that location. Tecia Pacheco in this case. We decided to reuse the underground facility for that location because we hadn't used them enough, basically.

Yeah, it's nice to make another variant.

Yeah, and we're putting more effort into those as well as we speak, actually, making some more entrances into them. So we get the requirements, like you need to make a mission for Tecia Pacheco. We get the lore for Tecia Pacheco: who she is, what she does. She works for the Antari Company, which is like this kind of cartel, but is also a shady business, I think, as well. And they're trying to move into Stanton and push out all the other competitors. Obviously drugs is just one part of the criminal empire. Trying to be clever with it as well.

We always, when it comes to mission givers, there's an excuse to really experiment and try and do something new. The thing we tried to do new in this mission was to gift the player a ship. In the future, we want to properly gift them for the duration of missions, so they go and use all the systems that they currently are used to, like go to an ASOP terminal, and they'll find it gifted in there, and then we use all those systems.

It's a great opportunity to go all out because you want the mission givers to feel special.

Yeah, exactly. We get a little extra support on these guys, so we try and do something different. So in this case, another thing we wanted to do is give them a ship. So we thought up a mission where they'd stolen a ship from the Nine Tails and they wanted you to take that to Klim, who's another mission giver, and he's a drug dealer. So you've got the Nine Tails and Klim who are at odds, competitors in the drug trade, and kind of frame the Nine Tails, or kind of start a small turf war between these two while the Antari Company moves in over the top. We really wanted to sell that these guys are not scrapping on the street.

Yeah, really sort of a cartel feel behind closed doors.

But unfortunately, that would have needed several things that we didn't have. I forget now exactly what the issue was there, but that didn't pan out, unfortunately. So we then thought, what can we do that allows them to have this ship and use all these drug packages we found? Because we also realized that criminals, or the unlawful, as it were, didn't have enough to do when it came to trading. There was literally just, I think, WiDoW. Maybe one or two.

I think it was WiDoW, yeah. Just WiDoW to trade.

So I'd gone, we need more. We need all these other drugs. So we put some effort into those. We'd gotten them made to be destructible, because I had an idea we might use it like this. I didn't ever think we'd use it to this extreme when I was asking for those assets.

You were like, put some drugs in here. And then you came to my screen, you're like, that's a lot of drugs.

It turns out you need a lot of drugs if you want to hide one package in there.

Well, certain missions have certain prerequisites. When we first got given that ability, we kind of really went for it.

A bit too hard.

Yeah, we realized it's far too early. If there's little content, we want players to get as much of it as possible. And obviously we want them testing, we don't want missions that no one ever sees, and we wipe so often, obviously, so to build your way up to those could be quite difficult in that time. So these prerequisites are really just virtue and reliability. Virtue you can knock down just by killing people, basically, or being naughty, whereas making it go up is a lot more difficult because you have to do missions. I guess video games are bad for this, but it's hard to do good things and be rewarded for those. It's really easy to go around slapping people.

Just like real life.

Yeah, exactly. So anyway, for this particular one, we've been fairly generous and we allow you to accept this mission all the way down to extremely bad and up to 0.1.

Well, the idea is that what we don't want to do is build this location and all these assets and everything like that just for one mission. And we also want to really bring players together as much as possible, because obviously it's an entire galaxy. It feels empty if they don't meet someone quite often, so we try and make concrete reasons for them to come across each other. In the previous mission Gareth made, the Clovis mission, we pit you basically directly against each other. So one person has to steal a chip from a downed satellite and then go and rip it at a...

Yeah, it was very much see guy, shoot guy.

Yeah, exactly. While the others chase it. And so that's fine, but some players don't like the direct PvP. So on this one, we decided that we would have it so that they're guided to the same location, but they're not necessarily there to take out each other. They just happen to be in the same place doing conflicting things.

Yeah, slight conflict of interest.

So in the mission that Detox is playing right now, you're out to get one very specific item, a box of particular drugs for Pacheco, and it's Maze. It's a very rare drug that's worth a lot of money. I think Maze is Tevarin. And it's this thing they use like, I guess, the Native American peace pipe kind of thing. They use it in ceremonies. But it's very rare, and a small amount of it can make a lot of drugs, I guess like LSD kind of thing. You need a small volume, but you get that and it's worth a lot of money.

So she's sending you out for this thing because she's heard through her contacts, like obviously the Antari Company have a few security on the payroll, and they've got wind that security forces are going to do a drug raid, basically, on a competitor. And what she's trying to get you to do is get there before this goes down and steal this one particular item. You are sent there to basically wade through 300 boxes and try and find the one in particular that has been very vaguely described to you and bring it back to her. Which sounds straightforward. Obviously you get there, there's going to be some people to fight, maybe, hopefully. There'll be turrets and stuff like that, because this is obviously a working drug lab at the time you're arriving; the bust hasn't happened yet.

So where the counter mission comes in is, we could have just done that mission and that be it. But we wanted to inject some possible tension into the mission, because we also tell you in the description that you can steal anything else you want while you're there. We don't care. Pacheco doesn't care. She just wants the box. That's all she cares about. You can steal the rest. So there's plenty of opportunity to be greedy, and in a game, that's a fantastic idea, that you can get greedy and maybe if you get too greedy, bad things will happen.

We don't tend to class missions like that. I mean, this is ready for a release. Obviously, we've been talking about the fact that the ship is not lent to you in the correct way. We'll obviously have to go back and address that. The rooftops themselves, maybe that's not classed as the mission, but I tend to class it as that, the rooftops may get some more love. The UGFs will get some more love and many more varieties. We don't tend to really tier missions in that way. Like I said, it relies on so many other things.

Yeah, exactly. Missions are always a work in progress.

All of them are. Back in the Star Citizen 2.0 days, when these all went in and were built in Flowgraph, like the Tessa Bannister missions and the security guard at Kareah, and all the bounty hunting missions, PvP and stuff like that, they were all built in Flowgraph. Then when it came to turn them into Subsumption, we had to cut a few, or just obviously focus again on the ones that gave us the most bang for buck. Obviously, Subsumption is here to stay, thankfully. We won't be doing anything like that again, but a huge thing could change in the tech that means that we have to rethink them or rewrite them or something like that. So I'm never going to say that anything's done until the game's done.

Yeah, I'm the type of person to always push to keep things growing.

No, no. It used to be the case that a CrimeStat would actually impede more missions, especially the higher CrimeStats, because why would anyone, even a criminal, hire someone who is being actively hunted by bounty hunters?

It is an interesting question, because before, we had mission giver missions only be available based on locality, but then we decided to make the invites available globally to make it more available for everyone.

Yeah, it's a real difficult decision to make. What we want these missions to do, because they're so special, we think, compared with the others, is a player would maybe want to travel some distance, and maybe that's the impetus for them moving from Crusader to Hurston. They get a mission giver mission, and that makes them travel to a new location, and then they have new adventures there. That's a really good intention, but it does mean that a lot of people don't want to travel. So we basically offered a mission to someone who will not play it, and that sits there for a time on them, and someone else could be playing it. Like Jared really wanted this mission, but it was on Detox, and Detox may not have wanted to play it. So we have to be very careful about how we do that. We are offering it from across the solar system, so if you want to play it, you should be able to get it from anywhere in that solar system. Whether it stays like that, we'll see. But you can be kind and immediately decline the invite and then at least free it up for other players if you don't want it. But obviously, we don't expect that.

Oh, that's very easy to get, thankfully. As long as somebody accepts this mission and gets close enough to the UGF, the underground facility, anyone with a positive virtue, so that's like minus 0.1 to 1, they will be offered the mission. They will be offered it, and up to four people can accept that.

Yeah, I saw it offered on my screen as well. That's the Seize and Destroy mission?

Yep. So the Seize and Destroy mission is from Blackjack Security, and they're the people that obviously have heard about this underground facility and want the drugs taken, destroyed, so they don't hit the streets. They're a local security for ArcCorp, a kind of private security hired. And you will be hired to go in there and destroy the drugs by any means possible.

It's essentially the operation that Pacheco had heard of.

Yep. Very soon, I think we should be able to actually spawn AI, like the security forces that are coming in as well, using kind of monster closets and things like that. But for now, we're relying on players.