Star Citizen Live: FPS Weapons and Systems

Yeah, so we actually have a form of non-lethal damage in the game already. So if you guys have actually been playing around with the melee combat system, it uses a damage type called stun. And when your stun goes over a certain threshold, you actually get knocked out. And I'm sure you guys have been playing around with that quite a lot. I've seen a lot of people going around taking each other down. I know we're doing a lot of that in our internal playtests for fun. But yeah, that's kind of one of the things we've already got in-game at the moment. Another thing that I touched on in a recent ISC as well is Electron damage. Actually, it's comprised of multiple damage types. So it uses electrical damage, and then it also delivers some stun damage as well. So you'll find that if you get hit by a lot of Electron damage, your vision might start to go a little, and then eventually you might even get knocked out if you don't die first. But the weapons we've got in game right now are more focused on, we called it weaponized Electron damage, where it's designed to kill you more than it is to knock you out. So one of the things that we're actually leveraging on a bit more at the moment, and something that's in the current stage of inception and is going through concept at the moment, is effectively going to become a taser. So it's going to be a very short-range, pistol-sized Electron weapon, but it's more ramped up in terms of being non-lethal, so we're ramping up the stun damage on that rather than the actual radiant energy damage that's coming from it instead. And it's one of the cool things about our damage system. We can tweak those. If we've got a damage type that has multiple damage types that it's made of, then we can pull those levels a little bit and get the desired effect out of it. So yeah, that's something that will be an incredible weapon for bounty hunters, because it's not entirely effective always having to sneak up on your target from behind and doing an unarmed takedown. So yeah, that one will be quite good. But then down the line, we've talked about lots of different forms of non-lethal weapons. So things like, and obviously none of this is set in stone, but we've talked about a flechette gun which might deliver drugs or poisons into the target. It might even be psychoactives and things like that that obscure people's vision, or something that raises their heart rate and makes them pass out. It's quite open to what we can really do. Obviously, if it makes sense for Star Citizen, we can use it.

But nothing in the immediate future at this point? This is all stuff that's still being concepted and worked out at this point.

Yeah, so I think the first thing that will come down the line is going to be the taser-style weapon, which obviously is probably going to take a little while to get right internally. We'll have to play around with it quite a bit, make sure that it feels right. Obviously, we don't want it to be quite as effective as a weapon that's designed to kill you. It probably should be a little bit harder to subdue someone instead of just straight up shooting them. So we've talked about ways we're going to achieve that. If someone's shooting with this taser gun, we want to give you the opportunity to get your way out of that situation if you're good enough.

Yeah, so they're definitely being worked on still, or at least being discussed and looked at. So we want to look at them next year, as long as priorities don't change. So effectively, we actually call them FPS devices internally. What we call combat throwables, combat consumables, and deployables, and then things like utility items as well. But throwables, a current example of what we have in game right now is a grenade. But we might be able to have throwable gadget-style items. So we might even have something like, and this is just me thinking off the top of my head, a throwable shield or something like that that you throw down on the floor in the same way that you throw a grenade. Consumables, we've already got them in the game, at least the first couple. So we've got the MedPen and the OxyPen at the moment. And we can utilize that system as well to actually have drugs or something like that to enhance performance. And then deployables is probably the big interesting one that provides us with a lot of options: something that you actually put down on the floor or on a wall. Kind of like a proximity mine, a trip mine; a deployable shield is the big one that is always mentioned. And that is certainly one of the first ones that we want to develop on. But yeah, they are certainly coming and being worked on. We've not forgotten about them. It's just going to take some work to get right.

Yeah, so there's a few things we're looking to work on. In the short term, we're actually looking at improving the way that you interact with items around you. So there's the idea of a swap wheel, so that if you've got a bunch of things on your suit and you want to, say, pick up ammo off the floor and your suit's full, it gives you a wheel. You can say, actually, I want to swap it with what's on my slot here, or just put it into my inventory. We're also looking at default item actions. And that is basically a system that's going to, I think, really improve the player experience. It allows you to do things quicker. It's basically choosing things that are most appropriate to your context, whether that's the player context or the item's context, et cetera. So just little things to speed up picking things up and putting them where you want them to go. We're also going to be improving the player interaction system. So at the moment, it's just a flat list, but we're actually going to be replacing that with a wheel, which is aesthetically similar to the inner thought menu. And that's actually in progress right now. Not sure when that's coming online, but we're working on it. So soon, TM. There's also the trading systems that one of the other teams is looking at. I think they're hoping to leverage the external delivery system that's being worked on right now. That should be going live in 3.11, but as you know, everything's open to game development. We'll see. And then also there's the mag stripping. So the intent there is to be able to refill and split ammo across mags as you see fit. And that will allow you to have different ammos in different magazines. I think also, in terms of charging, the armor suit is going to play quite a big role in that. JJ, do you want to touch on that a little bit?

Yeah. So eventually, and I think we've mentioned this in the past, we do want our suits to effectively replicate a similar power system to what we have in ships. So we'll have all of our components, again similar to ships, like the FPS radar and scanner that will require power to work, like our climate control system internally in the suit that will require power to work. And just as a bonus: obviously with ballistic ammunition, you can use mag stripping and refill for the same ammo types to transfer between magazines, stack all of your ammunition into a bunch of mags if you have a bunch of partially empty ones, or if you find some on the floor you can refill your magazines by looting people's bodies. We thought, you can't really do that with energy batteries. It doesn't really work if you jam two double A's together. So what we were thinking, something we could do is actually have energy batteries trickle charge on a suit. So when they're actually attached to the suit, they do slowly recharge. You don't have completely finite ammo when you're using these unique energy weapon batteries. As you're out and about, they will start to recharge back up. And in some cases, that's better than trying to scavenge for ballistic ammunition. But obviously, each type of player will have their own preference.

Yeah, I'll put those ideas in our backlog. But yeah, so basically, we actually talked quite in depth recently about the way we approach our weapon manufacturers. So something that we're still doing at the moment is we're really trying to still build up our human manufacturers. So they're like ones that you've seen already, like Gemini, Kastak Arms, Behring, Klaus & Werner, all of those guys. And we're still trying to basically build out the weapon family from each of those manufacturers in an interesting way. So as we talked about recently with the brands, we try and push out functionality between these different weapons, so they've each got these identifiable traits, so they're different from each other. And we're still coming up with new ideas that will work with these as well. So as we finish these out, we're going to start seeing more and more exotic weapons, as we've been calling them internally. So we recently released the Lightning Bolt Company sniper rifle, the Atzkav, and the Yubarev. Those are very different compared to our regular weapons. They're using Electron damage, which operates really differently, and they've got a much more non-standard look to them, I'll say. So as we start pushing more and more in that direction, that's when we're going to start actually looking at alien weapons. So it's not the case that we don't want to do them, or we can't do them for any reason. It's just a case of: we have prioritized these more standard manufacturers first to get a good base, and then we're going to start looking at things that are a little bit more unique.

So yes, absolutely. Firing range is something that we really want to do for a multitude of reasons. One, you want to try before you buy in shops, and the intent there is definitely to have that within shops. As to when that's going to happen, not sure. We do have a prototype that's been signed off internally. I was lucky enough to work on that and have fun doing that. But again, time frame-wise, it's uncertain. We have lots of other priorities, obviously, and that's not at the top right now. And the other side as well is, obviously, it's a level design team feature mostly, with a bit of systems involved, so that would be more their thing. So unfortunately, I won't get to do that sort of stuff anymore. The other side of things in terms of what we need to work out, which are potentially blocking us: there's some complexities in it. For example, if you're getting the gun out, if you're in a shop, you're going to be in a green zone. And obviously the plan is to remove those at some point and have something more complicated involving NPCs and whatnot policing you, rather than you just can't get your gun out. So it might be that when that comes along, it'll be a bit easier to get this in. But we'll have to wait and see.

And of course, we don't want all places to be all things. So we might add them to some shops, but not necessarily every single shop throughout the Stanton system. You want things to drive people to different areas of the star system. So if we do add them to weapon shops or Garrity Defense, it might be in some of them and not all of them, stuff like that. But I think the one thing that we can absolutely commit to is that we want it as much as the folks want it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all of the above and more. And I can address those each individually. EMP, we certainly want to do. I think it would be best to bring that in when we start to bring in the aforementioned power system on the suit. Obviously, we've got ships that have EMP weaponry at the moment, and that interacts really well with the power systems on those ships. I think for now, if we wanted to introduce it early, it would just be affecting things like your FPS HUD, so you'd lose a lot of valuable information on there. But for it to really take effect, I think we need those power systems to come online for the actual suit. The concussion grenades: that immediately hooks into some of our actor features already. We have actor statuses that have concussive effects on them already, so that's something we can certainly look at doing. And then things like the standard grenades, like flashbangs and smokes and things like that, absolutely, there's no reason why we can't do those. Again, it's just a matter of time and priorities. And for things like smoke as well, we'd have to go to the graphics and the FX teams and see what they can accomplish on an FPS side. I know they've made those awesome gas clouds and stuff in space, so it can't be too hard, right?

You touched on a good point. It's not just the weapon feature team or the weapon content team that makes these things. They'll take resources from audio, because each one of those will need to sound a certain way. They'll take resources from VFX, because they want them all to look a certain way. So it's not just entirely up to you to determine when those things go in. They have to fit into everybody's schedule before they can come out.

100%. And I think you even mentioned radar grenades, and they are something we've even talked about as well. Because we have a concept of pinging, you might want to throw something out that's constantly pinging out, either making a signal on other people's radars or using a detection method. And that's the beauty with a lot of the systems we've got in-game at the moment: we can link this in on any kind of item that we build. And then down to our damage system as well, it's so versatile with what we can build. We can almost build some of these things modularly internally. So if we do want something that's an EMP, we use the electrical or electromagnetic kind of damage type, and then the game just kind of knows what to do at that point.

We talked a bit about radar jamming as well, so I can see that being factored into that sort of thing too.

I'm so excited about the FPS devices actually coming in, because you can do so much fun stuff like that, and there's a lot of fun scenarios that we've talked about. If you want to be that guy that puts down something that's emitting a signal, and it's like, I'm scanning you, and it's like, oh, there's Jared, I'm going to sneak up on him, and I turn up, and it's just this little deployable thing on the floor, and you're four hours away, cruising through space somewhere, and I'll be like, ah, I'll get you next time.

OK, I'll try and tackle it a bit at a time. So skins and paints, absolutely. We're currently talking about how we can make that system a bit more flexible, just in the way we apply skins and paints, even from a tech point of view. So it's something that we want to go and revisit and make easier for our artists to actually make skins and paints for the weapons, because right now we're duplicating a lot of entities, and people are ending up with a ton of weapons in their inventory that have got all these different skins on, so if you own them all, it's actually quite difficult to scroll through everything. So that's something that we're actually currently talking about, and we want to find a better way to do that. And in terms of how we actually get those paints and skins, obviously this is more on the economy and shop side, but it would be great to have a station that you could go to, or a kiosk inside the station, where you can actually take your weapon and go and get a new paint job on it. So you can use the gun that you've always used, like the gun that you got at the very start of the game, your precious, and you can go and repaint it any color that you want. So that's the idea anyway, and something that we want to do. So stuff like grips: we initially did want to do grips when we rolled out the attachment system, but there were quite a few animation complications. And I think the gains that we would have got from them at the time weren't really worth the amount of time we would have to put in to get them to work properly. So it's something that we are not currently looking at doing right now. But never say never; they might come back at some point when we actually have time to address that. And I think you mentioned barrels and stocks. So again, it's a never-say-never situation, but not right now. We're obviously looking at expanding our existing set of attachment options for weapons. Because our weapons are so unique from each other, and they're very non-standard, it's difficult to create stock and barrel options without taking up loads of art resources, right? I think we've got, and someone's probably going to give me the exact number now, but I'm sure we've got 40, 50-plus weapons in game at the moment, just off the top of my head. Trying to create different barrels and stocks that are unique for each of them is a huge undertaking. So not for the foreseeable, at least.

It's hard to say, and it depends on a weapon-to-weapon basis, really. Something like I was talking about before, building out the weapon families that we've got now. For example, the Behring shotgun that we're making at the moment: we've really well established the Behring manufacturer. We know what they're about. We know what they're going to do. They're quite straightforward in the way the fire modes work and stuff. There's little overhead in terms of code and playtesting that we have to do to actually get that right and then make adjustments as we go. That one's a bit more straightforward. I wouldn't like to put an actual time on there. I would maybe say they're generally ones that we can quite comfortably get out within a quarter if we need to. Whereas something like the Electron weapons that we brought recently requires a lot of forethought before that quarter starts if we want to get it out for that release, where we have to actually go through several iterations of concepts. It's a new manufacturer, so we have to talk with the concept guys about the manufacturer's style and how it feeds into the weapon and everything. And then we have to get it in game and test it. And because Electron's quite complex in the way that it works and interacts, we have to work out how that's going to work, work with the coders to actually get it in, and then test it to see if it actually plays well. So I would say that that requires more forethought before we actually try and make the push to get it out there.

There's a lot of similarities there between the weapon pipeline and what folks already know about the ship pipeline, which we've talked about for several years now. Obviously a smaller ship will generally go faster than a larger ship, but also a ship from an established manufacturer where you've got the style guide: the more you know about that manufacturer, the more you can take from other things that have been created and kitbash, and you start at an advantage ahead of where you would with something like the Atzkav, which we had never had a weapon from before. So it was like, okay, you have to define all these new things. So yeah, some real strong similarities. It works the same way with the character team and armors. If it's an armor manufacturer that they're familiar with, they've got seven examples from that manufacturer, it's very easy to iterate on an eighth, whereas if you're starting a brand new manufacturer and determining a brand new style for it, that process can take much longer to find that thing that you're looking for.

Yes, absolutely. So there's more than one sort of downed state. There's obviously the traditional: your health is zero and you're down, waiting to be revived. So body dragging is definitely going to be used for that. There's a whole slew of health gameplay and even Death of a Spaceman stuff coming in. And in terms of health stuff, we're thinking that I'll be working on that towards the start of next year. Obviously, that's a massive caveat. Priorities will change, but yes, that is absolutely coming, and it's a big part of our plans. There are also going to be other sorts of downed states in terms of being unconscious. We have that already with unarmed combat. But there's also the bounty hunting side. So if you're tied and bound by a bounty hunter, that's going to feed into that same sort of system. So yes, absolutely, we're definitely planning that. It's going to be a big part of gameplay: you dragging people around into cover and healing them, or hauling them up to your ambulance and then getting them on a med bed. Lots to come for that.

Yeah, they're still planned. So we didn't manage to get those out with the weapon attachments tier zero set that we actually got out there, just because it has additional animation complications. Obviously it flips in and out; you have to get the hand interacting with that. And then once you're actually on the floor, you're meant to be pivoting around the bipod if you're actually aiming, and that's trying to move the player's body around. And as you know, with the unified rig, things aren't always as simple as they are in other games. So 100%, we still want to do those, and they're on the list. I'm not sure when they will come in, so I can't even give a vague date on those. But yeah, we know how useful they're going to be for gameplay with things like LMGs and sniper rifles. So yeah, the bipods: yes.

I've been asked that a few times internally, actually. So it's not something that we've written a design document for yet in terms of actually having a weapon that we want to start pushing through the pipeline. But as the hazard system, and the fire system is the hazard system basically, is built to be systemic, there's no reason we can't have weapons that spawn hazards, like a flamethrower. So if we do have something that is pushing flames out everywhere, it'll start fires in the environment. And then obviously the fire system that we've talked about quite a bit at length now takes over, and that will start spreading throughout the environment and damaging things and people. So something else I just wanted to touch on as well is that the hazard system is more than just fire. We've got some plasma weapons out there already now, and obviously we want to expand on making the plasma weapons feel a bit more unique, because right now they're a lot heavier hitting than some of our other weapons, but basically we want the on-impact effect to be much more unique. So it'll basically burn people when it impacts them, and you'll hopefully see it sizzling away on your armor or whatever. But some of the bigger weapons, and especially those ones with charge modes, we want to have them spawn hazards in the environment. So if I'm using a giant plasma LMG or something, for example, and I switch it into plasma blob mode and I fire that out into the environment, I'd expect it to make a hazard on the floor and bubble away and sizzle for a bit. And if anyone's nearby and walks over it, they'll take damage. And it's the same thing if we have any weapons that create a radioactive fallout in an area: if people walk into it, they'll start getting irradiated. The hazard system, when it's eventually built up and complete, we can link in on a lot of our weapons and have these hazards spawning as part of unique weapons that are firing and impacting different places in the environment.

Yeah, absolutely. If you're fighting at any extended ranges at the moment, it should be quite obvious on many of our planets that have a reasonable amount of gravity. And quite recently, actually, just to touch on this briefly, Theaters of War has been an amazing testing ground for us to actually look at things like bullet drop, because previously we've only had our focused combat in the Star Marine space stations, and all of those combat ranges are quite small, so you don't ever notice the bullet drop. Whereas in Theaters of War, you're looking at 50 to 100 meters plus. So we've actually noticed that the bullet drop at first was way too severe, just because we'd never been shooting at those ranges before. And it's let us look at that and speed up the velocities of the bullets to be a bit more... and you start to get levels of bullet drop that you actually expect. And actually, something that we have been working on recently and will be coming, and I think I can say this with a reasonable amount of certainty, is that in Q4 we'll be bringing in weapon zeroing. So obviously with 4x scopes and higher, you'll be able to actually set your weapon zeroing. If you set it to 100 meters, you'll be firing accurately at 100 meters. So it accounts for the bullet drop and does the calculation there and aids you in aiming.

More nay than yay. There are a lot of issues when it comes to trying to get dual wielding to work, both with our current system and because we're trying to make a simulator. So there are a lot of complications when it comes to having two weapons. There are things like, when we're holding a weapon at the moment, we have this left hand free if you want to, say for example, quick interact with something in the environment; that hand's free to quickly let go of that weapon, do what it needs to do and come back again. But then it also comes down to things like reloading, where if you're holding two pistols and you're trying to grab magazines, and again, I'm sure someone out there will tell me that they've done this... It's quite complex to try and work out. And obviously it makes it hard to aim, because we don't utilize an on-screen crosshair when we're not in ADS mode, and it's quite difficult to look down the sights of two pistols. I've actually not seen anyone do that before. There are some difficulties. We could probably work around them, but right now we're not looking at doing it. There is something, though, that we've talked about internally a bit, and it's a new weapon type that would involve a weapon on each arm or in each hand. So that's all I'm going to say.

I didn't. I nearly did get into that, but I wanted to keep it a bit more brief. So yeah, I can go into that a little bit. Essentially, when we shoot each bullet, if weapon zeroing is enabled, or you have a scope that has weapon zeroing on, we actually do a physics calculation prior to it being fired, so we know how much to help offset the scope and trajectory. And what it does is it takes the gravitational environment that you're in. So if you're in zero G and you set your zeroing to a thousand, nothing will change, because obviously the bullet's always going to fly straight. But if you're in an Earth-gravity environment, it will account and offset for that as much as it needs to. I think the only thing where it can't account for something like that is when you're, say, in the back of a ship, which is an environment with gravity, and you're firing into zero G. What it will try and do is account for the gravity all the way through to the end. So if you're trying to do some insane trick shots, you're going to have to rely more on player skill than you are on the weapon zeroing. So if you want to sit in the back of your Cutlass and shoot into space all the way through an Idris hangar and hit someone in the head about two kilometers away, you might need some practice.

Yeah, I can touch on this a little bit. And this is very much not set in stone, but it's an idea that we've had for quite some time and that we do want to do. So this would be for ballistic ammunition rather than energy ammunition. Internally, we've been calling it smart ammo. So it's a system we've planned for a while, and it might only be on certain weapons as well. So it's ballistic, certain weapons only, and it would also require an underbarrel attachment on your gun. But effectively, what it does... We've not discussed this through with the writing team, so we're going to work out how this actually works physically with the bullets and how it interacts with the actual underbarrel attachment. But it almost programs the bullets as they leave the barrel. So you might fit your smart ammo attachment and say, I want standard ballistic rounds, I want incendiary rounds, and I want high-explosive rounds. And what you'll be able to do in the field is switch between whichever ammunition you want, and essentially, when it hits the target, it will have the behavior that you've set on that. So we've always liked to think of it as the Judge Dredd gun, the hot shot. I mean, it's as cool as anything, that thing. There's also no reason, when we actually bring in things like mag stripping and refill, why we can't have non-smart ammo options here as well. So if we want to add 7mm high-explosive rounds to the game, if you buy a load of that, put it in your bag, and your mags are full of standard ammunition, as long as you can take the time to strip your magazines and refill them, there's no reason why we can't do something like that either. But again, I will say none of that is set in stone. That's just something that we've discussed internally a little bit, and something that we know people want and we want ourselves.

I suppose there isn't really a definitive marker we can put on this. So ultimately, I guess if it makes sense to be in the universe, then it's something that we could make. For the examples you mentioned, a high-tech boomerang might be a good fit for an alien race. But that's the sort of thing that we would communicate closely with the writing team on if we had a cool idea, for example. So we would go to them and talk about it and say, is this a good fit for any of the races that we've got out there? And then they might say, yeah, but we might need to make some alterations to make it make sense for Star Citizen. So we're not going to take an energy sword from Star Wars or something like that and go, hey, I'm just waving this around. It wouldn't really make sense. It's not Star Citizen. If we could think of something that fits our universe, then absolutely, we can do anything like that. I mean, look at the Vanduul lance, for example. People have seen that. That's just a giant sci-fi spear, and it fits completely with the Vanduul race and their way of life and how they work.

Just speaking as yourself: if you had to pitch a sci-fi boomerang as being an alien weapon, what alien would you try to pitch it as? You've got to go to Dave Haddock, you've got to pitch a high-tech alien boomerang. What would be your first instinct?

I don't know. I think I might go to the Vanduul, because I'd want it to look brutal. If I was throwing that boomerang at someone, I'd want to find people with them sticking out of their chest on the floor, looking terrified. So yeah, I love the Vanduul weaponry that we've done so far, so I'd love to see some more of that.

How about you, Chris?

I think I'd go for the Xi'an. It's all a really nice, sleek, high-tech thing going on there. I'm intrigued by the Xi'an, so yeah.

Yeah, they've got really cool grav tech, so that would work quite nicely. It would be like a deadly Frisbee almost.

All right, so hands up in the air. I think the fire mode decals are actually a bug, so I'll see what we can do about getting that fixed. Basically, I think back when the weapon was actually being made, we were playing around with a few different fire modes on there. So I think the decals made it on there while we were signing the weapon off. Then at some point, a fire mode must have been removed to push a more focused functionality of the gun. So yeah, I think that was just something that was missed, which we can quite easily fix. It being made a bit more redundant compared to the Gemini sniper: you've got to think about the P6, I think it's called. It's the big brother to the S71. So it's firing heavier ammunition at an increased velocity. It's actually using sniper ammunition at an increased velocity, so it's going to be doing more damage. It's going to be firing at a slightly slower rate, and the weapon itself can equip more powerful scopes. While the weapons are similar, that's kind of the idea, right? It's because they're Gemini weapons. But because the weapons are similar, yeah, I can understand the worry that they'll end up basically being the same thing. But I think the differences there will be big enough that you'll find the range at which the S71 is most effective and the situations in which it's better than the P6. So I'm not too concerned about them overlapping too much.

Yes, absolutely. We haven't forgotten it. Again, massive caveat, game development, things could change, but we'll start next year. And it's not just doing drive-bys and shooting people whilst laughing maniacally. It's also, I want to have a snack and a burrito whilst I'm traveling in my Gladius. There's a lot of things we're going to be looking at in terms of doing the majority of what you can do whilst on foot, but also in a ship seat or on the back of someone's bike. So lots of stuff to come from that. I won't say the S word.

Yes, I thank you for caveating that, according to the current internal intentions, we're to start work on that next year. That is not a claim of when it will be delivered. It's just that that's when we're scheduled to begin evaluating that process and looking at what it will take to get that going. But it's definitely something that we want.

Oh, OK. That's quite a long one, yeah. So I think the existing meta emerged as people realized that you take additional damage on the body and head. And actually, back in the day, those were the limbs that we called lethal. So if those limbs actually reached zero health, then you died immediately. And we're going to revisit the health system at some point from a balance point of view. But right now, we're replicating that system by increasing the damage the head and the body take. So effectively, those are the critical parts that you want to protect right now anyway. So I understand why people did this, though, because obviously you're mixing light and heavy to prevent some severe movement penalties that a full heavy loadout would give you. I'll try and keep it short, but I am actually looking at the armor design at the moment, and it's something that touches on many aspects of the game. And I will say that any functional work, like the power system and all that work being done on the armor, is not going to be foreseeable. It's something that's very long term and will come down the line. But to keep it short, we do want to make all armor type combinations viable. So we're currently investigating options to make mixing and matching parts enticing. But also, we want to provide some sort of bonus to having a full mono loadout, so like a full heavy suit, for example. So we've been looking into things like: if you are wearing a heavy chest and helmet, you're going to be a lot heavier than normal. A heavy leg armor might have some exoskeleton-style support in it that helps you support that weight, and it might even give you a bonus towards going faster in heavy armor. So if you're using light legs or no legs, for example, sorry, leg armor, everyone needs legs, then you might actually suffer a bit of a penalty because your legs are unsupported. You're trying to run around without any of this exoskeleton-style support. So we're constantly thinking about ways to make all options viable. I obviously don't ever want to say wearing a heavy helmet and a heavy chest is a bad idea and we want to stop you doing that. We want to make that enticing in certain scenarios, whereas we want a full suit loadout to be enticing in others.

Just off the bat, just brainstorming on my own: we talked earlier about how the armor could act as a recharge for energy batteries. A full heavy suit gives you the most energy recharge for something like that, so if you choose to strip down the arms and the legs, you're not going to have as much juice to recharge. There's all kinds of things we can explore.

And there are so many things that it ties into as well. So obviously, if you're generating more power, you're generating a higher signal. So you might not want maximum power gain. You might want to recharge your battery as well, but not so much that it flares you up on everyone's radar. So actually wearing a heavy chest and head, if you want to be someone who goes out and does combat but doesn't want to be super obvious wherever they go, and you don't care about your movement speed or the penalties that come with it, then yeah, absolutely, we want that to be an option too.

Again, this links in a bit more with physical damage, so I don't want to touch on it too much, but we're going to be utilizing essentially our materials system. So if something is determined to actually be, say, steel, and we know its thickness, then we'll know how much it can be penetrated. Whereas if it's something that's concealing you, like a leaf or a cloak or something like that, like a cloth that you've got over your head, then we'll know that it's extremely thin and it's made of a material that's not very tough. So I think people will just be able to look at things in the environment and go, that's made of metal, it's several inches thick, I'm probably OK to hide behind that, versus, there's a wooden table that's been flipped over here, I might actually take some damage if someone shoots through it. So yeah, hopefully when that system comes online, it'll be quite self-explanatory in how the actual environment looks.

So many. But yeah, we've been gathering a ton of metrics recently, especially out of our recent Theaters of War playtests, which is our ideal combined arms, concentrated combat scenario, where we are getting people in environments that are more indicative of combat that will happen in the PU, versus, like I said earlier, the Star Marine levels, which were a lot more enclosed. And obviously in the PU, combat will happen on ships, which is a much more enclosed environment, so that's valuable too. But the way we tuned our combat previously was for short range. You can take long-range combat and apply it to short range and it still works. Take something for short range and take it to long range, and everyone's like, why the hell am I not hitting this guy? Or the recoil is too strong, or the spread is too strong, and my guns aren't doing enough damage, and the bullet drop's too strong. So yeah, we've managed to get tons of data from the analytics team on how individual weapons perform, loadouts, what that loadout was killed by, so if it was a soldier killed by a soldier, and the stats versus versus. So it's given us tons of valuable insight into how effectively weapons are being used. So we've actually been able to take a look at some of the weapons that were really underperforming and think to ourselves, OK, is this due to how the weapon itself works and plays, or is it just down to stats? And is it something that we can tweak quite easily? So there are some weapons that we've actually gone and had a rethink on and gone, actually, yeah, this functionally doesn't work as well as we originally intended for its original purpose, that we've gone back to, not the drawing board, but gone back to explore some new ideas on how we can change it and how it works. So those bigger changes haven't actually rolled out yet, because obviously it's got to go back through the weapon concept pipeline a little bit. But the tuning and balancing changes, they're always happening. We never stop making changes as we need to.

And just to go back to the analytics question itself, we get analytics from the PU and from Star Marine as well. I see those same reports that come through, so I know that they're being done and they're seen. It's just that one of the whole reasons Theaters of War has been created is so it can serve as a petri dish for that kind of thing. So it's just designed to be a little more effective for our needs, specifically for testing.