TL;DRThe mission first teaches players to take the shuttle to a transit platform and join an instance, with no reward, and the new instance lets a group of four play a more directed experience without outside interference.
Well, for now we're taking the old shuttle that always has been here, and we're going to go to the transition platform, as at least we've been calling it, where we can call ourselves an instance and get involved, get in the mix. So that's step number one. That's what this mission is going to teach us right now, how to do it. And then after that, anyone who wants to play, they can just rock up to these elevators and get themselves an instance.
So yeah, what we are now is the transit platform. This is new compared to the original Siege. We can already kind of see that some stuff has been going on and that Crusader is actually in distress. And then from here, we'll take an elevator and we will go into the instance. It's a new technology that we deployed that allows people to have a more curated experience within the universe, where you go in with your own group of four for this Siege of Orison experience, and then other players can't really obstruct your player experience, so we are able to provide the players with a lot more of a directed experience.
We changed it. Originally, this was like a no man's land that was kind of safe. You join in with Crusader and you'd be safe. And then, I don't know, we just want to kind of throw you into it straight away. You're here to take this back.
Yeah, and I think initially we were also thinking, oh, we want to throw people directly in it. We want to have enemies directly as you get out of the shuttle. And then we actually noticed that we were getting overwhelmed a little bit, because there was no time to kind of position and plan. So we dialed it back a little bit, and it gave you a little bit of room to kind of plan ahead and have that opportunity to jump into the different lanes, as we call it, the different approaches.
TL;DRThe first island has a theme of a Normandy-style beach landing with immediate, intense uphill fighting, and encounters are designed with peaks and troughs so intensity alternates with moments to regroup.
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.
Yeah, so what we're trying to do right now is that, at a high level, Crusader got invaded by the Ninetales, and they started to place some of these friend-or-foe machines, which basically means that the Ninetales now disrupt what is considered friend and foe in the airspace around it. So our goal is to disable the friend-or-foe inverters so that the Crusader forces can come in and help us clear the threat.
We just discovered an issue where we need to decide what we load in, and based on that we take the proximity of the size of the location, and the location size is determined by everything that's in the location. What we discovered is that I had that ship fly by, and no one checked what happened at the end of the path it flies. And then we discovered that after it's done, it just keeps flying, it just goes in a straight line and just flies out, so the bounds of the location just...
TL;DRMax hasn't worked out an optimal route; the level design offers varied cover and engagement ranges for different playstyles, with hand-placed AI inside the instance, praised as the team's good work.
Yeah, and that's what we try to think about as well, from an environment and especially from a level design perspective: okay, where are the covers? Are they very close to each other? And then based on that, you kind of get a play space that works very well for shotguns or SMGs, close-range weapons.
But also, it's added challenge, right? If you're always doing shotgun stuff, you just bring a shotgun and do that, but you have to kind of have a bit of variety within the team, make sure you're covering all bases.
Yeah. That's why we create these protected pockets where the AI is really hunkered down, and now it's like, ah, there's a big open area in front of it.
Yeah, and actually, if there's an opportunity to do it, I think the level design team that has worked on this mandate has been so exceptional. We had a lot of work. The AI inside of this instance is actually all hand placed, which is something we don't do anywhere else in the game. We spawn all our AI through spawn closets. Instancing allows us to hand place AI and assign them defend areas, give them all of their settings, hand placed in editor, which is super helpful for development going forward. But once we tried to start doing it, there were a number of problems that arose. They had a lot up against them, and they got it done in record time. They really did an amazing job with this. So shout out to Manuel, John, Marcus. They did an amazing job.
Yeah. We built this together with the team in Germany, and they really smacked it. Level design, the environment, my environment guys in Germany were super proud of how it all came together.
TL;DRThe last section now lets players take a shuttle straight back into the action instead of flying their own ships to the barge, and the barge has a redesigned maze layout and a fully designed boss fight.
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.
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.
TL;DRThe developers say bases can be used however players choose, from small mining outposts to trading hubs, with likely links into most gameplay, and even players without bases benefit by using other players' facilities.
So this is a big one because we really believe that base building will enable us to really change the universe. The way that players will interact with one another or not want to interact with one another. And it will become hopefully more of the backbone of the game where even if you want to interact with it or not, one way or another, you are always influenced by the gameplay loops of base building. So for example, maybe you're just a small miner and you want to just mine your resources and kind of ship that out and make a nice living out of that. Then for you, it might actually be good to have a small little base close by the mining resources to more efficiently do your gathering of your resources and so on. And the cool thing with base building is that we're trying to keep the possibilities as open as possible so that you can actually choose what you want to do with your bases yourself. So maybe you have these weird bases just tucked away in the universe where it's just like there's no electricity and you just use it to store away some of the stuff you found in the universe. Or maybe it is more of a sprawling trading hub for you and your organization. Or a base just built for the most efficient refining processes or search. Again, the guys know a little bit more about the specific processes. But from a visual perspective, what we're really trying to do is to just give you a beautiful base template that you then can let your imagination all lose. And kind of use it the way you want to use it as a player, even though it might be very different than other players.
Yeah, I think you really hit on it. It's very much a base can be used for whatever you want to use it for. That will provide options for you to do all kinds of stuff with it. And there should be or is likely to be relevant links into pretty much any kind of gameplay that you can think of.
TL
Thorsten LeimannLead Systems Designer, Core Pillar Gameplay System Design Team
Actually adding to that, it's a growing feature in addition to what we have already, right? So every gameplay loop that we have will also have its representation in the... Not every, but most of the gameplay features that we have will probably have representation in the base building aspect. And the bigger our game grows, the more features I introduce, they will also find a slot in your base.
Even if you don't have your own base, it's still impactful because you'll be visiting the other people who have made their bases and using their facilities. So even if you're not doing the work, it's still an interesting thing for you to use.
TL;DRBases can blend in through biome tint palettes, careful placement around trees and signature-reducing buildings, while terrain editing is limited so scouting stays valuable, with foundation tiles used to level building areas.
I think long time players can remember the very first outpost that ever appeared in 3.0 were almost always up on stilts because they couldn't deform the terrain. How well will our stuff blend in with the terrain? Yeah, so you'll be able to kind of again with the tinting you'll be able to pick certain tint palettes that work better with the biomes that are located. You can also put buildings around trees and stuff. If you put the building on top of the trees it will get rid of the trees with the nice precision placement mode through the construction ER mode. You'll be able to find a nice position and to kind of get some trees to maybe cover a little bit of your building as well. We'll see how that goes. Because we also have the construction drones that need to fly in and out so we'll have to we're taking those things in account. But you'll be able to kind of blend it in pretty well if you want and additionally we'll have some buildings that actually will be able to kind of reduce the signature of your base as well to kind of further kind of hide your base if you want to or in the other way like really make it stand out in the base or in the environment. But yes the idea is that we will have different tint palettes that fit with the different biomes that can be found on the planet.
One would assume there has to be some level of terrain manipulation though. Is that entirely automated by the system or will any of that be in player control?
The idea is that we don't want to fully allow the players to customize the terrain to their liking because that would take away from the value of scouting for a good location. So there will be buildings that will do a very light terrain manipulation just to make sure that the staircases work and so on. But the majority the best solution that we'll provide is the use of foundation tiles, the big concrete slabs that people get to place down and then on those they'll be able to put their buildings down. Those will deform the terrain so if you have a plot of land that is not particularly flat for you to build connectable buildings then the idea is that you would put down a foundation first and then from there on you'll be able to connect your buildings on top of there.
Yeah, so the idea is that we don't want to fully allow the players to customize the terrain to their liking, because that would take away from the value of scouting for a good location. So there will be buildings that will do a very light terrain manipulation just to make sure that the staircases work and so on. But the best solution that we'll provide is the use of foundation tiles, the big concrete slabs that people get to place down, and on those they'll be able to put their buildings down. Those will deform the terrain, so if you have a plot of land that is not particularly flat for you to build connectable buildings, then the idea is that you would put down a foundation first, and then from there on you'll be able to connect your buildings on top of there.