Developers discuss mission design: travel distance and rewards, a planned reputation system as mission gating, investigation missions with procedural clues, and the Covalex Gundo mission. They also cover cargo-quantity, passenger, melee and bounty missions, plus NPC handoffs, voice acting and CrimeStat.
TL;DRThey aim to make enough content to keep players within one planetary system, bringing other systems up to the content density of Crusader, though some missions that send players across the system will remain.
Always nervous about philosophy. Okay, so the philosophy going forward is that we try and make enough content to fill a planetary system to keep you there for a good long while. We're aware travel times are a big investment and quite dangerous sometimes as well. So what we're going to do is... Crusader is the first planetary system we built, and I'm sure everyone will be able to see that it's a lot more dense with content than the other planets. We want to get the other planets up to the same parity with Crusader and beyond, obviously.
The planet and its three moons. You'll notice there are space stations in there that don't exist elsewhere. They are kind of legacy things, these one-off builds that I'm sure we'll get to later, like how we're going to have abandoned rest stops and things like that. So we'll soon be making huge leaps forward in the content and the locations that we can add to the other systems. I did take a quick look at the ratios of local missions versus ones where you go to another planet. And if this question is coming from someone who plays a lot of the main content in the game, which is obviously delivery missions and bounty missions: delivery missions do tend to send you here, there and everywhere. But within Crusader, you'll see that there's Ling, this family company who only do deliveries within Crusader. You can imagine we'll be starting making those organizations that live local to the planets. And also there are plenty of Covalex missions that are just within the location as well, and FTL. And when it comes to bounty missions, the majority of bounty missions do take place in one location. There is a specific company called Northrock that sends you across the system, and they pay more, but maybe not enough for the distances, because obviously we don't dynamically generate or calculate the rewards just yet based on distance. So going forward, we are going to be making sure that there is a lot more content, or enough content, to keep you interested there. The only other things that really try and move you around are the mission giver invites, because they're special enough missions, we hope, that you may be tempted to make the journey.
TL;DRDistance-based rewards aren't in yet; a separate economy team sets rewards after mission designers set difficulty, and they hope a dynamic mission system will make this easier, while still exploring ways to measure difficulty.
There's the mission feature team, which designs missions and the content of missions. And then there's the economy team, the folks who are building the economy of the Stanton system and then, of course, of the Star Citizen persistent universe as a whole. When we showcased the 890 hijack mission gameplay on ISC a couple weeks ago, there were a lot of comments about the mission rewards up there, but those were filler numbers. An entire different team factors in the rewards later on down the line. You don't need to know the reward when you're designing the mission.
Yeah, exactly. We start out with a difficulty. We're aiming for it to be this difficult and therefore maybe shared between this many players, and then we'll give the economy team that information. But they have a very difficult job to do, because we throw in so many of these missions and we give them this vague 'we think it's this hard', but really it only comes to feedback from the backers playing it, like 'this isn't paying enough', and so they'll go and take another look at those. Again, because some of our systems are so early on, they'll have to change the number for every mission individually. We aren't at that point yet; this is why we need Tony's system to come along and make this so much more easy for them and us. We're also exploring different ways of defining difficulty, because that's very difficult to do. So, for instance, AI made a change a while ago that made ship AI much better at being able to shoot with fixed weapons. So suddenly, I forget which ship it was, one of the 300 series, which was an easy ship, became harder to kill, because it was so quick and so accurate, than a Cutlass. And we say Cutlass, we'll say that's medium because it's big and it's got two sets of people shooting from it. And it just isn't the case anymore. And that's dynamic. That changed right underneath us. So we're in talks now: how do we set up, maybe, one computer there making these things just fight, Deadliest Warrior style, a thousand times, and tell us dynamically, every now and again, every release, what is actually a difficult ship?
TL;DRShowing a distance or travel time before accepting is possible since missions are calculated in advance, but they think time tied to quantum travel would be more useful and haven't settled how to compute it.
Yeah, these missions are kind of calculated before you accept them, so it's possible to do that. Now, I would argue that distance is not always actually useful. There are far too many zeros on these things for you to figure out or to use that yourself. So I would say time might be better. But if we just did a crow-flies time, that's so misleading. It would take you through the sun or whatever. What we'd really want to do is tie it into the quantum travel system, so we would see where you are and figure out how long it would take you to get there. And I guess the question is then, is that the time in your specific ship, or the time of the slowest member of your party if you were to link, or do we just take an average?
Well, I definitely wouldn't take that necessarily into account. But the speed that your ship can do this. Do we just take an average speed and let players eventually get to a feel of that?
TL;DRThey want to make more missions like that one and will eventually, but they're expensive in time and resources, so they'll focus first on lower-hanging content.
It's our favourite, the complexity and the story and how we've taken that one simple story and tried to make arcs within it. Obviously they're expensive to make, time and such, and also crafting that kind of story. I'd say that's our first attempt at it, and we're going to get deeper and deeper. But yeah, we're all desperate to work on ones like that. The introduction now, or soon to be, of abandoned rest stops... So Covalex Gundo is supposed to be a cargo depot that blew up. And it was crafted by designers and such. It doesn't bear any real resemblance; it doesn't look functional. So we're taking the rest stops, and the abandoned ones have not only the bit that players can walk around, but they have a workers' area, huge, and lower decks. So you can imagine an abandoned one of those that you get to walk or EVA around will provide us with so much scope to do a huge investigation mission with so many arcing stories. And the building block system that we have, I think we've talked about it before, but having an email system or something so you can actually go and log on and flick through the history and see if there are any bits that stand out that will just lead you on investigations that could be dead ends or could be where the mission is supposed to lead you.
Time, resources, yeah. Obviously, we have to work with writers on the story, and if it includes recordings or even facial capture, that means we have to do it right the first time, because otherwise you miss one line or you decide to change the design. You can't change the design once it's been recorded, because that means getting that one person back in to do a few lines, and that's money. But that's also then time. You have to schedule that.
It's a much bigger investment. This much time and this much resources can get us one PI mission, or it can get us 10 other, I'm just picking a number out of the air, cargo missions and delivery missions and combat missions and PvP missions and stuff like that.
I'm sure that that answer will be a recurring theme in here. Yes, we could do that, and we will do that, but there's so much more low-hanging fruit when it comes to content that we will probably focus on that first.
It was supposed to be deeper than it was as well. We were going to lead them off on a trail as well, into space. So sometime in the future you'll probably see that.
Yes. In fact, it's absolutely necessary for investigation missions. We can't handcraft every single one. What we tend to do is take a location and then mark it up for several missions. I don't know how to explain that. There are things hidden that you will not see where things may spawn. Take a cave. A cave is actually full of dead bodies, and we pick which one we want, and we dress it so some dressing can spawn around it, like a flare or something like that. It's obviously also full of navigation zones and spawn points for AI to fight against, that kind of thing. So all these locations tend to be these ecosystems that various missions happen in.
That's the difficulty with making procedurally generated content. We have seeds in that, so they can tell us which seed it was and we can go back and check it, but they can't check every seed that could be generated. It'd be impossible. But yeah, we plan to do that. So you can imagine that the mission could send you to an abandoned rest stop that gives you a clue that leads you to an outpost, which could be a dead end. You have to go back to the rest stop and dig a little deeper. And then you find it takes you to a UGF and then to a derelict in space. And only then do you complete it.
Yeah, we're aware going back to see them every single time was a bit of a chore. With what we'll be working on pretty soon, actually, a really deep reputation system, it'll allow progression with organisations, individuals like Miles Eckhart. And it may be that as you work your way through this progression and hit certain thresholds, you'll have to go back to see him, so he can give you the next... almost like, well done.
Yeah, exactly. The equivalent. But also, if you do badly, kind of take the pin off. But as you build up this relationship with these guys, they won't need to have you go back there as often.
Yeah, there's been discussions back and forth several times on this, and seriously, recently. We really want to. It's the asset generation that's the costly part of it.
Yeah. Obviously, right now, where do you get it from? Because you need someone to hand it to you, really. Otherwise, you go to a delivery locker and you're like, 'yay, trophy', and then you put it in your persistent hab. But it's not like decorating your home. So no, it's not been our focus, but it's definitely something that keeps coming up and something that we will definitely push for.
TL;DRThey want specialty-ship missions but are focusing on missions for everyone for now, and trading, mining and shop jobs hinge on first converting those consoles into building blocks.
I'll refer back to my previous answers. Basically, we want to do them, but you can imagine that putting all that effort into a mission that only a small portion of the player base can play is not right at this moment. We could be making missions for everyone, and we are making missions for everyone. But they're definitely things we want to do. I'll give you a few for instances. Right now we are actually making missions that are, hopefully, by the time we're done, completable by ships, or teams that have a ship, that can fire torpedoes, do some real damage. And in future we want to do the cargo running missions and stuff. Strangely, all that kind of hinges on the screens that we have, like the trading consoles, the mining consoles and even the shop consoles, being converted into building blocks, so we have much more freedom as designers to get in there. Because right now they're Flash and we can't get involved. So the moment they are set up as a style, then we're allowed to go in there, and we can't not make it pretty because it's got the style set on it. We would add a new page, a new tab to all of these, which is jobs. So you could go to one of the shops and see, oh, they'd like this transferred, delivered to here. They have a courier kind of thing. On the trading consoles, you'd be able to see 'we need this much moving in this amount of time', to which you can decide, oh, my ship's not big enough to do that, or I think I can make it in two runs. But basically go around all these screens and get an array of jobs from them. Same with mining. You'd be able to, 'I will give you this long to find me this much weight of this.' No guidance. You have to be good. You have to have gone out there and done your research and know where these things are, the seams of this stuff, to be able to then fulfill these in the time granted. But even balancing that is quite difficult.
TL;DRSuch missions are possible, such as mining or trading quotas, but they must first make sure the requested amount is achievable nearby, and moving the console screens to building blocks is a prerequisite.
Yeah, that, for instance, the mining thing. Or even trading: 'we want this amount of stuff and we will pay you this amount.' Now, we have to be sure that there is somewhere in a reasonable distance that you can get it at that price. Otherwise you take a hit, and you can take a huge hit if we don't balance that. It's the same with mining. If we ask you to get this much stuff in this amount of time, but that is just impossible in the region, we would be making poorly balanced missions there. There's some hurdles before we get there. Getting building blocks on these screens is one of the main ones, because as soon as that's out of the way, we can do the more simplistic 'please take this much of this to here'. But any ones that request an amount of things in a time, we would have to ensure are actually possible.
TL;DRNot generally, since surprising players with PvP wouldn't go down well, but they could see counter-missions where players knowingly sign up for possible combat, and ordinary PvP interdiction remains possible anyway.
Yeah, I guess. We've done the thing in the past where it generates a mission, go rescue the satellite, and generates a counter mission, go stop them. So they're saying if there's a mission that says go take this from A to B, could there be a generated counter mission, go intercept that?
Not generally. Not like, 'excuse me, could you just deliver this pair of shoes', or whatever it is that's in this Covalex box, and then you're suddenly jumped and killed, and you didn't know what was in there. But totally when it comes to a Crusader security guy saying, 'we need this moved from here to here, don't ask questions, just be on the lookout.' So if players kind of signed up for a little combat, I can see that happening. But I think if we were to generally surprise players with PvP, that wouldn't go down particularly well.
I mean, the thing is, it's a game with PvP. There's nothing stopping you from being jumped and them taking the box of shoes or whatever it is. It's just it won't be worth much. Sandbox kind of PvP and what you get out of that in the final game: I'd have all your wreckage, I'd have all your components. Killing you is worth something beyond just a mission anyway. So you should always be on the lookout. It's just that kind of 'I'm sending someone after you'. I've always really wanted to do assassination missions against players. But we have to be able to pick why it is that I'm deciding to assassinate you. Have you killed so many bounties or this, that and the other that you're out to be assassinated? But it starts to get difficult, I think, where we draw the line there. Bounties are fine. People know that if they commit crimes, other people will come after them. They can expect that.
TL;DRThey like the idea of boxing or capture missions and melee is coming, but they will build missions around it only after it has been played and tested, not based on half-finished systems.
Yeah. Boxing competitions. Yeah. I actually worked on Fable 2 and did the no-handed combat stuff until they cut it. So I totally get stuff like that in there. Just small side missions like that. You'll need dragging, or hopefully not dragging, hopefully over the shoulder. I've been talking to Rich Tyrer, who's our lead on the actor team. So I've been looking at the melee system. We've had to make laws around it, obviously. There's battery second degree if I just punch you in the face, battery first degree if I knock you out, and then proper aggravated assault if I pull a gun or whatever. Hopefully knock you out, throw you over my shoulder, carry you out. As soon as we have that, then I'd imagine most bounty missions would become that, or pay double for taking you in. We have, right now, or actually in 3.8, you'll be able to... is it 3.8? Yeah, it's going in 3.8.
Well, the melee system is, which posed a problem, because you could run around, say, Kareah, right? Kareah has got a clear role. You could run around and just punch everyone in the back of the head, knock them down, they fall on the floor. And are they dead? We had to shoot them several times, and then you just hear them go 'ugh' and ragdoll again, and it's like, oh, now they're dead. Because you wouldn't know the dead from the unconscious, and the mission counter is up there going, no, they have to be dead. The mission counter knows. So we've made it so that you can just go around knocking them out if you want to. But it's a bit of a weird concept for a mission. 'I want you to go in here and knock everyone out' is odd. We just have to figure out the ways to work this into missions. These systems arrive and the backers are basically playing it at the same time we are, right? So we sit there and we play with it and we figure out what's fun and we make missions based around that. We don't do that in conjunction with them making it, because it's being made. I don't want to base missions off of half-done things.
So that's your way of saying that melee combat will go in and then it will get played, it'll get tested, it'll get iterated on, and then you'll begin to develop missions that involve it.
We totally intend to do that. Again, voice acting and things. And you'll see a lot of these kind of questions, like when can we go and have more interesting conversations with people and that. It all comes down to: let's get the quicker stuff that will really flesh out all the low-hanging stuff done, and then we'll start looking at these things, because we really have to get them right the first time when it comes to voice. And these things change constantly. For instance, all the actors in the Covalex mission, the PI one: it's now maybe five years on from when we recorded those.
Yeah. It's funny when I read that, actually, how deep the cave goes. There is a design that we'll be working on soon based on that. Obviously, the collectibles: we have now inherited, the mission team, as it were, the harvestable and mining thing. Once the system's been completed by a feature team, we've inherited it, so we'll be deciding what goes on each planet, what kind of exotic harvestables. So when it comes to collections, yes, but again, you'd really want to hand that off to a person who puts it under a microscope, and you get a nice ending to that mission. We could do them; you drop them in the delivery locker, sadly, until we get that handoff.
TL;DRSimple sequential missions are in the works, and a still-unapproved idea would have players hand in ship flight recorders (black boxes) found on derelicts, which could trigger follow-up investigation missions.
Okay. There are a few things there. There are simple sequential missions that we're working on. I don't know if I want to go into those. I might keep it as a surprise. So, very simple ones. This one's a little more involved. Obviously, it involves spawning. It's more like a procedural thing like we talked about before. You spawn something on them and there's a chance that then triggers another mission thread. We definitely want to do this. I have been planning this in a different context to taking something off of a body. I have been floating this around the directors, and I've not got the absolute thumbs up yet, but this is a theory, right, I'm allowed to theorize. So, all ships have on them flight recorders.
Yeah. Let's say so. And when you blow that ship up... well, I should say, this flight recorder records all the things that happen on board. So as a criminal, if I kill someone outside of monitored space, the law doesn't know about it yet, and they didn't catch me doing it. But on the victim ship is the log; they caught me doing it, basically. I was on radar when that happened, and if they deep scanned, they could know everyone who's aboard. And my ship has a log of every crime that I've committed. So if I blow up the ship, it might be worth going and taking the black box and taking it somewhere that can destroy it, so that crime is gone. But then on my ship, it has the entire log of everything. So I'm protecting not only my ship from being destroyed, because I love my ship, but if that was destroyed and the guy's got the flight recorder, they could take that to a security depot, hand that in, and personally they would get the rewards for every crime that I've committed. If I go and take a big bad guy out who's got loads of murders and stuff on there, I would get a nice reward from that. But he would be hit with all the crimes that have been registered against him. So it kind of creates this little ecosystem, a little economy even, and it's sandboxed. That's what's beautiful about it. It's sandboxed but can be worked into missions.
And just in case you came in in the middle of that and you missed Luke's disclaimer at the beginning, that's an idea, it's a theory, it's something he's exploring and discussing with others. It's not an approved design or anything going into Star Citizen at this time. I think it's an interesting wrinkle that you could be out there committing these crimes and actually carrying the evidence against yourself with you, and you have to protect that. And then you tie the black box into insurance claims: in order to claim when your ship is destroyed, you have to have the black box to get your insurance claim. That's me theorizing, but that would stop criminals from wanting to destroy their own black box. You have to give criminals a reason for keeping their own black box.
If not just that it costs a lot of money to get wiped. Maybe. But back to that question, which I realise I've not really answered: those black boxes, once handed in, they'd get back in touch with you and say... well, basically, it would start an investigation mission that you could take. So if you were the person who enjoyed just doing these random procedural investigations and figuring things out, you could find black boxes. You didn't even have to fight for them. You find them on derelicts that we spawn. And you go get them, you take them in, you get a little reward straight off the bat because this guy was a criminal or something. And then a few minutes later, they're in touch with a mission for you to do based on that. You've got a career there.
TL;DRThey want hackers for hire to clear others' CrimeStats but can't yet, because meshed servers and persistence make editing offline players hard; the new hacking database lets you hack individual crimes.
We desperately wanted to do this for 3.8, but then SOCS came along and spoiled a lot of fun. In 3.7, we could have done this, because everyone's on their own server, there are 50 players in it, and we could just say, show all the names of these 50 players, and you get to choose, okay, this guy, and I'm going to get rid of this crime for him. But when we're talking about a meshed server where everyone's together, it gets a lot more complicated. Right now, their CrimeStat and all their infractions are carried on them when they're loaded in, and when they're out, you can't get hold of that very easily. So we'd have to be able to ask the back end...
Yeah, update his persistence when he's not in the game, which is more difficult. And obviously there's also the UI; you'd have to actually search for people's names because there'd be that many. But yes, we totally want to do this, and you'll find that in the new hacking database all the individual crimes are listed, which is really cool. And you have to hack each one individually. And depending on the reliability of your card, you may get caught halfway through. Basically, you're not supposed to, as someone who works on the criminal database, go through and delete too many things, because then it starts to flag: this is an unusual load of things you're deleting here. So now it's all about, okay, I'll pick the worst, I'll get rid of that murder, and maybe I'll leave these fines, because the fines will be on there as well. So you get to pick and choose. And what's great about that is that you don't just wipe the entire CrimeStat and it's gone. It's, again, an economy. So this card that you've paid 8,000 UEC for is not just a ticket to freedom. It's a ticket to get your crimes down, but you may get caught and shut out of the system and have to use another one.
And for folks who are taking what Luke said and extrapolating from that, SOCS, or Server Object Container Streaming, is being worked on right now. What Luke was saying is not that SOCS is coming with 3.8. He's saying that because we're working on it right now, you don't want to build a system that you know is going to break whenever it does. You want to wait until that comes in and then work within the confines of that new system. SOCS is a wonderful thing that will solve many issues, but it will also create many issues.
It really has as well. We are having to redesign and maybe even say this mission in the state it's in cannot be done now. We have to change it quite considerably. So we are going back to the drawing board sometimes on missions because of the way that SOCS works. These things stream out. Right now, we have a universe that is always streamed in, and that's why we've been unable to add the content we wanted, because it just runs out of memory. But now these things disappear. We can't send you to them because they're gone.
And we want to give you those missions. They did take time. We made one. It was a super difficult one, because we figured that people who get to CrimeStat 5... It's not easy to get to CrimeStat 5. Well, I'll roll back. Obviously, you can go straight to a Commodore.
You have to be intending to get to CrimeStat 5, and to stay there is a whole other matter. You get PvP bounties on you, and all that. It's quite difficult. You get many restrictions placed upon you. So we made this crazy mission where you have to go and take out the Navy, a Hammerhead or several Vanguards. So it's a start. We're going to keep that up.
Well, directly to an NPC. It's something we really, really want to focus on now, doing the shady drug drop-offs or even just being passed things. You've probably noticed that the admin guys aren't accepting boxes anymore. They haven't been for a while. They did for a small window of time. It's one of the hardest things to do, strangely. You'll see it in other games. Whenever anything's passed over, that moment it goes from your hand to their hand, you see it jump. It's strangely very difficult to do, but it's something we do want to focus on.
TL;DROnly one mission can be tracked at a time by default to avoid confusing players, and that stays until the contract manager rework, though an opt-in multiple-tracking option would be acceptable.
We made the decision that you could only track one thing at a time because some missions are extremely complicated and have lots of mission markers up, and it would be very confusing for the player if we by default allowed them to just track as many things as they wanted. But obviously with delivery missions, which are much more simplistic, I can see how that would be helpful. It's just you can't make a system that fits everything necessarily. We could allow them to ruin their own experience if we wanted, just allow them to track all these things, maybe give you a warning that it may produce some weird results. But I think for now, for the foreseeable, until we get the contract manager rework, it will remain the same.
I think there's an argument to be made for allowing player agency in those situations whenever possible. You see it in a lot of MMOs that have fully customizable UIs.
If there was just an option at the top that is basically 'allow multiple tracking' and the player decides to do that, then I am absolutely fine. That's what I was getting at. I'm saying by default, no; we don't want to assault new players or inexperienced players with all these markers on the screen at once.
TL;DRPassenger transport missions are wanted and early groundwork exists, since AI can now step off certain ships, but dialogue, boarding and law handling for things like kidnapping still need work.
Yeah, I'll get on that. Yes, there is. We've just managed to get... I don't know if I'm going to spoil things, but AI can step off of ships now. Certain ships. There are so many ways on and off of ships, obviously. And it's easier to get off of a ship than it is to get back on it, as I'm sure all players know who have landed on an uneven surface, right? So obviously they'll probably be done from landing pads or at least some flat ground. I imagine if we can get AI off of a ship, we can also get AI on a ship, and they should be able to use all the same animations that players do to sit in the locations that players sit in. So yes, again, if you want to do this properly, we want dialogue, otherwise it'd be basically moving cargo with legs around. You want to entertain them as well. You don't want to just have them, again, cargo with legs, just sat there, happy. You want missions that want you to take them places, see certain things. And then we have to make the law system be able to understand kidnapping, for a start.
I don't know. If hijackers come on and start waving the gun around, what do these guys do? I'm sure it sounds simple. It's not that simple. But we have the beginnings of this.
I think it's the idea of interactive cargo. Cargo that can get sick. Cargo that can get pissy. Cargo that can yell at me or get into fights with each other.
What's interesting about what you're saying there is it's something we've been wanting to do for a while. Take away the fact that they're people and speak, and obviously it's a much nicer experience to be the host aboard a ship, but we want to do cargo that is volatile, or has a time limit, or can't touch space, or can't be put next to this type of thing.
Exactly. What you're talking about there is that, extrapolated into people. And we want to be able to do all that kind of thing. Simplistic, like 'don't shake this box' and stuff.
TL;DRMissions won't be gated by owned ships, but sorted into folders; gating will rely on progression, reputation and hard barriers like active CrimeStat, with simple gates now and reputation-based gating planned.
Okay. Not based on what ships you own. Obviously, you can rent a different ship. You can work as a party and accept these missions and put them in someone else's ship. So not based on that. If you have a Gladius, then what we will do is we'll put all the missions in genres, as it were, and in folders, and you can close the box folder, the cargo folder, because you aren't capable of doing that. So you'll never get mixed up with that. And you'll probably only ever really have the first mission from every cargo courier organization. You'll only have the first mission because you've not started progression. So when it comes to gates, progression, like reputation, those will be the gates. Yeah, very hard gates like criminality. If you have an active CrimeStat on you, certain organizations won't have anything to do with you. Certain organizations might be more interested in you, but when it comes to Level 5 Wanted, no one wants one of the top ten on the watch list working for them, because that's just a dead giveaway. Not even a criminal would want someone so recognizable working for them. So there are hard barriers to that. And then there are these reputational ones that we're working on, which is, I might have a high reputation with Miles Eckhart, but that makes me not favourable to someone who doesn't like Miles Eckhart. Or, I guess, how do these people know these relationships, and how much does it affect them? But gates: we have gates now, they're very simplistic. You'll notice maybe that with the bounty missions, there's an introductory mission. Once done, it unlocks a whole host of offers from other people. There'll be an easy mission. Once you've completed that, you'll start getting offered medium ones and then hard ones, and we're expanding that for 3.8. But that's such a simplistic gating system, whereas we are going towards this reputation as gate.
TL;DRShort-term, a mission lets credentialed players scan ships and earn rewards for CrimeStats on board, while long-term reputation could let players be deputized by security companies and paid for arrests.
Yeah, so there are short-term plans and long-term plans. The long-term plans are, as I was talking about these reputations, right? So if you got to a certain reputation with a security company, or Crusader Security or someone like that, a law enforcement agency, you could be deputized. And therefore, you could go around and start getting money for anyone you arrest. Arrest: shoot them out the sky, take the body, whatever form arrest is currently in. For instance, right now, arrest is an empty function that has 'remove CrimeStat'. And we have to have that because otherwise you get in this death loop of arrest, at a landing zone, when the security kill you. So that is the arrest function right now, but obviously you can imagine that it'll send you to prison and that will be the arrest loop from there on, and you'll be allowed to surrender and stuff like that. Stuff I'll be going into in my CitizenCon...
But, so, you can imagine the... Now I forgot the question. Faction-wide, yes. Short-term: the CDF is, I think, some kind of citizen or civilian defense force that's run by the Advocacy. So we will be introducing a mission that, should you have the right credentials, you are able to basically do that. You can scan a ship and you will be able to see all the people on it and all of their CrimeStats. And each of their CrimeStats, if they have a CrimeStat, will be worth some amount of money to you. This is players, this is AI. Obviously, we're going to have to balance this very carefully. CrimeStat Level 1, which a lot of people have... It'll be harder to get CrimeStat Level 1, by the way, because with the way we're implementing fines now, we're not taking the money straight off of you. We're leaving them on you. So we can bring a lot more down into misdemeanors rather than where they are now as a felony. But CrimeStat 1: we don't really want people going around murdering CrimeStat 1s and getting huge rewards, so that should be low. Whereas CrimeStat 5s, go at it. So yeah, there are plans. We are working on them actively, these short-term ones, and the long-term ones are much more... I think the idea of them being perks, you've worked hard enough for this security company that they now deputise you, is really cool.
TL;DRThe speaker agrees mission givers are all morally grey, says they'll raise it with the writers, and mentions two security characters coming who are their first good guys.
And when you said this to me, I was like, surely there's... Yeah, they're absolutely right. It's one I'll obviously raise with the writers who come up with these mission givers. Well, am I dropping someone else in it? Yeah, I have, haven't I? Oh well. But there are two security guys who are going to be on Horizon. They are good guys. They're, I guess, our first good guys. But until you said that, I hadn't really realised. They live in the grey. Battaglia, she's not bad.
Pacheco is bad. There's no one altruistic yet. Hurston is corporate greed, and I'm just going to default to thinking they're evil. Eckhart is based on Phil Miller, so he's obviously a terrible, terrible person.