Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Playing With the Lore Team
The lore team explains how they work with design on mission content, including planned multi-part "mission complications", and how technical limits shape deliberately vague lore. They also cover alien races, old corporations, the Galactapedia, the Ark, shared rewards and party play, and procedural set dressing.
TL;DRThe lore team works closely with the live and Squadron 42 teams on missions, currently improving tools for procedurally generated missions, with economy-driven mission content expected eventually.
In fact, we do. We work very closely with the live team and the Squadron 42 team on all the mission content. It kind of works two ways, where sometimes they'll come with ideas, and a lot of times more recently they come to us with mechanics that they have ready, or that they want to implement. And so it's kind of all these loose pieces and we help them come up with ways to glue them all together that we think is interesting. So right now what we have in 3.0 and 3.1 and 3.2 is kind of our first pass at basic generic missions showing up in the general stream from all these kind of generic delivery people. It's kind of a mixture right now. But recently, we've been working specifically to enable more functionality for procedurally generated missions and improve that workflow. Because as we're adding in a bunch of new locations, we kind of need to upgrade our toolset so that it's easier to dynamically integrate stuff as we rapidly expand outwards. And so that the system can more intelligently be able to pick between locations and items to deliver and who you're doing it for. So that's very exciting.
Yeah, it's a fascinating process to look at, particularly coming to it kind of new, because it's sort of a... The system itself, currently, because we're kind of handcrafting these things, there's a sense of how a delivery mission works. Originally, there'd be a list of locations for those delivery missions that you would need to fill in. But if we wanted to add a new location to it, we would have to manually go in and add it to all of the missions that that affected. We're trying to shift over to a more dynamic way where we can just have a massive list of locations that are tagged as these can be delivery mission locations, these can be assassination missions or whatever. And so we just add to that one list and all the missions will kind of point to it.
And so this is like the very first steps, and then eventually the economy's being worked on as well. So eventually all that should be glued together so that there's economic drivers as well determining these things. For example, eventually you'll have a factory that's producing products in real time, which is generating mission content to grab that stuff and deliver it to where it's being sold, and all that kind of exciting stuff.
Oh, yeah. Yes. I mean, that was always kind of the thing over the years, was trying to develop this stuff in a way that gave us kind of wiggle room, where we were not dictating gameplay or how things would work. And always being very upfront about the fact that, hey, some of this stuff might change based on how these systems behave when they come online and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's always been kind of a big factor. And I mean, that's what's been fun now, is that now that we've really been locking in the gameplay, we can develop stuff with a little bit more confidence, knowing that, okay, this is representative of how the system is supposed to work.
It's a good one. It'd be the comeback, right? I would go Tevarin as well. They've always been sort of my favorite. Although the Xi'an have really kind of... actually, I don't know, tough call. Banu are super fun now, too.
That's a question. I mean, that's a little bit about the fun history of the different races, is that the Xi'an we have a very known timeline for, because they keep such good family records and we know them going back for thousands of years. But as humans in the UEE, we don't know nearly as much about the Banu's history, as we've talked about before, because their records are very incomplete. And the beauty of it is that they don't know. And then the Vanduul, we do not know their full race history yet. So it's hard to answer that question because there's so many unknowns left for people to discover.
Yeah. I mean, the closest, as Will said, is the Xi'an. We have actually worked out sort of a timeline for them. We did basically the same approach that we did for the original Time Capsule thing, but we just did it for the Xi'an. So it broke down what are the main events throughout their history that kind of changed the direction of their culture. And so we wrote those up as vague kind of rough sketches of, this is when this happened, this is when this happened.
We actually addressed that on Calling All Devs just a couple weeks ago. Yes, but we don't have a timetable for that just yet. But keep an eye on the RSI roadmap.
Yeah, 3.2 introduced tier zero of our new party and grouping system. So I don't know if it's a tier one feature or a tier two feature, but it's on the list.
TL;DRA novella is supposed to happen but time is the problem, and the team is focusing on in-game content over comics, with Jump Point as the existing magazine.
Yeah. I've got to do that. No, I mean, the funny thing is actually I have the story hook for it, which is really dope, but, yeah, time. It's actually really fun, but it's just a question of time.
As far as the other stuff, we have a magazine. I mean, we have Jump Point, the subscriber magazine that we're creating every month. It's full of pretty fantastic content. But as far as comics and the other stuff, we're really digging down, and we talked about this at the beginning of the year when we did our revised lore schedule for the website: we're dedicating more and more of our hours to creating game content. Now that more of the game systems are online, we're having more demands from that. So it's trying to keep our attention there and less on stuff outside the game, which I know is hard, because a lot of the experience also happens outside the game, on the website and stuff like that.
Chris has commented several times throughout the years that that is a goal we want to pursue. I don't want to say there's been movement on it, but let's just say the conversation has come up again recently. Still nothing to announce or report on it, but it's something we've talked about quite often, and it's something we're still talking about.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been one of those things that's been kind of pervasive throughout the entire development, the notion of in-fiction news and updates and commenting on the universe and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's always been...
Because it's true, we do have a lot of companies that have kind of existed for hundreds of years, for centuries. We do have some upstarts, some newer ones that have started in the last 10, 20 years. But I think lore-wise, it's kind of this settling down in the scale of economics, that some companies just became so big, the infrastructure that you needed in place to do the gathering of resources, the shipping, the manufacturing on a galactic scale, means that once you have that foothold, you're much harder to shake and collapse down. Again, we're hearing about the success stories as well.
Also, records are much, much better. And you have companies like ArcCorp who kind of exist because they absorb other companies and add them to this sort of, I don't know. It was always that thing where, I remember someone did the graphic of the number of mega corporations in the world today that own all of the food and drink subsidiaries and stuff like that. And it's like five, and it's like hundreds and hundreds of these things.
Two reasons. One, you guys see me plenty enough. You can't get away from me outside the game. The game should be the one respite where you don't have to deal with me. And the second reason is just I've spent all this time doing all this weight loss and trying to improve my physical health and whatever, and Jeremiah comes on and says, we want to immortalize you fat and hairy and whatever. So it's like... It was a good troll. It was a good troll.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's also that thing, too, where I think it'd be fun, but at the same time, having that level of division, because then whatever you do with that company is weighted with a lot of stuff, so it gets a little weird. We could have companies like Aegis, where we're like, oh, yeah, people hated them because they backed a dictator, and we don't have to worry about getting an angry call from a real company being like, whoa, what?
Probably for the same reason we don't talk about a whole lot of the other systems. We're building out the Stanton system right now, so that's where the overwhelming majority of our developer resources are focused.
We go in phases too, of when we feel like we've done a lot of lore in one place, we'll try to turn our attention to some of the other places that we think need more love.
Spider is never far from my thoughts. Well, it presents a very interesting slash possibly horrifying technical challenge. But again, I think it's actually really interesting. I'm really curious to see if, for example, this sort of modular rest stop stuff that we showed off at CitizenCon last year, that system is laying the groundwork for what we can use for Spider. It's just a question of new assets, but creating a huge sprawling thing.
Very good question. I actually don't remember if we ever specifically placed it. I think we did. I would have to dig in my notes. That story was from a while ago, so... I don't know, Adam, when you were reviewing it, did you come across...?
Like most things, it's a mix. We use procedural systems to get our artists started, and then they go in after the procedural systems get them started and craft after that.
Part of the new procedural station stuff that they have been showing off is kind of doing set dressing sets. An artist will come in and do one version of the set dressing. They will have a table with props arranged on it in a certain way, and then they will do dozens of iterations of that. It is still hand art. The computer is not randomly deciding what 50 objects to put on a table, but it is taking from a bunch of different artist options and choosing between those. It is a way we get a lot of variety while also keeping the artist's love in place.
TL;DRLore is only changed when it is egregiously off from game mechanics, since early vagueness helps, and new fiction is now checked with design before release.
If something's really egregious, we might go back and update it. It's kind of a tricky debate that we have, because stuff is still being developed and in flux. If we go through every time design updates, then we're going to be spending all our time doing that rather than creating new content. So if it's in the wheelhouse of, flavor-wise, feeling almost about right, we'll usually leave it for now.
It also goes back to what we were saying earlier about us being kind of willfully vague in the early days. That has kind of helped out a lot, because by not specifically saying, oh, this exactly is how this thing works, we don't have to go back and modify. But yeah, like Will said, if it's still in the spirit of what we're aiming for, we usually haven't had to do that much. But we will. Again, the hope is that we won't ever do anything that's really serious.
Every time before we release a piece of fiction onto the site nowadays, we email it out to a dedicated group that reads it to not only check our punctuation and grammar, but also to make sure that the content is in line with what design is thinking.
So we'll have design representatives on the email chain, so they have an opportunity to kind of walk back on, you know, this is a bit too, or this is inaccurate, this is sort of what we were thinking, and work with them to bring it in line, or make it a little bit more cryptic so we don't paint them into a corner or provide something that's a false expectation.
TL;DRThe team wants multi-part or branching missions, described as mission complications, as a future upgrade to the mission system, but gives no timing.
Well, we've talked a lot about adding Witchers into Star Citizen, and we've decided against it. It just didn't feel right. We are all Geralt. I think in the future, people are a lot more accepting of werewolves than they were in the Witcher days, and we respect our lycanthropic neighbors now. But yes, we do want to have multi-part storylines or branching missions. Mission complications is the way that we've been talking about it with design, so that you get sent to find a package, but something goes wrong. Someone gets there before you get to it, and then you have to chase them down and get it. It's just a simple example, but you can't always guarantee that a mission will go exactly as planned. That's definitely a future upgrade that we want to make to the mission system. That's part of the ongoing work we're doing now to make everything more procedurally friendly.
Your ship's avionics and your suit's computer do simulated sounds based on advanced computational stuff in order to help you navigate better and be a better pilot. It is like extra sensory feedback. We have talked about a possible thing that we might do well down the road. We talked to Audio about the idea of, when your ship's computer starts breaking down, or if you get EMP'd, that you would lose audio temporarily, that it has the ability to glitch in and out to kind of sell that fiction that it's your computer creating these sounds.
I think there was actually, in the conversations with Britton when devising the languages, this sort of idea of the Xi'an listening to really, really slowed-down music, that it's this very kind of droning, very slow thing that, weirdly enough, they get really into. But yeah, kind of a dirge type thing. Like Brian Eno, slow ambient.
TL;DRLore NPCs in the Ark can't be confirmed either way until the Ark is being built, though it's seen as a possibility, and Galactapedia entries are trickling out in Jump Point.
But I could see that as a possibility, but we'll have to look into that more. But that's a fun idea. Yeah, the Ark will be a fun location once we get it in-game because of the Galactapedia. We're still progressing on the Galactapedia as far as updates go. Working on entries, Cherie's been doing a lot of work on that herself. We've been slowly trickling it out actually in the Jump Points. You can see some early preview of some of the Galactapedia articles. It's been alternating with some other fiction, but there's been a couple of the posts out. What was the last Galactapedia entry we did, Dave?
I did get my head scanned. I insisted upon it. It was very exciting. I'm very low on the tier list, though, for getting my head polished up, but hopefully one day you'll see me running around in-game. I've already been growing my hair into the Riki just to be that much more immersive.