Nick Peers

This question simply says, Yeah, so yeah, that's correct. We did see a lot of combat stuff. I think we were very excited to show a lot of the new armor sets that we're making and it was just by chance that they were combat-focused. But any eagle-eyed spiders would have seen in one of the slides, we actually had the concept or the prototype of our mining suit. So the mining suit is going to have its own dedicated mining visor, where you'll be able to scan and find more detailed information about mineables that are around you, much further distance. And obviously it offers great environmental protection. So obviously we want players to be going down in caves and obviously with different temperatures and distance and obviously for storage as well. So those mineables, whether they be large or small, we want the player to be able to think if they're dedicated in mining, that they can head towards that. And we've got the salvage suit as well, like just, it reminded me of that. Like we obviously, the beauty of this as well is we are going into some of our armor sets that are more legacy as well. So it's not just new armor sets. So obviously we've got the current Grin armor, which I actually think has got a really cool feature. So it will be kind of streamlined more with the backpack, it's having its own dedicated backpack, which will stream from the tool through the arm into the backpack, which means once you're salvaging, you won't have to worry about changing the vials and whatnot, it'll go straight, streamlined straight into your backpack. So if that is something you're dedicated in, then that has that opportunity as well.

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.

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.

Regardless of lighting conditions, the glint is there. And that is because of how powerful these weapons are, and these things are needed to essentially say, hey, there is this incredibly powerful weapon aiming on you. You have time to react if necessary. They have to line up their shot on you and so on and so forth. So it is visible during the night. I'm aware that is controversial. And if anyone has any good alternatives they'd like to suggest, please give feedback. We're more than open to hear it. But this is a very gameplay-oriented thing.

Zach and I, we had a playtest the other day with our lead, Torsten, other Torsten, not Nook, Lehmann. And I really want players just to have a go with it, because I think it really adds to the gameplay, especially when we want to make snipers really powerful, especially the .50 cal snipers like the P6-LR. We really want them to be beneficial and really reward that gameplay. But at the same time, it needs some sort of balance. It needs some sort of counter to that. So I think, especially with the angles that Zach mentioned, at first it's a bit like, oh, I'm not sure, but once you give it a go... Like the crosshair: at first, when we were talking about the crosshair, we were like, how are we going to implement it? And then after you've been using it for a while, you're like, actually, this feels great, and we can't imagine not using it now.

Yeah, the key thing is when you look at people, especially in places like Jumptown, where it's very dark, it's very hard to see things, and you have a sniper. And currently, we obviously don't have the most fantastic post-shot feedback for the snipers. For example, we don't have the really obvious tracers, we don't have the really obvious muzzle flash, and the audio doesn't go far enough, and things like that. So we are aware of those things. But it's very hard to see the sniper at Jumptown, and it just leads to this kind of degenerate play style where someone is not engaging with Jumptown, right? They're there to just sit and be a sniper. They're not contesting Jumptown. They're not doing it for their team. And there's a couple of examples of this, and it's healthy for the game.

One more thing I will add on this as well. I've seen some comparisons to other games and looking at glint and stuff. Our glint is a lot smaller. Our glint is a lot less obvious. And obviously, we only showed one distance. But you'll see that the glint is not like the light of God itself looking at you.

Yes. We have a lot of grenade types already prototyped or implemented for Squadron. The basic FPS grenade types that you know: smokes, flashes and whatnot. And from there on, we're going to move on to the more sci-fi things and other FPS devices as well.

Nick, do you want to give some of the examples that we've been cooking up and can talk about? I'd say the more standard contemporary ones.

Yeah, so obviously we've got the flash done, like Pascal mentioned. With the flash grenades or even the stun grenade, concussion grenade, we're playing around with different ideas of how exactly we want to do it with Squadron, and obviously with PvP as well you've got to be careful with balancing and stuff like that. But we have played around with the idea of the angles of where it goes off. So obviously if your flash goes off directly in front of your face, how long that would have that effect on screen, as opposed to if it just happens in your peripheral vision to your right-hand side, and how long that would have an effect, and then after-effects. And obviously, we've got a really great health system, like the BDL system, in our game. And we looked at some of the effects that we could produce on the eyes, the after-effects of being stunned, and how that all plays into it as well. And again, smoke grenades: it's so different between PvE and PvP. How long does the smoke last, performance-wise? So we're obviously looking into all the different factors of bringing something from a single-player experience into a multiplayer experience. We're not going to reinvent the wheel necessarily. They're going to be what you expect for those classic items. But then, like Pascal mentioned, we are going to start introducing some more sci-fi elements, things like area-denial types of devices as well.

Yes. It's actually going to work the same way. In the current iteration, all mags are subject to repooling, except for tools, so not the dedicated salvage tool at this point in time. All are the same. We have the mid-term, long-term idea which revolves around differentiating energy weapons from ballistic weapons by giving energy weapons some automatic ammo regeneration. But that's for the future. So for the time being, they will repool all the same.

So basically, for right now for 3.23, it's much easier for balancing and stuff to make sure that both ammo types will repool. But as Atil mentioned, we are talking about, when armor suits get the resource network, potentially looking into the idea of the ammo being able to trickle charge, because at the end of the day, the energy weapons are using batteries, right? So they don't have a physical capacity. And so the idea is that they might be able to slowly charge up. So there's obviously pros and cons to both, and that's how we are going to eventually differentiate them from ballistic. Ballistic may do more damage, heavy-hitting, but obviously it's limited by its capacity, right? And you need to reload and run out of bullets and repool, whereas laser, for example, doesn't have a drop-off, so it can travel much further. But then obviously we've got to think about overheating, and if it does overheat, it can also just recharge. You don't need to worry about running out of ammo per se. So currently right now it's the same, but eventually we are looking at ways we can differentiate the two different ammo types.

Yes, you will be able to cancel the reloading and repooling process, probably by sprinting and jumping. There's a list of actions which we can cancel repooling with, or which we cannot do while repooling. We already have the system, but I don't have the full list of actions in mind right now. But you will certainly be able to cancel that rummage animation.

Can you cancel other people reloading?

If you kill them; death is the ultimate cancel. Or knock them over, right?

Can you knock them over and it cancels their reload?

Force reactions will throw you out. That's the intention. If someone throws a grenade and you go flying, you're not going to be able to rummage through your backpack.

And if somebody's in the middle of reloading and I punch them in unarmed combat, will that interrupt?

Depends on how hard you punch them. If you knock them out, yeah.

Zach and I obviously spent a lot of time looking at what we've called an actions matrix, basically. We've looked at everything: jumping, crouching, proning, what actions are you doing whilst you're doing that. So we're definitely working through it. It's a big list, because if you try and think of every single action you're doing, then it's: do I reload, do I want to heal, do I want to holster? So it's a big list to get through, but we're working with engineers to basically decide exactly the game that we want to make, and where we want to give freedom to the player, and what actions are more punishable, like if you've committed to that, then you've got to finish the animation and so forth.

Yeah, an example from the action matrix work could be the MedPen, right? Obviously, it's very quick now. But if we were to make that MedPen process longer in the future, you might not be able to sprint out. You have to commit to it. On the design side, we can pick and choose where that goes. It goes a long way to making the game feel less clunky when you have more autonomy and control over your character and the movement and the feel of that. It's very important. It's where the word 'clunk' comes from, right? It's an indescribable feeling of, oh, this feels janky, this feels clunky. It typically comes from actions not working as you'd expect.

Yeah, obviously. There are other situations where you might not want to wear a combat helmet. Like, we have these environmental suits. And in these scenarios, you might want to wield a weapon or a tool and equip a laser pointer to it to know where you're aiming. Or further down the line, with different armor types equipped, like a medical helmet or whatever. I'm not sure what the design is for all of these armor types; Nick can go into detail about this. But there are definitely situations in our game, and we will create even more situations along the line, where the laser pointer will still be necessary or useful.

Like I said in ISC, this is kind of the start of our branching off into the archetypes for armors. So as Pascal mentioned, we do have different ideas. We're still playing with ideas. Nothing's concrete right now. And Rich talked about this in 2019 at CitizenCon on stage: for example, medic gameplay, what would that visor look like? Would they see the vital signs of their teammates? Or if you're a miner: if you're just wearing a combat helmet and you do a scan, maybe it'll just tell you the type of rock it is, but if you're wearing a mining helmet, maybe the visor will give you extra details like the clarity of the material or how efficient the rock will be to break down, and stuff like that. Or even a specialist: if you're pinging as a bounty hunter, maybe you get to ping further and get a bit more of a head start on who you're trying to track. I don't think we touched on this in the ISC, but we also looked at the HUD, for example, with backpack reloading. With the combat helmets, obviously, it gives you the information of the magazines on your suit and the backpack. We may actually lose that information when you use, for example, the environment suit. To answer your question, I think the laser sight still has a very viable path, because if you are doing a profession, let's say you want to be a miner or you want to be salvaging or whatever, obviously we're in a PvP environment. You just don't know what's going to happen. If you still want that freedom of knowing exactly where your barrel is pointing when you're getting jumped by an enemy team or whoever, then it still has that choice when you're outside of a combat helmet scenario.

So again, we've spent a lot of time working out exactly how we want damage to apply. A few years ago I wrote the design for wear and dirt and everything that comes with it, and overheating, and we've implemented that in Squadron, obviously thinking with the PU in mind as well. We really are quite keen on the idea of an explosion applying to the specific area that you've been hit. So, for example, if a grenade does go off right by your weapon, then the level of wear and the damage applied to that weapon will skyrocket, as it's gone off right next to it. And the same could be applied for dirt. So, for example, let's say you're in a swampy environment and you walk through; if you then sprint through, the amount of dirt that's applied to that specific area, like your legs, will skyrocket. Same as if you were crawling through the mud: your whole armor will be caked in mud. And the same for damage on items as well. So yes, it will damage certain items, but we are still playing around with how much of a factor that will play in overall.

We develop all of these features in silos: this team working on this, and this team working on this, and this team working on this. And those all come with their own struggles, their own bugs, their own things where, oh, we tried to get this to work and we just never found it. Or we got it to work and then we found out it wasn't fun, so we want to do it differently. Then when you start to combine them all in a bigger patch, you find a whole new series of bugs from different interactions: oh, this worked great on its own and this worked great on its own, but when you put it together, we've got two piles of bugs. So we need to do more work and more adjustments, and that's where the go/no-go process comes in. It allows us to look at these things and determine whether they're ready for prime time, whether they should go into the patch or whether they should not go into the patch. Very few things generally fail a go/no-go. I think the last one we talked about was the last Xi'an ship that was supposed to be in a patch, and it failed a go/no-go. Nobody liked the cockpit. It wasn't a good experience and they held it back. There's a couple other examples like that, but for the most part, that's what the go/no-go is. It's how we attempt to prevent things from causing more trouble than they're worth. Do we always succeed? No. But having the process and trying is better than not having the process at all. So that's what a go/no-go is, and that process happens much closer to the release of the patch.

Sometimes they're really beneficial as well, because you'll get a point of view from someone from a completely different department, like you just mentioned, who brings something up, and you think, actually, that's a really good point. And then it leads you down another path. So it's very, very important that we do these.

And then you'll get the other end of that, where, for example, we talked about optic zoom, which was on the inner side of sights, but then we had issues with upscaling. So we've had to take out the inner optic zoom on the optics, which we showed off at CitizenCon, because it just doesn't work with upscaling. So, like Jared was saying, when you work on a bunch of different stuff and all of a sudden it comes together, you're like, oh, oh no.

Quickly adding on to that inner zoom thing that Zach mentioned: we're still trying to get this back in, because we like the look of it, right? And the graphics guys are currently looking into solutions to that problem to give you that zoom effect on the actual scope. For 3.23, it's probably not going to happen. Let's see what they can come up with.