Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse 2.3 - Austin

Well, from the first ship, it's changed quite a bit. It took a while. The first couple of years were a lot of almost pre-production and trying out things. Now we're kind of reworking the ships because we have changed it and improved it so much, also with the help of some of the guys in England. Nathan, he knows a lot about CryEngine, and those guys. They helped out a lot and we built out the pipeline and now it's pretty solid. It's good, it's fast, and now we're able to reuse some of the textures or assets to build ships faster.

I think a lot of people have noticed that and even called it out. It seems like there's a flight-ready ship, a hangar-ready ship coming out practically every patch. And I think that mentality of honing a process over time and structuring that pipeline really goes even further than just ships. It seems like a lot of the content picks up momentum, and then we start seeing large amounts of content get pushed out.

Yeah, it pushed through the whole development, like the characters and the environment and all that. It just gets better and more efficient as you go, and everybody just kind of gets worked in and then it just kind of flows. And for the ships, we definitely need it because there's a lot of ships to be done.

So the concepting phase is actually one of my favorite parts, for sure. A lot of times in Star Citizen, I really haven't started or concepted a ship from the beginning. This Hornet one is pretty much the closest one, probably. Because I was able to take the ship, which the old one was basically a concept for me, to make the new one. So as far as the creative freedom goes, I pretty much had all the freedom I wanted. And then basically what I'll do is I'll start modeling and then present it to Chris and some of the other artists here. And then we have feedback sessions. But as far as creative freedom goes, a great deal. I just kind of go with it. Chris, since I've been around for a while, kind of trusts me to a certain point, and then I show it to him and it goes from there. It's a back and forth.

Well, Chris and I had some email discussions before we started the redesign, and it was always sort of the idea that we would take it and make it more sleek. Because for me personally, even though the original Hornet is very cool and iconic, there were always some issues as far as the form and everything that kind of put me off a little bit, and I was like, I could just make that a little bit better. And so the idea was then to basically make it the same difference as when BMW would make a new version of their car. The new one was sort of boxy, but still cool. And then from the 2000s and up, they were a little bit more rounded, but you could still tell it was a BMW. So the idea was to definitely keep the spirit, and you should still be able to tell it's a Hornet or an Anvil ship from a distance. And also from the top view, it looks like a star, which I always thought was cool. So I wanted to keep that, but just make it a little bit more streamlined.

Well, for me, it kind of goes back to when I grew up, back in the early 1980s, late 1970s. I had this affinity for computer games, and the types of games that I liked were these large, completely open-ended world simulators. That's why I was so attracted to the Ultimas and the Magic Candles. And so back then, it was pretty much a one-man operation. If you wanted to create that type of game, you needed to be able to do everything yourself. You had to construct the AI and the sound system and the usable system and the world editor so that you could lay out the entire environment. You had to come up with a system so that you could have NPCs and conversations, your whole mission system and everything else. What this got me very used to doing was looking for what I would call points of leverage in the process. Areas where you could invest development time upfront. There was a cost to this. There was a cost in terms of, if you just wanted to show short-term progress, you could always brute force something. You could just special case, hack it, invest very little in terms of building things out the proper way, but you could show progress within a few days, a few weeks, a couple of months, etc. But that wouldn't get you to where you needed to be for the long term, for the level of detail that you knew you were eventually going to want in these types of games. And so for me, I'm always looking for these points of leverage within the process. And I'm looking for areas where I can take the development and, instead of basically adding a second person so now you can do things twice as quickly, or adding a third person so it becomes a little bit faster (again, that tends to be very linear), what you really need, if you're going to get that exponential curve in terms of how quickly you can produce things, is to basically put a lot of thought, a lot of effort, a lot of development time into properly structuring these tools and data structures, so that your ultimate goal is to basically minimize the amount of time and effort required to go from concept to completion. To get from 'well, I want to set this particular scenario up' to being able to explain that to the game engine in as efficient a way as possible, such that you can bring it to life. And the more you're able to do that, the more interesting the game is going to become.

An example I use very frequently goes back to the bartender for AI. If you look at a bartender, a bartender doesn't look very intelligent at all if you enter the bar and he basically says, 'Hey, what do you want to drink?' and you tell him and he gives you one drink, and other than that, he just sits there and polishes the bar. But he starts to look extraordinarily intelligent if he can do that, and if somebody starts getting into a fight over here, he can tell them to pipe down or else he's going to call security. And when somebody drops a glass, he'll go get the broom out of the broom closet and sweep it up. And when the trash is full, he'll take it out. And before he goes home at night, he'll turn off the lights. If he's got the potential to respond to all these different situations that arise, then he starts to look much more interesting. And to me, it's not that that is the game per se. It's that if you put the player into a universe where you've got that level of detail, that... And so conceptually, if I were to borrow an analogy from the world of finance, it would be like what Amazon did. For years and years, Amazon was basically making an investment in their infrastructure, building out all these distribution centers, refining their online model. They could have long, long ago stopped investing, stopped spending, stopped building for the future and just started minting money up to a certain level. But they were convinced that longer term they'd be in a much better, much stronger position versus their competition if they continued to do that and basically push it to the limit. And so now you see, after 20 years of that going on, they're just now getting to the point where they're starting to flip into that other mode, where most of the hard work's been done. Now you look at how they're performing relative to a Walmart or relative to a Target, and they're absolutely destroying them. Obviously, the timeframes are dramatically different, but you get the basic point, which is that spending time and effort up front will often pay enormous dividends on the back end if you do it properly.

To me, I would say that the feature I'm most looking forward to isn't actually an individual feature. I've said this before. It's the breadth of features. It's the ability for the player to choose their own path through the world. And what you need when you have so many choices, the counterpart to that, is consequence. There need to be repercussions to your actions. If you think about it in terms of combat, in this game you can be a pirate. You are now basically doing things that are illegal. Therefore, we need to have in place an apparatus: security, a reputation system, etc., NPCs that will not deal with you if you've been doing that type of stuff. And these are all things that... The system allows you to do that, but it will push back against that. If you look at it in terms of being a miner, you will have the choice as to what you want to mine. Do you want to stick to the safe, secure zones? You're probably not going to make as much money. If you want to try to make a fortune, you're going to have to take some chances. Or are you going to form an alliance with some other miners, and you guys go out and stick together as a group? Are you going to hire a bunch of mercenary ships, which is going to cut down on your profitability? The point is, we're putting in place a lot of different levers, and it's up to the player to ultimately arrange those things the way they really want to, to get the type of game experience they're looking for.

Well, it really depends on what type of NPC you're talking about. If you're talking about crew members, then in general, we're going to be more straightforward in the implementation. They're there as really an extension of you, your ship, your capabilities, etc. If you're talking about the NPCs you deal with that are external, the ones in the world that offer you a mission, then absolutely, some of those guys will not be so on the up and up. You may be offered a screamingly good deal, where there's supposedly a really lucrative set of asteroids just waiting for you to mine it, and you show up and basically it's a pirate trap. So there will be a lot of that type of stuff where, just like in the real world, just because something looks one way doesn't necessarily mean that it really is. But we're not going to be so arbitrary about it. We're going to put a lot of time and thought into figuring out what mechanisms we provide to the players such that they can make informed and intelligent choices, as opposed to: you roll the dice and you went left and you wind up getting slapped because we decided to set things up this way. That to me is not a very fun aspect of a game, when you've got those types of just boolean outcomes and there's no way for you to process the data beforehand so that you can make an informed decision.

NPCs are actually going to play a huge role in getting the game where it needs to be. When I say that, I mean if you think about a world where it's just players, you could have a lot of interaction, you could have a lot of combat, you could have guys forming alliances, but the piece of the puzzle you'd be missing is that at any given time, when we're sending you off to do this or you've made a decision to do that, we wouldn't be able to guarantee that the other pieces on the board are set up properly. In other words, you accept a mission to go into deep space and recover a satellite, and maybe the designers have set things up so that, well, on this one you're being paid a very high price to go out and do it. And so we want to make sure that the danger you face for taking that on is appropriate. And if we had to rely on players to always be the counterparty in one of these transactions, we wouldn't be able to do that. Sometimes you'd take on a very lucrative mission and you'd run into nothing and you'd be bored out of your mind and you'd scratch your head and go... Well, it kind of goes back to what I was saying before, where it would feel very arbitrary: sometimes I take on a mission for very little money and I face tons of challenges in order to get that pittance. Other times I take on something that offers me a fortune and I don't run into much of a challenge at all. And so for us to properly balance everything, we need to be able to rely on NPCs to fill in the blanks as necessary. Now, that doesn't mean we can't intelligently pit players against each other at times, and we will absolutely aim to do that. If you're a miner and you're going out here, well, then we're going to have a pirate organization, and they may know where there are a lot of miners doing their business. And when you actually go over to that pirate base, assuming you've got enough reputation that they'll talk to you, et cetera, et cetera, then they may want you to go prove yourself by picking on these poor hapless miners over there. Meanwhile, there are miners on the other side. There will be a lot of this player versus NPC, player versus player, player versus NPC and player. Ultimately, it's all just different colors on the palette with which we're going to be painting these different scenarios.

To me, a lot of that comes, again, from when I grew up: the classic games of the 70s and 80s. What I actually like about them, even to this day, is that they were what I would call pure. By that I mean they didn't have the computing horsepower to do anything particularly sophisticated in terms of their execution. But there are many games I've referenced in the past, whether it's the Ultimas that I love; Crusader, which was largely, I always used to say, inspired by Muse Software's Castle Wolfenstein; Loose Cannon, which was inspired by Steve Jackson's Autoduel. There are so many games from back then where you could see the potential, but the technology wasn't sufficient to do the ideas justice. And it's not that you look back at those ideas and just want to pull them and integrate them into your game. It's that, I think, having played so many of those types of games, I now look at things from a very mechanical point of view. You look at things in terms of the raw components, which is largely all those games had. They gave you some token graphics, but you really had to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. When I look at a game nowadays, the visuals and that type of stuff come second for me. It's the underlying skeleton of the game. It's making sure that the balance is proper. It's making sure that you've got all of these parts and counterparts set up properly, because that's what drives the whole process forward. And so if you've gotten yourself used to thinking about problems in that fashion, then a lot of this just comes naturally.

That's something we've actually talked about specifically. I think it'll be less frequently used. I think you're going to see the impact once we enable the 24-hour schedules. That you're going to see every single day, and you would expect to see it. You show up at night, you don't expect to see as many people at this landing zone. You show up in the day, you expect to see a different mix of people, et cetera, et cetera. When we've talked about this specific concept in the past, it's usually been along the lines of some sort of event that happens only periodically. Like Hurston, for example: we were talking about having a ship that... Because it's a commodity planet, you've got all these overworked, oppressed workers being exploited. It was only natural, when you're following a logical sequence of events, that some of these guys would be seeking to pilfer some of the valuable ores and stuff they're pulling out of the ground. What we wanted to have is a ship, and having it show up every night at 3 a.m. becomes a little bit too repetitive, too predictable. And so in that particular case, we were talking about how it'd be neat if this guy showed up every second Tuesday or something like that. Or maybe he only shows up on occasion, and it's always several days out once you actually talk to a particular guy in the bar, something like that. So I think we will absolutely have less regular types of scheduled events, but that'll be more on a case-by-case basis.

That's another one that's been discussed in the past, as far as you eventually having the capability to have a guy transport something from point A to point B. Would you eventually be able to actually own a shop, et cetera? And at least as of right now, I lean predominantly towards this: if we're going to have this type of detailed world, I want the player to be a part of it. And I'm less interested in trying to turn the game into something completely different. In other words, if you think about that concept and follow it through to its logical conclusion, what it really means is, and there are a lot of games that do this, where this is what I mean by controlling a fleet or something... Citizen or something like that. The only way those types of things really work well is if you have a lot of other bits and pieces of information and levers you can pull, et cetera, on the part of the player, to allow them to do that efficiently, to do that effectively, to actually make that a game. And the problem then becomes that it just starts to defocus us. It pulls us away from where we want the real impact of the game to be. And so I don't think it's likely that you're going to be sending out unattended ships, because then it just becomes a roll of the dice, right? We're literally just saying, 'What's the overall aggression level here?', and you basically flip the switch, and it says, 'Sorry, that guy got destroyed.' And you're like, well, did you have a fun time? And you say, no, I didn't have a fun time at all. And then you would say, well, why wasn't I informed of what the threat level was along there? Okay, so we'll give you that capability. And then you want to be...

Right, it's a whole other beast.

That's exactly it. It very quickly becomes a whole other beast. And I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that this game is already extremely ambitious. And as ambitious as it is, we're also, in a number of different areas, trying to keep the design as focused as possible so that we can get these other features out to the community quickly. Then I would say the second pass is really going to be more refining, balancing, getting everything feeling really good. Once that's all done, much farther down the road, you can come back and say, 'Hey, now that all of that stuff is done, what can we explore now?' And whether it would be something like that, or owning stores, or stuff along those lines, we would basically bring up the next tier of features and figure out which ones were going to be of most interest to the player base, which ones were going to give us the most bang for the buck, and then move forward as appropriate.