Luke Pressley

Okay. I'm not going to lie. Clothing is never going to fulfill the same purpose as those things. It's never going to be space-worthy. But we are working on combat clothing, which will have more damage mitigation. So if you want to imagine a kind of John Wick style suit, that kind of thing. But I think the main problem now is that it's one or the other. You have to wear clothes or you have to wear armour, right? And that's where Starwear is going to come in and change all that, because the purpose of clothing is cosmetic. It's to dress the way you want to look. So to just go into that in a bit more detail, you'll be able to, with Starwear, have your own suit on if you want it, and then put certain, well, jackets over the top, all the jackets, certain trousers, gloves, boots on the top, then armor on the top of that. And then in future, we're going to have hoods and big overcoats that can go over some of the armors too. So all these layers.

It's like we said at CitizenCon as well, there will be areas where you can't wear armour, so clothing and all that will have particular uses and things like that.

We've talked about that in the past, locations that prohibit it, and you have to go through customs, so you're wearing your, I mean, I don't think we're going to ever block an undersuit in that scenario, but it's probably more useful to wear the kind of combat clothing we were talking about.

There's never been an MMO where cosmetics isn't the end game.

It cannot be overstated. I'm really glad you brought that up. Chris and other people have mentioned for years this idea of wanting to facilitate the wearing of clothing as opposed to armor. He hates that everybody wears armor everywhere. So this will always be kind of a goal at some point to go to. When I first saw the outfit scanners that were part of Stormbreaker, the ones where it forced you to change into the scientist outfit in order to open the door, I was really excited about what that means for the future, forcing people to switch into outfits as opposed to armors in order to infiltrate something. The gameplay options there were really exciting. Combat clothing is a bit interesting though. I heard the term and I didn't realize.

Not full-on John Wick. Not bulletproof, but some decent mitigation. Not to the point of being better than lights.

It's a thousand years in the future. There's going to be clothing that's a little better than what it is today, anyway.

Yeah, I've talked to the audio team and they're really keen on joining this armour refactor, reworking what we've got so far. So if you're wearing a heavy suit, you actually sound extremely heavy. But beyond that, they really want to have the wearer feel that they're in a heavy suit. So if you're wearing that massive radiation suit, you'll feel isolated, everything will be muffled around you as well. And I've generated this big list of audio I want to hear specifically on the stealth suit that we're going to be having, that one's to be the quietest sounding, because no matter what emissions it gives out or all that stuff under the hood, if you can hear your feet squeaking against the floor as you sneak up behind someone, that's really off-putting. So it's really important to nail all that.

It's also worth pointing out that footsteps have gone through a big iteration in Squadron as well, in terms of when you sprint in SC right now, essentially you have the heel down and the foot forward making a noise, but now it's just one foot plant. It's also reading the context of the environment as well. So if you're on railings, it'll make railing noises and things like that. So we've gone from a generic footstep noise to an environmental context noise.

So just to start off that, they don't have a slowdown effect, they just weigh a lot, and depending on how much weight you have on your character, your character moves slower. So we don't do a "oh, this gives you a 20% movement speed debuff just because you have this weapon on." It's systemic, there's weight. The more weight you have, the more you slow down. But yeah, go on, with the weapon inertia. Do you want to handle it?

The thing is, I thought this had come last, so I thought I'd have done my spiel.

So one thing we're talking about with the armor work is essentially, correct me if I'm wrong, but the heavier the weapon is, the more weapon inertia you get. So if you've got heavier arms, it's easier to handle heavier weapons. So if you're wearing light arms and you have an LMG, you'll essentially have a lot more weapon sway. Think with the Fresnel, how long that takes to correct the sight picture. That's an example of something that, if you had light and you picked up heavy, it's a way of saying, cool, you want to fit in the archetype, that fantasy of being, oh, I'm a super heavy armor wearing, I've got my LMG, I'm walking in a location, versus, oh, I'm light and I've got a pistol. Because as you know, in real life, the shorter the barrel of a weapon is, the lighter it is, the easier it is to move around. I was talking to Luke about this, and the reason why pirates always have short swords is because if they're on boats and they're killing people close, that's why they have short swords. That's why people clear rooms with pistols and SMGs and things like that.

So progress is going great. Finished. That's it. It's something I'm actively working on, and we've had multiple reviews to decide which stats I'm actually going to be able to play with. Because one thing we don't want to do is ruin the game, make it unbearable, by just making things worse. So there's lots of things we're doing to improve things as well. Design-wise, I think we're like 90% there. I've just got to pitch some of the non-systemic perks. The perks you get for wearing a full suit of armour and stuff. Because most of the perks are actually quite systemic, so the stealth suit, actually each piece blocks the emissions of your body and stuff, so you have to have the full thing and then suddenly you're stealthy. But the perks where you have to make something up, I don't know, being able to...

Let's say if you have a full stealth suit, you might get a massive bonus to hiding your emissions. As an example, something that makes sense within the context of the armour.

Something that's more than the sum of its parts.

It's the more gimmicky things, I would say, but I don't really want to go into it because I've not pitched them. Our main aims with the armour refactor are to give players reason to wear flight suits, lights, medium and heavy armours, give players reasons to wear the combat versus utility armors, because that's been a big distinction now, the two of those. To give players a reason to change armors based on their intent, and that's the specializations we were talking about at CitizenCon two years ago. So I'll go into some of those later. And then give individual armour pieces a purpose so that arms aren't just useless cosmetics and stuff. Each piece of the armour has stats with it that you don't get with the others. So for me, and I think for you as well, the most important thing is nailing those weight classes.

The feel of those weight classes. Last time I heard it was about the legs and you get mass reduction, right? So if you have heavy legs on, then your overall mass gets reduced because it's easier to walk and things like that. You don't just become instantly a tank because you've got the thing on. It's like, cool, I've got these legs. I don't want to be weighed down too much. I want to be able to move faster, still more heavy, but that'll have other offsets.

Almost like an exosuit. It's just the support that it gives. Right now, we have this funny situation where if you were wearing entirely heavy armor, you had a full backpack on, all the attachments, and then you took your leg armor off and you just had naked legs. In real life, you'd crumple under that weight. But in the game now, you are faster because you weigh less. And that's obviously something we want to get rid of. So if we focus in on that, the way we're going to make lights versus mediums versus heavies and flight suits very different and actually a choice you make is damage mitigation. We're going to up the damage mitigation on mediums and heavies to give you a higher TTK.

Beyond what they are right now?

Beyond where they are now, yeah.

It's obviously offset with crafting and the improvements that come with weapons.

Yeah, so me and Dec, who was on crafting, are in this interesting situation where obviously you only have between 0 and 100 to play with and we're having to meter out and share the percentages we can go up. So I can go up to this and then crafting will take you up to this. So that's an interesting thing to have to take into account. The combat crosshair, which is primarily going to be on combat suits and helmets, so not everyone is getting that anymore, which is kind of the way it's done right now. The ability to have your MFDs cast to the visor, which I think everyone has right now when they sit in the ship, that's going to be for flight-specific helmets. And ship handling as well will be impacted by wearing medium or heavy armours. So that means that your inputs are slower. So if you make a hard turn, it will take it slower if you've got medium and heavy armour on. And g-force tolerance as well will be lower in those suits. So you'll pass out quicker. We're also increasing the g-force tolerance in things like the combat and racing flight suits, so it's not all just a negative. FPS radar, when that comes, that's going to make a huge difference between the weight classes for a start, because bigger things, they're noisier, you'll hear them on your passive radar.

A good example is combat helmets are seen as the default right now because they're the main archetype that we have online, but that will make more noises and emissions, so you'll get less feedback, but then you'll obviously be quiet and less picked up by radar and scanning and things like that.

Yeah, if you wear lights, you'll all have the same strength radar, but being light gives you the ability to get so many meters closer before you're picked up. And we keep alluding to this, but I'd say the most important feature is the mass mitigation. And that affects the weight affecting the player. You weigh more, obviously, the whole thing together weighs more, but if you have heavy arms and then heavy core and heavy legs, and then you've got a railgun in your arms, right? That'll be fully supported, no added weight to the player. But then if you start taking pieces off or making them a lesser weight, the percentage that those arms can take will get less and less. If you take your legs off, it doesn't matter what your arms can lift, because your legs are still taking the weight of that thing completely.

It's very nitty-gritty, this, obviously, but we still do have high-level archetypes as well. So things like having medic armor and things like that. This is in the weeds, but we also do have the high-level ideas of different combat armors. We have the scanning armor and things like that. What is it called? The hunter armor? Hunter armor and things like that, which obviously are way better at scanning and things like that. So there's some very high-level, easy to understand stuff, and then you have this stuff, which is down in the nitty-gritty weeds of it.

Reducing the amount of times you're going to see somebody in a hospital gown carrying around a railgun. So if you want to be able to keep a railgun up and on your shoulder and use it, you're going to need to actually increase the mass of your armor in order to have that support system to make it possible for you to carry it.

And finally on the weight class, right? Because this is what we're talking about. Weight classes, they span all of these archetypes. You can have a heavy medic, maybe. So, EVA. Controversial, maybe. EVA will be removed from undersuits as it is now, so everybody has it, and put on some but not all flight suits and cores, and we'll be introducing an EVA backpack for those who don't have EVA built into the suit, or if you do have EVA built into your suit and you just want more fuel and more oxygen, you can also put that on as well.

You're basically adding a whole lot of choice. Basically a whole lot of tactical decisions between what you wear. It's not just going to be about rule of cool. You have to understand the situation that you're going into and the best loadout for that situation, not just bringing the right weapons.

If you know you're going into [unclear], you might want to bring people with more medic suits, for example, because you know you're going to have to heal each other more and things like that.

So that's weight classes. There's a difference between combat and utility. That's a big difference. And that's mainly down to the mass mitigation, which you'll have more of on the utility. That'll mean that combat armors are lighter to start with, right? But the moment you start loading them up, they get slower. Whereas utility armors start heavier, and then the more you load them up, the more they can take. So you kind of keep the speed you're running at with those. Whereas if you streamline yourself in combat, you'll always be faster.

I assume there's different types of utility armor then.

Yeah, there's loads. Which I will jump to now then. Flight suits. We've got racing flight suits, amazing g-force resistance, really good environmental resistances. So if you're racing in a car on all kinds of planets, you'll be fine.

And I hear that the flight suits getting their g-force resistance is not necessarily a far-away thing.

No, I think Yoga's working on it very soon. But they have no radar. They're super stripped down, no EVA and really poor damage mitigation, because they're basically just kind of leathers. Combat flight suits, which do have EVA, they have better damage mitigation, bigger inventory, but slightly reduced g-force and poor environmental resistances, because they're made for space. Then you've got the combat armors, you've got the assault armors, which make up the majority of our armors right now.

If you want to put new stuff out, you've got to have a crosshair at the minute, otherwise it doesn't feel as impactful. But obviously that'll be revisited when we get more archetypes in.

Yeah, it's definitely our biggest section of armors we currently have. And these are the pure combat armors. They've got the best at absorbing damage, good radar for fighting humans, but they lack EVA. Creatures too. Anything with an emission of IR and EM. But it's not resource. They do not have resource radar, so you're not going to be finding mineables with those. Stealth armours, again, we've talked about, they've reduced emissions and sounds. The hunter armors we've talked about is the only combat armor to have EVA, and it has an amazing radar for finding people. They'll see you coming more, though, and it has less damage mitigation. Utility armors. Right, I'm going to actually breeze through these because I don't want to spend too long, actually. Right, medical can scan health. So when you do a scan, it will show you the health of people around you and various other things, and it can locate downed players from much further away, specifically, that's its thing. So if you do a scan, you're going to pick up the downed players that you wouldn't normally pick up just by IR and EM. There's engineers, and they can reveal the positions and health of components. And resource specialists, these are like the salvagers and miners. We have an amazing resource radar. And hopefully we'll reveal details about mineables that you would otherwise have to go up to and scan, from a distance.

So you can be on the surface or whatever, send your ping out and see the things. You don't have to go to it.

I'd say it's more for it being in caves, where there's that kind of distance. It's still a distance to go, but if you scan and then focus on a rock that is 50 metres away, you might get some more information than otherwise you would have to. And then you've got the Explorer, which is like the jack of all trades. It's got kind of good utility. It's got the crosshair. It's got good environmental resistances and it can scan resources. Its damage resistance is fine, but it's not a combat armor. And then you've got all the other kind of very specialist things. You've got EVA, heat, cold and radiation, and they hopefully speak for themselves.

Okay. Rich told me to be very careful with this one as well. But I actually do have this one written down, because Rich said you can't say, oh, it's not. So, why is the Boom Tube dealing so much damage? Well, basically, as we said, we're going to be looking at balance, we're going to be looking at damage and those things, especially with crafting coming more online, especially with armor coming more online, like you said, with the heavy armor, with the mass resistance and things like that. But the hardest thing with the Boom Tube, obviously, is the diversity of vehicles in the game. The diversity of the health between a light fighter, a ground vehicle, a heavy vehicle is, it's a complicated game, especially when you mix all those things together. But most importantly, this is something we're looking at. I've already come up with a couple of ideas of what we want to do, like increasing the arming distance. There was a clip on Reddit recently where someone just shot it in a ship and the ship blew up because they were [unclear]. But yeah, so it's something we're looking at and keeping an eye on. If you take a Boom Tube into an encounter, you're sacrificing a weapon slot, you're sacrificing the ability to fight other people, fight other NPCs. So it's a heavy cost versus the reward you get, for how slow the projectile is and how much spread it has.

We're also doing a bit of a refactor on the way explosions deal damage to actors, because right now an explosion deals six times the damage to the player because it hits their head, arms, legs, body. So you have to balance it weirdly. So that one explosion would do just 100 damage to that table, but to you would do 600 damage. So it's really hard to balance. So we're making it so that any explosion will do 100 damage to the player. Depends where it hits them, how much damage they take, and it'll still just do 100 damage to an object.

So the mining suit, because we almost had a miner in our demo. The armor wasn't quite ready. There's a visor specifically for the miner suit that'll help you better identify materials and stuff like this. For the salvage suit, is there something similar for the visor? Are we working on a specific salvage visor? Yeah, so that's still kind of in concept phase for that. I know the mining one's a bit more obvious, but we'd like obviously to provide the players with enough details they need. So if that is a profession that they're particularly interested in, then when they do scan and ping out towards objects that they can interact with, then they will get more detail about potentially what material is and how much the health of the component, of the chip component.

Yeah, most players who don't have that visor will be relying on the screen on their weapon to understand what they're salvaging, whereas the visors may get extra information either side.

Well, those are on very different teams like the Starware and the lockers. So those guys have very different priorities as well. I can't guarantee they'll come out at the same time. All ships that should have inventory though, do currently. And for 4.0, a lot more of those will have like physicalized panels and things that you interact with to find those. And like the lockers themselves, those are really cool. Like they allow you to kind of pre-customize your load. And then swap into it very quickly. Like, and your clothes would go into like the mannequin on the inside as well. So you can quickly swap back and forth. They also have like, you know, small inventory space. So you can put your spares on your glasses and your grenades and whatever in there. Yeah, so like there will always be somewhere to store these things when you have to take them off or swap. But you know, they may not come online at the same time.

A couple weeks ago, might be a couple months ago now because time is illusion. I've been sucked into CitizenGone for so long. We released a preview on social media about the upcoming base building and the suit lockers and these gorgeous, you know, lockers where you can just display your full load out and stuff like this in your homes and whatnot. And it occurs to me that, you know, with cargo grids and having these things that you might be able to, ships have their own suit lockers, but you might be able to, you know, kit your ships out with even more lockers and stuff like that, you know, and carry them around and basically really do the doomsday prepper kind of thing. Like, you know, I've got my Zeus, I've got my, you know, a C2 and in the back, I've just got, you know, the Batman armory for every occasion, no matter what comes up, I can run to the back and you know, there's my mining outfit and there's my salvage outfit and stuff like this. And that's a really exciting moment for me because it's not like, obviously the inventory screen is cool, you go through and you drag and drop and whatever, but this idea that you just said.

It's almost like, you know, your models in the background, like if you want to show off your favorite armors, you know, they are behind a shiny glass.

And then to immediately just go right to it and be like, equip, I want that. Yeah, I think that's gonna unlock a lot of cool gameplay.

Yeah, that's something that Rich is really passionate about as well because, you know, we have so many different types and these like specializations, they kind of enhance the other styles of gameplay. So if you're in a drop ship, for example, you don't want to be dropping into a hot war zone and then you're like, oh, okay, one minute, let me drag this and let me drag that. You want to be like, no, I want my combat. Yeah, I want to go straight to, I want to get out there, I want to fight. So they kind of, all these little things that we're doing kind of start to compliment one another and it starts to feel more cohesive and what we intend.

Yeah, when your ship's been attacked, you know what I mean, the lights are going off, you're really worried, you're not like, oh, hang on, let me open a menu. It's like, people are coming, yeah. You want, yeah, you want the Doom shotgun gif, right? Like these guys are coming, well, boosh. And then, yeah, it's gonna be cool.

So all armors are gonna get this, like roles and specializations, all of them. And the subscriber stuff is all variants of things already in game, mostly. Mostly. And even the more unique stuff will get a role. So yeah, you don't need to worry about that. Like, we'll just... I won't go through them all.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think what the question is actually looking for is like a comprehensive list. Like, back when I was running the subscriber program way, way back when, we invented the Overlord armors, which was a vigilante gang in Pyro and stuff like that. Well, which roles are those armors and stuff like this? The parasite helmet is like, what role is that for? It's like this, so yeah, a little too detailed for something like SCL, but I think absolutely when the time comes and stuff, we can write up a FAQ. That's the appropriate thing to have a FAQ. We'll work with the community team, put that together, pull a list together and work that out.

Yeah, it should be made clear as well that the things, the armors you saw at CitizenCon, they're our newest, shiniest ones. That's the reason we picked those. But all the legacy stuff, all the stuff that's currently in game right now.

It's also worth saying, a lot of these armors, they were very specialized and we were trying to use that as a showcase to show like, okay, so if you wanna be the ultimate stealth, you pick the stealth suit. But we are having items that are, not every item is gonna be specialized to the T. There are gonna be ones that tinker towards that way. Like, oh, they're a little bit of stealth, but they also have loads of attributes. It's not like, oh, I picked the stealth out of Sam, now I'm really weak. We just focused a lot on those ones, so a lot of the subscriber ones are absolutely gonna still have traits and stuff, but it doesn't mean. More generalized, exactly, but it doesn't mean like, oh, okay, I've got this helmet, so that means I'm forced down this route.

That's a good point. Two points to remember that the majority of armors will be a more generalized thing with little tiny advantages here and there and stuff. And the second that you can still do almost anything in any armor. It's just a question of how well you'll do it or how much of an advantage you'll have in one particular area.

Exactly, and then when you really wanna specialize and you progress through the game and you work with factions and guilds and you get rewards and then all of a sudden it's like, I wanna be the salvager. You have that suit, etc.

You will need to stow them, yep. It will be a case of, obviously, we have so many different backpacks and we've got more coming down the line. So it might be a case of that we, and I think it depends on the ship as well, we talked about, right? It depends on whether it'd be automatically stored.

There are seats that, you know, the dropship seats that have their own inventory and you'll automatically have that backpack and your weapon, anything else that would clip, taken off and put in that inventory and when you stand up, it will appear back on you because as you said before, Nick, the last thing you wanna do is be strapped into your dropship and then the doors open and then suddenly, oh, backpack gun, you know, taking all that visual.

That's a major piece of information there, Luke. Like, you know, it's in the last couple patches when people have seen, you know, we've seen people sticking chairs, you know, to the cargo grid on the sides of, you know, hull Cs and stuff like this and people have had questions about, well, what does this do for dropships if you can just put seats anywhere and whatnot? Like, where's the value of my dropship? But you just dropped a great little pearl there that, you know, a dropship seat will have its own specific inventory, it will store your backpack, your weapons, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so you can sit comfortably and when you get out, all there for you, that's huge and I think folks who own a dropship will appreciate that.

We're looking at other places where we can maybe do that as well. Like, you know, maybe single seater ships and things but, you know, nothing confirmed.

Yeah, of course, you will see different, like weight classes for the majority of the roles with the main differences, like the unique differences but main differences obviously being protection versus mobility on foot and then in flight. So, for instance, like, you know, the hunter, say we've got a light hunter, we've got a medium hunter and two heavies currently. And they'll all be, you know, the best in their classes at scanning, finding life forms but maybe the heavy will be way better at it than the light but the light gets the benefit of being stealthier and faster. And it's like, you know, which one do you take? If you're storming, if you know your bounty is in an underground facility they've taken for themselves, you know, you're gonna go in the heavy one. Whereas if it's in like, you know, busy streets and stuff you take the light. So it's all about, you know, you know.

It's about knowing your prey. If you're stalking somebody, you know, who's savvy and knows what's going on like space to me or something, you'd want a heavy armor cause you know, they're probably gonna fight back and they want the additional protection. But if, you know, if you're stalking someone who has no clue what's going on you're just gonna be able to sneak upright them like Captain Berks. You can just, you just use the light armor. It's like, you know, it's just getting there fast. He's not gonna know what's going on anyway.

Yeah, and I do want to clarify actually, like there's a bit of confusion about the full suit feature. That isn't some like arbitrary buff. It's not something we just made up. Seven of seven, super powers. Yeah, yeah. Like not all suits will have this kind of thing but like it tends to be systemic. So say the stealth suit is a really good one, right? The bit you put, like the piece you put on your arms that masks the emissions of your arms, right? So you need the full set to fully be hidden. Otherwise some part of you is giving off emissions. It's not like, you know, you put it on and then suddenly you vanish off the face of the earth. It is systemic.

I'm glad you said medics, because I saw a lot of comments about medics. So yeah, we do have lots of non-combat, so things like, obviously, a medic. And again, we kind of, not just by class, because obviously like Luke mentioned, it's not just always about the mass and the size or more protection. It's also about like, what makes sense? You know, if you're a first responder, what would you wear? You probably wear something light, quick on your feet, can get down to it if, you know, someone's in a cave or whatever, get down there and help someone out. But then obviously we talked about potentially the ideas of like a medic on the front line, so they'd have a bit more protection. But the things with the medic, obviously they've got the visor, so they're gonna have more, when they ping and scan, they're gonna have the vital signs of people in their group. So if someone's down, they're gonna get a notification on their screen, be like, someone's over there and that may be how long they've got before they're incapacitated. And then obviously we've also looked at the idea of like refilling your med pen, so the vials on your leg, again, kind of being a systemic system about it. Rather than discarding your med pen, you actually put them back and they slowly refill. So it means that your primary role isn't just focused on combat, you're on the front line, like healing people up and helping them, body dragging them to areas of safety and whatnot. But then we've got a lot, we've just started concepting like the tech suit, which I know is quite a vague term, but obviously we've got hacking in the game coming soon and that would be like the idea that you can remote hack, so maybe you don't actually have to go up to the terminal and this suit will excel at that. And obviously, again, you'll have your own different visor. And one exciting feature is like wireless charging, which I know we're quite passionate about. So some of our combat armors, which we've not really spoke about before, but if you have your energy magazines and you store them onto your suit, you'll start to get a bit of trickle charge because they are essentially batteries. So these magazines will start to slowly recharge and there's kind of like the trade off, right? So it's like ballistic, they've got limited capacity, but maybe they do more damage, whereas like energy ammo, you can slowly recharge it over time via your suit is powering it, but maybe they do do as much damage or maybe they don't have as much travel distance. And one of the beauties with the tech suit is the idea that you can wirelessly charge your teammates around you. So if I was wearing the suit, Luke and Zach would have their energy mags start to slowly recharge. But yeah, like obviously we mentioned like the pilot suits and we talked about racing[, the environment suit, the leader.] [...] So we've got environment suits. So obviously like, you know, we're going to have these planets that we're introducing and all these different systems are going to have lots of hot and cold temperatures, radiation, corrosive. And these planets are going to be, you know, you're not going to be able to travel to these in just any old army. You're going to have to prepare. You're going to think about storage. And it's like, if you're like an artifact hunter or you want to, you grab resources or you want to be the Luke guy and you want to collect everything, like in a Fallout game or whatever, then you're going to have to wear one of these suits and go from there.

The other thing is like, we'll be scaling back which suits have EVA capabilities as well. So there are some very specialised EVA suits in the game. So if you want to spend a lot of time out in space, these are the ones you'll wind around.

Yeah, exactly. And if you're like a salvager, for example, and you're going out in space, like you're going to need a lot of, like oxygen capacity and EVA capacity, these are going to be a much bigger deal than they are now. Like it's going to be a lot of kind of preparing for like, okay, like you said, if you're, you know, mid-battle, maybe I want to sneak out, do some salvaging, get back quick.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's core to the whole system.

Yeah, but again, you will be worse in some other ways. You might find that mixing together like some random bits of armor get you exactly what you want, for a very specific situation. But for instance, we're gonna have these full suit kind of features. So there'll be systems and even just kind of weight, you know, the mass support, these things clip together. So right now, for instance, you can put on like a heavy backpack, heavy core, heavy arms, heavy helmet, and then absolutely no trousers, right? Just run around with you. Feeble little legs, somehow holding all that up, and you will be faster currently than if you wore leg armor. So that's going. Like your puny little legs won't be able to carry the weight of that because we're making all armors heavier as well. So you will need the support of this leg armor to make that viable.

So basically the three Idrises are the same at the moment, but they obviously come with bespoke components because these are such large ships that they needed their own components, and they've been tuned that way. I wouldn't say we're happy with the loadouts at the moment. They're still subject to change and balance changes, and we're basically looking at additions to loadouts based on things we've identified during the combat with Xenothreat, and just looking at how these ships are defending themselves. So there's a good possibility that they will change in the future.

Yeah, I don't think it was important to have the Idrises have different loadouts this time around because this is the first time we're proving they work, right? So let's do that first rather than getting back conflicting things from QA who are saying this one's weak and this one's not. Let's focus on being happy with one.

Yeah, so it has been really tricky balancing this because it isn't just the number of ships, it's the type of ships as well that people bring, and it's also the way they use their ships, the tactics they use, the timings they use. There's so many variables, and it comes down to how they can defend themselves as well. So we did have a really good idea of the baseline strengths of these big ships, and we feel we've kind of hit roughly in the right place for the baseline strengths, but we don't feel they're fully able to defend themselves yet. And there's lots of factors involved with that, but we are kind of working on this, and we're basically looking back at how players have attacked these big ships and we're learning weaknesses that these ships have. There's certain times when the players can outgun the turrets, and it's basically because the ship can't keep up with the movement and the turrets can't keep up, and they're able to find a hole where they can't get shot, and they can move in that, and it's really hard for those big ships to react to that. So we're looking at those weaknesses, and we're looking at how well the big ships can defend against torpedoes, because that's what does the real damage to these ships, the torpedoes. So we do see some times where these big ships can use countermeasures really effectively. That's really cool. And they can also shoot some of the big torpedoes. And it's just getting that balance right between: we want these big torpedoes that are basically small nuclear devices to do damage to these ships, but at the same time, we want the big ships to be able to defend themselves. And hitting that balance when you have as many variations possible as we have currently is really tricky, but we're going to look back at these events and we are going to improve it from both a balance side and an AI side as well.

And there is the elephant in the room, which is obviously the servers struggling right now. Because if you're talking about, should it be this easy to kill an Idris, and all you say is it only takes nine size nine torpedoes to blow it up, that seems like too little. I think, actually, no, that makes some kind of sense. As Rich is saying, the issue is that they're not shooting them out of the sky. And on our local servers, that works. It works really well. It's balanced to the point where... I mean, you bring in a whole group of Retaliators and you organize them and you will easily take down an Idris, because that's what the Retaliators are designed for. Otherwise it would be overpowered now for capital ships.

And of course, as more capital ship systems come online, there will be more opportunities for the ships to defend themselves. I know the Idrises aren't using their missiles and stuff like that, but sometimes a good defense is a better offense. So as more of their capabilities come online, it will change that experience.

The latter. Because originally, without doing any work, they did focus all on one thing and then move to the next thing and then move to the next thing. And it was not fun to be in a fight for a few seconds and then obliterated. Also, it just made the ship look like it was controlled by an AI. Robotic. These are manned turrets.

Like a hive mind on it.

Yeah, exactly. Everyone has their own focus. Everyone knows what they can shoot at at any one point, because they can only cover so much of an arc. So yeah, it looked bad. It felt really bad. And we actually put a lot of effort into getting these individual turrets to prioritize their own. As Robbie was saying, they shoot at different size ships. The larger turrets shoot at larger ships because otherwise they'd miss all the time, because the ships move too fast. So yeah, it's a conscious decision to make it work like that. There's still work to do.

I feel like, depending on the situation, and this is just me speaking anecdotally from the hours of streams and videos that I've been watching for the last week, it seems like a bomber without proper cover sometimes seems to draw all the turrets to them. And it's pretty magnificent when you see it happen, when you see all the turrets just converge on one and just decide to yeet somebody into a different game.

It's the same as a railgun. The railgun only chooses to shoot at certain things because otherwise it would just miss all the time. So I mean, we had plenty of tests where people brought a Hammerhead along, fully crewed, thought they were going to own this thing and just got one-shot out of the sky.

I happened to be in one of the playtests. Yeah, it was basically us as a team, and then it just pointed towards us. It missed the first time, and we thought we evaded it, but then it came back, and it just one-shotted us, and we're like, oh well, that's us dead.