Writers discuss Star Citizen lore: the Galactopedia, readable in-game books, and the Imperator election. They also cover the Stanton corporations (Hurston, ArcCorp, microTech, Crusader), Grim HEX, Delamar, Earth's status, food, AI, genetic modification and player influence.
TL;DRThe goal is to bring the Galactopedia into the game, and it is being discussed and worked on, but there is no timeline yet because resources still have to be found.
Yeah, that's the goal, is that we ultimately want it to be incorporated and exist in the game as well as on the website. We're actually having conversations to try and figure out the best way. Because once we start to get it in-game, it obviously loops in a whole other aspect of development, because right now we were just doing it as a web thing. But the beautiful thing was that the way that Sherry and Turbulent built it was that it was designed kind of like the Star Map, with that same kind of language, so hopefully the step to transition it from website to game was already thought of. So hopefully it'll be a lot easier to do. But yeah, we're trying to figure out a timeline and when we can get resources dedicated to transitioning it over. But it's definitely on the forefront.
And it's actively being discussed and worked on. So while we don't have a set timeline yet, it's something that we really want. And for those who haven't checked out the Galactopedia in a while since it launched back at CitizenCon, Sherry has been working diligently on adding updates really regularly. So there's a ton of new content there for you to check out. There's a series of Spectrum posts outlining all the new stuff that's in there. So really, really cool stuff.
Yeah, those are definitely our more deep-dive Galactopedia articles. Right now, a lot of the ones on the site are the shorter blurbs because, as Sherry outlined, we're going for breadth in this first pass rather than depth. But the ones in Jump Point are those really deep dives that we're hoping to get more and more of as time goes on.
TL;DRProbably not in full; they will most likely offer short excerpts in-game, with longer-term hopes of reading content on mobiGlas or offline in an app.
I don't know about its entirety. It's something we have talked about with the props team before, and something that we have Adam thinking about this quarter, is how do we do more of that fun, interactive being able to read stories in the game. Most likely we will go along with the direction that a lot of games take, where we have a select excerpt for you to peruse rather than a full 300-page fish tank book. But that is kind of the hope and direction that we're going into. We've seen fun tests where you can actually hold up the prop and look at the contents inside the book, which is pretty neat, or whether you're going to be able to download it to your mobiGlas and read it there. One of our long-term dreams that we've talked about, and this is all very long-term, is the idea of, once we have the Star Citizen app as well, that when you get reading content that you find in the 'verse, you'll be able to later on read it offline on your phone or tablet or whatever and enjoy it that way. So rather than sitting in the game reading those pages, you can take it offline. So that would be fun.
TL;DRThe speakers each name a different pick: one would make the fish tank dogfighting book into an illustrated children's book, another a full illustrated novel, another the activist author's political books.
Oh, I've got to go back to Everything I Learned About Dogfighting I Learned From My Fish Tank. I'd make that a children's book, because then you could do it mainly through illustrations and use water and space and stuff like that. And we could make a full book that way without it being too intensive. A fun little starter's guide to how to kill people with your spaceship for all the kids out there.
We added with the 890 Jump these activist books by Lawrence Gito that I think would be really funny to write. It's this author that just writes a lot of very aggressive political books like Silent Voices and Easy Mark and stuff like that. So I kind of want to put on that hat.
TL;DREarth has probably stabilized since its overcrowding and water wars, is likely cleaner and less populated, and remains the historical homeland, but details await art team attention.
It's a planet. Funny enough, I think Earth has sort of stabilized a bit. It had a real rough go of it early on. Weirdly enough, between now, like now now, and the successful terraforming of Mars, that was when Earth hit a really, really bad patch, because it had a real serious overcrowding problem and water wars and stuff like that. And so basically, that's what drove the need to develop this terraforming technology. And then once that succeeded and we were able to spread out onto Mars and then spread out from there, it sort of deflated the problem on Earth. So I think at this point it's probably been sort of okay. It's probably not as inhabited as it used to be. But yeah, again, obviously, once we can get the art team to focus the eye of Sauron on Earth, we'll dig a little bit deeper into it and be able to really get the nuts and bolts of what Earth is really like. But again, from a lore perspective, it's still the ancestral home of humanity, so there's a lot of historical ties, that notion of who we were and where we came from and blah, blah, blah, to keep hammering that point of the difference between Earth and Terra, where Terra is all about looking towards the future, Earth would probably be more about looking towards the past, which again solidifies that argument about why people would stay with Earth or go with Terra. So I feel like we'll probably try to hammer that point, or at least give subtle nods to it, just to heighten that disparity between the two places.
We have that concept art that we released of Manchester in the year, it was like 2945 or something like that. That was kind of a cool indication of one direction we might go, that mix of preserving the history and emphasizing it, as well as the new high-rises and stuff. But I think we envision a prettier, cleaner Earth than what we have now, that they've been able to wrangle that after the diaspora and with all the new future tech, as Dave said.
Yeah, one of the things that we had called out, because in Lost Generation, actually, Tanya went to Earth, was this idea that a lot of the older buildings were encased in these shells to protect them from the elements and from ships ramming into them. There is a sort of weird museum quality to it, I think, which again would be kind of fun to play with once we get there.
TL;DRAdam Wieser picks the science-first candidate Leilani as his favorite and Will Weissbaum would vote for her too, while Dave Haddock finds her stance on AI unsettling.
Yeah, empower the systems, pull apart the UEE as one governing body over all systems, and let local government rule all. Gosh, to pick one, that's tough, because I've had to go through and basically write all 10 perspectives. So to be able to do that, I had to get into their headspace and try to understand what would motivate them. I believe, was it Leilani? I think that would be my favorite. Let me double check really quick.
Yeah, the science-first one. Sorry to jump on that. This is me not as a narrative writer. This is me as a human voter, that she would probably be who I would steer towards. So that's not indicative of who I want, as the lead writer, to win. So why do you like her? Adam, I jumped on you, I'm sorry.
Oh, no, all good. I think just for some reason, when I started to dig into what motivated her to lead her down this path of let's trust science, let's open it up... both my parents are educators and teachers, so I'm a big believer in that too. So there was just something about her as a young child, and she comes from, was it Oya? Yeah. So she comes from Oya, which is basically a UEE system that has this Xi'an settlement in the middle of it. It's a historical Xi'an settlement. It's been there for generations. It's this one chunk of the UEE which technically has Xi'an occupation in it. She grew up with this mixing of human and Xi'an cultures. I thought that was really cool, to be able to give her this perspective of wider science and greater understanding of different things. The more you learn about something, the more you can see other perspectives and grow and learn. There was just something really uplifting about that. Since so much of politics can get nasty and dirty, it was fun to be able to get in the mind and perspective of someone that was trying to raise people up and fight for a better future, rather than just fight for political power or greed or purposes like that.
TL;DRRobots and drones exist, but sophisticated AI was left out as a stylistic choice for a gritty, people-driven universe, explained in lore by past AI attempts going wrong and 'dumb AI' systems.
Yeah, I guess to get into the larger question about just the AI thing, synthetic life, I suppose: it's not for a scientific reason or anything like that. It's purely the fact of, when setting out to create something like this, what is the world that you want to make? Again, with any large universe, people sit there and go, what are their influences and what are their personal tastes and stuff like that. From the earliest conversations with Chris, he wanted it to feel like a very tactile world; he wants people to be out doing stuff. You get to be the baddest pilot in the universe because you are that cool. So it was a stylistic, artistic, creative choice to say we didn't want AI, because obviously, AI developed will be the most efficient, best pilots, crack shots. If you read the Iain Banks stuff, where armies are waging war across galaxies and just firing shots and destroying each other and stuff like that, that's a very specific type of sci-fi space opera thing. And Chris, again, wanted it to feel more gritty, people-driven. So it was really just, that was the thing. And then we had to come up with a reason to back-explain it. The original statement was, I'm not really a fan of AI or synthetic humanoids, just because of A, B and C. And so I was like, okay, so we could pepper all of these incidents throughout history where attempts to make AI have gone horrifically wrong. And every 20 or 30 or 50 years, someone's like, oh, I think I can finally crack it. And then that goes wrong. And everyone goes, you know what, this AI thing is just not really our bag. So that's the core of it. Again, it's a break from a forward projection of what life will actually be like in the 30th century and stuff like that. This is just how we wanted to tell the game.
Yeah, so we had these horrible experiences with people trying to develop AI that created these laws that we live under. But there are those fears that so much of our technology in the game is connected through the comms and Spectrum, and the idea that if you have an artificial intelligence, the danger that it would pose to our way of life, potentially not even if they are malicious and mean to harm us, but there is that threat there, like modern thinkers always warn us about: oh, the next big threat is going to be AI. So you have those people still existing in lore who are like, we can get most of what we need done with our advanced computers, really smart, intelligent computers, without them being able to think freely for themselves. We've just set the mark somewhere else.
Yeah, they have the capacity, I think it's called dumb AI, where the systems are smart and can do really, really cool stuff, but they need that input. You tell them to do it and then they can do really, really cool stuff. But it still needs that human aspect, because again, if you want to be the coolest pilot or the best hauler, it's about getting out there and doing it, not just chilling out in your penthouse sitting on tablets and sending out an army of hauling drones.
Yeah, which is going to be interesting when we get that gameplay in, because we do have these cargo-moving drones. We do have the idea of combat drones. So people, I think, are going to get a little bit more of that fictional flavor that they're looking for once we get these drones running in game and have the different kinds of them, so that you will have your robot helpers coming along with you and doing stuff for you. And when you're in the city, you'll start seeing them moving around and stuff. That'll be another level, I think, that we're striving for, that science fiction fun that we're not at yet.
There are different kinds of meat. A lot of the cheaper stuff, you'll see synthetically grown meat, still technically meat. And for some of it, there is actual livestock still being raised. We have land, and grain is not so much of an issue anymore. It is a little more luxury, because you have to fly it around and ship it and all that cost involved. But we do have space, literally whole planets, to do this stuff on. So yeah, it comes from a variety of sources. And you'll see in some of the descriptions, some things are just protein, which gives you the nutrients you need, but it's not trying to simulate any kind of flesh-eating experience.
TL;DRThey are trying to find ways for players to affect lore, such as discovering jump points or having the economy change a region, though these ideas still need design and testing, and Spectrum feedback influences them.
Ever since the very earliest days of this, the example that always gets brought up is the Dread Pirate Roberts thing: if you're the pilot who kills the notorious Dread Pirate Roberts, that goes down in history, you were the person that tagged that person. For me, we're not really creating any kind of 'you're the one' type scenario here. You are just one of a couple-billion-person universe. So we're trying to figure out ways that the players can affect the flow of the lore, but it has to be something of note and significance. We've talked in the past about discovering jump points, even trying to figure out ways that we can add gameplay to existing jump points as well, so there's additional stuff for explorers to try to do in the meantime. Can we make routes more efficient? The tried and true path is stable and dah, dah, dah, but can we do unstable routes that you can discover, that can show up and then disappear? Stuff like that. We're trying to figure out a bunch of different ways. Obviously, all of this needs to go by design and be tested out to see if it's fun. But trying to figure out ways to have the players affect the world around them has always been a thing on the forefront.
We saw Tony and Jake's presentation at CitizenCon with the new economy stuff, and the narrative team is very excited about that coming online, because that's going to be another tool, hopefully, that we'll be able to tie into, from the perspective of what the players are doing. So again, the idea that they're a small percentage of the population, but if enough players, if a big enough org starts interrupting trade to an area, we hope in real time to be able to have that area affected, so that you might see a city get dirtier and the crime rates start going up and security start coming in. That's one way that I see the players interacting with narrative and design on the same level, seeing the world change slowly because of what they're doing.
Conversely, with that same example, an area starts getting affected and starts going down economically, and they start putting out a bunch of ads for hired guns to come in and help restore security, and players come in and fulfill those roles. Then they feel responsible for bringing the economy back up, because they've kicked out the outlaws and swept the area clear and stuff like that. So yeah, there's a bunch of different ways, basically.
And even on a simpler level, we love your input on Spectrum, everywhere. We read a lot more than we're able to comment on, unfortunately. Reading is faster than commenting, because we have to be very careful with how we respond to make sure that it's canon. It takes a little bit longer, so we're not as active with that as I would like to be. Apologies. But I love hearing your thoughts, and it does influence what we do. A lot, like the election stuff, where we're reading everything that you guys are saying on it, and it's really fun and it makes us think of stuff. So that's great. Keep doing that, please.
TL;DRPlayer activity has fed into lore in several cases, including Benny Henge, a response to an org's logo dispute with Consolidated Outland, and Jumptown becoming notorious enough to appear in a Senate hearing.
Benny Henge is a great example. That was player-inspired, from all the big Big Benny's vending machine collections, and then we wanted to do an homage to that. We always try to really bury stuff in the narrative of the game, so it wasn't just building this fun site that was cool. We had to think of why someone would do this. And so we came up with a story, spoilers for people who haven't discovered it, of this eccentric artist who was trying to make a name for themselves, who met a slightly tragic end out there. And so that was all inspired by this back-and-forth conversation between the players, the game, and the designers. So that was pretty neat.
There's another good one too. This was years ago, but I remember, I think it was Consolidated Outland. We came out with an ad, and there was an org that had a logo that was very similar to the Consolidated Outland one. So they tried to send a cease and desist letter to Consolidated Outland. And so we organized a response, and we shut down their org, or said that they were locked, because they were under investigation from the Advocacy for libel. And it was just a little fun back-and-forth thing. I always get a kick out of doing stuff like that.
Oh, Jumptown, yeah. That was fascinating to see, how that all came together, and how there were people that were trying to game the system and people just trying to do runs, and it created a whole...
Yeah, and we literally folded that back into the lore also, regarding Crusader getting into trouble for basically playing with their crime stats, basically saying crime is lower than it was there. And so the head of Crusader had to go in front of a Senate subcommittee and testify about improving their security. And one of the points that came back around was, oh, well, what about this place called Jumptown, which is a very notorious drug-running location in your system that you're doing nothing about? We know about it here. So it was because of the popularity of Jumptown, and people sharing the information and doing the runs there, that we then folded it back into where it became a part of the lore itself, that it had become so notorious it was known in the Senate and throughout the universe.
TL;DRThey hope so: several tiers of long-running storylines, from the election to local conflicts, are meant to be explored through gameplay without fixed outcomes, with occasional special events, to convey time passing.
That's the hope. We've sort of been outlining stories, and you're seeing some of it. Again, the thing Adam was referring to about the crime situation outside of Crusader becoming an issue, and them not being well equipped to handle it, is one of the storylines that we have developing in Stanton. And yeah, so the hope is that, because Squadron 42 is a much more blinders-on, single-player experience, cinematic adventure type thing, we're trying to figure out ways to still have that kind of fun, but obviously in a larger multiplayer arena.
Yeah, I think a lot of our larger plots that we introduce, and you can see some of these in the election with these hot-button topics of how should security work? Should it be more of these government-run organizations, or should we offload it more to private security? These are topics that we want explored through gameplay, and we have a bunch of ideas for what the different outcomes could do. So the Karen Civil War, Synthworld, all these high-level topics, it's not that we have one set narrative where we know how it ends. We're hoping to put these things into the universe and see how the players interact with them and see which way that goes. And hopefully these storylines will develop and then end, and then we'll introduce more ones. And so that way, you'll feel the passage of time.
And also having the multiple tiers of stories. There's a larger storyline going on with, obviously, the upcoming election, there's the Vanduul military conflict, all that stuff. But then within Stanton, we're having this question of, technically they're a UEE system, but they're not a recognized one because they're all corporate-owned. So the corporations are trying to figure out how to handle crime within their system, because Crusader's obviously not doing a great job and that's screwing it up for everybody else. But then we'll have stories that are on a more local level, like Lorville has its own storyline about activists versus Hurston Dynamics, fair pay and non-toxic work conditions type thing. And then hopefully we'll get interpersonal storylines, where you come across characters who have something at stake that they really care about that you can get involved with. So hopefully, between all of those levels of stories that are all moving at different paces, obviously, we get a sense of an interwoven universe.
Yeah. And then hopefully, as well, down the road, we're going to start introducing more special events, which are these bigger story moments where there will be some kind of effect at the end of it that'll change things a little bit. But those will be more special case, because a lot of these, like Hurston versus the Hurston activists, we want that to carry on for a long time and play with that storyline, so that we're not just introducing a bunch of content and then having it go away after one quarter or something like that, because it's just too expensive development-wise in terms of time and development resources. So by having these long-brewing storylines that lead up to a big event, we can then have an outcome happen.
TL;DRArcCorp's story is less defined, but it involves a crime element and a free-market-gone-wild theme where workers get stuck on the planet in low-paying jobs.
Yes. It's not as defined, because it's much more of a weird melting pot, because they bring in a bunch of different companies. But yes, there's a crime element going on there that Twitch is a part of.
Stanton as a whole has all these different takes on capitalism, and we've talked about this before a little bit, but ArcCorp is like the free market gone completely wild, is kind of the idea. And so we hinted at in one of our short stories the idea that people can get stuck there, because there's so many people going there for work, and it's a hiring market, so people arrive there, can't find work, and get stuck on the planet because they can't get anything other than low-paying subsistence jobs, and end up there a bit destitute. Even though they're working, they can't afford to get back out, which is a different kind of entrapment than Hurston's tight contracts. And so we're trying to play around with the idea of that. And you have microTech, which we just dropped, and we're starting to hint that they're a company that means well, but this is kind of what happens when they're making their own laws as this corporate entity. And so you start seeing this party scene developing and these more liberal attitudes, and what's going to come out of that. Versus Crusader, which is a company that really tries to care and take care of people, but maybe they're not equipped to be a government. So it's interesting.
TL;DRmicroTech is a tech-campus culture that tolerates recreational drugs and offers perks to keep workers, but treats intellectual property theft as sacrosanct, which makes corporate espionage a big area to play with.
Basically, microTech obviously is the developer of mobiGlas. We sort of have this water-cooler description of New Babbage as Silicon Valley slash Cabo or Vail. Because it's basically this very weird mishmash of a lot of tech developers, and they really are trying to foster innovation and bring smart minds together and stuff like that. And this is something we discussed when Will and I were walking through halls carrying lattes: the idea that to them, recreational drugs are not good, people abuse them, but people need to blow off steam and party a little bit, so they'll turn a blind eye to it. But intellectual property theft on microTech is sacrosanct, you don't do that. So yeah, like what Will was saying, they have fallen into this interesting spin on capitalism or corporate culture, of being very lax with a lot of things but super hardcore with other things. So how does that exactly play out for their employees? And obviously, there's a huge market for corporate espionage. So that would be a big thing we get to play with there, because again, the stakes are so high. There's a lot of really cutting-edge development going on, there's a lot of interest in that next billion-dollar idea, and people are willing to shed some blood to get the next hot app.
Yeah, it's interesting, because it's almost like corporate campus culture taken to a planetary level. So it's almost the inverse of Hurston, where they try to lock you into these contracts where you can't leave. On microTech, it's Brave New World style, where they're like, well, let's give you all this good stuff so you don't want to leave. We'll put you in these domes, and you'll have all these yoga services and rock climbing walls and things like that. It's just a different way to try to entice people to want to stay there and stay working and active all the time and essentially not leave the planet.
Golden handcuffs type thing. You get all of these opportunities, and they're like, well, why do you need to take a vacation? Any place you want to go is right here. And so they get to trap them into working a little bit longer. It's not that insidious, but it's that type of thing.
TL;DRCrusader is a caring company that is too nice to be a government, struggling with security as tourism attracted outlaws and facing a dilemma over its charitable donations.
The nice guys who are probably too nice. Yeah, Crusader. And also, we're trying to not have it be ultra, ultra pessimistic. I mean, I'm pessimistic by nature, so that's just going to happen. But with Crusader, we actually wanted them to be genuinely like, we care about our workers and want to make a good environment for them, and a safe place and a place for their families, a place that they're proud to work at, and know that their higher-ups really take care of them. But the double-edged sword to that is, are they able to make the hard calls, to make decisions that aren't nice? And so that's where their willingness to empathize is almost becoming a detriment to them, because with their outlaws, they're like, well, they're clearly desperate and they're having problems and stuff like that. So it's staying their hand a little bit as far as being able to really clamp down on them from a security standpoint, which, unfortunately, a lot of these outlaws are going to take advantage of and capitalize on. So that was sort of the fun twist.
Yeah, that they wanted all this tourism to come, because, building the Starliner and stuff like that, they were trying to attract people. And then with those tourists came people looking to prey off those tourists. And then the question is, is their security up to snuff? And they're having a hard time dealing with this. And it's just that thing that we're seeing: running a company is not the same thing as running a government. They're not equatable. And that's what Crusader is learning in real time and trying to get on top of.
Yeah. And one of the core principles of Crusader has always been to donate a percentage of their profits to nonprofit organizations. So they have all this money that they've also dedicated to other causes, which is now becoming something for them to consider. Do you stop doing that to increase security? Do you give up one of your core principles as a way to protect yourself? But if you don't protect yourself, does the entire thing just go away, and then you have no money to give away? So they're kind of stuck in this Catch-22 to a certain degree.
Not disingenuous. I think microTech has read a report that says you get better productivity. They noticed a 0.3 increase if people do exercise every two hours in their creative function. And so they provided that, and people do better if they have healthy food to eat, so they made sure that's there. And that's kind of how they approached this. They did city planning. They looked at reports. They decided that these colors are best to improve your mood, and that's why this stuff is this color, that kind of thing.
Again, not to rub it in, but there are some really fun aspects when you walk around New Babbage: some of the announcements in the shopping areas are part of that self-help. They hired a self-help guru, basically, to give you bits of inspiration to take with you on your day that are really fantastic.
TL;DRGrim HEX is a former housing exchange for miners, now squatted and run by the Nine Tails outlaw pack, who use it as a headquarters and are a major thorn for Crusader.
Well, they're just trying to keep their heads down. Again, it used to be a legitimate housing exchange, which is where the HEX comes from. So it was basically a staging area for local miners to rent rooms and dock their ship. Basically, they can go out and mine an asteroid and then have a place. They don't have to travel to another system to go home. They can dock pretty close. But the station shut down, but was not uninhabited. So basically, people either stuck around or moved back in and started squatting there. And so it's an off-the-grid type establishment. And then the new power was an outlaw pack known as the Nine Tails, who basically moved in and set up shop there. And so that's their basic haunt. So they're basically the security, obviously not conventional police, but that's their headquarters for operations in the system. So they're basically there messing around and hitting Crusader really hard, and they're probably one of the biggest thorns in their side at the moment.
That's the hope. Again, to help us, to allow us to reuse assets, the hope is that we create a standardized housing station, and then this was just the dilapidated version. Fingers crossed. I'm hoping that we see some more.
Yeah, just a more permanent setup for people that's not just renting EZ Habs at an R&R station, these floating space apartments that would be much more affordable than living planetside. If you work in space doing asteroid mining in a big belt, you would maybe want to live in one of these rather than going down to a world and back up every time.
TL;DRDelamar is an unclaimed Nyx refugee base founded by people fleeing the Messer regime, where the egalitarian People's Alliance tolerates a growing criminal element as long as no crime happens in the station.
Delamar, again, is actually supposed to be situated in the Nyx system, which is unclaimed. Basically, it started off as a refugee base. People who were trying to flee the fascist Messer regime went there to try to set up their own society and community, and called themselves the People's Alliance. It's a similar thing to Crusader, actually. The goal was to set up this really egalitarian society: the Messers are evil and doing it all wrong, so we're going to do it right, and it's all going to be about people and celebrating each other and sharing and blah, blah, blah, and not cracking down on people and shutting down their ways of belief and stuff. But unfortunately, there are people that are taking advantage of that freedom, which is a criminal element that is slowly moving in, using them as a shelter to hide from authorities. And so it puts the People's Alliance in a precarious position, because, like what was said earlier, we don't want to sacrifice our beliefs by ratting out these people who are clearly a bad element. But at the same time, they're preying upon people, even people in our system. So they're not good. How do we reconcile those two?
Yeah, and basically they reach this imperfect balance where, as long as there's no crime actively in the station, they're willing to turn a blind eye to it. So the criminals are keeping it low-key for now, and everyone's just ignoring each other to maintain this truce. So we'll see if that breaks or bubbles up or something.
TL;DRThey concede the timeline was already lengthened and explain it with hand-waving about flat factory and warehouse areas, and say future planet tech may stop the city covering the whole planet.
One of the things that's coming up with one of the future planet techs is, hopefully, it's still in discussion, that the city texture isn't going to cover the entirety of the planet. There are going to be areas that don't have the megacity. It's mostly covered, but it's not going to be as uniform as it is right now.
No, no, that's fair. Again, a thing that we were trying to say, as part of the hand-wavium of it, was the idea that a lot of the planet is large swaths of mostly flat factory stuff or warehouses and stuff that's relatively easy to throw up. And also, our hand-wavium was that they drew a lot of inspiration from some of the Xi'an production worlds that are also that very single-focus type of world allocation. So hopefully they would have magic space brushes that could just spray down urban sprawl. But we haven't really gotten into that. But that was fun.
Yeah, every time the planet team releases a new round, I'm just blown away again. I keep thinking, wow, how can it get better than this? And then they show me. So the new stuff going in in 3.9 is stunning.
We try to stay a little more crunchy sci-fi than that. There are a few things that we've talked about that we're not going to get into now, but that start dipping our toe into the more mysterious science stuff. Like we have our grav-lev technology, where you see on the Xi'an spaceships they have little floaty bits. And we understand the science behind that, but it is heading that way. Yeah, we don't plan on having a whole team of elite esper fighting forces or something coming out and mind-controlling everyone or anything like that. So it's not on the cards right now.
TL;DRNo date is given; they deliberately hold off resolving the Synthworld story in lore until players can experience it in game, and player supply runs could influence the outcome.
That's what every citizen wants to know. I'm paying taxes. So this is something Dave and I were talking a bit about before, just to touch on: a lot of times we want to introduce these cool stories into the lore, but we don't want them to resolve until people can experience them in the game. So sometimes a little bit of time goes on without anything major happening, and that's because we're holding off a little bit narratively until we can resolve this stuff in the game. So sure, we could write a story saying it's done or it failed, but we don't want to do that right now. That's going to be later on. Same thing with the Karen Civil War.
Then it gets to be a thing where it's like, all right, well, then it doesn't matter. If we resolve the Synthworld before you get to hopefully go to the Chronos system and see something about it, then it loses a lot of magic, because you hear about a cool story that happened that you didn't get to experience.
That's another way for players to engage actively with the story. If a lot of players are bringing supplies to the Synthworld to help it be completed, then there's always a chance that maybe it goes in the right direction. If people aren't taking it there because it's not worth it, then that might influence the story for why it fails.
TL;DRGenetic modification is fairly limited in the lore, mostly removing diseases and pre-existing conditions, because too much leads to homogeneity or side effects, though Dave Haddock says it is still somewhat up in the air.
I covered that a little bit in the writer's guide. I'd gone with the Gattaca approach, where initially they cut down on a lot of pre-existing conditions that they could. So there's a certain aspect of genetic modification. Again, it doesn't feel like that's our universe, in a weird way, because we don't want it to get super weird. But again, I don't know. It's still kind of up in the air.
It's fairly limited. I think we're going with the problems that arise from too much genetic modification: generationally, you start seeing these issues spring up. They quickly identified that if you start messing with DNA too much, either you end up with homogeny, which is a big issue for the human race as a whole, or you start getting these unintended side effects a couple of generations in. I think it ended up being a little more controlled and limited to making sure that these diseases were wiped out or nipped in the bud. I think a lot of times you end up having later-in-life gene stuff happen, or lab-grown body parts or organs and stuff like that coming down the road, and that's where medical science headed, versus trying to build the perfect human in a lab through genetic modification.