Richard Towler

Short answer to that is yes, but the long answer is, they are relatively close. So our light fighters are actually pretty heavy and pretty big themselves. So it's no surprise that that kind of range of ships does blur the lines. But we've been putting a lot of work over the past four months on the new flight model. And we're really working on how we make these ships interact with each other in different ways, so there's different advantages and different weaknesses in each archetype. Also, we've been working with Torsten on the weapon balance and the armor changes, and that's already started to have an impact on how these ships interact as well.

Actually, it's something that we discussed a lot lately in the vehicle leadership meeting that we all have, where we need to treat fighters more as its own bucket. But in that bucket, we also need to treat the fighters differently so that there is a clear identity between the fighters. And this is something that we have been working out. The new flight model that Rich and his team are working on is also moving us into that direction, that there's better distinction between the fighters. But something that also came out from the feedback that we received with all the armor rework that we have been doing is, because we have right now in the game in 4.7, in 4.8 hopefully not anymore, this hard gap between heavy fighters and medium fighters and light fighters. So there's even a stop gap between medium fighters and heavy fighters. So we decided that doesn't paint the picture of fighters, because fighters have to fight each other, rather than there's one sitting outside that is immune to light fighters. So one consequence of us discussing in there was also bringing that closer together but still maintaining perceived differences between these fighters. So there's still a meaningful choice that then also plays into all the content that we are doing now for spaceships, where you better bring a heavy fighter, but there are also opportunities for the light fighter.

It's something we've talked about before as well that I want to reiterate, is that you don't do like 20 hours of light fighter, 'I've done light fighter now, so now I'm going to upgrade my role or career into medium fighters and then heavy fighters.' They're tools for different jobs. They're not linear power upgrades. You can obviously upgrade, but it's a choice of how your gameplay is to go from light to medium. You could stay in a light fighter for all your game time if you want and have a perfectly great time. You don't need to go up the chain if you don't want to. It just gives you different opportunities and different experiences.

I think there was this big expectation when the F8C came out that it was just going to be the 'I win' button.

And it's not. It's not intended to be. It's something that we have been trying for ages already, that we want each category to have its own purpose. Sometimes we hit it, and it's actually working out the way that we intended, but sometimes we have to do slight adjustments, and we are right now in the adjustment phase, especially for the fighters, and they have a focus right now, especially in the new flight model testing. Focus very hard on the fighters, that they feel great, that they feel different. And no, I'm actually looking forward to the future for fighters in our game, because I think we are on a good way there. We just need more testing.

So in the current game, I think we've got a really good flight model. But it's lacking some of the levers that we want to pull to make the ships feel different, to do the light fighter to heavy fighter, but also not just fighters, to make our large ships feel like massive ships that you're really pulling through to turn and move the ships around. So I do think our current flight model is really good and it's a really good testament to the team, but we've learnt so much since we've introduced it. But I would see the new flight model as not just how the ships fly, but it's the overall flight experience that's going to change drastically. So we aren't going to rush out there and just put out a piece of the new flight model and not have the rest. So we're looking at this as: as soon as you take off in your ship, that is the flight model starting, and then you go all the way to the full new quantum experience. And that's going to be the new flight experience, really. So it's not just a flight model and how the ships fly that's going to change. It's the entire flight experience that's going to come as one package.

And even that is just an ingredient, right? Because it's also the bullet speeds that will change the weapon behavior. Let's even describe it more broadly; that's what adds a lot to the experience as well there. And there were again a lot of discussions just the last couple of weeks around what we can do to actually improve the feel, because CR wants this very cinematic combat that we are now getting closer and closer to. And that's the reason I would even describe this as our red line in our iteration over all the flight experiences, flight combat and flight changes that we have been doing over the years. We always try to aim for what CR was envisioning, and there was always some information that we got additionally, and then we could improve a bit more on what we actually wanted to achieve. And I think we are now getting close to where we would get the CR seal of approval here. And especially, we did some tests last week with some weapon changes that will not make it into the game the way that we tested it, because we are not ready for that yet, but we will do a step in between for that. That is increasing the ranges for weapons and slowing down the bullet speed. It gives already a more cinematic approach to all the battles, or all the fights, and it helps also tremendously with... even though with lower speeds it might sound a bit contradicting, but actually with lower speeds we have a more agile combat, because we have to bring [ships] closer together. You are able to dodge bullets more than you were previously. The goal for these changes is to have an agile combat in a closer range, which is exactly what CR wants for this game. And then with all the flight changes that we are working on, we are moving slowly into that direction. And the reason why we have to move slowly, and it's not a negative thing, it's something that we learned last year, when we did all the changes at once for engineering gameplay in one PTU cycle, and we learned, no, that was a bit too much. So what we are doing right now is we do these increments now. I think we talked about that in some of the other SCLs. We have a very focused view on what we change, and we can iterate, or we gather data untainted from all the rest that we did. So we know exactly, when we put something out, all the feedback that we receive is around that topic. For the next patch, it will be... so we did some armor adjustments based on the feedback on the armor release in the last patch, because we only released the armor changes in 4.8. We will do some bullet speed changes, bullet range changes. So we will get feedback on that and then we can iterate over that. And in the next patch, there might be something new for flight behavior, combat behavior.

I think the 'it's always around the corner' problem is, for Star Citizen, it's all interconnected. If you change flight speeds, you have to change projectile speeds, lifetimes, shields, and there's a lot of ships and there's a lot of content, and you have the PvE side, so you've got to do all the AI side as well as coping with the player side. A lot of this work was done in Squadron a long time ago, and compared to Star Citizen live, it's a very constrained scenario set. We know exactly what the player's going to be doing or should be doing, against who, in what formation, and you can quickly iterate there. But when it comes to bringing that over to Star Citizen, you're 10, 50, 100 times the amount of work there to get that same experience at a larger scale. It plays really nicely. Everything gels together really well, but we can't just piecemeal parts out without some big drops, like we did with engineering, where it was too much and then the feedback just goes everywhere and it's disjointed. So it takes a while to roll that out.

So we have a big missile rework planned at the moment, where the core aspect of what's wrong with missiles right now is just it's really hard to predict where they're going to land, because they're so quick. So we've got problems with networking. The missiles are very small and agile; they're way more agile than the ships. So the inaccuracies you see sometimes are just how they are predicted to hit at the moment, and that prediction isn't hitting the mark all the time. But also it's to do with countermeasures as well. So I would say we've got a linear relationship right now, which is either a countermeasure and the missile misses... But that's not the intended goal of how the missiles work. We want more clear readability of where the missile's coming from. Because at the moment, if you've got a missile coming at you and you don't countermeasure and you get hit, it's bad. And you don't know where it's coming from. So we want a much more clear readability of where the missile's coming from, but it means we've got to change the flight of the missiles themselves. Because at the moment the missiles fly in a fully decoupled way where they can change direction very, very quickly at the last minute as well. So again, it's that predictability at the end, where they do go suddenly like this to you. But we want that to be much more predictable. So we want to slow them down a little bit so you can actually evade them. But also that slowing down makes it easier to predict where they're going to hit as well. And then we've got systems. We want to do stealth gameplay, so you can do things on your ship yourself to make you less susceptible to missiles, but we need all these systems to come together as one big package of how missiles work. But that's where Torsten comes in as well.

Yeah, actually, we did some steps already to improve the missile gameplay. So not on the missiles themselves. There are issues that are even quite high on our immediate fix list for that. We don't have feedback right now, visual feedback, that the target lock is completely done. So this definitely needs fixing. So we already started working on the UI improvements. There are reasons why it's not in yet, so we are still actively working on that, getting all the changes across, but at least it will help for the initial missile gameplay that we currently have in the game. As Rich already said, the speeds of them, now with the updated bullet speeds for the normal weapons, are also disproportional again. So that means that this is definitely something we need to tackle afterwards. And for the stealth gameplay, actually we did some changes already around that. So engineering gameplay influences the EM signatures; IR signatures are also driven by the cooler functionality. So we already have player decisions impact the signatures. Also, actually a shout out to Michael Smith there, it's basically his doing that the cross-section is only detectable now by active ping. So it's actually something that was brought up in our vehicle leadership meeting and we just acted on it because it works out quite well. It has the downside, though, that the cross-section missiles now need an active ping, and there are also some visual indicators missing. So we have a list of things we need to improve even for the missile gameplay that we currently have in the game. But we also are very aware that the missile gameplay is the gameplay that we can improve a bit more even after these quality of life changes, because we have dedicated missile boats, we have dedicated ships with a lot of missiles on them, and we have to make it fun for missiles. It needs to be an exciting gameplay, and right now it's more like, and I'm very sorry to be that honest, but it's more like a side thing to do. The benefit though, and I have to advertise it, is missiles ignore the armor checks because they do so much damage. So if you have a small ship and you want to crack the armor, use a missile.

It seems like one of the more difficult tasks, because if you have a ship with missiles, you want them to be amazing, you want them to be effective, you want them to be devastating, because they cost a lot to reload. CR is always on about how replacing a missile or a giant S7 torpedo should cost you a lot, just like it does in the world. So if it costs you a lot, they have to be effective. But on the flip side, if you're on the other side of that missile or torpedo, you need to have options to defend yourself, to survive and whatnot. And no matter what you do, somebody is going to be like, 'yes, that's great,' and somebody is going to be like, 'that is the worst change ever.' It's very hard to find a middle ground there, because if you get killed by a missile, missiles are terrible; I should have had more things to do. There are a couple questions in here; we've sort of hit all of them, so I'm not going to ask why there's no lead pips on shooting down torpedoes and stuff. We wanted to make it easier to shoot down the torpedoes, but if you do that, then torpedoes become less effective. So this constant give and take...

Yeah, but even with the torpedoes, right now with the lead pips, it's basically impossible because they are traveling so fast. So we have to reduce the speed again so that they feel also correct for a torpedo, because a torpedo should not target a small fighter, because they are meant to...

Everything's interconnected. If you mess with one thing...

There's always got to be this element of chance. You can't make it so that you can always shoot them down, because then they're ineffective. And you can't make it so that they always hit and destroy their target. So there's always got to be this gray area of chance.

Yeah, and it's a really fine balance, because it's got to make sense for both parties that what happened happened. If it hit or missed, it's got to make sense to both people that are on either side of it, which is a really difficult thing, because it's a really hard thing to communicate. Because in real life, if you've got a missile coming at you, you have one option: press the button and go evade. But if you get hit by a missile in real life, that's it. You've got to go down, right? So it's just a question of balance, and it is really fine tuning because it requires so many systems to come together. It isn't just flight, it's the emissions and everything else. So it's just a really fine balance, which we get right sometimes and we get wrong other times.

But overall, I would really say, and it feels like I'm repeating myself, with the decision that we do smaller changes continuously, we are now way better suited for where we want to go, in comparison to where we threw in a lot of changes all at once, how we worked a couple of years ago.

So the two things are connected. We wanted to complete what we think is the new flight experience first before we moved our resources onto the ground vehicles. But, well, it was like three years ago now, we did do an update in a very limited slot of time we had, to introduce a new tire model, some new suspension physics, and just generally how they behave. Now, by going this route of how the flight model behaves, in terms of going for realism but accessibility and just things feeling good in the game, it made the ground vehicles better, but also introduced some of the problems of the ground vehicles, because we freed up the physics to react more realistically, which inherently makes them look unrealistic at times, because we're hitting solid objects with the bottom of the vehicle or with the suspension, kind of funny, and the vehicles would do strange things. So we've got a framework of the ground vehicles. And interestingly enough, we've got a meeting very, very soon to discuss the ground vehicle 1.0 plan of what we want to achieve with ground vehicles. Because as we do base building, as we do combined arms, the ground vehicles can become even more important for the universe. So we've got a plan to improve the tire model, the suspension, but just the general way that the vehicles interact with our world, so when you hit rocks and stuff, the vehicles don't flip over and crash all the time and feel very strange and feel like they don't have mass. Because the vehicles do have mass, but the force that is generated is a very hard force. It's a very simple calculation of just: you hit objects, force generated, force is applied to the ground vehicle. But we're going to start controlling that so it feels much more natural. And also, we're looking at converting the ground vehicles to the exact same systems that the spaceships work on as well. So they'll have an engine, a power plant, and everything will work as a normal Star Citizen vehicle as well. And this overall will make a much more natural feeling ground vehicle in the end, once we get some time to work on the physics of just how it interacts with the world. And I'm kind of excited by that, which will hopefully allow us to do more interesting gameplay and for the vehicles to actually have a purpose. Yeah, just be able to do more in the game and have that purpose, where you can go take your Ballista, park it somewhere and have it in the right spot that you want it, so you can use it for that purpose.

Actually, there were these big facilities we have on the ground, distribution centers. Those were our first intent of making ground vehicles more viable, because we equipped those distribution centers with very effective turrets so that you should land further out. Our planet environments weren't built for that. So we had a bumpy ride.

One of the biggest problems the ground vehicles have are the very beautiful looking planets. We don't have nice roads on them, because part of it is they're not habitable or, I can't think of the word, civilized with infrastructure. So there aren't roads there. And a lot of people underestimate the scale of Star Citizen, and they're bombing along in their Cyclone, which they don't realize makes a Humvee look small. And they hit what they think is a small rock, but if you stood next to it in real life, it's two meters tall. So a vehicle traveling 40 meters a second hitting something that essentially has infinite mass in how it is in the world... In the real world, you'll just go pancake into it. But our vehicles have mass; that thing doesn't have mass. Like Rich talked about, it was changed to a more realistic model and then we had to rapidly change it, because the physical forces that were being imparted on the vehicles were just insane. So there's lots of things we've had to do to tone it down.

When I saw something like Stormbreaker for the first time, I was excited. A big area that doesn't allow you to fly ships in and stuff like this. I'm like, great, do something like that where you can do vehicles. Imagine the entire patch content was ground vehicle related. And the answer I got back from creative director Ian Leyland was, we'd love to, but playing in ground vehicles right now isn't that great. So if you do an entire patch of content that requires everybody to roll around in ground vehicles, you better make sure the ground vehicles are fun and actually work.

I want them to be just as good as the ships, and maybe to the point where you never even want a ship. You're just content with your base-built location, ground vehicles, tooling around, doing all the game loops with ground vehicles.

Adding to that even, right now it's also not the most convenient thing to call your ground vehicles. So that is something that we have had on our list for ages at this point, which is ground vehicles through freight elevators, or nested spawning of ships with ground vehicles. So good news is we have been working on that. I was about to say, we proved it with the Atlas, but the Atlas is technically not a vehicle. No, it has been on our list for quite some time, because the moment that we allow ground vehicles to be more comfortably stored, or pulled up and then stored in your ship, I think they also will be used naturally more than what they are right now, because right now it's, pardon my French, a bit of a pain.

So it's about providing a tuning that fits the archetype of that ship. And that's what we're working towards: giving the ship the archetype. And as I said, it's always work in progress. And that ship in particular, it's got loads of guns, it's got loads of thrusters. And as you say, not all ships have to fit the perfect progression of balance in that sense. So we're definitely looking at what the ship should be with the new flight model as well. There's going to be some more changes there. Because a big thing with the new flight model is we're going to have far more tools at our disposal to make ships different. Whereas at the moment we've got tools, but we're quite limited in that context of providing ships that are quick but sluggish at the same time. So we're kind of in a box for the current balance a little bit in that regard, but with the new flight model we've got more tools to give us maybe a ship that can be really quick, but it actually takes a little bit longer to get there. The acceleration is a little bit slower, but it can move faster.

Anything you want to add, Mattia?

So we do know that at the current state, the overall heavy fighter angular velocity has decreased a little bit, but we think it's for the better. And once again, we think the feeling and the perception that we see on the player side these days is mostly related to, once again, the relation between those ship classes, right? In our opinion, once again, what we want to reach is a balanced and intended gameplay experience for the ship per se, right? So having a super OP, mega powerful ship can be cool the first time that you have it, right? But after a while, when it becomes the meta and it becomes the forced choice, game design-wise and gameplay-wise, I don't think this is a good direction or a fun direction. So what we want...

Yeah, it's not healthy.

Now, of course, you're going to say that and Twitch is about to fill up with people saying, "But what about this ship? And what about that ship that's currently OP?" And the answer is, we'll get there.

Yeah, and that's the big thing about the balance: it's a continuous thing. It's moving, it's evolving all the time. And we can't tune 200 ships all in one go when we figure something out. So it has to come in steps, which is why we're doing a pass on the mediums as well. We've done the pass on the heavies. And that'll keep evolving, but we have to do it in pieces because we can't move 200 ships at the same time.

And also it's more important for us to move those pieces step by step because we understand the dynamics that we generate inside the game a bit better as well. So we get more knowledge about it, we understand how players prefer to use certain types of ships rather than others. So moving those Lego bricks in tiny blocks is easier than just moving one, seeing how it performs and then trying to scale everything according to that. So that's what we're going to try to do, what we have tried to do, and what we are actually doing as well with the current monthly patches. So we always try to deliver something to address maybe a specific issue or a specific area of ship flight in the game.

So it's really complex. So we start off with a ship concept, and the teams we work with, the vehicle team and the drone crew, and we work with them on identifying the identity of that ship and what it should be and what it will be in the game. And then according to that, we're building a certain character that we think suits that ship. It could be really fast forwards, it could have really good handling, or it's really slow and clunky. It depends on the ship. So we try and apply that. And then it falls to the loadout of the ship; it can depend on the weapons, or if it doesn't have the weapons to defend itself, what does that mean as well? Does that mean make it really tanky, so it can't fight back, but it can sustain? But all those different things that we have, all the tools we have at our disposal, create what that ship is in the game. And then from that, the players themselves have choices within that ship as well. And we try and provide as much as we can to let the players move the ship a little bit more to that place or that place, depending on what they want. But the ship always has a kind of window that it will operate in, and it might creep into other ships if you have different components, stuff like that, but it's always got that core identity.

And sometimes that's not going to align with each individual player and what they want it to be, and that's not a balance issue, that's a thing that happens when you've got a game with 200 ships.

I mean, there is a good analogy. There was a German World War II ace called Adolf Galland, and he flew the Focke-Wulf 190 and the Me 109. And although one of them was better, like the Focke-Wulf was a lot better in terms of the stats, he actually preferred the Me 109 because it was just better in handling. And it just speaks to the characteristics of the ship. The ship has its characteristics and might not be the right ship for you. Maybe you just focused so much on one ship that your muscle memory is all aligned with how this or that ship should handle, right? But this is why we have different ships, right? They give you different access to the universe. Maybe the handling is different, but then you have a big [garbled] somewhere else.

No, so I'd say it's part of the journey. And let's say we throw away everything tomorrow, we still have what we've learned along the way. And that's really important because we're constantly learning. It goes back to what you said earlier: I've been here seven years and my understanding of the game and the game mechanics has fundamentally changed in that time, as we've built more systems and added more to the game, and we do know the game's not complete. But it's kind of exciting because we're building towards that and we're always moving in that direction and learning more and getting better, hopefully, at what we do. So we change things along the way, and then we have other systems that come in and they might throw a curveball into that system that we've made. But we're learning along the way to build what we think is the best game.

I think I can add something on that from a different perspective, because I joined the team roughly around two years ago, so not as long as these other two veterans, right? But it's very important, as a game designer in my case, but in general I think as a developer, to have that knowledge and to be able to have that experience in tuning and getting accustomed to the game, getting to know how the game is working currently. Also to understand, first of all, what you can do and what you can plan to improve the game in the future, in the long run, and also be prepared for that when the moment comes. You know what to do, you know what to expect, you know what to manipulate in order to create the right experience. It's never a waste of time. And also, I guess you guys want to play the game as well from time to time, so playing a game that is in a better state is probably better than a game that is not balanced at all.

We know what we're doing and there is a plan, but those things change. We know what we're doing, but we learn more along the way, and those things that we learn change our perceptions.

I don't think that the vision has changed a lot though, right? I mean, the one thing you can't underestimate is engineering and design and development. It just takes time. I mean, seriously, 90% of all the things that players propose that we should do better, we usually thought about these already, right? Because this is what we're doing for a living. But it just takes time to implement these. If somebody tells me, "Oh, please add an altimeter" or something like this, then there's 15 different problems we need to solve. It's a lot.

And those are the easy parts as well, because a lot of the time players have very interesting insights and ideas about very complex systems that we can potentially put in place, but those touch such a vast amount of other features in the game, and organizing that type of work and getting everyone on board from completely different teams, especially in a company the size of CIG, is very difficult, right? But in general, it's very difficult in video game making, so it's not a unique problem for us.

Yeah, we've got a very complex game, but that's very exciting because we are doing it differently. All our systems are real systems. They function, they work, and they do real things based on real physics mechanics. Most times. There's a few exceptions here and there. But most of the time, that works really well for us, because it's a really complex problem to solve. But actually, it makes Star Citizen, I think, really unique. And it makes it really fun to work on.

That 90% is probably a bit high. There are still plenty of times, being completely honest, where an idea has come from the community and we've been like, "Oh, that's a really good idea."

No, but I mean, we've all seen similar media. We've all seen similar films. We play Star Citizen because we probably liked Wing Commander or Star Wars in the past and so on, right? So there is a common understanding. So I think even for some things where we would say, "Oh, we had this idea," it probably just came from somewhere else. We incorporate a lot of community ideas in the designs as well.

Okay, so I know what you want to say. So the vertical thing, right, where ships do this: nobody wants that, right? CR doesn't want that. He had a talk with me last week, right? But this is also something we probably will only fix with the new flight model. I don't want to say, "Oh, it's going to be fine in the future," but it is the plan for this, right? So right now, when you're in atmosphere, we have something called thruster efficiency curves, and the efficiency of your thrusters goes down by about 50% in the highest case. In the future, that efficiency will be much, much lower. So what you can expect, if you have a ship, let's say, give me a ship with VTOLs, I don't know, Cutlass, right? So if you have the Cutlass, the Cutlass is a light transport, so it will not be as punishing, probably. But let's say, does the Idris have VTOLs?

Yes, but they don't work currently in game, but they will do.

Okay, fine. So let's say the Idris has landed. Then you will get a message on the heads-up display that tells you what your thrust-to-weight ratio against gravity is. And if that ratio is below one, you will not be able to take off. And this is then just taking into account the mass of the ship and how much is loaded on it. So if you have your cargo full of lead cubes, let's say, then it is possible that you will not be able to take off.

It's possible, not a guarantee. You can overload.

You can overload, and then you will not be able to take off. I mean, you may try to boost, because boost gives you, vertically, I think something like 35% more thrust. You can put more power into your engines so you get this natural resource-network-based buff in your engines. You will have a hard time just hovering like this. And at the same time, these are your strongest thrusters, but your retros are usually a lot weaker than the other thrusters. So if you do this, you will eventually just sink down. That's at least the plan. So you can expect that larger ships will be harder to fly and to land in atmosphere. We will try to give players helpers so that new players don't just crash land this thing. But still, there's still physics. And the reason why the ships can hover at the moment is because they have so much thrust that they can. Because all they need to do is be able to hover in 1G, or let's say on Earth, right? When that is not guaranteed anymore, then you automatically have a more realistic and harder situation there.

Yep, so the whole point of those turrets is that the ships can't defend themselves with guns, so we've got turrets, and we want the ships to be able to defend themselves with turrets. We are working on the general turret experience and how powerful the turrets are as well, and we've made some changes. Was it last release?

Yeah, in general, with the engineering buff, we buffed the ammo, we buffed maybe some regen rates for specific ships as well.

But there's this other thing. The thing that we're currently lacking is effective medium-range weaponry. Right now, a turret fires projectiles that are just normal gun projectiles. The thing is, we don't want to twist the projectile after we've launched it, right? So what we need is some medium-range weaponry. We have a plan for this. We would like to try out flak at some point, but it's not ready for multiplayer yet. But it can be effective beyond the range where normal gun turrets are effective. I mean, I guess the question comes mostly from, "Oh, I have this large ship and I'm getting shot at by fighters which keep their distance." But the other thing is, coming more to Torsten's work concerning the armor system and so on, there's also the question of whether smaller ships will actually be a danger to larger ships, because we are going to have penetration parameters on the bullets and we're going to have armor and so on. So a lot of these weapons that people use at the moment to damage larger ships, they might not be able to damage them in the future. It's like if you have a pistol and shoot at a tank, the tank says, "Well, okay." If the ships want to do actual damage on the larger ships, they probably need to get so close in the future that they can precisely destroy the subsystems.

Wow, it's very subjective again. So we have obviously made a big change to ground vehicles. We changed the fundamental physics of the ground vehicles. But that still doesn't mean they're finished. They are still subject to the same physics as the rest of the game. And we do know that the general collisions don't feel very good, and we do want to improve that. But we also want to give more purpose to the ground vehicles. And that isn't just the ground vehicle itself. It's the guns or it's the torpedoes on the ground vehicle. So it's about improving those systems as well, so players have more of a reason to choose them, especially as we have more environments in the game that may limit where ships can go but not where ground vehicles can go. And also you may want to use ground vehicles to defend a certain area. So if you've got a Ballista, you can have Ballistas in a protection area. But that isn't just making that ground vehicle physically good. It's the systems on it. It's the torpedoes, and how those kinds of systems generate the gameplay we want.

That's why we already tried to bespokely tune the Ballista torpedoes and missiles to fit more into the anti-air role, as well as the Centurion turret, by the way. Now the turret has gimbals as well, so it has more range, it has more ammo, to try to enhance the peculiarities of the anti-air vehicles as well.

Well, I posted about my feelings concerning Master Modes about a couple of weeks ago in Spectrum. So in general, I'm very happy with the progress and what we achieved, because the swap to Master Modes meant that we had to update all the ships all in one bulk. So we could not really stretch this out to multiple releases, because our data system is not able to have two different tuning values or two different ways of keeping ships balanced at the same time. So we had to squish all the ships, and just to be clear, we have about 140 different ship records in the game. So we had to update them all and take the other related tech from Squadron, like the new aiming system, the way the weapons work, the gimbaling system and so on, plus part of the UI updates, and squish this all into 3.23. Now, we knew before that this was a pretty tough ask, because it's just a lot of work. So overall, I'm really happy with the progress. Of course, there's a couple of, let's say, balance issues. There's a couple of balance offenders, of course. But we don't need to say it's perfect. We never said it's going to be perfect on this release. But it builds a far better foundation from which we can iterate faster going forward beyond 3.23. What about you, Rich?

Yeah, that's basically where we're at. It's about moving towards the better foundation for the future of the game. So it's been really cool to get here. But for us, it's just the start of this, but it's been a really cool journey. I mean, this journey started for us, wow, like three years ago, I think? Yeah, it's about three years ago, maybe more than that now.

It's been four years. I lost track of time.

So we got together and we looked at stats and went, right, what do we need to do to make the combat experience good, but also the general flight experience good. We came up with lots of things, and Master Modes was one of the ones that evolved as the prominent feature that we were working on. It's involved so many teams and so much feedback from all across the studio. So it's been an effort not just of myself and Yogi, but lots of different teams and lots of different people that have been waiting on this some of the time that I've been here. So it's been really good to see it out there. It's been a big push at the last minute because, as Yogi said, we've got so many ships and every single one of them had to be updated to make this work. So there's a couple of things that we didn't catch probably, but that was expected given how many records have changed in the game. But we believe it's a much better foundation, and we're excited for the feedback as it's coming in, and also for the future as well, because it's going to evolve massively over the next few releases.

It's not a pipe dream at all. So yes, we had 140 records and we did a very quick weapon tuning pass and a little bit of a health pass for some components and ships. But we're also getting a huge amount of data from the players actually playing that stuff. Internally, when we develop stuff, it's sometimes hard to judge whether or not we reached the right balance, because we have a vast array of ships and items and all that. But when you watch players playing it, then you get an idea what's happening. That said, as I said, the current pass that we have on the balance should not be treated as a 'this is now the final product' thing. It's really just a stepping stone, because it just sets the stage for the vastly bigger changes that are coming in 4.0 and beyond, because there will be new gameplay loops and so on.

I think a huge step we took right now is actually that we set our intentions very straight. So we know exactly what we want to achieve. And now we actually look for the data sets in what players are actually experiencing right now. And we use these observations to improve the balance even more.

Yeah, on the overall question, is balance even possible? Do we want balance? As in, do we want everything to be balanced? Because the kind of nature of balance is the imbalance in balance, if that makes sense. Because we've got to capture all the unique characteristics of the ships, and that throws them off in all different kinds of directions. And we've got to capture that balance to make sure that within the game context, the ship fits within the game. But every ship needs to feel different and offer different things and have different character to them. So that's kind of the complex nature of balance. And then we have to balance the game with the other features that affect flight. So basically, as Yogi said, this is the starting point of the rebalance of the game. But then with 4.0, it's going to evolve massively. With the engineering gameplay, it's going to have a significant impact on how the ships are in the game. So we're going to reset again there. And then again, we're going to look at the data to see if we're delivering the gameplay we intend. So it's a juggernaut. And it doesn't really ever end with a game like Star Citizen, because the game is a live product. It's out there, it's evolving, we're adding features, we're changing things all the time. So from my side, balance is not something that will ever be finished. It's an evolving thing. It's a living, breathing thing that exists in the game currently and will carry on evolving.

Which is true for any MMO, any online game, right? The main guy in charge of Smash had an interview where he talked about their internal numbers, about how the most successful fighter in all of Smash Brothers had like a 51% win rate, and the least successful fighter had a 46% win rate. So it was really only about a 5% difference there. And Torsten, you mentioned that he had a YouTube channel where he talks about design.

Yeah, basically he talked about how if you have a fully balanced game, everything is average, and average is generally boring. So if you do balancing, there's always a peak up or a peak down, so it's more interesting for players. Worth watching, by the way.

Oh, changes, yes, of course. I mean, how is it doing right now? It's better than what we had in live on 3.22 before. In terms of how successful the change was so far, I think it's pretty positive. I can't say exact numbers, but the relationships of kill-death ratios on all ships, for example, have flattened out a lot. A lot of the time in the past, we always had one or two ships which basically were responsible for most of the kills in the game, and that's not the case anymore. We also have more players with, let's say, more diverse levels of flying and combat skills enjoying the game more, so I would count that as a win. But there's a huge amount of stuff that is on our list to do. There's typical examples like ESP needs to be improved. The 1v1 dogfighting needs to be improved. There's also a couple of things we want to try out with the flight model, like using an X-shaped velocity space to combat the backstrafing problem. Whether that works or not, we'll see. In general, we want to improve the combat distances a bit. There will be more stuff happening with the 4.0 tuning patch concerning weapon speeds that also might help with the distances. And there's a couple of bugs, like the camera shaking is sometimes inconsistent, the G-force zoom effects are sometimes inconsistent. And of course, there are a couple of ships that feel out of whack. One of the Hornets can at the moment pull 35Gs upwards. That is, of course, not intended. So, yeah, there's lots of stuff. But as I said, overall, I'm pretty happy with the current progress. Is it the final state? Of course not. But there will be more stuff happening, especially with the resource network, because of course these new feature sets also require some changes in the flight model or the way we target certain parts of the ships.

Yeah, I can echo Yogi's comments that we're personally really happy with how it's gone. There's definitely going to be more changes. A big challenge for Master Modes for us in terms of release was just how much around Master Modes changed. It wasn't just adding Master Modes to the game. We were fundamentally making some big changes to the aiming system and the flight model itself as well. So we had a lot of changes going in that went alongside Master Modes. This was quite hard to manage. But that's part of the fun of working in games on this: we're always trying to improve things, always trying to change things for the better. And we're going to carry on listening to the feedback from the players and also looking at the data as well. That's a big part for us: we basically need to be accountable for what we're doing. So any changes we make, we've got to prove that they're actually having the impact in the game that we intended. So that's going to be a big part of moving forward with the general balance. But yeah, there's going to be lots more changes. We're going to fix up some of the ships, because we definitely missed some of the ships for various reasons. We changed a lot of ships, and there's some ships that inherit certain records from other ships. Sometimes that can catch us out a little bit. But we're basically working on identifying those ships, which we are in the process of doing, and we'll fix those up. And then we'll move towards 4.0 as well, where we basically expect another round of big changes to the balance.

I would say yes.

Of course.

Of course it has a future.

We've got to sound more confident, guys. Come on. Yeah, racing's got a future.

Racing has a future. But really, the Master Modes tuning patch, of course, affected the current racing tracks that there are. The speeds got a lot slower and so on. And so some of the tracks right now might not work as they did. But the level design team, for example, also asked, hey, should we adapt the racing tracks now? And we're like, we're not completely done with our Master Modes changes with the flight model development, so maybe hold off on doing extensive changes for a while. But racing, I mean, we're celebrating ships, so of course we invested in racing. Specifically for the racing community, we added something to the flight model back then that was addressing the lack of certain acceleration when you're not using digital input devices and so on. So yes, racing is really important to us. And actually, today I got a question from Knabel, one of the German podcasters, YouTube streamers. He asked if we could add smoke pots to racing ships. I have not discussed it with anyone, but I think the idea is really, really great. Just putting this out there. Rich, say more about racing.

It's definitely got a future, because I come from a racing background. I've done a lot of sim racing and I'm a big fan of racing in real life. And that's the key thing with Master Modes: it's going to allow us in the future to give more freedom to allow the racing variants to excel at racing. And that's something we're really keen on. Because one of the issues we've had in the past is balancing the combat experience with the flight experience and the racing experience. If you have a really good racing ship that can use all its guns at the same time and everything, it can suddenly be the dominant force in combat, which is probably not intentional. So we're looking at ways where we can balance that, so we can allow racing ships to be the best handling ships or the fastest in a straight line. And then basically, as Yogi said, it's about the tracks as well, because the tracks are where you're racing. So it's important that they're designed around the current flight model. And as we've made a lot of changes, we need to now take a step back and look at what tracks are going to make the most out of the handling that we now have in the game.

Yeah, unfortunately that was another change that wasn't really caught in time to fix, but it's also been fixed. So basically, the vehicle you saw as a player was actually the server vehicle and not the actual player vehicle in the player physics. So it caused a lot of glitching, but we've corrected that. And the ground vehicles are now back to being fairly stable ground vehicles. It is fair to say we're still looking at improving the general ground vehicle experience to make it as good as ships, because it should be. They're all vehicles in the game, and all vehicles should be up to the same standards. So we're definitely looking at improving the ground vehicle experience still. But we're pretty happy with the major physics overhaul that went through with it. We just need to make it a little bit more game-friendly for our environments, which are massive planets with loads of different terrains.

This one, we're not quite sure. So we got reports about this midweek and we started to do our own investigations across different teams to figure out what's going on, because we've changed some of the stuff in the handling, but the backend technology hasn't changed. But again, with a game like Star Citizen, the fundamental game engine is updating all the time and there can be negative consequences on completely different features, because a feature might use some part of the game which works a certain way, which now works a different way, and that could have an impact. It's about figuring out where it's gone wrong. Because we're definitely not happy with the overall Grav Lev experience, and we're definitely looking at improving it. Because that's one of the key parts of racing as well, because Grav Lev racing can actually be really cool. When it works really well, it's probably one of the cooler race experiences in the game. So we're definitely looking at what's gone wrong in 3.23 for Grav Lev.

Okay, let's start with the big elephant. So in general, there is no difference between how we're treating combat ships and non-combat ships. If you want to have a consistent gameplay system, it needs to make sure that all the ships follow the same rules. So although we have combat-focused and non-combat-focused ships, we still need to make sure that the non-combat-focused ships are basically fitting that scheme. And so the effect that master modes brings for non-combat ships, let's just talk about maybe miners and salvagers, it's just the same. You're going into NAV mode to travel somewhere and you're going into SCM mode to do whatever you need to do in your normal gameplay loop. So navigation or NAV mode is just for traversal. And this does not mean that industrial ships are easy fodder or something like that. If we see some kind of imbalance in our data, then we usually react to that. So if we have, for example, a Gladius that's fighting against an Aurora, the Aurora is, of course, not a fighter, right? But it will also not be super easy fodder for a Gladius. So what we usually do is we give it a little bit more health or bump up some other defenses. But in any case, you don't need to worry. The ruleset is the same for all ships. And the other thing with NAV mode that came up was whether or not you can always escape a situation. So yes, if your navigation mode is completely spooled and your quantum drive is ready, you can usually quite quickly escape whatever combat situation you're in, unless there's some specialized ships that snare you in some way or keep you there. But this is dependent on a case-by-case basis. Rich, do you want to add something?

Yeah, sure. A big thing with Master Modes for us is it's not just about combat. We can keep saying this, but it's not just about the combat ships. We have reworked every single ship in the game right now. And we've got a base archetype we use, so there's a difference between archetype and role for us. So archetype is something we use internally to start a baseline with a ship. But then as we move forward, we start to look at the role of the ship and what that kind of individuality of each ship means. But yeah, every single ship in the game is going to have a rework and feel different to what it has done in the past. And there's been a big focus not just on the combat side of things, but what makes a good cargo ship and what makes a bad cargo ship, and to make sure that the overall balance between these ships is fair for everyone. Because we do realize that in our game, there are some people that love combat, but there are people that don't really want to do combat. So we've got to tune ships for an environment where it's fair for everyone playing the game. And that's been a big focus of ours. Because we don't want people that don't want to do combat to feel like combat is always a threat. There's always got to be something to balance that out. There's going to be a big learning process when it first goes out. There's a good chance we might not get it right. There's definitely a good chance we'll make some changes, and we'll definitely listen to the feedback, and we'll start making iterative changes on these. But our overall goal is that the game is fair for everyone, no matter what you've come to Star Citizen for.

You mentioned that archetypes are not the same as roles, and this was one of the bigger misunderstandings that came from the episode. Archetypes are not about the overall purpose and intention of the ship. Archetypes are about a flight profile. It's building out a number of flight profiles as a starting point, as a first pass assumption on a vehicle before you go in and do individual specific tunings. So yes, the archetypes tend to be combat focused because that's where the essence of balancing between the different fighter types is most important. We don't need a mining ship and a salvage ship to have individual flight characteristic archetypes. They will have their own individual tuning so they won't handle exactly the same. But there doesn't need to be an entire archetype made for the way that all mining ships fly and turn. So there was a big misconception here that archetypes and roles are synonymous. They are not. When we were referring to the Idris as this or that, those were for the flight archetypes. And yes, some of the names match and some of the names don't. But it's important to know that archetypes are not the roles. They're not the intended function of the ships. They are simply a starting point for the flight profile that Rich and his team and Yogi and all of them then go to drill down and balance from. It's just a start here, then customize.

So the reason how that came together is practically based on our day-to-day work, right? So in general, the fighter gameplay is the most challenging one, so naturally we are going for that first. But we could have also called a light fighter archetype a small wiggle ship archetype or something like that, right? But it's not as descriptive for us. So when we were focused on fighters, we just called it fighters. We're also calling something light fighter bombers, which are not bombers. They just for us internally describe something, just like as Jared said, a flight profile. It does not mean that this describes the role.

There's definitely a lot there. It can even just be on balancing, whether it be the tuning of the ship, how it handles, or just even health pools, or even the weapon gunnery changes that are coming. There's definitely a lot of things that can contribute to why 1v1s sometimes don't feel the best, but the furball or the Squadron Battle feels really good.

I'll mention a couple of key observations that I think players are having with it. Because we limited the velocity space with master modes, you're seeing people get this locked-in feeling where they're hitting these max speeds and they can't go beyond that, and their opponent is hitting the max speeds, and you get kind of stuck in a position where you can't get an advantage over them. That's that locked-in feeling caused by the velocity space itself. In addition to, a lot of 1v1s are what we call mirror matches, where you're facing the same ship. So the most common is going to be Gladius versus Gladius, right? And when you're facing the same ship, you have the exact same performance characteristics, so you can counterbalance one another pretty easily, and you end up with a head-on situation quite often. And this is something we're observing a lot of when players are talking about it. And we're advising Yogi, advising Rich that this is something that we're seeing. Players are talking about it a lot. And as for solutions, I'll let Yogi and Rich talk about that a bit more. But that's the information we're passing on.

Yeah, so we do a lot of iterative testing here on the vehicle team. So we're constantly testing new things. And Mike and his team did a really good job of adding the feedback. And then we discuss that feedback. But then we action that feedback in testing. And we try and find out what causes it. And it's never just like, oh, just move this thing here. It's always a really complicated combination of things that are quite difficult to get sometimes, and also difficult to basically implement in the game. Because we've got very complex mathematics behind a lot of the systems in the game. So is it just a case of just tweaking one number here and there? We've got to really break down and really understand the problem of what's causing it. As I said, we do a lot of play testing, we get a lot of feedback internally, but we also go to Spectrum and the forums and everywhere else to get a lot of feedback to understand the way and why the combat is the way it is.

Yeah, the feedback from master modes was very, very diverse. I mean, just the comments on the YouTube video that we had last time were very diverse. And then we're also monitoring Discords and so on. And what I usually do is I listen to the worries that the players have, but I let Bayor and Brent actually come up with an actual proposal, because for me it's very hard to filter through what's actually actionable feedback. But in terms of what we're trying, we absolutely agree that the 1v1s, they're a little bit meh at the moment, but this has to do exactly with the problem of the velocities. We want to not go into high velocities, because going into high velocities just causes one thing, and this is dragging out the fights more. The only class that really benefited from high velocities were light fighters. And in the legacy systems, there was not a lot of space for medium and heavy fighters. So in terms of what we're trying to make this more interesting in 1v1s, we're trying to break up that specific pattern where you have two ships circling each other and then they're feeling locked in. One of the tries that we did was actually adding more dynamic rotational speeds, so that when you hold boost, your boost pool needs to spool up first before it is expended, and then it actually not just gives you higher accelerations, it also gives you higher rotation rates and so on. That did a little bit, but not enough yet. We do hope that with other things, like smoothing accelerations out a little bit more so you don't get a super strong initial kick, but rather ramp them up, this will create enough diversity in the maneuvering so that we're getting to a better place with the 1v1s again. That said, six degrees of freedom is very hard to balance. Michael talked about the feeling of being locked in. Another worry that always comes up is the feeling of backstrafing. The backstrafing problem itself is just mathematically hard to solve, because you need to have an insane amount of acceleration to actually overcome a target that is accelerating backwards on you just to get around it, right? That's really, really complicated. So we're thinking about trying things out like X-shaped velocity spaces so that you can, for example, not fly as fast backwards as you can fly forwards. But what this exactly does with the dynamics is insanely hard to predict, even internally. Because even when we're playing internally, it produces some results, and sometimes we think, oh, yeah, this might work. But the actual test is only when we're playing with actual players and actually letting them play for a while, for a couple of days or weeks. So we can actually see if the new changes are creating some dominant strategies that then cannot be countered or something like that.