Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - RSI Apollo and Medical Gameplay

That's a good question. I mean, for me, the Connie was the launching point, really. I think for me, the Connie is the one that's most accessible in terms of relative size or size bracket. For me, it was the signature ship. Obviously, we'd worked on the Polaris previously, but Polaris is quite a bit bigger, and I just really wanted to drive this back to the basics of those Connie shapes. Really, once you factor in the functionality of the ship, how you want to get in and out easily, the things you want it to do... again, sometimes these things just start to shape themselves. So yeah, it's been fun. I sort of really got to understand the workings of Ryan Church's mind, I would say, because he was obviously the original concept artist. And without having a conversation with him, you really sort of have to figure out what's going on. And then you take your key components and transpose them onto the new ship. It's a little bit like cooking, isn't it? You've got your base recipe and then you add in your chef's flair and then hope everybody likes it at the end.

So, yeah, medium is basically... there's medium-large. Basically, once we started looking at what we wanted with the Apollo, which is having several patients and doing this kind of stuff over a large distance, we thought, well, it's too big to be a small ship. And the issue is that even if the Endeavor is massive, like bigger than large, large was too big for what we wanted to do. So medium was basically the sweet spot, even if it's close to some ships that are a bit too small, or some ships that are a bit too close to large. So it's a bit tight, but it's the sweet spot basically to do what we wanted to do, which, well, we will talk about it, and we've seen that in Ship Shape and other stuff. But yeah, the sweet spot on a medium ship is basically going around, but without needing a lot of people with you to do this kind of stuff.

The larger you get, the more extra stuff you have to factor in. They start becoming big targets. So you either need to start throwing turrets all over the place on them, which then, if they're manned turrets, you need spaces for people to be in those manned turrets, you need spaces to get to them. Or you start sort of almost needing larger components to provide that defense, which then just makes it a bigger ship, at which point you're back to being a large one. So medium just fits that goal nicely. And if you compare it to the Cutlass, they're the same sort of width if you factor in the Cutlass's engines, which sort of artificially bloat it, but it is a fair length longer because of the shape of it. Whilst on paper it doesn't seem that much bigger than the Cutlass, there is a lot more usable space in it.

So in terms of stats, like John said, it's basically a bit longer than a Cutlass, but about the same width. So it's 43 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 10 meters high. It has 28 SCU. The thing is that it's separated into two rooms at the back; it's not one big room. You've got two entrances: basically you've got a small lift, like at the front of the Constellation, which is basically for the crew, and at the rear you've got a big ramp, which also allows it to work as a big docking collar, if you want. Outside of that, in terms of speed, it's relatively a bit like the Freelancer, if I remember well, which is 205 meters per second for the base variant and 195 meters per second for the Medivac variant. The thing that is different between the speeds is that, as people might see later on, or have already seen, the Medivac variant is better armored, but basically it's a bit slower and not as maneuverable. You're trading that.

Do you want the faster, more nimble version, or do you want a bit of extra safety and armor?

In terms of weapons, it's relatively simple. It's one remote turret on the top with two size 2 cannons. Well, it's two size 2 laser cannons for the regular variant and two size 2 miniguns, ballistic miniguns, Gatlings, for the Medivac. Outside of that, in terms of thruster placement, it's relatively the usual. The Medivac variant has heavy armor, the regular has medium armor, two shield generators. It has a large radar, which is different from the usual, because obviously you will need to scan space to find bodies and other injured people. I've seen that some people might be interested in the number of toilets, so there's two toilets in the ship. There's two ejection beds as well. It's basically like on the Constellation: it's ejection pods that also act like beds. So it's pretty good.

I think the really interesting thing about this is the two rooms where the medical beds are; they're going to be modular. So you can swap them out depending on what level of medical gameplay you want to do. And alongside the pages later today, there is actually going to be an updated design post that talks about medical gameplay, because we haven't really talked about it since the Death of a Spaceman post. So it's sort of like a short update post to that.

So some ships are like... in the past we've had emergency C-sections. This one, I'd say, was a good natural birth. We had the birthing pool, everything went naturally, it all flowed. It's been enjoyable actually, this one; it's actually gone well, even though there's always a couple of surprises that are thrown in there. We've been heavily on top of this one, so we've wasted no time and pretty early on hit the style, hit the shape and the sort of silhouette. Chris was like, well, it's not RSI enough. So I just dived back in and we just started messing with more of the shapes and just getting more of that core architecture in there. And so, yeah, pretty good process.

I think the hardest bit was coming up with the names for it. I feel sorry for the people doing the brochures because they must have had to change it multiple times a day.

I can see an image of the reflection on your TV. So it looks like it's the layout that I provided right at the start of the process. So it has changed a little bit since then, because we had to extend the ship just to factor in all the components. But in terms of the bridge, it's fairly straightforward. We sort of went back and forth on things like visibility, because we all know... struts. I tried to get some extra struts in, Corentin was like, no, get them out. And then once we fixed that up, it was just adding some additional visibility to the left and right, the corners of the ship. And then, again, it was just a matter of taking some of the styling from the Polaris interior and factoring that in. Obviously, you can't see that from the layout. And then we've got the beds. To be honest, we're just doing a little bit of a refactor now, just this week, just to tie up some loose ends on some of the interior space, just so that when it gets to the artists, it's super clear what they need to achieve.

Yeah, so you can see that they're essentially mirror images of each other. So when I say med bays, I'm talking about them both at the same time. Part of the medical gameplay post talks about different levels of injury and healing, and different equipment can do different levels of things. So an abandoned moon that might have this old ancient medical facility might only be able to do certain levels of healing. Like it might be able to stop some bleeding, patch you up enough to get you somewhere properly. It's not going to be able to replace a ruined limb or multiple injuries. And that's something we want to do with the Apollo. So in, I think, that shot, there's three beds on every side. So these are three of the sort of... I can't remember which way the numbering went in the design post... I think tier three beds.

Tier three is recovering from minor injuries, like limbs being damaged. Tier one is recovering from near-death experiences and fatal injuries. So tier one is the more severe.

Yeah. So these are essentially tier three medical beds. So you've got six medical beds that can heal a variety of just general injuries that you'd expect people to find. If you want to be a bit more serious, you can swap those rooms out for some tier two rooms, which only have two beds on each side, but they're bigger beds, they can do more. And then if you really want to be full doctor, full surgeon, you swap them out for tier one rooms. And those are your big isolation rooms, big surgery rooms that can do the whole thing that you would find in, like, Hurston's big planetary medical facilities, but in a small ship. But you can only do one at a time in those beds. You can mix and match, so you could have one tier one on one side and a tier three on the other, so you can provide some flexibility, and it sort of allows you to tailor how you want to play that. But it's all about just letting you...

It will be interesting to see what the players are going with in terms of configuration, like if players really want to be basic three on three or two on one.

It's just the tier three ones at the moment. I don't know how we're going to plan on that. That's one for the marketing department to decide on. Once we've sort of nailed that down a bit more, we can decide how much extra gameplay they give and whether you get a set with that base purchase or they're additional.

Right now, I do want to confirm that when the RSI Apollo promotion starts in earnest towards the end of this broadcast, there are no modules that are being provided for the promotion at this time. The ship that you get will have the tier three beds, and how we choose to roll out the tier one and two, we will decide once the tech for that comes online and we know more. It's one of those things we wanted to preserve until that tech comes online and it's developed further before we tried to ascribe value to them and stuff like that. So for right now it's just the ship with the tier three beds.

Yes, 3.2 right now is fairly easy. Obviously, it evolved a bit over time; it's not what we had a long time ago. But right now, it's basically: you get injuries or you get bleeding or whatever, and you use your MediPen or you die, basically. So that's it. We have some stuff that is already in the code, like planned for it, like for injuring limbs and stuff like this. But it's not where we want to go yet. Basically we have this plan, but obviously it's not there yet. And the thing is that what we want to do is some kind of permanent injuries, like in Death of a Spaceman.

As we were reading through that during this post, there was quite a lot of it that is still completely accurate today, even though it was written four years ago, five years ago. It's still exactly what we plan to do. So in our heads, we had, oh, we need to do this huge design post about how much has changed. And actually, there isn't a huge amount that's changed. The design post talks about what Corentin said, how it is now, how we want to go in the future, so this more persistent damage, how people are going to be dealing with respawning from death and other sort of injuries, what side effects that has, why you choose to respawn at a medical ship versus going somewhere else, just things like that. When that was written, there wasn't a huge amount in game to sort of get your mind wrapped around, whereas now there is significantly more. So there's a lot more questions that have come up since then. It's not a huge, full, in-depth article like Death of a Spaceman 2.0. It's more like an appendix.

Yeah, I mean, we've spoken about this before. I think this year probably has been our most colorful year. And I think it was just a natural event, really. I started looking at our ships and there are easy wins we can do to add more personality to our ships, rather than being the traditional white or the silver or the black. I mean, they're all cool, but why not? Let's get some color in. Those 13 sort of fall into different groups. So, if my memory serves me right, there were the whites, then there were the blacks, and then there were the reds. And it's kind of the process I really enjoy, actually, because the concept artist will have done all the hard work and come up with the great geometry and stuff. And then I render out about 20 different finishes and then just overlay them in Photoshop and just start getting creative. And obviously there are many influences you can pull from: typical EMS, ambulances; depending on which country you're in as well, they have different colors. So for me, I think by the time I got to the red one, that was probably one of the later ones. And I don't know, I just really liked it. And the devil was in the detail. It was essentially having a two-tone red. There was a satin, there was a gloss. Then you had your polished metal frame of the canopy. We've got probably about 5% gold accents on the ship and just really went for that quality RSI feel, basically. And I did my pitch to Chris. I basically sent them all to Chris, but said which were my favorites, and the red one won out. So, yeah, I was very happy, because it kind of heavily pulls on recovery, like when you see those vehicles in the snow, avalanche rescue vehicles, that sort of stuff. And so it's really hinting at that side of things. And I think just the shape, just because of the complexity of the shapes that are in RSI, you can get away with just having that one block of color, because all the shapes are doing the breakup.

Well, there's a battle royale going on in Twitch chat right now while folks are calling out their favorites.

I mean, there's a lot of good ones there. There's some that I like, and you never know. There's one for everyone, isn't there? So as we go along, we're sort of trying to do more of that, basically, to look at more options. Those were the ones that got released, you see. So those are the ones I was happy with. There was a whole bunch that I hated and they just got left.

At a functional level, drones are drones are drones. They can be controlled remotely or they can be semi-autonomous. But these ones are specifically designed for... I was going to say capturing, but that's probably an aggressive tone... for rescuing injured people, particularly in space where they're just floating around. So they can be sent out; they come out of the bottom of the ship and encase the person in this sort of protective field. Because obviously in space you might be in a cracked suit; you probably don't want to just be left in the void until you get back in the ship, so it sort of encases them. It goes back in the ship, and it's quite a neat system. I don't think we really showed it in any detail, but they go in the bottom of the ship and they sort of get filtered to the underside of the beds, and the drone attaches onto the other side of the beds, and they come up through the beds, and the beds all sort of open up to take them. Then the drone goes back down and leaves them on the bed. So it sort of makes a nice seal to put them in this sort of healing bed, and then they can go off and do it again. Obviously, if you've got six beds, you can fill it up with six people. You only get two drones with it, and they are just for that. It's not like the Vulcan's drones that you can repurpose into doing other things. They are purely for capturing and rescuing bodies. You can't use them to go up to another ship and rescue the missiles off them. And they are sort of the stretcher in the same way. So if they're not being semi-autonomous... unless I'm just speaking nonsense now, they are one and the same.

This is whatever you guys want it to be. In terms of the art style and the art and the design, it's fairly flexible.

Stop it being a remote-controlled drone, and it's essentially a hovering platform that you can maneuver on the planet.

One of the reasons that we put a big hump at the back with a big airlock is, if needed, if the drone can't be used properly, you just push it and go in.

It blurs the line between a drone and a stretcher. Is it a drone or a stretcher if it's being pushed by someone?

Definitely not the Polaris. We were looking at what we'd said on record about the Polaris all those years ago and found this really nice fan-created image where they had extrapolated the landing pad size out of the holoviewer model and then taken all our ships in-game. And the old Cutlass couldn't fit on there, so the new Cutlass definitely won't fit on there, which means the Apollo won't fit on there. We were talking about the Endeavor. Obviously, the Endeavor is not being built at the moment, so we're quite flexible in what we can do with that. So we fully intend for it to fit in the hangar module there. I know way back in the day when we talked about it, it was said to hold two Cutlasses, I believe. I don't know whether it will still take two Cutlasses; the Cutlass has got bigger since then. But if it holds one Cutlass, it will definitely hold one Apollo. Maybe not two, because it's going to start getting very long. It might look a bit odd.

Something that we will look at when it comes to the Endeavor... We were about to check the Idris before we came on here. The thing is that it's supposed to have a docking collar anyway, so it will be able to get close to some other big ships that won't be able to have it inside anyway. It's not a small ship that you try the usual 'can it fit?' with, because it's a big ship; it's 40 meters long and 10 meters tall. Basically, the biggest issues are it's really long, and it's pretty tall as well.

So basically, there's two things about that. Obviously, the Cutlass Red, the last time we talked about it, was when it was way smaller. Now it's way bigger. But the intention stays the same, which is that it only has one bed inside. So it's not something where you can take a lot of patients. It's something where you get on the scene, you get someone. You can either go somewhere to a hospital, for example, or to an Apollo, to an Endeavor, this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's a bit complicated with that. And the other thing is that the Cutlass Red obviously is based on the Cutlass, which is a pretty big fighter now, a medium fighter. So while it won't be as powerful as the Cutlass Black, because, well, it's not a fighter...

It loses the turret, so it loses a couple of guns.

It will still be more powerful. I'd say it's a bit more like you go into a hot zone with the Cutlass rather than going there with an Apollo. Obviously, the Medivac variant of the Apollo is pretty good, but it's more: you've got an emergency, you need to go there, you need to escape quickly.

Yeah, the sort of methodology we use internally is the Cutlass Red is your ambulance, or sort of your combat ambulance. It's very small scale, but it's faster, it's got the armament. The Apollo is like a little doctor's clinic where it can treat a small amount of things, and the Endeavor is your big city hospital. And all three are completely valid. Not everyone wants to have the big hospital. Not everyone wants to have just an ambulance. Some people want all three. That's fine. They all work together in the same career, and you can go up and down the chain as you please, because if you want to just jump in and just ferry one injured person around at a time, the Apollo is sort of overkill for that, whereas you might get a medical mission where you've got 400 people to transfer within a time limit. You could probably do that in your Cutlass Red, but you're going to have to be going fast and not make a mistake or not get interdicted during that time.

Technically, the Cutlass is still the starter because it's only one bed, but it doesn't mean that you can't use it for all your medical career.

The Cutlass Red was actually due to go into production around the time we were starting this process. And we pushed it back because of this ship, because we wanted to solve a lot of the unanswered questions with medical gameplay that we just hadn't really thought about. And rather than just start the Cutlass Red and sort of put ourselves into a corner, we pushed that back. It's still some months away before we start doing it. We got our ducks in a row with this, and then we can work out where does the Cutlass Red fit against this? Where does the Apollo fit against that? And make sure that they're both complementary to each other, not that one just blasts the other one out of the water.

Yeah, obviously there's been a lot of work done on the Connie, and... I mean, yes, we have done some stuff on the Polaris, and this is a little bit of having your cake and eating it, maybe. I've taken some elements from the Polaris and some of the shape language that works well for this, for the overall medical bays and central room. Obviously it's medical, so we're keeping it clean in that area, but the cockpit and those sort of areas definitely will have similar doors, things that the fans are familiar with, door frames, buttresses. So, yeah, I think it will be an advancement of the RSI visuals, but everything will still tie in.

There's a lot of the Bengal in there as well. I guess the Bengal and the Polaris, they're very similar.

I guess it's taking that cross-sectional shape from the corridors and feeding that in. There's lots of nods.

Why do we want better visibility?

We had a bit of a debate, not a long debate, but obviously when we look at the Constellation, there are some struts. When we look at the Apollo, it's a different kind of ship, and you need to look: oh, there's a body there, a body there, a body there. And it's something that personally I wanted to push on. Paul managed as well to keep the RSI style with the struts on the side, and it's a bit different. The main issue that we've seen, for example recently with the Cutlass or with the Razor before, is that obviously it's always a bit of a pain if you use your head to aim and you've got a big strut in front of you and you can't see shit. So yeah, that's something that works really well as well with the slanted glass. So it's still really RSI if you look from the side at the struts, but in a way that if you turn your head, yes, there are some struts, but they're not in your view. It just works well.