Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Player vs. Player

From that standpoint, you have to consider how systems are interconnected, where you have both lawful and lawless systems existing close together. So already a player can decide what system they want to be in, and can travel to find combat whether that be PvP or PvE. We'll never be able to 100% guarantee safety, and frankly, we don't want to do that. We never want it to be 0% nor 100%, we still want there to be areas (hotspots) for people to look for PvP and PvE in most systems, and allowing the players to go if they wish. We also plan for green zones in cities and other areas, where if you act up there will be turrets or security that come after you. I want there to be tension in the game. (in reply to Jared mentioning that even in the heart of the empire, PvP is still possible, but will really have to be worked for). Something could take place and you would have to deal with it.

The starmap, in the future, we want to provide information to allow players to see where these hotspots are and allow them to plan their routes around them. Whilst in the past we've spoken about PvP sliders, we are not going to have anything that is player facing. However, as devs, we still want to be able to have systems in place to push PvP content to those players who are going more down that route. If the players are not geared to that, then their choices matter and so the content will differ.
Even to how the fights play out, say that we (Jared and Todd) are fighting and that I have a warrant and you kill me. Then if you kill me, the reward you are getting should be higher, because you're going up against another player, and when physical inventory comes in, then everything I had on me can now be yours. Giving the players a way to collect rewards and earn money.

The FPS combat loop for Star Citizen starts way before you get into combat, and that is the question "What am I going to bring". At the moment in Star Citizen you can change, equip and store as much as you like without many issues. But physical inventory will mean that players will need to consider every possibility when planning to do first-person combat. When you don't have access to all your equipment at the drop of a hat, that fundamentally is a game-changer, which really makes a difference when you move away from these larger built-up areas. You really have to think about the decisions you make when managing and bringing items with a finite inventory. You may end up killing someone, and want to take all their items with you, but because you've filled your backpack up already ,you may want to drag them to your ship, or instead take them alive. When considering all the things Physical Inventory adds to the game, you can really start to see its impact on the combat gameplay loop.

Physical Inventory by itself has been something we are adding little by little each patch, starting with the commodity pack, then the inner thought system. We are now in the act of changing it to what we are calling the "External Inventory", which isn't so much tetris but a grid system that will naturally mold around each item, much in the way apps change automatically when you move them around. So what that gives us is an overview of the character and the items you have as well as being able to interact with external inventories, player's backpacks, crates, and boxes, anything that may have a physical volume but not a physical representation. So that's very much in the end game when other tech comes online. At first, it'll be the commodities in the beginning, the things you can currently put in your backpack, but it means when we have the [REDACTED] you'll be able to interact with the cargo hold and put things in there or take FPS mineables out, and that'll be the next iteration. Which will eventually become full items you can put in there, and then interact with the character. And that gives you the idea of what physical inventory looks like on the character and the external UI, but you still need the storage in ships and habs.

It did go quite well, the first test was a little rough for performance, and it got a little worse than we expected, which mostly comes down to the size of the team we have to test. Just from the first test, we spent a whole sprint fixing the roughly 180 items we got from reports. With all of these things benefitting the PU, which players may see.One of the things we say that server performance was actually pretty good, but when we scaled it up to about 5x our previous smaller tests, we saw we had some issues with the matchmaker which was down to some of the logic in there. Another thing we spent some time adding in were analytics so that when we did do these tests it was just a matter of getting feedback, but let us see solid data from the game. Allowing us to see that someone managed to kill someone else with a fire-extinguisher, something that had us all curious. And to add to the mystery, the Valk chair managed to get 2 kills.

If you look at ToW as a breakdown of the PU gameplay, we got some incredible feedback from the evo testers about certain issues that spread across both game modes such as ship handling and character feeling. We broke down that feedback and got some real gold-dust, and we've created a plan for the next ToW test, so let's just say when we do the next test for ToW expect the game to play much differently. It will feel more Star Citizen, in the best of way, which I think when we first added ToW, much like SM and AC, it's a very distilled experience. With all the feedback we've gotten from both external and internal sources, I do feel that the next test will have that more Star Citizen feel.