Zac Preece

Okay, so, I'm not on creatures anymore, but I did ask the people who were on creatures.

Oh, why not?

Oh, not because they're anything bad, but because it turns out me doing everything is not good for development. So we've got some great new people, we've got a creature team now that are more focused on it, don't have to share resources. Basically, working on it, dialing it in. I won't speak for their work, I'll just leave it at that.

I probably shouldn't have started with this question. I just wanted to get it out of the way. Basically, it's one of those things. We've been talking about this thing for so long at this point. I was just having a conversation with the newly minted creature team and whatnot, and the expectations on this are now, from being first introduced in 2016, from being brought back again in 2023. We've come really close to getting it where we wanted, but then there's just something that doesn't make it feel right. There's something that doesn't quite make it the apex experience we've been looking for. So they're still working, and I think you spent this amount of time on it, you want to be sure you get it right, or at least have the best chance of getting it right.

It's easier to make an FPS boss fight because there's a lot of contexts that you can refer to and you know it works. Name me a game where you have multiple people in multiple spaceships fighting a humongous worm and how you make that fun. Air and on the ground. That's in an MMO of a huge planet where the servers...

Still working on it. It's just wanting to make sure it's everything we want it to be.

So a lot of our older locations were built with just a lot less level design resource, essentially. But what we're trying to do now is that obviously this game is very heavy on PvE. There's always going to be PvP. That's never going to stop. And we've started building locations intended, basically intended for PvE. And those locations are always going to be more linear. They're always going to be more set up for that. When instancing comes online, that's not going to be a problem for everyone else either. You're going to go to a location and you know it's only going to be you, so you're going to enjoy your PvE gameplay. When it comes to PvP or PvP locations, with the bigger level design team now, we can actually focus on making sure that there are multiple entrances, the sight lines are actually cared for and ensured that it makes sense for multiple teams coming in from different angles, and that we just make sure that cover placement and all of that sort of stuff is up to scratch, basically.

The LD team's a lot bigger now as well compared to where it was two years ago.

We've gained six people in the last year.

I don't think it's inappropriate to say that level design was probably underserved in previous years of Star Citizen's development. Why that is, a variety of reasons, but it's been recognized in the last 12 months and the rectification is in process. Like you said, is it doubled? It's probably more than doubled at this point.

I think it's about doubled now.

We've still got a few more coming. So we recognized this challenge early on. We recognized we weren't doing enough to support it, and the fix for that is underway. I just saw a review of Starkitect locations on Tuesday, and you could see right away. I'm like, oh, these immediately look different than the stuff, not just with the visual stuff. I'm talking about the layout, with the amount of cover points, with the amount of interior, exterior, combined cover spaces where you're half inside, half outside, lots of moving in, moving out and stuff like this. The big towers, to make snipers incredibly deadly and stuff like that. There's a lot more effort going in, and I think the stuff we have coming down the pipe, Rock Cracker, and then going forward, the new Siege of Wars and the Municipal Works, are going to benefit from that renewed focus on level design.

Same as the Starkitect stuff as well in the future.

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, so this was the first year that I got to basically plan out all the weapons, and the first one on the list, obviously, that always gets mentioned is the crossbow. So I can confirm that the crossbow is coming this year. The main reason I think that we got that crossbow was because Rich is an original Shroud of the Avatar backer, so he is very interested in getting his skin. So yes, crossbow this year.

Before we move off the crossbow, it's not just going to be available to the folks who pledged for whatever level of Shroud of the Avatar. There are versions of it going into loot for everybody.

I believe they get a specific skin if they were Shroud of the Avatar.

But the crossbow weapon itself is going to be made available to everybody who plays Star Citizen today, either through loot or through a bundle or whatever, or if you did pledge at those specific Shroud of the Avatar levels, that specific skin. And the process of how you claim those will be made available to you when it comes time to add it to the game.

Yeah, so there's space [unclear], which is space, kind of based on a real gun sort of thing that people really like. Loads of people like the space AK. We've got a lever action rifle.

You're adding more space versions of existing weapons, like you did with the space AK?

Correct. No, I don't want to reveal it right now, because it's very cool, and it's something that people mention a lot, and I think it's fun to find out, but just a little tease. Med gun pistol. I'm very excited. We have a bullpup rifle. I want to say the name of it, and then as it comes out, you'll see, okay, cool. Med gun pistol, bullpup rifle, lever action rifle. And some more cool stuff later on as well. So that's some cool stuff that's coming this year. And well, sorry, let me be clear. Our intention is that those things come this year. And there's some other stuff that's not just it. We also spoke about, we've said we want an area denial grenade. We know that gadgets and utility are big requests and things like that. So those are the things I want to tease now. There's more than that, as we delivered a lot of weapons last year. We want to also deliver a lot of weapon content this year as well.

You just casually dropped there's going to be a lever action. A 30th century lever action.

The plan is that it's going to have revolving, evolving geo as well. You switch the fire modes and stuff like that. So leaning into taking it and making it really cool and sci-fi.

And your intention is for all these ones that you mentioned to arrive this year.

Yes. And some more of the cool stuff we planned out this year, in terms of looking how much we delivered last year, what can we deliver this year that is exciting and is really fun. So there's a hint on the bottom of what it is.

So this is, I'm assuming, a space lever action. And some railroad tracks.

And you'll have to figure out what that one is. And that one is stocked, not shouldered as well.

Okay, so there has basically been a lot of work on the player character, so from minor things in terms of how actions automate into each other. So we have something called a sprint toggle now, which is the default, which essentially means if I'm sprinting and I shoot, I have sprint to fire, so I don't start shooting when I'm down here, it comes back up, it's natural, it feels good. Even the new sprint pose, which is up here, which includes head bob. All of these things massively improve the experience that you get as you play the game. Previously, in 2023, when we showed all the FPS improvements at CitizenCon, where you think backpack reloading, you think ammo reporting and things like that, we're running on these things in Squadron and obviously polishing them up for the release. And all of the things that we are working on in Squadron will come to the PU in future. The action matrix is the biggest one. We've got sprinting while reloading. We've really been spending a lot of time dialing in that FPS experience and making it feel really polished. And even sprinting now, it's a really big thing for me, because the gun goes down here, it goes off screen, you can't see it. When it's up here and you feel like you're running and things like that, it just feels a lot more polished. It's very nice. The FPS experience basically has been dialed in a lot more. There is a bunch of stuff which escapes the top of my head right now. You know, I accidentally deleted the question, I realized. So yeah, as we said, with movement accelerations, melee improvements, that's a big one. So hey, you're not randomly going to go in front of you anymore. There's nicer animations there, how it follows up feels better. Weapons having consistent slots, so for people who have to constantly switch around and do those things, I know it's very annoying, but that is now, cool, I have weapon one, I have weapon two, they have consistent slots. The action matrix, oh yeah, for example, sprinting and medpenning now: if you press sprint, you press your medpen button, you medpen, then you automatically go back to sprinting, so sprint toggle, beautiful. And oh, my favorite one, weapon raise 2.0. So as you know right now, if you go up to a surface, you do this. We now have a procedural back like that, and it's very, very nice. We've also moved the pushback point to the optic. So for people who want to aim over railings and shoot over railings, you can now do that. I mean, the FPS experience overall is far smoother to play. FPS AI has basically been overhauled. Francesco Roccucci and Chris Roberts have themselves been very involved in that process as well. Chris has been very keen on making the AI experience in Squadron, so they've been working very closely together. Entirely new audio setup for guns. The guns sound absolutely amazing. The audio work on them has been incredible. Not just the sound that you hear, but also the mixing. So that's basically how loud shots are, how they feel. So if someone's down the other hallway and they're firing, it sounds like they're down the hallway, and it is honestly gorgeous. And all of that is planned to come to the Persistent Universe.

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.