Star Citizen Live: Mission Features Q&A

And the answer is when a gameplay team creates data running as a gameplay system, as a loop, then you guys can create missions.

Yeah, because on that we could fake it, but what's the point in that? We might as well wait and give you the real, true, intended experience.

We might invent things that the real owner of that feature doesn't necessarily want it to be. So we do two things: we basically mess with expectations of players, and we also waste work on us. Annoy people who are also developers. And then in the end result, we have to backpedal all of our work and redo it once they've done the feature. And then we also have egg on our face. So it's a pretty bad way of working.

One of the terms we use internally is downstream. You're not as downstream as audio is. Audio has to wait for everybody to do their stuff before they can get in there, because before they make the sound of a ship, they need to see the profile, how big it is, how aggressive it looks, how janky or how slick and smooth it looks, and they build a profile that matches that. You guys are somewhere in the middle, but still downstream of a lot of other teams, downstream of at least the gameplay design teams.

I mean, we still make stuff ourselves, and sometimes we own those things, like the law system. Or even the spawn closets are part of our team, which is why it ends up in a lot of missions. It's why it works perfectly.

Yes, we're going to want more variety when it comes to FPS missions. When it comes to stuff like convoy assault, again, with us being a downstream dependency, it requires things like AI to be able to drive a convoy for assaulting one that's already in process. It comes with other things like making sure that we have a route set up and we can send you to intercept.

The main one is trying to enforce something with ground vehicles. A mission with ground vehicles where we have to say you have to use a ground vehicle, we have to contrive why you would stay in that. You've got ships.

Just put the ground vehicle on the ship and do it. It's very difficult. We've talked about stuff like having electrical storms on planets and things like that, but they're feature requests that are in, and when we get the time and scheduling, we'll get to them and we'll be able to do this sort of stuff, because we need to have some sort of situation that goes to the player, kind of like how we did with Siege, where we go, you can't use your ships. You can only use this method of vehicle to be able to ensure that you can achieve it.

Yeah, that was our contrivance in that scenario to enforce a kind of gameplay scenario we really wanted to achieve.

But again, as gameplay teams and other feature teams add things like the electrical storm that create situations, then you won't have to fake a situation.

No, you won't, because it will be a systemic thing and it will all work as you would expect it to.

In Siege, if we took away the no-fly zone, someone will bring a Carrack and just mow down the entire platform and then just drop bombs on it. So having a reason to remove that ability, even though obviously the game is massively about ships, it's about having multiple gameplay styles and catering to everyone.

I just want to say one other thing about those ground vehicles: right now we have AI working on making it so that they will be able to drive those vehicles on the planets and stuff. But it's still obviously possibly some distance from them being competent in both firing and driving. So there are other reasons. We could probably have static vehicles, but you might argue, what's the point? It's not much fun blowing up static vehicles.

Yeah, so the thing that happened with the mission givers is that the team that owned mission givers went through some movement around of personnel, and so the ownership kind of fell away a little bit. But the narrative team now own mission givers, which makes a lot more sense because, I mean, they design the characters, they write their words, they build their lore. So it makes a lot of sense that they would own it. They're also building their own designers in the narrative team, so there are actual people who design stuff and make things. So now they also have people to work on them and improve them. So there is definitely a focus on getting them up, working better and maybe introducing more or improving various things about them. So yeah, they will come back and they will get better.

There's this movement internally. We would really like to get that going, get those back. I know the narrative team has so much intended for these people, including Tessa Bannister.

To add a little bit more to it, the credence to those designers: the designer working on it is our former embedded QA. He became a designer and he came from our strong stock. We trust his abilities to bring the best.

Yeah, so the way we think about missions that would be aimed at large groups or organizations is that we kind of have a philosophy that the more complex the objectives are, the more they're intended for larger groups. Right now, a lot of our missions are quite simple in their combination of objectives or the number of objectives you have to do at the same time. Obviously, something like Siege of Orison is a good example of something with multiple things, and the intention there is multiple players play together. However, outside of dynamic events, we want to make sure that we have content that is suitable to divvy up to a crew of players and whatnot. So we're aware that players like this because they demonstrate it in Xenothreat and Siege, where people play, they do different things, different roles. And so we're aware that there's an appetite.

For example, one of our missions that's fairly newly announced, it's on the roadmap now, the Data Heist mission. That one is a mission that a skilled player probably would be able to do on their own, but it's one of these missions that puts a lot of stress on that one player if they were to do it. First, you've got enemies that you're going to be contending with in the UGFs. On top of that, you're basically uploading data to a handler, like an offsite hacker. And to do that, you basically... I'm losing my train of thought, so you're going to have to take over. So you've got the FPS guys, then you've got these downloads that can be interrupted. When they're interrupted, someone needs to run around looking for codes to enter into servers to prevent them from losing their data. And then you've got to get to them before they overheat, and then you lose the data and you lose the mission.

Anyway, point is, a single player is doing a lot of stressful things in one go. But a crew of players, a bunch of players who want to play together and make the most out of that, well-oiled machines, are probably going to work their way through that and have one person doing this, one person doing that, coordinating well. And that mission is clearly designed probably better to be worked on as a group. And in addition to that, a mission like that, if we were to make it, and we are making it like that, we would make sure that we'd put a reward on it that would be meaningful for a group of players. Obviously, single player, great payday, but you did a lot of work for it. Whereas a group of players, you're working to get the best out of it and not be so stressed, but the payoff is still worth your time. So yeah, it's a consideration.

Yeah, PvP missions in our game are a bit more of a challenge to do because it always relies on two people wanting to do the same thing. So what we try to do instead is not give you an objective that's directly like "kill Ed"; instead we put you in a sort of mission flow that has parts of vulnerability where the player can do these sorts of acts. For example, Jumptown: we only want you to deliver Maze. Whatever bloodthirsty murdering you do is strictly on you as a person and your choice there.

Exactly. And that's fine.

So our intention is to put you in a situation that allows you to take advantage and think, right, well, if I kill this person, I could come out on top, the risk versus reward. So that's the sort of thing we're trying to do. Jumptown, Kareah; we have other things in the pipeline that are going to also try to pull this sort of gameplay in, with the new resource rush stuff, the asteroid mining we've talked about. That is an open area where people will go in and fight, same sort of thing. We're not going to tell you to kill anyone, but if you want the high profits, you're probably going to do it.

And then there's always the classic: one mission to one group of people that says go here and do the thing, and then a mission to another group of people that says maybe go to the same place and do something else.

If it was a delivery mission and we sent you after the same box, both of you, one of you is going to win.

Well, we wouldn't do it that way, per se. Like your missions coming up, the salvage ones?

I mean, salvage ones, you take them off, yeah.

Yeah, salvage ones, you could take them off. So in which case, I guess the way that we probably would do this is we treat the wrecks as effectively like a loot box. So its loadout is potentially good. It's potentially got cool and interesting components on it. So if you happen to be salvaging this ship that we've spawned for you and it's good, well, your reward is in the cool stuff you find, isn't it? I think we'd do it that way rather than, let's say, here's your reward for completing this mission and it's a component. So that's how I think we think about it, really.

We like to use our missions to set up situations. And then if you are proactive in that situation and you do a little extra due diligence and you search something, we provide opportunities for you to discover other things. But I can't think of a single mission in our game that's specifically "go and do this and I'm going to give you this item as a reward."

We don't do item rewards at the moment, so no.

Again, that's not to say that we won't ever. We've learned never to say never here, but just at the moment, that's not really the direction.

I think a good point on what Ed was saying, and I've said this in multiple Twitch chats, so I guess it's good to say here and put it all in one place, is that when it comes to salvage, your main thing you'll do is hull scraping. However, now with the item port detaching, you can take the guns off and the components and sell them. Not only that, we populate the cargo hold with random assortments of cargo. So there's extra value.

Random, or a bit more chosen to be a bit more interesting to you.

We play with it. So you could go do a ship, you could scrape all of it, take all its guns and then go into the hold and it's full of something that's incredibly expensive. So what goes from being, oh, I've just hull scraped this entire ship and got like 500,000 UEC, becomes a 2.2 million payout because of the items on the ship and the cargo hold.

Yeah, we would like in the future the way that you obtain missions to be a slightly more personable experience. But at the end of the day, you're not really ever going to get away from a scenario where you are using your mobiGlas to read mission descriptions or see the objectives or even accept them. When you go to Eckhart, when you sit down with him, you do a little chitchat, you still bring up your mobiGlas to accept that mission. So this aspect isn't going to go. So that's always going to be there, but there may be other ways that we want to do it. One way that the narrative team and some other designers want to go for is a sort of simple mission giver, a sort of mission giver light, which isn't quite as elaborate as something like Eckhart. But it would be something where you have a sort of generic NPC, like someone you just meet on the street who wants you to do an errand. And they would say, hey, I want you... I don't know what the lines are going to be, and they're probably quite simple lines, but you would then go over to them, you'd have a simpler interact with them, but then they'd offer you a mission, you take their errand or their mission or their quest or whatever it is, and you go and do it. And so that would be more organic: rather than going to the mission giver in the bar, it would be like walking down the street and hearing something and getting involved with someone's business in a nice way.

No, it's just how it ended up. It's really the same answer we talked about on the video a couple of years ago. We had all the legal things; Tessa was still in the universe at the time. It's like, well, we wanted to start putting in some of that morally gray. Those became the focus. Those became the first things. And then, as you already answered earlier, the mission giver team kind of got rearranged and lost some priority. And now that it's back with narrative, that's sort of picking up steam again. It's also really dependent on the character team and really dependent on the animation team, because the mission giver requires way more animation work than any other NPC.

Because they have a unique location.

Exactly. So it's just a lot of things that have to come together to do them. But there's a list. The best I can offer is that there's a list internally. I've seen it. There are more mission givers that aren't scumbags, that just aren't Clovis Darneely and stuff like that.

They're not in the game yet. There are some from Crusader who, I'm pretty sure, are supposed to be security: Batista and Gibbs. They're a mission giver of two people, which is a new thing, which is partly probably why they're not in the game yet. So there's another challenge for us. So yeah, they head up Crusader security and they would be offering security missions. And of course, there's Tessa Bannister, who isn't in the game at the moment, but she will be coming back.

Let's just wrap this question up by saying there are a number of mission givers. They've already had their PCAP recorded. They've already had their voiceovers done years ago. It's just waiting for that confluence of AI, of character art, of animation, of location, all that stuff that has to come together.

There is also another aspect, which is we don't want to put out more mission givers where they don't have missions. So it's kind of like, we've already done that. We don't want to do more of that.

So the thing is, if we were able to detect that one of these bad things had happened, we would have modified the mission such that it would be fixed and you would never see it happen. Of course, it still happens, because we know it happens. And in the case specifically of reputation and the reputation hit, because of course reputation is progression to get new missions and whatnot, we do and have selectively in the past decided we're going to remove this negative hit on a fail. But the problem is, if you do it everywhere, you bury bugs. And we don't want to bury bugs. We don't want to ruin your day either. But at the same time, we need to figure out: some things are within the wheelhouse of what missions can fix and some things are outside of what missions can fix. But we still can't just turn that off and then never really improve it as a system. We never even fix it as a system. So it's not that we're vindictive or anything. We just want to make it better. And sometimes we need to find the bug, and sometimes it's really hard to find the bug.

Workarounds not only don't solve the problem, but sometimes they can exacerbate and prolong the existence of the problem.

Yeah, it could be further down the line, when suddenly a few missions are using it and it's like, oh, it's broken, so we turn it off. Then suddenly a load of designers go and implement something, and they put it across loads of missions, and they turn it all on and it all breaks. And then you're like, oh no, we didn't fix the thing that was underlying that. That would be very bad. So whilst we have fewer missions, we want to fix them before you get loads and they've all got the bug in them.

Yeah, so refueling has been with us for quite a while now, but it is still a player-on-player mechanic. When refueling was first being designed, there was an effort, AI had priority to be looking at ways for AI to reciprocate and be the refueled. And then, shifting of priorities and people moving around, and refueling changed a lot, came out, and the prototype work of what refueling is for an AI didn't get maintained to be matched with it. Right now, priorities for AI don't put them in alignment with working on that particular feature to bring it up. So basically, AI designers and AI engineers would need to come back and look at that particular behavior for them to cooperate with a player refueling them, and then it would be possible. Once they make a behavior, then it would be something that I think we'd probably put in service beacons. So it'd be a spoofed NPC beacon where they ask for refueling and you refuel them. And then after that, it would actually be something that we could put in a mission, because we could make a module around it. But you see how we are downstream of a sort of downstream. So it's not like no one's thought about it.

It's just layers. There's also the chicken and egg problem, where you generally want to prioritize work that affects the largest percentage of people. And not everybody owns a refueling ship; probably most players don't. So that becomes kind of a niche. But the chicken and the egg thing is, well, if you made missions for it, then maybe more people would get refueling ships. So it's hard to balance that.

Yeah, I've spoken about this multiple times, big fan of delivery missions. I spend a lot of my time on Euro Truck Simulator 2. So yeah, I love big cargo missions, but there's one of the fundamental pieces we need, because I don't want to give you cargo missions where you go up, click a terminal, it spawns in your ship. I'd prefer the flow to be nice. So, cargo elevators. I want you to have to move the boxes, or in the future, pay someone to move the boxes for you, and I want that to feel like you are a delivery man who's loading your truck full of goods, going from A to B, maybe getting pirated, getting there.

You don't always have to be pirated.

Maybe. That's just an example, Reddit. And then taking your boxes to drop off. But I want a full proper mission flow that makes you feel like a delivery man.

And for those who follow the public roadmap, not the release view, the progress view, you'll see that freight elevators are in development. I've seen some internal reviews. The elevator opens up and there's a whole bunch of stuff and it's like, I've got to get this into my ship. And they're all prototyping different ways of moving the things, either by the hand tractor beam or by carts and stuff like this. So it's all being worked out, and when it's farther along and we're more confident in the exact approach we're going to take, that's when we'll show it to you. They're still kind of blue-skying a couple of things, how best to move things from the elevator into the ships.

It goes into the whole thing of: we could fudge it and make it all right, but our key focus is fun in the 'verse, so we want to make things that are polished, that we think are going to be fun and that players enjoy.

Yeah, and another team is working on making it fun, so we would be stepping on their toes. It would be very silly for us.

Reputation. Yeah, we've taken it over from the US PU team, and there are a few things that we're focusing on. One of the most important parts we think we need to get out is reputation-based hostility. So we want it so that you can do missions for, like, the Nine Tails in the 'verse. And when you do these missions, you gain reputation, and you can gain reputation to a point where you're allowed at their outposts because you're friends with them. You could be doing Siege of Orison and they won't shoot you because they think you're friends. But then what needs to come pretty much at the same time or directly after that is sandbox reputation hooks. If you shoot Nine Tails, your reputation would decrease with them. And if you keep shooting them, they're going to start hating you.

It's not just shooting.

It could be destroying their ships or anything. We just want ways of going, right, the player's done this. It's against this faction, this reputation. This reputation has allies of these people, so it's also going to affect them a little bit, but they're hated by these, so these people are going to get a positive outcome from your one action. So we're focusing on getting those, because we think that's going to make the universe feel more alive and more influenced by your actions as a player, especially being able to do missions for Nine Tails, which will allow criminal players to live that life.

Yeah, because I think that's why we chose not to do reputation for Nine Tails up till now, because it creates this problem where we go, yeah, but wait a minute, you do these missions for Nine Tails and they're supposed to like you, yet you still get missions to murder them, and you can murder them all, and yet they still give you missions. And because there's no connection between those two things, that's where it all comes apart. So we don't want to expose that obvious fault. But we want to after this particular feature work.

Reputation is a very important system to us.

Yeah. We know it's supposed to underpin many things.

So it's really about tooling at the moment. We do have tools for making the UI, but they're not very user friendly. The two guys previously would definitely attest to this. So we want something that's definitely more designer friendly, definitely more artistically friendly as well. And it's a complicated business, because Chris is really into very 3D UIs, and we've all seen the stuff that Zane produces, which is awesome, but he's extremely technical. And what we want to do is lower the bar so we don't need extremely technical people. Anyone can pick it up and make cool-looking stuff. You still need artistic ability and to understand UX, but at the same time we want to make this really achievable for the broad range of designers and artists.

When we say we want to make it more broadly available, that is because we are, as a company, as a team, fast approaching, if not over, a thousand people, with lots of developers, all with varying levels of technical abilities. If everybody could program UI, everybody would. So making these things accessible is super important. It's not about, well, let's not hire people who aren't technically proficient. You hire people who have their proficiency here and here and here, but you want to build a thing that doesn't require them to also have a UI programming proficiency, so that you can spread this out. That's how we hit this at scale.

But also just do stuff quicker. If you can try stuff out and go, hmm, I'm not quite so sure, try some other things out, and you're not struggling with the tools, you're not struggling to author stuff, and you just go, here are some things. Right, yeah, that really suits my feature. You can move on really quickly. You can produce more work if you've got better tools. It's like trying to build a house with a tiny trowel or something. No, you want some heavy machinery that can build this stuff together. So the better the tools, the better people can work, and it frees them up to do more creative stuff rather than just screaming at their computers going, these damn Building Blocks.