The developers explain the $250 Vanduul Blade concept sale and its lore-based pricing, and cover Caterpillar modules, Nyx, 2.3 and Org 2.0. They also discuss VR support, the Tevarin Prowler, the Saitek HOTAS, an upcoming economy design post and the Wing Commander livestream.
TL;DRPrevious Vanduul ships were event-limited and not to be resold, so selling the Blade lets them make it flyable sooner and gets more testing, while stressing nobody needs to buy it.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Because both the previous Vanduul ships, the Glaive and the Scythe, were limited to specific events. And we said we were not going to sell them again. There's many, many, many people out there who want a Vanduul ship. But it would be very, very easy for us to say, hey, everybody get a Glaive. It's extra money or something. We'd rather not. Selling the Blade means that we get to make it flyable a lot sooner than we wanted initially. It's a win for everybody, I hope.
And more Vanduul ships in players' hands means more testing on the Vanduul ships for Star Citizen, for Squadron 42, and stuff.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
My absolute favorite thing about the Blade is that I got to write a post about how you shouldn't buy it as the sale. We talked to design, and we were like, okay, how do we make life harder for people who have Vanduul ships?
We put this disclaimer on every sales post that we do, but we really do mean it. You don't have to buy every ship that we put out there. I would even say, for me personally, I'm not speaking for everybody else, but I don't think you should buy every ship. Earn some stuff in the game. That's perfectly fine. We sell these things so that you can support the continued development of Star Citizen, and we certainly appreciate it when you do. But nobody should feel compelled.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Yeah, there'll be plenty of opportunities to capture a Glaive in the game. I think it's the most common Vanduul design. It's an older ship. It was one of the first ones we encountered in 2681, and it's a classic.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
So the Blade is at the bottom of the tier. If you're familiar with Wing Commander, it's the Hornet, it's the Ferret, it's the Arrow, and then the Glaive and the Scythe are the medium fighters. They are the Scimitar, the Rapier.
It should go through the 28th. I saw somebody mention the 21st. If the post does say the 21st, we'll change it. We can't look at it right now. We're on the show.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
The limited ship sale is through the 21st. The Blade is longer.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
No. One of the things that seems to make everybody in the universe really, really angry is when we do a stock limited ship. So we try not to do that. Something we're super concerned about balance for, we try not to do it. In this case, we're more concerned with lore than, it's not a balance issue to give everybody a light fighter. It's more of a lore issue. We don't want there to be too many Blades out there. And we didn't want to basically punish customers for a lore issue. So we kind of factor that into the price, essentially.
TL;DRConcept work is mostly done in 3D now, and the earlier leaked model is being fully replaced by a ground-up build with interiors, since leaked content may not appear in the game.
It's because we do most of our concept work in 3D now.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Well, actually, I can tell you some more to that. The 3D version that some folks might have found in a leak that someone posted has been totally replaced. It's getting a new ground-up 3D model with interiors thanks to this concept.
Yeah, it hasn't been built out with all the damage states and with the new techniques that we've learned and all that stuff.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
That entire initial model is out. They're building it from the ground up. And actually, that's kind of an example of one of the things that having these sales lets us do. We can put more fidelity into a ship that, yes, we've thought about in the past, but we haven't kind of committed to. This may come as a surprise, but some of the things that are in the leak are not going to be in the game at all. There are entire ships in there that the design has changed. They're not even there anymore. There's a lot of work in there that will appear and a lot that won't. And that's not on any game. I was digging through Privateer 2 the other day, and I found that there is an entire pirate cruiser in the game that they either cut the missions it was used in, or they never wrote one in the first place, but they had designed out an entire massive pirate ship that just never gets spawned anywhere in the game. So you'll find that in everything.
Actually, I was just talking to Gurmukh about it yesterday. Gurmukh's working on it, Calix is working on it, Elwin's been working on it. They are ramping up.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
And the great thing about that is we're generating a whole lot of new art we're going to be able to share in the not-too-distant future once they're done.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
No, we can't. No, the plan is that we're currently planning out our later Q3, Q4 asset assignments for that stuff. Constellation's already gone through its hopefully final revamp, and it's just a matter of taking that base Constellation and turning it into the way we want the variants to work. But I think the priority is going to be get the base ship up to almost ready to go in the game. And then we kind of build the variant off of that. And that'll happen for the 300 and the Aurora and everything that has variants.
TL;DRNyx is far along and walkable, with lighting done a month ago and the team now implementing some environment design changes, such as a giant floating ship engine.
Emre did one of his final lighting passes about a month ago. And then I think there were a few design changes, a couple of things they wanted to change about the environment. And so I think that right now they're implementing those changes. But it's gorgeous, and it seems very far along. You can walk all over the place. The same thing that happened with ArcCorp happened with Nyx, where as soon as Emre got his hands on it, the entire thing just came to life, and that's pretty much where it is now. I think that one of the things they're changing is they're adding this giant ship engine that's going to be floating above the marketplace, which looks pretty sweet.
And if you want to see some of Emre's lighting work on Nyx, you can look at an episode of ATV from December. I don't remember which one. But there's an episode of ATV if someone wants to look for it and put it in chat where you can see Emre's work doing the lighting on Nyx.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
That's a germane question. We do have folks on VR now, but we're not working to Oculus' timeline. We're working to when it makes sense to integrate it into our engine.
I will ask Brian Chambers to say whatever he can say about it in next week's News from Around the Verse. So I'm not promising what it'll be, how much information, but I will ask him to mention the state of VR in next week's News from Around the Verse.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Fingers crossed. So we did hit our commit deadline for 2.3. Everything is in the stew right now, and our testers are going to start seeing what actually works and what needs more work. So too soon to release a feature list, but we may have something a little bit later that will answer one of those questions.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Yes, that is one of the things that the procedural folks are working on because we don't just want to make a planet, we want to make the Genesis planet from Star Trek 3. In fact, that's part of the original way, way, way, way back economic plan: there could be a natural disaster on this planet, and you can give the game masters the ability to cause some problem on some planet which will affect the economics around it. Which they used to do in Privateer 2. There was a generic news story. It would be like, there's a flood on Carotacus, and then water would be really cheap there, or there's famine somewhere, and food would be a good thing to ship.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
We have that many and more ships coming out. So the goal will be to have one every, I think it's actually every six weeks. So you end up having a skipped month in there somewhere. But yeah, we've got ships to show you. And why is that ramping up? Because we have more concept assets freeing up from Squadron 42. It's all implementers now, so we've got artists and designers with some time, and it's letting us build some of the ships we want to.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
So the Prowler is one of the ships we have on the schedule. The thing that's been holding up the Prowler is still the Tevarin race. We don't want to jump in and do the art for the ship before we have the race style guide locked down. Chris Olivia is currently working on that. You guys probably remember him from earlier in the campaign. He's been doing paintovers for us for a long time. He did the initial Xi'an and Vanduul and all our cool races. So he's working his magic on the Tevarin and he's one of those people you give some extra time to because he's that good.
TL;DRNo date is given, but design posts on mining and the economy are in flux, with ship pricing in credits being worked on and some ships soon to be sellable for earned credits.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
That is a good question. I have been talking to the folks. We've got two that are kind of in flux right now. One is mining, which is getting serious. And the other is the economy, because we're just about ready to answer one of the questions people have had forever, ever, ever. Which is how much our ships are going to cost in the game. You kind of notice there's an immersion problem right now with Flair item prices versus ship prices in the store. Is an Aurora, a futuristic spaceship that can take you anywhere in the galaxy, the same thing as 25 posters of Eric Peterson? We don't know. Maybe in the future, spaceships are really cheap. Posters of Eric are very expensive. Neither of those explanations is very satisfying, and chief among the people who are not satisfied with that explanation is Chris Roberts, who has directed Design to come up with not the final plan, but as close to the final plan as we can get before people get in there and wreck it.
And if you watch this week's ATV, you'll see Jake Ross and our own Tyler Witkin talking a little bit to that effect about Pete Mackay's work.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Pete has been working on this very extensively. And it goes along with shopping, which is something we're getting ready to put in the game. And we're going to start to sell a couple of ship models with earned credits rather than with actual dollars. We're finally getting to that stage, which is really cool. But, spoiler warning, a ship bought during the pledge campaign does not translate directly into UEC. The actual ships are some number of times that in credits.
Saitek. I'm going to point you again to ATV this week, with an interview with Carl Jones, our Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Business Development, who's been at the forefront of that whole thing. So he talks about the Saitek deal and where it is right now.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
We're still waiting for a production prototype here at the office. We've seen some non-production prototypes, the ones they mocked up themselves. But we want to know how the finished product works before we start selling it.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Okay, I am very, very, very sorry for this one. Two weeks ago, we had the internal studio content share, and we were all like, we've got to show all this, we've got to show all this. And I emailed Chris in the UK and said, hey, this was so cool. Can we show this, this, this in ATV? Jared made me a list, like a checklist. He could just check off each one. I didn't hear anything, so I emailed him again a couple days ago. You learn when to contact Chris based on your other emails. And he replied and said, yeah, we can show that, that, that, that, that, but let's wait on the Idris. So we're holding on the Idris video, but you're going to see some other cool stuff from the show and tell soon.
So they can get it to the LTI. So yeah, we'll mention that to Turbulent at the end of the show. Make sure all the available CCUs are present. Or Scott, if you're watching, CCUs, man.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Yeah, well, this was no small task, putting every single ship that's flyable up for sale and then with all the CCUs. It's a pretty massive task. We'll have them do an audit and see which ones, if any, are missing. It could be there, too. I don't know. I can't look at it right now during the show.
TL;DRYes in spirit: they already have bland, common ships like the Hull series, and concept sales let them make such ships to fill out the universe even at a small loss.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Well, this is probably not something we should say, but we already have some pretty bland ships. Stuff like the Hull series. The Hull series is very much designed to be the ship out there. Go out driving and try to count how many white box trucks you see. And I remember figuring this out after the, remember there was a sniper in Washington, D.C. that was just killing random people, and then the rumor came out that they were driving around in a box truck, and suddenly everywhere you realize that one out of every five things is a box truck. So that's the idea behind stuff like the Hull. It's super bland in that sense. Which again is another thing that's great that the more concept sales let us do: make ships that wouldn't have gotten us our goal originally, but we can lose a little money on them now that we have some to spare, and fill out the universe.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Not specifically. Beyond some of the concepts for the rovers and things and some of the ideas for the Titan suits and the longer term stuff. But we don't have an artist working on ground vehicles today.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Drake, MISC, RSI, all the big guys. Because we know there are people, and this is one of the wonderful, wonderful things about Star Citizen, there are people who are internally brand loyal. They love Drake ships, they love RSI ships, they hate Aegis ships, and it's great. It's like Ford versus Chevy people in real life. And lots of people will look at the Blade and be like, Hesperia, this is tired. So I wanted to let people know that more will be coming.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
We don't, I'm sorry. I'm very much looking forward to a very near future time when the game is done and we can kind of travel the country spreading the word, because that is fun. So maybe 2017 will be the year that we can all go to the various conventions.
TL;DRThey say there is much progress, with Turbulent speccing a bespoke all-in-one system for chat, forums and the hub, though specifics are withheld because scope and budget aren't settled.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Well, you saw some of the new org forum stuff this week, didn't you?
Yes. Much progress, much progress. Turbulent is, without giving too much away yet, because we're still figuring out what we can do, what we can't do, what's within the budget and everything. So I don't want to say something specific that we end up not being able to do. But we are speccing out a whole new system for chat, for forums, for the hub, for everything. Kind of an all-in-one bespoke solution that integrates everything and makes it all work better. A replacement for the private message system. Basically, for all the ways in which you communicate with us and your other citizens. Org 2.0 is much bigger than just, hey, here's a thing for orgs. In order to do the things we want to do for orgs, we are replacing the whole kit and caboodle. So if we get half the stuff that they're talking about, it'll be very, very, very cool and well worth the time.
A personal plan, perhaps. I want to race the Starfarers. I want to do the Starfarer racing.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
We actually had a, I think people know this already, we had a Greycat racing arena back in 2013. And we were like, well, it doesn't make sense that every single hangar in the universe would also have a racetrack with flaming hoops to jump through. So we didn't put it in at the time, but I wonder if someday we could release that build or anything. Just for fun.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
We have talked about this specifically before. Unfortunately, lotteries are extremely illegal in various countries where we like doing business. So we've always had to tread very carefully around lottery rules as they apply to certain regions of the world.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
No news to give you today. Planetary landings are, the tech has been proven. We just have to get the production version ready. Maybe they'll come along with the procedural stuff.
We'll bring back Where's My Spaceship next week, but give them a quick Crucible update, Ben.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
They have been doing some prototyping on, not the Crucible itself, they just have the original greybox concept model in the thing, but they've been doing some repair prototyping over in design, so they have the little arm and how it works that they're working on right now.
TL;DRYes, a livestream of the expansion pack is planned for a Saturday in April at the office, with a further one planned for September.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Yes, we do. That is April. Yeah, this is something I am super excited about, and no one else has to be. But we are doing the Secret Missions 2 livestream. So I believe the release date for Secret Missions 2 was April 8. We're going to do it Saturday, April 9, here in the office. We'll be playing that. We'll have some guests who work on the game or crazy people. We'll just talk Wing Commander for 12 hours or so. It's going to be great. It's my favorite time of the year. And then after that, the one we're really excited about is in September, where you can do Wing Commander 2.
Yeah, I'm actually excited for Wing Commander 2, because I've never played Wing Commander 2.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
Wing Commander 2 is my favorite single Wing Commander narrative. There's a moment in there that genuinely makes me tear up every time I read it. You'll be interested, because it's a new writer. It's Ellen Guon and Steven Beeman who come in, and Secret Missions 2 is all about setting the stage for Wing Commander 2. It introduces characters, concepts, that broader history of Wing Commander. It changes very much.
Although the Glaive does have the unique ability to be able to fly down, pick a ship up off the platform, and suplex it over the edge. Which is pretty cool. But yes, we're aware. It's one of those things that's one of the reasons we want to get all these ships out there, because you can't do true balancing until you have all the things that you need to balance. You do these little tiny micro bits of balancing. So it's a process. But yes, we are very aware about the Scythe and the Glaive and stuff.
Probably not, because the Vega segment's done at this point. We've got a lot of systems to go through, so I don't think we've got time to do supplementals on systems we've already done.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
I feel like you'll be seeing more of Cargo Olympics in the future, because that's lore that comes directly from our design guys. It's a beloved thing they're working on.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy, and Spaceships
So at some point, I'm sure it will. We don't have a specific plan to put it on sale right now. The Idris is one of those ones that we like to keep a certain percentage of the overall ship population. So it's usually very limited sales. And luckily the Star Citizen community is continuing to expand. We sold a couple hundred Idris back when there were 50,000 people, and we've sold more since then, and it kind of balances out someday.
Well, that is one of the things we were looking at in our meeting with Benoit and John Erskine. They've got a really cool mock-up done. It's a whole nice grid thing. You see the thumbnails of the ships. You can drag them and put them in different places, and you see comparisons and stuff. It's coming along really good. It's just one more thing that's on their list of things that they're building for us. So no ETA just yet. But actively being worked on and designed, yes. Including a whole new page now that shows every ship that we have in development, with progress bars. And so you can see a global shot of where every ship is. And you can see how many ships are actually in the game and flyable and stuff. It's cool.