Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Ships of Alpha 3.2

I don't think so. It's got them because it doesn't need to have the components of the larger ships, which have got extra roles and functionality that require those things. It's got a large power plant because it's got a lot of things to do, but the rest of the components that are medium are sort of capable for what its intended role is. It's not out there refining fuel like the Starfarer. It's not a supremely large target that needs to have all its power putting into shields. It sort of fits in with those other medium sized ships.

It's one of those hard things to really wrap your brain around from an outside design perspective until the full Item System 2.0 and component system fully come online. Until players are able to actually pull components out and swap them, increase the grade, change the class, whether it's civilian or military or industrial and whatnot. Until we actually start to get our hands on these components and start swapping them out and seeing the effect of each one on ships, this is a question that comes up quite a lot, is what I'm saying. It's going to be a hard thing for folks like me outside of design to really wrap our heads around until that day comes.

It's very hard to just see it from those stats and get sort of how it works together. You just see the numbers and the quantities and you have to put it together in your mind as to how it works, but there's a lot more that goes on in the middle. The exact same configuration in two ships could completely be different gameplay-wise.

And the easy thing to forget is also, just using the power plant for instance, it's not just the size of the power plant, but it is the consumption of the ship, how the ship itself is designed to consume power. So if the ship is a more efficient design, for instance, where it uses primarily ballistics instead of energy weapons, it's not going to need that big a drain on the power plant like another ship might.

Yeah, and there's other components in ships that aren't on the website, and they aren't swappable, so you don't see any interaction with them. Like heat sinks on ships, you can't swap them out, they're just part of the ship. So you could put a million coolers on a ship, but if that heat sink is quite tiny, it's not gonna do a great deal.

It's still there, but it won't be functional in the initial release. It's going to function the same as the big capital ship war globe hollow sphere things. So they are, in essence, a 3D radar that you have in your cockpit, scaled up, and rather than being little dots, they are the little mini ship models. So it is going to behave like that, but we're just not enabling that at the moment.

Whilst I'm here, I'll just say there's two things stopping us making it happen at the moment. First thing is we don't have the ability to change those little icons into mini 3D ships at the moment. So you just have the little small icons blown up really big, which looks terrible. And we don't have the ability to click on them to do targeting and selecting them, which is something Chris is really keen on having in all the ships. And in fact, even on the small 3D radars in ships, when you can zoom really far in, they will change into those 3D models, and then you can select on them if you want. It's the same as looking in that direction and targeting it. When we have those, then the big ships which have those big holospheres will get all that essentially for free.

Ships that were built a long time ago don't have the same considerations put into them as ships built today. Some of them are intentional. If it's a bed, then without an example, it's hard to tell you why or why not it doesn't have it. But for research ships, if it's just got a bed, then it's something we're not wanting you to spend a long time away from base in, because you're not going to have the food and hygiene facilities. The bed's there for essentially the log in, log out. Ones that do have the beds and toilets and showers and the toilet shower combo that everyone loves are there for the extended duration stuff. So where you can go out, land on the planet,

Yeah, it's hard to talk about it in general because, like I said, without specific examples to speak to, like most things in life, things happen for a variety of reasons. This was this way because of these three factors that existed at that time. This happened this way because of those two factors that existed two years later when those developers were on it. So it's hard to give kind of a blanket answer why that is.

It's part of my role as well now, to make sure everything has everything it should do. There's always the human error.

The only thing that's changed on that component-wise is the weapon hardpoints on the wings have gone up by one size. It still comes gimballed by default, but they're now gimballed size 2s, I think.

It got a weapon size upgrade, but as far as the internal components, there was nothing that required the internal components to change.

Nothing internal was changed component-wise. The main reason for doing that rework was simply that really cramped interior space, so making that a more pleasant traversal experience. And once we did that, the rest of it had to change because it looked ridiculous with just this extended and stretched middle section. You've got a mental image of the old Avenger with just the middle bit a third larger. It looks silly. And then when we did that, the guns on the wings looked tiny.

The other thing that changed is the nose mount is no longer bespoke and locked. So the Tigerstrike is gone for now. In its place is a size 4 mount with the size 3 Mantis, the new Mantis, on there by default. The Tigerstrike will come back in the future. It's just we didn't have time to make another size 3 Gatling just for that run.

Now when you say the Tigerstrike will be back in the future, you mean just in general, or it will be back as part of the Avenger default line?

It'll be back as a general size 3 ballistic Gatling that can go on any ship.

As far as when we update the stats, there's usually just the concept stats and then there's the when-it's-built-and-implemented stats. We tried once a while back to do these incremental stat increases, but honestly, it's just a lot of busy work. It's having to say, oh, this changed, and then you make the change, and then a day later, nope, we thought that was gonna change, it's not gonna change. And instead of just playing with everybody's emotions and updating them as they go up and down throughout development, we just figured let's do it at two milestones: at the concept phase and when it's implemented in-game. And then after that, should there be any changes, of course, when they happen. Those are the times that you can expect updates on ship stats. So when you're asking about when will they be updated, the next time that they could conceivably be updated is when it goes live.

So they definitely weren't correct when the concept was, and we did a quick fix on the, I was going to say HoloViewer, but it's not the HoloViewer, it's the ship stats page. To my knowledge, at the moment, what's on there is what it will be at launch. But as you said, if it's not, then it will be changed then. The only thing that likely is going to change is the size is going to not be a rounded number. If an artist has gone and put a fin on the width of it somewhere that we haven't noticed before and it's made it a meter wider, that's really the only level of changes to expect. The components are the same.

I wouldn't say it'll be in full swing, but it's going to be more improved than 3.1.4 is for the Sabre. With 3.2 we've got some big changes to Item 2.0, so the components in the ships are now consuming power and that power use changes depending on what you're doing rather than just being a flat amount. We've done a complete overhaul of the numbers for power and heat across multiple items, and then scanning, the very first version of it, is coming with mining. The majority of it's for mining at the moment, but it is going to be on all the ships. So you will be able to use it for scanning. And because we've done all the tweaking on the numbers side, the Eclipse especially has very low signatures. I was playing with it earlier today. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but the Eclipse was about a half to a third of what the Sabre's emissions were, which itself was about half a Hornet or a Gladius.

I do want to add on there, when he says the scanning is primarily with mining and that the scanning will be on all ships, that is not the same as saying all ships will be able to mine. All ships will not be able to mine in 3.2. We'll actually talk about which ships can mine in 3.2 towards the end of the show.

This goes back to the whole modules versus variants thing we discussed on one of these a while ago. We're still not sure which way we want to go with those Avengers. There was a lot of promises for both sides, so we're going to have to decide one way or the other. And when we do, we'll communicate that. It will either be they're fixed variants, you can't take them out, and if you've got one of them, that's the one you've got; you would need to get a different ship essentially to get the other ones. Or we go down the fully modular route, where everyone that got the three individual ones will now just have the one ship with the modular pieces. At the moment, it's going to stay as a variant and you can't remove them, but that's not the final answer.

If you want the short version of the history, for those of you who weren't around: there was the Avenger. When we introduced the EMP module, we originally intended to present them as modules, but the player-facing modular system wasn't online then. It's not online now. We wanted to get EMP gameplay into the game so we could start testing, so we implemented the Avenger as variants. As opposed to their original intention as modules, they've been variants for a number of years and everybody's sort of used to them as variants right now. So until such time as the player-facing modular system is ready to go and those decisions have to be made, we will continue to weigh our options. We will continue to read your feedback and we'll let you know when we have that decision.

Essentially, the Mustangs weren't ready enough for it. They needed a bit extra time. And as soon as you miss that, we have a feature lock date that is six, seven weeks before the release date. If stuff is not ready by that date, then it moves to the next one. It just wasn't ready in time for that date, so we moved it.

Some features have a locked date six to seven weeks out. Some features have a locked date sooner, and we're going to talk about that later in the show. The ship team, they have their feature lock date earlier. Other teams, they will push things right to the level. Plus, the Avenger rework had the benefit of being utilized in Squadron 42, so it got kind of a head start. It was originally started by the Squadron 42 ship team, wasn't it?

Yes, and it started a lot sooner than the Mustangs. I don't know when they officially started, so I'm not going to speculate, but I know the Avenger was started last year for the livestream.

I wouldn't say we've intentionally moved away from it. To create the whole breadth of ships that we need for the universe, there has to be some that have a sole focus. We did a huge push on modular ships early on, and they come in waves. We'll do a load of specific career-focused ones, specific role-focused ones, then we'll do a couple of modular ones. It's not been a general order to move away from those things. It's just we needed those specific ones.

And of course, from my side of things, from the marketing, the promotion and stuff like that, the player-facing modular system isn't in-game, and you always want to be careful how many things you promise. We've committed to a number of things using the player modular system. The Endeavor, for instance, lives and breathes by it. The Retaliator utilizes it. The Vanguards essentially use the player modularity system. So it's one of those things where it's prudent on our end, when we ask for things, to let that player-facing modularity system develop a bit more before we start making the requests from our end: hey, can we do this, can we do that. I just think it's the responsible thing to do on our end.

There are also things that can do lots of things. They're desirable for a small set of people that really love the ability to do everything. But as a wider concept, they lack a focus naturally because they're multi-role. So it's very hard to get excited about something that can do lots of things mediocrely rather than one thing that can do it really well.

The worst marketing tagline in the world would be "jack of all trades and master of none". Nobody wants to be told their ship isn't really good at anything because we made it too broad.

Yep. So armor is going to be a swappable item on the ships in the future. It's sort of there as something that functions on the Hornet series. The Tracker or the Ghost, one of them, has an armor that's different to the others. And that is an item that is not a visible item, but it's an item that adjusts the functionality of the armor behavior. And that's something we want to do for all ships in the future. And it can do anything from what armor does best, in reducing damage; we can change that by damage type, so you could choose to have an armor that is better against energy weapons at the expense of something else, or you can have one that is better at absorbing signals from yourself so you're harder to spot, which is what the Tracker or Hornet Ghost does. What's stopping us from really pushing ahead on that is we want to then have a visual change, because having stuff that just changes some numbers behind the scenes isn't that exciting, whereas if you put the item on and your ship visibly changes, that's much nicer. But the art guys are really, really hesitant to take their lovely ships and just cover them with armor plates as a visual styling. So it's sort of doing rounds of look dev every now and then to go, how can we convey this thing without making it look like an Abrams with ceramic armor all over it.

They are better at it. They can see much, much further doing it. These are not the exact numbers, but they're numbers for the sake of giving numbers: if normal ships can only scan 15 kilometers, the Terrapin and other scanning ships are going to be 30, 40, 50. So they are going to be able to detect things much further away. Their sensitivity is much better. So not only can they see things further away, they can see things closer that other ships can't see. So those stealth ships, which do have the lower emissions, they stand a better chance of being able to detect them and scan them. So stealth ships might be able to be targeted by regular ships at certain ranges, but it's just going to be a blob. You're not going to know what it is. There's this dot that's moving across my screen that my ship cannot scan because it hasn't got enough of a signature to tell me, oh, it's an Eclipse. Whereas something like a Terrapin is going to go bloop: there's a ship here, it's an Eclipse, it's piloted by this person, and it's got this health.

Visually, not in 3.2. It's something we've talked about. It's just something we haven't put on a schedule yet. Obviously, the Scythe and Glaive are from a time where the Vanduul visual aesthetic was quite different, and everything since then is a lot more different. It's something we want to do, but there's been no commitment to any dates for doing it.

It's also something that still needs to be investigated a bit. If you watch the Ship Shape on the Vanduul Blade, one of the things we talked about is how the Vanduul as a species take their technology from other places. So a Vanduul aesthetic can be quite all over the place. So it's well within the lore for, okay, when we build Scythes and Glaives, we've learned over the years to take from these sources, and when we build Blades, we've learned to take from these sources. So they can be quite visually different if the decision is made not to carry over.

Like I say, you could put the Vanduul family next to each other. The Scythe and Glaive look different, but they don't look like they've come from a different alien race.