The developers cover a combat information center with holo display for tasking fighters from the Idris Corvette, manual landing on carriers, jump engines needing no fuel, and heir-based permadeath with scars or cybernetic limbs. They also discuss avoiding grind missions through a simulated economy, the Starfarer cargo ship, arena mode, docking collars and in-engine cinematic tools.
TL;DRYes, in a limited form: bigger ships will have a combat-information-center style holo display station to task fighters, though it is simpler than real air traffic control.
So the short answer is yes. In the bigger ships, so like the Corvette and the bigger ones we go beyond that, they have sort of a combat information center set up. Or like if you saw in the Corvette, there was a place where there was a holo display, and you would sort of see the various ships in the battle arena. And if you're sitting in that station, you can task the different ships. So if you have, say on the Corvette, there's three fighters on board, you can task the people that launch on that and say, okay, you go and attack this person over there, you attack that person over there. It's not traffic control, but it's kind of air combat operations, I guess, would be the best way to describe it. So not nearly as sophisticated as it is in the real world, but game-wise it hopefully will be kind of fun for some people. So that's the idea of the bigger ships, is you're going to have things so all your friends, you can work together and do it cooperatively, which I think is going to be really cool. That's actually one of the things I'm most excited about, is the sort of ships that have two, four, six, eight, ten people on, and you work together as a team to try and achieve success in battle.
We haven't necessarily designed for that, but I think that we probably should do something along the line. Wouldn't be that difficult, a little hookah asset, a little animation. It could be a planet that's hookah-addicted that needs that supply. We're going to have a lamp, so we might as well do that too.
OK, so the answer would be yes. We will definitely have tools to let you do sort of in-engine cinematics. So we'll probably provide some of the tools we use. We won't have all the sophistication, because we're going to do full performance capture. But definitely having a character go from one place to wherever and capturing different action and battles and cutting it together would be very cool. I'm actually pretty interested to see what the community will come up with, because that's generally some of the funnest stuff that you see on other games.
That's actually a good question. So generally we weren't necessarily thinking that the jump engines required fuel. It just sort of opened up a rift in space, and that's how you went through it. So in these systems you require fuel to basically propel you in a more conventional manner. So I guess the answer would be no, you don't need it for jump points, just for in-system travel.
TL;DRChris Roberts hopes missions generated by the economy, world and other players, suited to your play style, avoid boring grind, and says busy-work grinding will not be in Star Citizen.
So basically you're saying the boring grinding missions that you get in most MMOs. So I guess several things. First of all, my personal opinion, whenever I've tried to play a lot of MMOs, I hate it when it's very basic grinding, because I feel like I'm doing busy work. So it should be kind of the same way that, say, Privateer or Freelancer felt in a lot of ways, where it was kind of fun even to do basic missions. But we have a really big focus on a combination of: in the big world, there's going to be a lot of sort of player-generated action and intrigue. And then also the economy itself, in terms of how the worlds and the systems work, they're generating sort of missions. So if you're a player going around, you can sort of do missions that are basically something you'd be interested in. So if you're someone that wants to be a trader, you can go and be taking goods from one planet to another planet. If you're someone that wants to be doing combat, then you can be taking on missions where you've got to hunt someone down, you've got to fly protection for someone. So generally, the missions should be getting generated by the world and the economy and the other players. And I'm hoping that will be more interesting. I mean, obviously you will have to play it to see it, but generally I don't want busy work. Like, I hate the MMOs where you go out there and you're literally killing low-level creatures and you've got to do it again and again and again, and then maybe you can get a really crappy sword. So that is something we will definitely not have in Star Citizen.
TL;DRChris Roberts says most missions should make sense in the world because all goods are produced within the simulated economy, so shortages can occur; he hopes this feels more real.
Well, yeah, it's kind of hard to say, but I think most of the missions you can do will make sense in terms of the world. So if you're talking about a fantasy MMO, one of the problems is you go out and you basically start killing orcs and goblins because they drop gold or they drop magic weapons. But there's no ecosystem of those orcs and goblins manufacturing those weapons or mining the gold. Whereas the difference in the Star Citizen universe is anything that people have, the ships they have, the weapons they have, will all have to be created inside the system. So when your ship gets destroyed or you use missiles in that star system, you'll have to go and buy them again from a factory that manufactures them, that has goods. And if there's way too much combat happening in that star system, you may actually go to the store and they're out of missiles or they're out of ships or whatever, and you'll have to go somewhere else. You'll have to wait for them to show up later on. And so it's slightly different: everything that you can buy or sell, or things that happen, are generated inside the economic system. And I'm hoping that will make the universe feel a bit more real and tangible and make more sense. So we'll see. But that's the concept.
OK, you're definitely going to have the ability to land manually, and it may even be you'll have to land manually no matter what. Although landing, I don't think with a ship that has the equivalent of VTOL, it's quite as difficult as landing on a carrier in the middle of the night in present-day conditions. But generally, probably, we haven't determined, so we'll see. So maybe there'll be auto-landing, or maybe you'll have to do it manually. Or maybe it's an upgrade for your flight control system. But you'll definitely have the option to always land manually.
TL;DRSquadron 42 potentially will have love interests, but relationships with wingmen will be player choice and may later affect story or gameplay, similar to Wing Commander 1.
So for Squadron 42, we're working on the story there. I think everyone's going to like it a lot. And it's, I would say, at a higher level than what I did on Wing 3 and Wing 4 in terms of story and narrative. So I'm working with a lot of people I've made my films with, and we're going to do something really great. And there potentially will be love interests, but the difference between what we're going to do on Squadron 42 and what we did on Wing 3 and Wing 4 is the relationships that you have with the different characters or wingmen that you have on board the ship are going to be more about your personal choice. So in Wing 3 or 4 it was more determined: you went this way or that way, and it was sort of forcing you down a path, and this is kind of optional. Do you like this wingman and do you foster a relationship with this wingman, or over here do you prefer this wingman? And it'll be sort of player choices, and then the relationship that you have with the different characters aboard the ship will sort of determine how they grow to like you and what their relationship is with you, and then later on it may have an effect on either the story or the gameplay. So if you get along really well with someone, later in the game they may basically put their own life at risk to try and save you in a mission, whereas normally they wouldn't have done that. We call it sort of relationship management. So it's set up in such a way that it's more similar to Wing Commander 1, in the way that you could finish the game and all your wingmen could be dead, and you could still finish the game. You don't need to have this character at the end of the game. But it's sort of up to you which relationships you foster and develop. So hopefully it will feel more immediate and more real. That's kind of the goal.
TL;DRAfter too many deaths a character's body gives out and passes to an heir, whom the player freely chooses and names after death; no specific heir bonuses like tax benefits are mentioned.
So the concept is, as a character you go through and you essentially have a life, and you can age, and after too many deaths or close calls, however you want to do it, your body gives out, and then from then it will pass on to your heir or next of kin. And it's kind of up to you as a player who that's going to be. So you can make your next of kin the son or the daughter, or maybe just someone you knew that you would leave it to. And it's sort of up to the player's choice. But the idea is to have a kind of legacy. So my hope is, as you play the game, you've only got so long to try and achieve great things. You know, find a jump point or kill a really tough pirate lord or something like that. So I would hope that players would sort of say, okay, well, I have a family legacy. And it's just like in the real world, that you would go, okay, well, my father fought in this war and was a hero, and I need to sign up for the UEE military and also be a hero, or something like that. But in terms of who that successor is, it's sort of up to the player to choose it, however the player wants to determine it. So they could say, okay, well, I really see this as a son or a cousin or a daughter, or they could just say, oh, it's just someone else. It's completely up to the player to determine who their successor is. And generally you would create that once your character has died, and you sort of step into the shoes of your successor, and it's up to you to name that person and go from there.
TL;DRChris Roberts hasn't thought about starting with a cybernetic limb and has no good answer yet; limbs and scars were an idea for showing how close a character is to dying.
I actually haven't thought about that. I guess maybe you could get yourself blown up and then get an artificial limb. I don't know, actually, to be honest with you. It's a bit early to make a decision on that. The idea that we just had was that most of the time, if you lose a battle, you will probably eject, and you actually won't even lose a life. But the idea is, if you didn't get to eject or someone shoots you in space, you lose a life, and you only have so many of those before you properly die. And to sort of see how close you are to the point that your character will pass on, that was kind of the idea: to see whether you had scars or you had an artificial limb. But I haven't really thought about starting a character off with an artificial limb. So it's something to think about. So I don't have a good answer for you right now.
TL;DRYes, big cargo ships are planned: the Starfarer is the largest player-ownable cargo ship so far, with probably bigger NPC-driven ships hauling goods in a simulated economy.
OK, so, well, the Starfarer is a pretty big ship. I think during the livestream we showed some of the concept work for it, but it's pretty large. It's almost as big as the Corvette, and it's all about cargo, so right now it's the biggest player-ownable cargo ship, and it will shift a lot of cargo. There will probably be some bigger ships that do the same kind of things that are NPC-driven in the game. But there's definitely going to be big cargo ships in it. We're going to have a whole simulated universe and economy. So you'll have ships going from planet to planet, taking goods, taking raw materials, going back and forth. Everything in the universe is meant to... like, you could have no one playing the game and you could be the only person in it, and you can fly around and you'll see the universe basically simulating. So people manufacturing goods, taking it to another planet, selling it, consuming it, et cetera, et cetera. So we're definitely going to have a lot of ships that haul cargo.
TL;DRArena mode is meant as a practice and trick-flying space, and they are toying with solo and team competitions using point-valued ships, plus single-ship-class and unlimited divisions.
OK, so the question's about the arena mode that we talked about. So the idea with arena mode is a little bit like, if you remember the original Wing Commander, there was the arcade machine that you could play and sort of practice before you actually got out there on a mission. So there's a little bit of that in arena mode. And the other thing that we were thinking was that it would be a good place that people could fly to sort of try tricks without taking the ships out there and risking losing all the stuff they have. And that's kind of what we're going to run when we go to the dogfighting module and the idea of arena mode. And then we've been sort of toying with the idea of making, I don't know whether you want to say esports, but the idea that you have different kinds of competitions, and you would have the solo competition, the team competition. So a team competition would be: each team has a certain number of points, and the ships you pick are worth different points. So an Aurora would be worth one point, but maybe a Constellation is worth, I don't know, 10 points or something. And each team gets to spend their points, have so many ships, and then whichever team gets to 100 points wins the match.
Yeah, exactly. And we were thinking that we would have classes that would be only one kind of ship, like NASCAR is a good example in America for that. And then you would have unlimited, where anyone can come with anything they want. So we were going to play around with it. We think it would be kind of fun. For a start, one of the goals with the dogfighting module and what we do is, like I said, my goal is when we make this game, that everyone has so much fun during the process of making the game that by the time we finish it, everyone feels like they had their money's worth from backing it, just from us making things like the dogfighting module fun and some of the latest stuff fun. So that's kind of why we want to do more stuff with the arena. And long term, I think it would be good for the game. We're going to do stuff also when the game is finished, like racing, like you'll be able to compete in the Murray Cup and all these other things. It's a big universe. It's going to be fun.
TL;DRDocking is definitely possible at docking collars, with other entry points preferred but undecided, and shots physically hit actual placed ship systems so players can target known locations.
OK, so I guess there's two questions there. One is, how are you going to dock with another ship? So the simple way is you'll definitely be able to dock where there's docking collars. And if people don't want you on, you'll have to break your way in and blow them up. I'd like to have some options that you could maybe cut a hole in a place. But that's potentially a lot more complicated, because, well, also how you go in, and if we build a ship, we have to make sure that you would be able to enter in any area, and that's actually pretty complicated. So maybe you could go through the airlock, and maybe there's a couple of other places that we would designate that you could get through. We haven't 100% fully decided on that yet, but my preference would be to make it more than just the airlock if we can. And then on targeting the systems, which is slightly different: the idea is that you know where the various systems are on a ship. So for instance, if you knew where the power plant is on a certain ship, or you knew where the life support was on a certain ship, or the avionics system was on a certain ship, if you're fighting against that ship and you've knocked down the shields and you've knocked down the armor, you know to hit that place. The way the engine works, the way the system works, is when your shot goes through the hull of the armor, it's actually doing collision checking against the actual physical system. So we actually place all the ship systems in the ship properly. So it's not that there's just 10 systems inside the ship, and once you go through the armor we roll a dice and one to 10 determines which system you get hit. It would be literally, if the life support system is in the middle and your shot goes through the middle and hits it, you do damage the life support system, and then all of a sudden you maybe have whatever you've got left in your spacesuit. So there should be a little level of skill involved in that, and if you sort of know what different ships have, maybe you know, okay, this is where this critical system is, and I can target that direction.
TL;DRLocking down a whole system is hard because of multiple instances, and they don't want that; groups could influence or monopolize a local area, but the exact design is still undecided.
So that's a good question. It's more difficult in the way that our game runs, since there's multiple instances. We can't have everybody all in the same place at the same time. It's actually going to be pretty hard for someone to completely lock a system down in that situation. But we actually do want a situation where a group of players could have a significant impact on a localized system. We never want to have a group of players have an impact on the whole universe, because that would be problematic, and also it probably wouldn't be that realistic. But we definitely would like to have a group of players get together and then maybe try and monopolize a corner system. The goal with Star Citizen is, you know, I always see a lot of debate about pay to win or something like that, and I'm like, there is no win in this game. It should be like life, and you're trying, you basically want to be on top. So if you're a clan or a guild, you want to own a planet or a system and do something. But even if you manage to achieve that, everybody else is trying to take that thing from you, just like in real life. And so it's kind of a balance that we still have to figure out, some of the pluses and minuses of it. So it won't be like EVE, where you could completely lock down a system or completely lock down a jump point. But we are definitely going to have the ability for people to have a large amount of influence or control a lot of the trade in a particular system. But I don't have a particularly great answer to say exactly this is the way it's going to happen, because that's still in the thinking, in the design stage.
TL;DRThere won't be narcotics, and skill-based flying makes stat-boosting drugs unlikely, though he's spitballing a temporary G-force tolerance boost followed by a penalty and says he may think about it.
Well, we're never going to have narcotics in the game. I don't know. The performance-enhancing drugs are kind of difficult, because the game is sort of skill-based. So it's not like a typical MMO where you would basically just say, okay, well, here's your skill level, your dexterity is plus five now that you've taken this drug, because it's based on how good of a pilot you are. So probably there aren't performance-enhancing drugs in that manner, although we're going to have the idea of G-forces, like when you're flying around and you're pulling really hard maneuvers, and there's only so much your body can take until you red out, black out and all the rest of it. So there may be, and I'm only spitballing here because I haven't even been thinking about it, but that would be a situation where if you took something, maybe instead of 9G you could take 12G or something. And that would give you an advantage in a battle for a brief period of time. But after that, you could only take 6G or something. So that would potentially be something. So it's potentially a good idea. So I'll think about that. Maybe we'll do something like that.