The developers explain the new lore for regeneration, where Ibrahim spheres and imprints let a bioprinted body retain memories, with traumatic echoes and imprint decay or wipes. They also cover its spread across species and the military, and Pyro's gangs, Ruin Station and Grim HEX.
TL;DRThe lore post revisits the original Death of a Spaceman idea, defining regeneration as bioprinting someone with memories and sense of self intact, stored as an imprint, unlike cloning.
Well, there was a discussion that happened, was it on this very show a few months ago, talking about what would ultimately be the respawning mechanic and revisiting the original Death of a Spaceman post from way back. And so basically this lore post was, as Jared explained earlier, the glorified explanation of what this tech is and what's happening. And just so we could start to get an idea of how we could justify it, what our rule set was and stuff like that, and make sure that it lined up with the mechanics that design has been looking at implementing.
So high-level, regeneration is the technology by which someone can be bioprinted with all their memories and sense of self intact, which is why it's a little bit different than cloning, which is just recreating someone's genetic material without the same person being inside that. And then also we have the idea of the imprint, which is the way that your sense of self is being stored in this technology in the Ibrahim sphere. So that's really high level for some of the stuff that we're going to be discussing later today.
Maybe that's a derogatory term we need to come up with through people who are kind of against this technology, that they don't trust. But we haven't established that yet, so maybe that's a good suggestion. The community may feel free to suggest terms for someone that's been regenerated.
TL;DRDamage carries over so regeneration isn't immortality: the brain is tricked into thinking it suffered the injury, and the imprint captures far more than DNA, such as scars.
The idea behind that was, as with the Death of a Spaceman thing, the idea was that this wasn't the key to immortality, that your body would still be degrading. So we tried to come up with a way to justify that, because on the surface, they're bioprinting a new version of you. It would seem like, well, if I got my arm cut off, they would just print me with a new arm or regenerate me with a new arm. So the idea with this was this notion that the brain is tricked into believing that, well, I got my arm cut off. So even though technically when I regenerate I have a functioning arm, to my brain it suffered such extensive damage that it thinks that it's dead and useless. So that aspect of it carried over. That way we were letting the body still degrade through these.
Yeah, that the imprint is capturing so much more than just a DNA sample would indicate. A DNA sample doesn't have your cool scar that you got when you were 12 years old. That's not in your DNA. That's just on your face. But imprints carry that information with them and carry on. If you want to go have plastic surgery to have that removed in a Calliope machine or something like that, that's still an option. But the imprint itself remembers your current version of you.
TL;DRIf a ship goes offline or is destroyed, you respawn at your primary residence or a hospital via transferred imprints, avoiding ship-stealing loopholes; details will be fleshed out once gameplay implications are clearer.
So even when it's not destroyed, even if a player ship goes offline, right? In terms of persistence and stuff, if someone parks it and makes their ship unavailable, we don't want regeneration to be some loophole in being able to steal someone's ship when they're not around. So when ships become unavailable, you will respawn at your primary residence, wherever your home is, is the idea. With the idea that imprints, because we have this idea that they can be transferred, there exists a backup of you at your home. Now, with the idea that imprints don't become active until you die, whatever is being transferred in that quantum entanglement thing shows up at the proper location, so you'll be at that hospital instead of the ship if you unfortunately pass away.
Yeah, I think from my understanding of it at this point, it's just more for flavor. Because it's this weird thing of, if you as a player have to go, well, my character doesn't remember... I don't know. It feels like right now it's just a bit of flavor text to add to it, that it crosses over.
It's leaving that openness for design to explore some ideas that they had about why you need to imprint frequently or how that's going to affect stuff in that gameplay cycle. And so we wanted to make sure that they had room to develop more impetus to go back to a hospital and get scanned rather than just continuing on forever.
And so the idea was that the imprint is an excellent copy of you, but the echoes that come through aren't complete, which is why you would want to make a new imprint and get scanned again. You're getting flashes of memory, flashes of trauma, but it isn't the same as a 100% copy of you all the time being updated, at least the idea right now.
And for those who are RPing, there's also some variation to it. Maybe you had minimal echoes and your new character remembers everything. It's up to you.
TL;DRWhether a sphere can be stolen is deferred to gameplay and design; they suggest theft might happen only to NPCs as missions, not players, to avoid denying respawns.
That is an interesting question. Again, I do feel bad always deferring on this stuff. I feel like that's going to be dictated by gameplay and design, because it seems like it could obviously be rife for griefing, and it puts players in a weird position if they could be stolen and thus inaccessible and it makes someone die. I don't know what that would mean. Part of the original idea of it was just that it was something that would probably not be accessible to people as an item to carry around. But again, that's going to be dependent on the gameplay and the ultimate design and stuff like that, and what's fun and what's not.
Just like it's been inspiring players to imagine cool scenarios, we're hoping to also inspire our mission designers to imagine stuff and be able to work with them on what is fun, like Dave said.
Yeah, and maybe it's one of those things where the theft of Ibrahim spheres happens to NPCs, where it's a mission thing of, hey, somebody jacked my Ibrahim sphere, can you go get it back? But something that doesn't happen to players, just because you don't want to be denied that opportunity to respawn, because that would be a bit of a drag.
Yeah, all the wiping stuff. You're an assassin and you don't want to just send a message and force someone to respawn. You want to get rid of this human forever. And it's been something we've been having fun talking about ourselves with this new mechanic. It's like, okay, is it that you're sent to kill the same person five times until they're dead for real, and you have to keep doing it and waiting at the hospital and stuff like that? Is it something, if we work with design on this, where you are manipulating an Ibrahim sphere directly or manipulating an imprint directly somehow? Of course, we might limit how much that affects it with our backup technology and all this kind of stuff. So definitely room to explore down the line as far as gameplay.
So basically they want to know, if you have your thing set in one location but you're forced to regenerate at a lower-quality place because it's closer, does that affect your IVS? I think we're just going to punt that one to the design team as they further develop it, probably.
Yeah, right now we have that there's a sense of economy to the imprints and IVS, and how fast it could degrade, and whether you repair that or help it, all these kinds of ideas floating, and we're looking forward to design figuring out more of the specifics of that and how it ties into insurance and how much you're paying and all this kind of stuff.
TL;DRHumans developed regeneration first, so other species didn't discover it independently; the speakers lean toward making it universal across species rather than giving each its own version, and will watch them adapt.
It was actually really interesting. While we've been talking about the post that we did on Tuesday, weirdly enough, we actually didn't really talk much about the implications for the other primary alien races. At this point, I kind of feel like it might be easier for them to share in the technology. Before we jumped on, Will and I were actually spitballing how the Banu would feel about it and how the Xi'an would feel about it and stuff like that. But as opposed to the Xi'an having their version of this, I have a feeling we probably would just make it universal across the various species.
Yeah, right now it was humans who developed this first. It was our tech and our big breakthrough over the other species. So it wasn't like they were off developing it and had fallen upon it. It was our unique consolidation of salvaging this Vanduul tech and having Calliope bioprinting technology come online recently, where everything came together and we had this huge breakthrough of being able to bring people back. So we'll actually be seeing in real time how the other species are dealing with this new technology as well. Humanity is still adjusting to this new way of life.
That was the quantum entanglement reference that we worked into the thing, is that it's something in and of itself. It's not like our engine technology or anything like that. It's an aspect of this that is still unknown, and people don't quite understand how it works, but this is just the effect of it.
And because it's not 100%, we were talking about that perfect recall, it makes it unreliable as a fast communication. If you tell someone an important message and then shoot them in the head, there's a chance they might not remember exactly what you told them on the other side of it.
TL;DRA CrimeStat gets your imprints impounded, like medical treatment before jail; waking awake serves the sentence, but Will isn't sure whether you respawn in prison or Grim HEX and will check.
It's when you get a CrimeStat, your imprints get impounded, would be a way of looking at it, if you have any on record in legal systems. Just like they would give you medical treatment if you got shot on the way to capture and then bring you to jail afterwards.
I would also maybe throw in there that, as opposed to, because you could argue, I think they did this in Altered Carbon, that idea of, oh well, if you're in prison, they just keep your stack in isolation for however many years. But it feels like in that regard, it might pass by in the blink of an eye. You just wake up and it's 150 years later or whatever. But with this, you're expected to be awake and conscious, so you serve your sentence. Otherwise, it's a catnap and you wake up.
I don't actually know how it works right now to make an imprint at Grim HEX and then get killed by the authorities, whether you respawn in prison or in Grim HEX. I'd have to double check on that. Not sure exactly of the gameplay flow. Something for Evocati to let me know. I need to go play the game after this and see for myself.
TL;DRA wipe means an imprint is no longer viable and the person is permanently dead; currently it's imprint decay over time, though assassination-style wipes remain undecided and appeal to the speakers.
Wipe is the term for when an imprint is no longer viable for regeneration. They've been wiped from the sphere. It's removed, and that person is dead forever at that point, other than in our hearts and our minds.
So a wipe is that moment when you'd be forced to create a new player, and your possessions and everything would transfer to that player, as in the original Death of a Spaceman. So what are some of the ways that a person can be wiped?
Well, again, as of right now, I would say that the effect of being wiped is more that the imprint degrades over time, that it's not necessarily something that somebody's doing to you or can accelerate. It's just the fact of your imprint decaying, if that makes sense. As opposed to, again, whether we're going to introduce a notion of an assassination mission where it's like, hey, we want you to go in and artificially wipe somebody...
Yeah, or something like that. That remains to be seen. But I just initially interpreted it as, it's not something that can be necessarily physically done to someone. It's just a thing that happens over time. That's the end goal of that degradation.
Yeah, I like the idea, though, even without the Ibrahim sphere manipulation, that there would be very high-tier assassination missions. Almost like the Nemesis system, where you have to kill this guy until he's gone forever. And that takes a lot of doing, and that would be a dedication of time, but really fun, of just always showing up and chasing.
TL;DRThey believe the technology has spread to criminals, and explain that the first regeneration came before the Imperator took office, whose later push made it standard in every hospital.
And to address the timeline a little bit, there's been some confusion about Imperator Addison. In the article we said in 2949 the first successful regeneration happened. And then when Addison came into office, she dedicated a large portion of the budget into proliferating the technology throughout the empire. And I guess there was some confusion because Addison didn't come into office until 2951. The idea was that after the first regeneration in 2949, development continued and people were very excited about it and it was starting to spread, but it was still limited in scope as to who could get access to this technology, who was able to be regenerated. And so Addison's part of it was making it standard. She forced the companies to make it so that everyone could be producing it. There was a mass initiative to make sure that every hospital had it, rather than just the biggest hospital on Terra or something like that. So that was what happened after she came into office, and that's why it's so common right now.
Yeah, the ramifications of this are everywhere. And I would imagine that the military severely adjusted their operating procedure, knowing that their soldiers can be brought back.
And it's an interesting problem, trying to teach your Starmen that they're not immortal. As soon as you know that you can get shot in the head and come back, that changes your sense of danger a little bit, right? Do you get reckless? So how do you tell people, wait, don't be reckless, because we don't want people flying stupid, blowing up ships and then just expecting to come back all the time.
And also, again, there's the physical effects. That's the fun thing about this, is that there's still consequence. Yes, you're back, but your arm might be useless, so you need to get a cybernetic arm. It's not nothing.
Not a firm date. As with all this kind of stuff, as we take the first pass, we put a couple of pins in, but we don't pin everything down until we really need to, because if we make it too rigid, then when someone comes in and says, we think for gameplay we need to do this, then we have a lot more work fitting it in. But if we just have these broader strokes of what we know, in 2949 the tech was there and by 2951 it was widely available, we can massage everything in between as needed.
I think it would vary. Just like people with car accidents today, a traumatic experience, what you can recall on the other side of it varies vastly between different people.
TL;DRThey haven't explored unintended consequences much yet, since this was only a broad sketch; they'll detail it as design decisions firm up, and only floated a speculative loop of repeated dying.
We haven't delved too heavily into that. It's mostly just been about getting this initial sketch out and seeing how it stuck. I'm sure you know how we get. We'll corrupt it in some way. But at this point, it was more outlining the system, the rough structure for it, and, like what we do with most things, this is the broad sketch of it and we'll be detailing it out, and we'll probably dig in more, especially once there are more decisions being made on the design side that we can really lock in on. Then we can play around with the expectations of it and turn it on its head and try to have more fun with it.
I was thinking about someone who got stuck in a loop where they have a problem that medical science can't fix that's terminal. And so they just keep coming back a few moments before they die, and have to wait until they're wiped. I don't know if that would happen or if they would just...
Well, until the degeneration hits them so much they just die from the degeneration, instead of what was killing them to begin with. You would just have a couple cycles of coming back and dying right away.
Currently, I would say yes. That's what we've been anticipating. Again, it's a physical thing like anything else. That's the chemical addiction. With WiDoW, the staining of the nerves or the veins. I would assume that that stuff would transfer over because, again, it's a part of the physiology, like a scar. So I would probably say yes.
It's definitely an interesting conundrum of our current day, right, that you have pet owners who have more and more advanced pet care options given to them, where previously they would have euthanized the pet, but now you can pay $100,000 to try to do a risky surgery that might save them. And do you do that because you love your pet? Which is a really terrible situation.
TL;DRThe hope is that Pyro gangs each get territory, colors and insignias, possibly separate from Ruin Station, and perhaps later small bases that dynamically change control; none of it is promised.
Yeah, that's the hope. Again, we have the ones where the idea was that they were battling over Ruin Station. But yeah, the hope is that ultimately they'll have their territory, they'll have their colors, insignias, tags, stuff like that, that you'd be able to use to identify them and places that they're occupying. So yeah, hopefully, that's the dream.
Yes. Well, because again, if they're not in charge at Ruin Station, they would probably be hiding out somewhere else. And there are larger gangs, we have system-wide ones, we have more planetary localized ones.
And I think way down the line somewhere, with the dynamic stuff that Tony's working on, we'll hopefully build up a situation where there's a small base that changes control and players can be part of that. And sometimes it's hostile towards them, sometimes it's friendly. So that would be kind of an end goal somewhere along the way.
TL;DRGrim HEX doctors are imagined as independent, often disgraced practitioners protected by the Nine Tails rather than gang members; a Doctors Without Borders type is an interesting idea, and some clinic additions are coming.
The Doctors Without Borders thing is interesting. Actually, I hadn't thought about that. Most of the ones that we had been talking about thus far, at least for Grim HEX, was the idea that they were probably disgraced doctors, people who had gotten addicted to drugs or had been drummed out for something, and this was the only way that they could make ends meet. Or they just happened to be handy with a saw. But it could be really interesting to have a Doctors Without Borders type character who's volunteering their time to go out here and provide adequate medical care for people who are living in a very dangerous environment. It's a humanitarian thing.
But as far as, does that imply that the doctors at Grim HEX work for the Nine Tails? I would probably say no. I would imagine that they would be an independent group.
Yeah, especially at Grim HEX. There's a lot of independent operators that are running shops and stuff who are under the protection of the Nine Tails. Maybe they would treat a Nine Tails member better than they would treat someone else because they're in charge, but they're not gang members.
We showed a bunch of the new aprons and costume libraries for the vendors yesterday, and I flat out put it to Ian, I'm like, let me see a surgeon in Grim HEX with a bloody Whammer's apron. Moonlighting: Whammer's by day, Grim HEX surgeon by night, doesn't change his clothes.
The hope is that, yeah, they would, or the expectation would be that the gangs maintain their own security in their facilities. But what those rules are might be different than an actual law enforcement security type thing. For example, if you go into Lorville and you start punching people in the street, the cops are going to sweep in and arrest you, and probably arrest them, and then probably arrest your family and then your cousins and your friends. But in Grim HEX, a Nine Tails security person might not care, but they will care if you pull out a gun and start shooting at Nine Tails people.
But because we messed up, we can change it to make it that we were always right. That's the power. No, we will not be retconning this. It was a slight slip-up.
TL;DRHow often Ruin Station changes hands is still undecided and tied to dynamic event design, though the hope is that it shifts relatively often, with reputation affecting how players are treated.
I think at this point it's TBD. Again, this is something that we want to work out with the dynamic event system that Tony works on and the design team. But one of the things that we have kicked around is this idea: do we make a transfer of power in Ruin Station a dynamic event? Kind of like what Will was suggesting earlier, where maybe players can help, stuff like that. Or it's just something that just happens. I leave Ruin Station and it's under XenoThreat control, and then I come back and it's now under the Headhunters' control, something like that. And again, it has multiple permutations of how it can affect the players, to the extent of, if I have good rep with XenoThreat, for example, but I have bad rep with the Headhunters, if the Headhunters take control, do I now have to watch my back while I'm in there? Do they react more coldly to me because I don't have good rep with them? Stuff like that. So there's a lot of questions that need to be answered before we can really take an official stance on it. But the hope was that it would be reflective of Pyro itself, that you would see the station shifting hands relatively often, just to seem fun and dynamic and shifting. And again, it's a system at war with itself.
TL;DRNo exact number is given beyond saying there were originally 11 gangs or factions in the lore; what actually gets released depends on gameplay testing and staggered patches.
I have to count them. There's a lot. There's a decent amount. Let's just preface this by saying that there's what we were outlining for the entire system, ultimately, as to how we can stagger these things to come out.
There's what you come up with, and then there's what gets released patch after patch after patch. So the number of gangs that you develop and that exist in lore may not be the same.
It's very cheap for us to come up with gangs. It's not cheap to realize them, as we've learned. But just to say, I had 11 gangs originally, or factions, I guess, would be a way to put it.
When we were doing the brainstorming, we wanted to make sure that different areas of crime were covered, so that players could have different groups to work with depending on what they wanted to do. And then we also wanted there to be natural competition, so that there wasn't only one group doing this, so that you could choose one side or the other. But as far as when they're going to get implemented, or how fast, it all comes down to us testing it in gameplay and seeing them actually be fun.
And we've organized it, again, because creating that rivalry is really fun. It gives the players a choice of which horse they want to back, which is really interesting.
I think it's important to remember, we ran into this when we put the Overlord armor out for the subscribers, that just because you're in a gang and just because you're in Pyro doesn't mean that... Sometimes that's a thing that you do for survival in a bad time, in a bad place. It's not because you're out there trying to hurt the world.
Again, I guess exclusive number two: one of the gangs or organizations in there is actually globally nicknamed the Survivors. It's intended to be clusters of neutral groups that are just out living in Pyro, trying to live off the grid. So they're not antagonistic. If you attack them, they'll attack you back, but they're just out there, heads down, trying to live their life. And so, yeah, there's a nice variety of them.
Yeah, getting Pyro online, and when we're going to be able to introduce some of the hostility system elements into it with the rivalries, so that who you're affiliated with, doing a job for this person, makes it dangerous to go to these areas or interact with these people, will be really interesting. With the more legal organizations, it doesn't make sense for Covalex to start shooting at you because you're doing missions with Ling Family Hauling. That's not how businesses work. So it hasn't been necessary to dial it in that much yet. But once we get major outlaw gameplay, I think that's going to be a more unique aspect, how those choices have much more dire consequences.
I would probably guess it was the Headhunters. I'll give you the water-cooler pitch for the Headhunters: they were like a real old-school, venerable gang. They've been around Pyro for a long time. They almost have a thieves' code type thing. If you had to deal with a gang in Pyro, if you made a deal with the Headhunters, they would stick to it. But that being said, they still rob people and kill people and stuff like that. But they were a bit more of a classic biker-gang-ish, rough-and-tumble group.
I think right now you're most likely to run into a survivor group that operates like that, about trying to make ends meet, looking out for each other. That small family-style gang versus a criminal enterprise, which is some of the bigger names that we're splashing around.