The Tevarin are a warrior species of aliens and our first kind of enemy in space. And we've been through two wars with them, we being the UPE at the time, and the Tevarin ended up losing both and becoming a sort of fractured people, now in the midst of a long-running, centuries-long diaspora. And at the point in time where we are now in the game, they're sort of rediscovering their culture and re-embracing aspects of their culture, finding new places to gather, and different political ideologies of how the Tevarin as a species and a culture should continue. Personally, I have a soft spot for them. I think they're very cool. So it's been a lot of fun as we've been developing them more recently.
Yeah, and I'm sure you'd see something similar with Tevarin, potentially, who, if they were lacking the resources to pursue more traditional designs that were Tevarin originated, I could easily see them wanting to adapt human ships to be more suitable for their use. But that's just purely in the written lore realm and not something that's probably going to be in the game.
TL;DRThe team thinks original Tevarin ships likely still exist, noting a cache found in the Kabal system release, and says a new Tevarin manufacturer would be possible like any UEE company.
I mean, I think the universe is big enough that you've got to imagine there's still ships out there. There's metals from the wars, and there's got to be still collected replicas, or things that have been lost and not found, that are out there. I think it'd be hard to imagine that there's nothing anywhere.
And it was part of the Kabal system release, that they had found basically a cache of original Tevarin ships and weapons and stuff like that. And that's what Esperia was given access to, in order to be able to recreate, I think it was the Prowler. I'm not sure. But one of the ships that they designed was based off of original scans that they had done of an actual, authentic Tevarin [ship].
Well, they were basically assimilated. As a culture, they were assimilated. Going back to the earlier question about whether there could be a new Tevarin manufacturer, it's certainly possible. If a Tevarin decides, hey, I want to make a new ship, and they've set up a company and they want to build it, they're members of the UEE, so technically it would be like any other company.
TL;DRThe hope is that Tevarin are widely integrated into UEE society and military, though integration may not mean equal treatment, and some live separately in the Branaugh diaspora.
I mean, the hope is that, yes, that there's a lot of that, that you would just see them walking down the street, and if they're living in the UEE and they're part of the culture, that they're just living in cities and doing their thing. Of course, like Jeremy and Adam were talking about, there's the diaspora and stuff like that, where they are living outside of the UEE but are trying to maintain or rebuild some of their culture. But again, the hope is that down the road, once we get Tevarin characters in game and stuff like that, we could modulate basically how many or how few there are based on location. But the idea is that you theoretically could walk around Area18 and just pass a Tevarin who's getting a frosty.
Yeah, and I mean, they went through a full civilization collapse, essentially, after the Second War. And so I think there's been hundreds of years since then. And so there's been time for Tevarin to either fall through the cracks and be in the underworld of human civilization, not really in any registered way, or to become more civilized and get representation through Sujikasi and all that. Whether they're officially integrated or part of it doesn't necessarily mean they're enjoying all the same freedoms or all the same regard in day-to-day life. But I think from the point of view of the UEE, there's ideas that Tevarin also serve in the military and all these things. So they are able to be fully integrated in that way. Whether they want to be, whether in practice that translates to an equitable day-to-day experience, I think is another matter. And then for those that want a life outside of that, that's where Branaugh is, I think, really taking root for the culture.
I mean, again, I think that's a ship team question, but it stands to reason that these alien civilizations, as advanced and wide-spanning as they are, probably have similar needs. How they go about that, I think, remains to be determined, whether it's utilizing the same technology and the same exact approaches as we know now with the human manufacturers. So, probably, but again, more of a ship team question if it'll happen at some point.
Yeah, they totally would, just not a lot. If you want a party bus, you should probably hit up the Banu. I imagine their party buses are the sickest in the universe.
Oh, yeah. Those would be the ones to be on. I just feel like, based on our conversations with Xi'an music being extremely slow, a Xi'an party bus would just be this droning thing with decaying food, slow-paced music.
Meanwhile, the Banu, I believe the Banu are the ones that take short little naps in cuddle piles, right? So if you're more looking for that vibe. And they have the Slomadon, which is a giant drinking vessel that they do when you close a deal with the Banu. They take all this stuff, and everyone is supposed to bring something to add to the Slomadon to then drink, whether it's the Banu stuff or stuff from that. So in the Banu language guide, if you check it out, one of the cultural things, it warns you that if you do deal with the Banu and drink from this, to take it slow, bring something light, because sometimes the stuff the Banu put in is very, very strong. So yeah, Banu party bus, cuddle nap sleeping rooms, I think they'd be the ones that'd be way more into it than the Xi'an.
TL;DRLore lives mainly in weekly-turned-sporadic lore posts on the RSI site's Spectrum Dispatch, short stories and Jump Point portfolios, and new lore is created only in service of the game's needs.
This is where I want to plug the only weekly recurring endeavor that's been going on longer than the shows that I make, and that's the weekly lore posts that go out every Tuesday.
Well, they're not going out every Tuesday anymore. We've been scaling back on it. They're going out more and more sporadically. We have been trailing off because the needs of Star Citizen and Squadron have sort of overridden those. But yes, they went on for over 10 years every week. And they used to be actually three times a week. When we first started, I was doing Kid Crimson, Cal Mason, and a news dispatch every week. That was fun.
Those are all available on the RobertsSpaceIndustries.com website. Generally speaking, one almost every week, and they cover a variety of topics. They're in a bunch of different formats. Some take the format of talk shows. Some are more like news reports. Some are just straight fiction. But many of them are delightful, and they paint a wonderfully complex picture of the society that's sitting underneath the Persistent Universe that the developers are building right now.
And the easiest way to get to them, let me just jump in, is if you go to the Comm-Link, and then the top dropdown on the left is called Channel. And if you go to Spectrum Dispatch, so if you think about this as a dispatch going out on the Spectrum, that's where the repository of all these live, going back years and years and years. And they do have things where they can be, like Jared said, really quick one-offs, or, as mentioned earlier, a longer story that Jeremy wrote called Crossroads, or we have a few stories like that that fill in some other things too. So it's an easy way to start diving into things. And then if you have any certain topics, you could type in Banu or Xi'an and just see what pops up, and then go through and see where they're referenced in any of these stories.
Yeah, and we have the Jump Points as well, which always have interesting narrative elements tied into the portfolios about the companies. I think older portfolios do get posted to Spectrum, but if you want to keep up kind of live, there's always interesting things to read there. I think the development of new lore, it's something that I faced over this last first year here: everyone's always really interested in creating and coming up with more. We're definitely doing it in service of a broader vision for the game, and when there are development needs that lore can answer questions to, to inform choices along the way. I think if we go too far and just make up lore for anything and everything without any connection to the rest of the game, then we start constraining what's possible with that vision, when ultimately we're trying to be in service to the players and to the game and to creating a cohesive vision for what Star Citizen can be, and can be understood by both the players and the developers. Because we've all read the deep 100-page-plus documents that we have for all the various little parts, niche parts of the game. I think we don't really expect that of anyone else, but that information is there for people who are passionate and interested about it.
TL;DRExisting creatures like the Yao Yao, flat cats and flow pets could support missions such as lost-pet recovery, poaching of protected space whales, or flow pet extermination, offered as spitballed ideas.
I mean, we have come up with at least one pet. Harking back to the animal naming contest, we had the Yao Yao. It's a little cat-otter type thing that was domesticated by the Xi'an a long time ago as a method of pest control. But they have modern tech now and they don't really need it for pest control anymore. So it's just this adorable little creature that sits in their house and watches everybody. They go, oh my God, it's so cute. So we at least have one of those. Oh, the flat cat, of course. Flat cats are pets, although they're a little hard to get, because they're sourced from a planet that's protected by the Fair Chance Act. So you're not going to see those around. And of course, we remember the fish. We got fish. And the turtles, Leyland's tortoise. You remember that? That was really fun. I'd count that as a pet. But yeah, for stories in the game or missions, just off the top of my head, we could do a lost pet mission to find any one of these little creatures. Make their owners very happy when you give them back, or conversely, maybe keep it to yourself, run away with the adorable pet. But that's just an idea. I'm just spitballing.
I mean, I think also the question of alien creatures for me always makes me think of the space whales, right? Like the big space whales in Orison. [Not] human pets necessarily. But I've always been interested in, what's the poaching narrative around that, right? They're protected. I could easily see the kind of combat missions that we have already featuring that sort of narrative approach.
Oh, wait, sorry. I almost forgot about flow pets, which were a huge pet craze, some kind of freshwater sea slug. But they're considered invasive now because of how quickly they enter sewers in whatever settlement they're on, breed, and take over the whole thing. So another fun thing you could probably do in game is go on a flow pet extermination mission. I want to see that.
TL;DRExamples include the Stanton system and Orison, which began as narrative seeds, and a racing organisation that began as a design request, with scope the main constraint rather than where ideas start.
I mean, Stanton system. What's interesting is a lot of the location stuff on a high level begins with the seeds that we planted, or Dave specifically planted, a decade ago, where: what is the system? What is the scale of the system? What are these four worlds? And of course, we do iterations on that, and once we plant that seed, art and design get their hands on it and make it better. And then we go back and we make sure that the narrative matches the final product. So I think that's the biggest impact. Arriving on the cloud city of Orison, that was a narrative idea of a cool location that would be fun to go visit. It's pretty awesome getting to see those ideas realized and being able to experience them as a player in the game. And then Jeremy can talk about it, recently Wildstar Racing, the org behind the racing. I guess it technically started as a design request because they're like, we need a racing org. But what they are and what they do, that was all Jeremy working on that.
Yeah, I mean, there's areas where we're still trying to develop a lot of the gameplay infrastructure for things that people want to see in the game. Salvage is another great example. But what I've found in my experience is the teams are just really collaborative. And so though there might be a mandate that starts from design, everyone's very open to talking about how that can be elaborated upon. And I think the biggest constraint is less where do the ideas start and more what do we have the ability to execute on in terms of scope management. And so Salvage and Racing both had contributions where, on those missions in particular, I was doing a lot of the writing and got to work really closely with those designers to integrate the lore and the design and make sure that they each supported each other.
Yeah, I mean, I think usually it starts off with a meeting of some kind, which I know everyone in the community loves so much. But once we've had an opportunity to sync and see what they're thinking from a design standpoint, it's about looking at the lore we have that's already established and saying what exists that can support it. And if there are opportunities within that, then we try to build upon that, with either the mission premises that design has already come up with or by suggesting new mission premises within the scope of that activity, like salvage, which grew in that process.
TL;DRThe team added a mission giver for salvage missions, a new lawful salvage organization and a new outlaw group that sells salvage-location rights, with more salvage mission types hoped for.
Yeah, so the introduction of the mission giver mission into that. We've been doing a lot of work to just be really on top of which mission givers could use additional content. We're going to get to do a lot of stuff with salvage, particularly in this case. If someone else wants to take it, I feel weird being in the spotlight.
I mean, one interesting thing that I think we worked on between narrative and design is this idea of these early missions as salvaging is matured, because it's still a tier zero, newer system, not fully as robust as where we want it to go eventually. We were talking to them about, all right, what is the end of the mission? Are the players returning the recycled material composite? And that was feeling sort of weird, in that why would this mission giver care about collecting a big pile of scrap material? And so then it sort of evolved through our conversations with them into, oh, maybe they're selling you the rights to a location. And so the missions themselves are more like buying the rights to the location of a ship for you to salvage. Whereas, of course, players can go out and find their own salvage. But sometimes it simplifies it: if you're willing to drop some credits, we'll give you an exact location of a ship totally ripe for collecting materials, and you get to keep all the profits after that. So that was something that had a little bit of back and forth that we helped influence, of trying to figure out why is this organization offering this mission? What do they want out of it? Does this make sense? And often we tweak stuff with them where they have multiple possible paths and we hone in on what feels best and what makes the most sense.
In that process, we ended up creating a new organization, Adagio, to handle more of the lawful salvage. And when we were figuring out new opportunities, we assigned the new mission giver salvage mission to Clovis Darneely, who will be handling that. And just breaking down, I know when MFT was on here, they talked about the three different kinds of salvage missions that there are, but there's going to be more than just those three that we're building and working towards, and hopefully salvage will continue to develop beyond that, just because it's a really fun gameplay loop and it has a ton of cool opportunities. I mean, just the introduction of the soft death mechanics, I think, does fundamentally change things in the verse. And so seeing that supported with narrative mission content and procedural mission content, I think, is really exciting to me.
There's also the introduction of the new outlaw group, the Tar Pits, coming in, where they have a fun little backstory. TAR stands for Tow and Rescue, and they're known for using fake tow ships to trick people and attack them or steal their ship when they're pretending to be a tow company. And so they're basically selling you salvage rights locations because they have too much work on their hands. They can't handle it all themselves. And so they're giving you an opportunity to buy one off them, kind of thing. And there's more risk in the locations they sell and stuff like that. So it's interesting.
So not only do we have players using service beacons to lure and trap people, now we have NPC organizations that are like, yeah, we're coming to help you, and we're not.
TL;DRStanton is a divided corporatocracy of megacorporation-owned planets, poorly governed by those companies, with growing discontent among residents and criminals exploiting the limited lawful presence.
Sure, yeah. So the Stanton system is kind of a divided corporatocracy, where all the major planets are owned by megacorporations after having purchased the rights to these planets and kicked out some illegal settlers and all that. They've taken these planets and turned them into HQs for their companies that also work as full cities with governments, and as you might expect, a lot of these companies aren't great at being governments. They're not necessarily doing the best job, and so within that you have a lot of discontent brewing amongst different parts of the populace for various reasons, as well as a lot of criminals encroaching, whether from nearby unlawful systems or just within Stanton itself, where there's not yet a massive lawful presence as the companies are figuring all this out, trying to take advantage of the opportunities and the commerce that's available to be pirated, stolen, etc., that's all transiting through that system.