Star Citizen: February Subscriber's Town Hall feat. Lore Team
The lore team covers the planned Galactapedia (website first, then mobiGlas) and ongoing Star Map updates, including a public changelog. They also discuss alien species and languages, player names in history, NPCs, retcons, the novella, underground cities like Levski, and how lore will reach players in game.
TL;DRThe team has made plans with Turbulent to launch the Galactapedia and is deciding what content to debut first, while compiling a lore canon of characters, places and events to draw on.
Yeah, and as one of the long-term things, I've been going through and helping compile a lore canon that collects lots of people, places, events, and starts to break that down so when it does come time to put it into the Galactapedia format, we already have a base of a lot of that information ready to go.
Yeah, Adam's been great about culling through all the old news updates and stories that we've released so far and making sure that all the stuff that we threw out when we were writing at the time has been logged and tracked so that we can make it an easy reference guide.
Yeah, I think through May of 2014, there are already 300 plus characters that were mentioned in official lore so far. And that's only May of 2014, so there's still more to slog through and find the right place for.
From what we've been talking about with Turbulent, the first place it'll go live is most likely the website. And then it'll also hopefully be easily available from your mobiGlas, is one thing we've been talking about. So we'll have to see how it shakes out. But that would be really great to have it as an in-game and out-of-game reference.
I can answer that one for sure. I've been trickling in updates as I get them, as we confirm what we want on the Star Map. I've been adding them. I've been keeping a changelog and we've been talking with Turbulent about making that changelog public.
Well, I think that one specifically, while we don't quite know exactly how the clothing system is going to work, I know one thing Dave had mentioned a while back is that he would love if players might have the option to be wearing flip-flops and shorts while flying their ship. That said, if you get in a firefight and you get vented out into space, you're toast. But we haven't confirmed whether that's going to be allowable, but I know that was a dream Dave once had. So hopefully we can make it in-game. I guess we'll have to see. Mostly because it would just be funny.
We have the high-level rating systems going on right on the high level, where we track the economy and the security level and the population. But we're still working with the PU design team on figuring out more the specifics of what a threat level would be, how is that going to be spread across the system? It's not like an entire system will be as dangerous throughout. It's going to have pockets of more dangerous hotspots and not. So we're still talking through how that's going to work specifically with the gameplay before we build in too much of that information on the lore side of things.
Yeah, I mean, the era of piracy definitely was part of conversations early on in the development. Like Ben and Chris, we would talk about that type of stuff. So it was definitely influencing it. And again, for a lot of this stuff, we use it as sort of a launching place, and then we create the projects of the universe, and then make it unique and make it our own. So I think there's elements that you could look at that would be directly influencing the game, but mostly, once it starts to take a life of its own, we wanted to develop how it would be narratively exciting and fun.
TL;DRPlayers should be able to create new history for a system, and the team hopes to track and record newsworthy player actions, though only impactful ones would be memorialized, not trivial ones.
Yeah, really, once it gets to the newsworthy level of actions or something big enough happens, hopefully we'll be watching that on a game level and being able to track and incorporate that into the lore is really our hope.
If the economy of a system tanks because resources are down or crime is up, then that ideally would affect the look of the area or the direction that the system takes, because there's now a crime-ridden system rather than a neutral one.
Yeah, we were talking to the environment artists about the potential of maybe being able to have the economy affect how much litter you find on the ground or how much graffiti is on the wall. So the worse a place is off economically, the more dirty and grungy it's going to look, and vice versa. So if you help an area out, if you start shipping more and more stuff to it, maybe it starts cleaning up its act a little bit.
But a player's ability to impact the way the history is written depends on the extent of the impact of what they're doing. We probably won't memorialize you having a beer.
On the Galactapedia side, as it updates, as the game unfolds, as the game is fully released, we would very much like to be able to record impactful player events, like taking down a well-known pirate, for example. That's what we really want to do.
Yeah, it's just the challenge of finding the right threshold on which you go from, like John said, just being another person out there, being a part of the solution or part of the problem, to actually doing enough of something to become well known for it. Sort of like life.
TL;DRInappropriate player names might be handled by UEE vetting of names, or by separating account names from character display names; how this is shown is still to be figured out.
We've talked. I mean, we sort of created our own failsafe for it. The early discussions were that you could name a system, but it would have to be vetted by the UEE before they would accept it as the actual name, which would give us a buffer. But, I mean, if CorruptU4Fun1 kills the Dread Pirate Roberts...
And also, I mean, we might have it so that your RSI website account name is not, we might allow you to have your fictional display name as well, so that your account name is CorruptU4Fun1, but your character's name is George.
So yeah, we'll have to figure out how all that information is displayed and the diegetic versus non-diegetic nature of that info. Luckily, we have some time.
It's usually kind of an open conversation. I mean, very early on, we had talked about this with alien species in very broad strokes, but as the team grew, when people started conceiving stuff, more people get linked into the conversation, their art needs and animation needs and stuff like that. So we still contribute to the conversation, but there are more people involved in it.
TL;DRDiversity comes from explicitly asking casting for it and from naming characters by mixing first and surnames from different countries, partly at random, since national boundaries have dissolved in the Empire.
It's definitely the case when we're naming characters, because one of the ideas is that international boundaries have dissolved in the Empire. Now it's more about planets. So before, where you would have these names that were segregated by what country you were from, those boundaries have definitely eroded away. So as we develop names, it's kind of fun sometimes. A good method is to take a first name from one country and a surname from another country and combine them in interesting ways.
Yeah, I personally keep a stack of magazines at my desk and sometimes I'll just open one up to one page and choose a first name, open it up to another and choose a second name, and just try to put something together that way. Making every name a reference or named after someone, it takes too much thought. Sometimes when you're writing, you just need a name, and sometimes it's best just to make it slightly more random.
It's really kind of both, and it's great that way. We'll come up with a fun idea and go pitch it to Design and vice versa. Design will come up with a really fun scenario and come to us to help spice it up or smooth out the corners of it to make it make sense in the universe. So it's a lot of conversation back and forth, and I kind of think that's the way game development should be.
I mean, it's worth noting that Chris is very intent on the game feeling cinematic and hanging on to a really cinematic sense of story and character. So the two things dovetail a lot. I think the writing team drives the story and the dramatic parts of the game, and then when it turns into gameplay, design has some ascendancy in that. But it's definitely an ongoing collaboration.
So far, I mean, having children included in video games is always a bit of a risky proposition, because, to be frank, violence against children falls into a different category, and so by including them you suddenly open up all these possibilities of situations that you may not want players getting into. So whether we're going to have them in locked-down areas or not, they're also a whole different set of animations and models and stuff. So right now, I think they're pretty low down the list. It'd be a question more for Chris, I guess. I think we'll definitely have couples that you'll see around. We'll have to talk to Bender about getting an animation where two people are walking with their hands in each other's back pockets.
TL;DRTechnically all lore can be retconned, but the team avoids it, especially for firmly established points, because the game is public-facing and one small change ripples into many others.
I mean, we can. I try not to retcon. Personally, I don't like retconning unless absolutely necessary. But technically, it's all malleable. It's just we're developing in a public face, so it's a little weird. We have to choose what we can retcon. Usually, if it's something really firmly established, I think we try to do whatever we can to not retcon it. But if it's little details, it's OK to amend it to save us some trouble down the line or make something else work.
Yeah, I would say, under normal circumstances, you'd be free to retcon whatever up until release, right? But because we're so public facing, it does give you an additional challenge.
Yeah, there's a lot of ripples from when you change one small detail, and we see it all the time. We'll try to adjust something, and then it really spiderwebs quickly into a whole bunch of smaller other changes.
Yeah, because the game is so story-driven, there's like a film version of an ecology to it, and it's shocking how much impact one small change can make, so it requires a lot of care.
I mean, part of it is also the idea that it has to exist in its own right within the reality of the game. So it can't stand out too much. But if you dig just under the surface, you can catch the reference. Yeah, I mean, you're not going to find The Big Lebowski as Jeff Lebowski in the game, because that wouldn't make sense. But there's a guy who's known as a dude who wears sunglasses, maybe, then it becomes a little bit more palatable, because they can exist within that reality and make sense.
I'm working on it, actually. I've been developing it over the holiday, the Christmas break. That was about two weeks of actually working intensely on the novella. Yeah, no, I think it'll be cool. I'm not going to spoil anything yet, but it's going to be really fun.
TL;DRProcedural generation hasn't been worked with closely yet; planets are hoped to be built from lore specs and scientific data, while the current tech is still being developed and tested.
All planets started, kind of, the Star Map was very lore-based, and we talked about stuff with design, a lot of that of what would make this system interesting and unique, what were these planets like. Procedural generation, we haven't worked too closely with yet, but they will be hopefully building the planets off the specs that we've outlined, especially now that we're starting to pull in real scientific data from our consultants to help the procedural generation team set parameters for the planets they're building.
Well, Crusader in 2.0 and 2.1 was the size of Jupiter, just to see how big they could make a planet. It wasn't the intended size. The goal was they wanted to see how big they could make a planet, and now they're attempting to size the planet to what it's supposed to be.
Oh, no. I'm still organizing that. The thing is that there's always new content being produced. And so it's like fighting a mountain, basically. You just fight a little bit of it every day and make sure that you keep the pile of the mountain that you fought in one corner. And eventually, you'll have a mountain of your own. And then the mountain will be a hill. But it'll always be producing pieces of content, and it'll always be managed. It is what I do about 60% of the time, and I spend about 40% of the time on the Star Map.
TL;DRWriting the political intricacies is described as fun: the team is fleshing out alien species' perspectives and wants them to have the same morally gray complexity as the UEE.
I mean, it's something we've been fleshing out, as we keep talking about in these interviews we do, about how we're fleshing out more of the lore and backstory for the alien species. And it's really getting that balance of what each species' unique perspective is on these different topics and trying to balance them out and make them have their own unique flair. So going through how they treat crime and how they view slavery, and juxtaposing that with how the UEE feels about stuff. So that's been pretty great. And very recently we've been putting out a little bit more content in the more recent news updates and in this month's subscriber-supported Jump Point magazine. So we've been releasing more alien-based content as we firm up our background work. So that's been a lot of fun.
Yeah, it's a fun thing to do, just because by knowing some of those very basic concepts of the different species, it not only informs the species, but it can also greatly inform the systems or the planets on the border or in the region, or their development history. So that is one of the fun things, to think about how life in a certain system or how a culture developed in a certain area based on its mixture of Xi'an influences or Banu influences, on top of whatever astronomical features made that system special too. So it's fun how small strands like that can affect the game in different areas.
And we spent so much time with the UEE, trying to make them feel like a really textured and morally gray political system and society, that we want to make sure that all the other ones have that same type of complexity and richness to them and feel compelling and interesting and have lots of opportunities for really cool stories, basically.
Not directly. It's really hard to write that stuff just as a straight-up, like, I'm going to write this book. We tend to seed it into other documents that we write, like news updates and portfolios and stuff like that, just to try and figure out how specific aspects of it work. But maybe it might be fun to put together a straight-up field manual for the Advocacy.
TL;DRXi'an may have evolved as carrion eaters with heavily spiced, texture-based food, and their culture is starting to come into focus through internal documents, though nothing is approved yet.
Something really fun that will probably not have much game impact, which is why I'm choosing this as my tidbit, is that we've been talking about the possibility that they evolved as carrion eaters, that they eat rotting plants and animals as the preferred food choice. And part of that is that their spicing is very heavy to make up for the fact that their taste buds are less sensitive than ours. As well as that, their spicing tends more to be texture-based, so a lot of prickling or numbing sensations in their spices. So if you go eat at a Xi'an restaurant, you might get a well-fermented, wilted plant seasoned with a prickly, numbing heat. So there you go, Xi'an tidbit.
This last Jump Point with the focus on Aopoa and Kaiifa was a lot of fun, to dip into the Xi'an and start to talk about them internally. There are a few unapproved docs that we have floating around that have started to sketch out ideas and visions for their culture and so forth. And it was a lot of fun to spend some time talking about that and starting to develop that. So they're definitely coming into focus, and it'll be fun to reveal more of those attributes as we go along.
The other week I was talking with one of the designers about how fun it's going to be when we have the possibility of a first ship coming out once the PU is live. So a company actually launching a new ship in the 'verse, and experiencing that fiction through your character, would be an exciting way to use the lore of a company that way. Scandals would be really interesting. We had the Goldfinch scandal with Origin, which was fun. So stuff like that popping up in game. Maybe recalls. Recalls would be really interesting too. And we've done that before in the back end of lore, but as a way to, when we're doing a bug fix or something, we can skin it as that. So hopefully a lot of different ways. And a lot of advertising everywhere for the companies, when you visit Cry-Astro filling stations or showrooms and stuff, having those companies advertised as well.
TL;DRLore dates have rarely needed retconning because the long history leaves gaps and latitude, though expanding the number of star systems forced some dates to be repositioned.
I mean, we've been pretty good about them so far. I think with a lot of this stuff, at least with the current developments of Vega II and Bishop's campaign, these things don't happen on a dime. So we have a little bit of latitude. We try to build that in, I guess, to make it a bit easier, but at least particularly with the Vanduul war, I think we have some latitude as to when events happen around the ones that we've established. So we have room to play, and we don't paint ourselves too badly into a corner.
Yeah, 900 years of history is a lot of time. So Dave did a really good job at the start laying these foundations through This Day in History and a really broad timeline. And so there's these big gaps, though. And with that much time, it's pretty easy just to toss something in between two different dates and have it work out for the most part. Dates, I think, have so far been one of the things we've had to retcon least. They've been pretty sticky.
Yeah, because it was the systems, actually. Once we started building the system maps, because originally, at the initial phase, the PU was only, I think, supposed to be 20 or 30 star systems, and then it expanded. So the ones that we had already created expanded out, and suddenly there were now 100 or 110 or whatever the number is. So the Time Capsule had established dates that now had to be transposed to this new arrangement of systems. So some of them got a little funky. Specifically, the system where first contact with the Banu happened was much closer to Earth, but when the map expanded, suddenly it was far away from the Banu. So it didn't really make sense. So we had to figure out how to place it so it made sense in the narrative, again, without retconning too badly.
Yeah, I forgot about that, all the hard work you did on that discovery timeline, making sure when the Star Map was final that we were discovering things in the right order, because I think there were a couple of instances where a system that was really far away had originally been discovered much sooner than was humanly possible.
TL;DRHuman language is not being changed much, since heavy slang is hard to write and localize; new terms are sprinkled in, with some content like Booty Call and StarWatch using more slang.
I mean, we have the Cathcart slang, the sort of pirate cant type thing. I've sort of kept it somewhat similar, just because it's easier to write, and it can get a little obtuse if you need a dictionary to understand what a person's saying to you. And also, it gets trickier once localization comes into the picture. I don't even know how we handle that type of stuff.
Yeah, it's the same way that movies will often have characters that should be speaking a foreign language just speak with an accent instead, because of having to deal with an audience understanding the material. I think a recent example is The Witch, which was trying to be historically accurate as much as possible, but even their Old English isn't really Old English, because no one would be able to understand it. So for that sake, we've been going lighter on it and just sprinkling in new terms when needed. Booty Call has probably been one of the heaviest on slang. Between that and StarWatch, which is using all the pop culture slang, we've been introducing new words. Everyone loves 'blading'. Cargo Olympics.
No, it's not an accurate representation of the physical locations. We are still working with the designers to make sure that the stuff on the Star Map will eventually be in the place where they want the planets in the PU. And so the Star Map is a continuously evolving thing. But the jump points that we have in place are accurate as far as our work with the designers.
I mean, the upcoming Nyx landing zone is an example of that. Levski is underground. It's an old mining facility that's been taken over. So that's completely sealed up.
I think there's one in Banshee, too. Banshee has a pulsar, I think. So I think that would make that planet uninhabitable. But there's lots of mining there, so everyone lives underground there.
TL;DRThe Galactapedia is meant to be pure, unfiltered information, unlike flavored Galactic Guides or scholarly papers, and it's not clear whether it's an ARC publication.
Can you recall if we actually established that the Galactapedia was a publication of the ARC? I mean, it makes sense. The nice thing about the ARC is that they try to be independent, so we don't have to worry about through whose lens this history is being told, so they can be a bit more impartial and a bit more objective. But I don't recall, actually.
Yeah, the Galactapedia is going to be that pure information, whereas we've already established more flavor-text-based information. The Galactic Guides, for instance, definitely have their own tone to them when they're describing these planets and systems, versus what you would expect from the Galactapedia, which would be more just pure, unfiltered information. I figure the same would probably go for going to a library at a university or something. You would be getting more scholarly papers, which would be different from the information you would expect in a Galactapedia.
No, the scholarly paper stuff would just be, you would find a short little excerpt, like you see in other games, where we just do a couple of paragraphs for fun and flavor of research being done at a university or something like that.
I'm estimating around 60, but I need to actually check the spreadsheets to be absolutely sure. I can have a solid answer for you if I can check my data.
We haven't been playing into that more fantastical aspect as much. We've definitely been drawing from history a bunch, as Dave described earlier, taking things as seeds, as starting nuggets, before we spin off in our wild Star Citizen directions. But as we start doing more of those creepy PU missions, maybe we'll start looking at weirder and wilder stuff.
TL;DRThe Galactapedia is hoped to give light summaries, with deeper lore found through varied in-world sources like locations, product packaging and advertising; this is still being explored with missions.
So that's a good question, and something we're starting to explore as we develop out missions. I'm hoping that it's going to be a wide variety of sources to come across. With what you'll be able to garner from the Galactapedia, we were talking about the Galactapedia being a go-to for very light summaries of everything. So maybe on Terra Mills, you'd get a short description of the company. But if you wanted the full history of them, for example, you would have to go visit their mill on Bremen. And then when you're on that planet, you would be able to learn more about that company, or maybe when you pick up a box of their tasty snack, you look on the back and they have a little write-up about their company that you can read. So blending in that immersion versus just throwing huge amounts of data at you. I think you make more of a connection with information when you've earned it yourself. So I like that approach.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of these things are also used as launching points, because we get asked a lot to come up with backgrounds for these companies for artists to start designing component parts, for example, and stuff like that. So exactly as Will said, you can infer the personality of Terra Mills or some of these companies just based on their advertising, the quality of their products, stuff like that. So you can get your own sense of it. And that's sort of the fun thing about what Chris is building here, that we can do that type of really involved deep dive into these companies, where normally you would just slap together a product with some stats and kick it out the door. But as we're doing ad campaigns and stuff like that, we can really make it pretty rich and really fun. So you get to determine the lore on your own based on how they're presenting themselves to you, rather than, as Will said, just finding a paragraph or two that sums them up completely in an almost meta way.
It's a little bit mind-blowing, actually, already, what we have available for these background write-ups on these companies. I can't think of a few other games that would have a couple of pages written up on a vending machine manufacturer. So that is just really exciting on its own.
Active ones? We've come across a couple, we've mentioned in the lore a couple of civilizations that have collapsed, or we found the ruins of them. Hadesians.
Well, yeah, we have the developing systems that are protected planets, where we have alien life that may become a civilization. We're watching that grow. As far as not-announced alien species... we haven't announced any.
I think the Kr'Thak is going to be a big moment when that does happen, and that's going to happen once the game launches, so that's farther down the road.