The developers describe first-person boarding and persistent space stations and asteroid bases, Freelancer versus Constellation trade-offs, in-game racing for the M50, Class 1 and Class 2 gun mounts, engines as power plants, and the Aurora's brochure. A writer also covers the fiction.
TL;DRBoarding and combat aboard persistent space locations will be first-person but more tactical than typical shooters, with death more terminal and no instant respawn, so careful play is encouraged over guns blazing.
Okay, well, so the ship-to-ship boarding, and also actually there'll be first-person combat aboard some persistent areas in space, that would be like an asteroid base or maybe a star base. But it will be first-person. I mean, pretty much when you're flying, you're in first-person. So think of it as a first-person shooter, but it's going to be a lot more tactical than, say, a lot of current-day military first-person shooters, mainly because this isn't Call of Duty. You're not blasting through 50 or 60 stupid AI that you get to blow up in various different ways. I mean, you'll probably be on a smaller ship or a bigger ship, maybe there'll be a crew of 10 or 20 people, and you could even try and take over a Constellation, which only has a crew of four, so that'll be a pretty quick battle. So there'll be an emphasis more on the tactics. Also, it's obviously more, I guess, terminal if you get killed or clipped when you're trying to board. So it's not like you respawn and go right in again. So that's why it's more tactical. You'll have to be careful about what you're doing, and you don't really necessarily want to be just going there with guns blazing, because that could be a very short boarding action. There you go.
Well, I was just talking about that, so the space station would be the same. It's a persistent... So we've got two persistent areas that would be in space. One are the more stationary ones. A space station would be it, the asteroid base that I mentioned would be it. And then the big capital ships are also persistent areas, although they're movable. And so, yeah, there will be space stations. You will dock. You will move around in first person. You'll actually be able to interact, get rumors, get missions, so they've got some of the features that you would have planetside, but because they're first-person and persistent, they're not as safe as down on the planet.
TL;DRThe Constellation isn't necessarily better across the board: a solo Freelancer may run more efficiently, burn less fuel and be more maneuverable, and upgrades matter greatly, with balancing planned during dogfighting.
Well, I'm not necessarily sure the Constellation is better across the board. I mean, it probably is if you're running the Constellation and you've got your friends and you're running at maximum efficiency. I think you're going to be pretty formidable. But in a lot of cases, maybe if you're just flying around solo and doing your own stuff, the Freelancer perhaps can operate a bit more efficiently. It may not require quite as much fuel. So you have advantages with it. There's a little pros and cons. I mean, the Constellation is going to be obviously very formidable, and even if you fly it yourself, you have the ability to have auto turrets and everything else, but you're probably not operating at maximum efficiency, because you can't necessarily fly yourself and fly the P-52 yourself. Versus the Freelancer isn't quite as big as the Constellation, so in some ways it could be potentially more maneuverable. And like I said, on a running cost basis it may burn less fuel as it moves around. So there's pros and cons either way. I'd rather not necessarily come up against either one of them, but that's part of the balancing that we're going to do during the dogfighting.
Absolutely. The upgrades make a big difference between ships. So if you set up a Freelancer a certain way and you've set up a Constellation another way, there could be a big mismatch. There's hopefully a lot for people to play and tweak and have fun.
Yeah, we've actually been talking about that. It's something pretty easy for us to do. We actually want to do in-game things to let people bet against each other. So we will have in-game racing.
No, I wouldn't necessarily say so. First of all, you'll probably be able to mount a heavier-duty, harder-hitting gun on a Class 1, because you don't have to counter the fact that you've got a swivel mount.
Maybe a big heavy rail gun or just a heavier energy gun. I would say there will be a fair amount of Class 2 stuff too, because that's kind of like modern military weapons, where you have the ability to... like in the Apache helicopter, your minigun, you can target with your helmet. So there's definitely trade-offs and balances. So I think on a Class 1 you can probably mount a heavier-duty weapon. And it's also going to depend on what kind of play style you like.
Well, I think maybe the best way to think of engines is it is the power plant of the ship. So that is generating the power. So it can be a fusion engine, it could be an antimatter engine. And it's generating the power for your shields, it's generating the power for your life support, your avionics, your weapons, and it's also generating the power to be expelling the mass, your fuel that you've stored, to move around. And that gets expelled through the thrusters. And that's where you would be fueling up with, say, hydrogen or something. And so the power plant does all that, so that's really what the engine is.
It is absolutely being developed. It's the thing that Ryan Church is working on right now. We've been working on it. We're getting pretty close to doing a brochure like we did on the Constellation. And hopefully you guys will really dig it. It's pretty cool.
TL;DRYes, players will see other players and NPCs in bars, prioritizing friends and similar contacts, with a check-in search system to bring others in when too many players are present.
Yeah, absolutely. So that's a core part of what we're doing. So when you're down in the bars, you will be able to see other players as well as NPC characters and have conversations with them. And we've got some clever ways that we're thinking about how we'll handle the case if there are too many players in the space bar for us to render at one time. So we've got some kind of cool ways of dealing with that. But you'll definitely get to see the other players.
Definitely your friends. It'll use the same setup that we've talked about in instancing, in terms of having a friends list and persons of interest and people that are in your guild or potential enemies, and we have a priority of how many people we can fit in and we put them in. And if there's people beyond that, we have a Foursquare check-in system where you can search for someone and see if they've checked into the space bar. And then when you search for them, they will come back into one of the slots and you'll see someone that will be back in the crowd.
I actually worked for Chris's production company, Ascendant Pictures. I was an intern there. It was my first job when I moved out from New York to LA. And they basically hired me as a PA intern, and I worked on that for what turned out to be two and a half years, and got to know Chris, got to know everybody involved and stuff like that. And then pretty much just kept in touch and started doing writing work on the side for Chris, for the guys from Outlander and stuff like that.
But yeah, I never had a computer that could run any of the other ones, so it turned out to be basically just the one. And actually, Bad Blood, I forgot. I used to play Bad Blood. I was a Larry Elmore fan, who did the cover for the box for it.
TL;DRDave Haddock's process was to lock onto the story's endpoint and write Cal Mason as an optimist and Kid Crimson as a cynic, which made weekly decisions easier.
It kind of depends. With the Cal Mason and Kid Crimson stuff, that was kind of the easiest, because the Kid Crimson stuff is obviously very film noir type thing, but the easiest way was, A, locking onto what the story was and making sure that everything is pushing towards that end point. But my kind of cheat for it was everything that I wrote for Cal Mason was written from the perspective of an optimist, and Kid Crimson was a cynic. So ideas I would come up with, if it was an optimistic resolution for a problem and I was writing Kid Crimson, I would ignore it and go with an angrier, "of course it's going to go bad" type thing. So that just made it easier to make decisions, because there's a lot of stuff to put out on a weekly basis. So it's like shifting gears back and forth between two very tonally different things. I was just using cheat shorthands to do it. That's a process.
Right. I mean, it's tough. I try to make it as accurate as possible, but we're still working out what the game mechanics will be and stuff like that. So sometimes it's fictional liberties just for the sake of pacing or story, stuff like that. But obviously I'd like to try and keep it as close to...
I think so. Most likely, yeah. I mean, the new one was just... I wanted to give those guys a break. But I would love to. I enjoyed both of those characters, and I think their worlds are so interesting. They definitely stand for more exploration.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's times where you just... I mean, kind of today. I'm sitting staring at the thing, like we have a new update on Tuesday, and just kind of sitting, and it's just a blank screen and I'm just watching the cursor.
I mean, this is early enough in this process that I think it's kind of the fun thing, where not everything is so locked down. It's not such an established world like Star Wars or whatever, where there's become a very rigid set of rules. It's fun to just see. I've been going on the fan fiction section of the forums and reading some of the stuff. A lot of it's just fun because people are using their imagination and imagining where they would like to see the universe. And that stuff is just always great to read.