Star Citizen Live Q&A: Invictus Vehicle Gameplay

Well, I posted about my feelings concerning Master Modes about a couple of weeks ago in Spectrum. So in general, I'm very happy with the progress and what we achieved, because the swap to Master Modes meant that we had to update all the ships all in one bulk. So we could not really stretch this out to multiple releases, because our data system is not able to have two different tuning values or two different ways of keeping ships balanced at the same time. So we had to squish all the ships, and just to be clear, we have about 140 different ship records in the game. So we had to update them all and take the other related tech from Squadron, like the new aiming system, the way the weapons work, the gimbaling system and so on, plus part of the UI updates, and squish this all into 3.23. Now, we knew before that this was a pretty tough ask, because it's just a lot of work. So overall, I'm really happy with the progress. Of course, there's a couple of, let's say, balance issues. There's a couple of balance offenders, of course. But we don't need to say it's perfect. We never said it's going to be perfect on this release. But it builds a far better foundation from which we can iterate faster going forward beyond 3.23. What about you, Rich?

Yeah, that's basically where we're at. It's about moving towards the better foundation for the future of the game. So it's been really cool to get here. But for us, it's just the start of this, but it's been a really cool journey. I mean, this journey started for us, wow, like three years ago, I think? Yeah, it's about three years ago, maybe more than that now.

It's been four years. I lost track of time.

So we got together and we looked at stats and went, right, what do we need to do to make the combat experience good, but also the general flight experience good. We came up with lots of things, and Master Modes was one of the ones that evolved as the prominent feature that we were working on. It's involved so many teams and so much feedback from all across the studio. So it's been an effort not just of myself and Yogi, but lots of different teams and lots of different people that have been waiting on this some of the time that I've been here. So it's been really good to see it out there. It's been a big push at the last minute because, as Yogi said, we've got so many ships and every single one of them had to be updated to make this work. So there's a couple of things that we didn't catch probably, but that was expected given how many records have changed in the game. But we believe it's a much better foundation, and we're excited for the feedback as it's coming in, and also for the future as well, because it's going to evolve massively over the next few releases.

So if you run ballistic ammunition, we will allow you to restock the ballistic ammunition. And the way that it will work is you will buy ammunition containers that you will then use to refill the pool of the ship that you landed. Or if you even have a capital ship or a bigger ship, you will be able to put those boxes with the ammunition inside. Right now it's a dedicated slot, but it's subject to change, and then it will basically drag the ammunition out of it and put it into the pool. One change that would come with that, and this is something that is coming sooner rather than later, is we will unify the ammunition size. And that's just for the fact that we don't want to have bespoke ammunition, for example, for your Behring Gatling, but we want you to share the ammunition between different weapons that share the same size of ammunition. For example, a size three Gatling uses the same round size as a size two repeater, and it uses the same size as a size one repeater. So you can plan your loadout accordingly if you just want to buy one type of ammunition for your ship.

Yeah, we already started with that. So the tractor beam detach was the first step already for that. So the following steps are then having these, I don't know if it was ever put out, the images of the, I might be leaking something now, but we had those missile racks, the mobile missile racks that you could push into vehicles, so these might also see the light of day at some point.

I don't remember if we've shown those or not, but that's been an idea that's been floating around development long enough that we can share that. Basically the idea of storing missile racks inside your vehicles that you can then, when the ship lands in something like the Polaris, you can just go and reload. There's also, I have no idea if it's out yet or not, but Tyler will have a post on Spectrum later today concerning some of the weapons for the Retaliator and some of the missile counts for the Firebird. So I don't know what the details are specifically, but check that out. There's some improvements coming in a 3.23.1a patch or two. But I know that the Firebird is getting more missiles than it currently has, and the Retaliator is getting bigger guns, I think. So look out for that. If that hasn't posted on Spectrum yet, it'll post later. And then trust him for the details, not me.

Yeah, it's something we want to do, but it's not a simple thing to do. There's a lot of downstream dependencies that we have to rely on for it, and there's a lot of edge cases. If we're doing refueling and then you board the ship and kill the AI pilot and you've just got a free ship because you sat there without any fuel, these are the sort of things we need to catch and protect against. Like a crazy amount of feedback for the player so that you know, right, I'm nearly full, or, hey, I need some help. Or maybe we do, here's the first version, it's just refueling. But then we have refueling, but you get pirated by some AI pirates. The AI needs to be able to react and communicate with you as the player and tell you about the situation that's currently happening so you can adapt appropriately. So, long story short, yes, just probably not yet because we need a few more things.

Mining missions? Yes. I mean, yeah, we want them, and we're going to have our first versions of them coming in, hopefully soon, in the form of resource gathering. But these are going to be the first iteration, which we kind of call open resource gathering. And this is the idea that a mining outpost will go, I want 1,000 SCU of iron, and then that's all they say. And then you have to go out and collect it. Or I want 1,000 SCU of Quantanium. And you as a player can go mine it and transport it. Or if you could purchase it from another player or a store, you do that. Or you can pirate people for it and bring it in, because they don't care where you've got it from. They just need that resource. So that will be kind of the idea of the first versions. And then later down the line, we might get more specific with the resources that we want. We're like, we want exactly these mining things from this area because we have bought the land claim there for those rocks.

Yeah, exactly. It's static because we have to preset up all of the data, but the idea is that it's all there. So when the Quantum system comes and hooks in, it'll just take over and start generating these on its own and balancing these based on the needs of the universe, and it will react to what players are doing.

And that's not to say that missions are the only way. When these missions come online, and as there are more salvage missions and more mining missions, that's not the only way to make a living with those professions. Those are introductory things to draw people to the profession for the first time that maybe they hadn't considered before, and to supplement with a little more directed initiatives the open sandbox stuff that you'll always be able to do.

Yeah, it's something that me and Thorsten have talked about a few times, when Thorsten first released salvaging, hull scraping. The gameplay came out and then the missions were a way to help expose it to new people so they could see the gameplay and find the things a bit quicker. So it's a nice way to show you to the world and then let the systemic nature of the universe, and the actual cost of doing it yourself without a mission, come into play when you get more advanced in it.

I guess the Overdrive was the first kind of beginnings of that multi-discipline kind of stuff.

Yeah. We definitely want multi-discipline things. What we're doing is, as I might have mentioned a few times, I build missions modularly. So we build a load of base modules. So with our resource gathering and our salvage things, the idea is that when we get enough of them, we'll start stitching bits of them together. So you might have a mission where you've got to take out a bounty and then you've got to hull scrape him and then maybe you've got to steal his component. Then someone wants that component, so you get another objective, like deliver that component to this person. We plan to have missions that take you through multiple bits of gameplay, but all in one mission. But right now our focus is creating the baseline of all the generic type missions that we can think of. So the idea of that is that if we build them, they can then scale out to all the systems that we have planned, and it's easier to get a wide spread of content before we start building into our bespoke things.

Yes, power plants will consume fuel in the future. So it has been a plan for quite some time already, and we are now looking into when is the perfect time actually to release it. It's not with 4.0, so it's not with the initial release of the resource network, but it will come at a later point. And the goal there is that the power plants will consume hydrogen fuel. So it's used for the thrusters and the power plants. And the reason is because power generators right now create energy out of thin air. And especially when we go forward to base building, we can't do that anymore. So we need a resource that is actually consumed over time. And the benefit then, in the scenario that is described in that question, is once your fuel runs out, once your battery is depleted, all the systems on that ship will then slowly die. And yeah, you will be able to enter that ship without any shields anymore, but also without any life support.

It's not a pipe dream at all. So yes, we had 140 records and we did a very quick weapon tuning pass and a little bit of a health pass for some components and ships. But we're also getting a huge amount of data from the players actually playing that stuff. Internally, when we develop stuff, it's sometimes hard to judge whether or not we reached the right balance, because we have a vast array of ships and items and all that. But when you watch players playing it, then you get an idea what's happening. That said, as I said, the current pass that we have on the balance should not be treated as a 'this is now the final product' thing. It's really just a stepping stone, because it just sets the stage for the vastly bigger changes that are coming in 4.0 and beyond, because there will be new gameplay loops and so on.

I think a huge step we took right now is actually that we set our intentions very straight. So we know exactly what we want to achieve. And now we actually look for the data sets in what players are actually experiencing right now. And we use these observations to improve the balance even more.

Yeah, on the overall question, is balance even possible? Do we want balance? As in, do we want everything to be balanced? Because the kind of nature of balance is the imbalance in balance, if that makes sense. Because we've got to capture all the unique characteristics of the ships, and that throws them off in all different kinds of directions. And we've got to capture that balance to make sure that within the game context, the ship fits within the game. But every ship needs to feel different and offer different things and have different character to them. So that's kind of the complex nature of balance. And then we have to balance the game with the other features that affect flight. So basically, as Yogi said, this is the starting point of the rebalance of the game. But then with 4.0, it's going to evolve massively. With the engineering gameplay, it's going to have a significant impact on how the ships are in the game. So we're going to reset again there. And then again, we're going to look at the data to see if we're delivering the gameplay we intend. So it's a juggernaut. And it doesn't really ever end with a game like Star Citizen, because the game is a live product. It's out there, it's evolving, we're adding features, we're changing things all the time. So from my side, balance is not something that will ever be finished. It's an evolving thing. It's a living, breathing thing that exists in the game currently and will carry on evolving.

Which is true for any MMO, any online game, right? The main guy in charge of Smash had an interview where he talked about their internal numbers, about how the most successful fighter in all of Smash Brothers had like a 51% win rate, and the least successful fighter had a 46% win rate. So it was really only about a 5% difference there. And Torsten, you mentioned that he had a YouTube channel where he talks about design.

Yeah, basically he talked about how if you have a fully balanced game, everything is average, and average is generally boring. So if you do balancing, there's always a peak up or a peak down, so it's more interesting for players. Worth watching, by the way.

Torsten, maybe you take that, because that's highly related to resource network. The big picture hasn't really changed, but there will be some specific details with soft death that Torsten will talk about in two seconds.

So we still keep all the weapon counters, that is distortion, that is EMP and stuff like that, where you can deactivate a ship. For EMP, you first have to bring the shield down, so there's some work that comes with it up front. For distortion, we already mentioned it, I think it's on the roadmap now, with a multi-tool you will be able to counter distortion. So that's something that we were missing before, that distortion damage actually has a valid counter. So you are not only a sitting duck when you get fully distorted by someone else; you will be able to drain that, so you will be able to make your ship work again. But I think the biggest change that will come with 4.0 is the change to soft death. I don't know if all of you already played the Arena Commander experimental mode, but that already gives a hint at what we are aiming for. So right now, also in 3.23.1 live, if you shoot a ship, if the ship reaches health zero, it will explode or it will go into the soft death state. But we are right now actively discussing how we want to change that. So we have already some ideas. One of the big ideas is tied actually to the health or the life of the power plant, and also giving players a way to maybe fix or escape the soft death scenario there. But this is, as said, still an active discussion, but the goal is to have it come with everything resource network related.

No, I won't. No, I'm joking. In the future, when we redo the Contract Manager app, we're going to add a section where you can see the sort of gameplay you're going to encounter. So it'd say things like, maybe you need a multi-tool, maybe you're going to need FPS weapons, maybe you're going to need a powerful ship. There'll be a section where you can see what it is. And the reason that we don't currently make a distinction between the two is because the idea is that in the future, the bounty that you're hunting might be above a bunker, but then he might land and go inside and then you've got to infiltrate and fight them. There's a whole bunch of different things that we want to happen, so therefore we don't want to make a clear distinction where there might be none. You might get there, start attacking them, and then they get in their ship and take off, and you've got to transition from ground to space-based combat.

We don't want to make too clear a distinction. It's like we could give you expectations: the mission giver expects it to be primarily this or primarily that. But I think it's important to leave room for the element of surprise, not just from the story of your mission team and the narrative, but the surprises of the other players in the 'verse.

Exactly. It takes influence from real life. You take a job and they're like, hey, this is what you're applying for, you're only going to do this. And 90% of the time you start and they give you so much other shit to do at the same time.

Internally, it's called Sandbox Criminal Kills. It's the one that just gives you money for killing people with crime stats. Players seem to always just want money. We try to be reactive with missions. So we look at them and we see if they're earning way too much than we'd like, and we take it back a bit. But now we have the economy team, and they're actually helping with this. So they've actually rebalanced this again. So hopefully for the next patch, you'll see a change in the Call to Arms payment, because before, Call to Arms was literally balanced by the mission team. Balancing UEC for our economy, obviously, the reason we have a dedicated team is because it's so big. A kind of funny example: one of the big reasons that we had to wipe UEC is because of my team, and I'll take sole blame because I submitted it. I accidentally managed to make it so that people had earned 4 billion UEC just from salvage missions, and the economy team, when they found out, weren't very happy with me. But that's because the numbers are absolutely insane to try and balance.

Oh, changes, yes, of course. I mean, how is it doing right now? It's better than what we had in live on 3.22 before. In terms of how successful the change was so far, I think it's pretty positive. I can't say exact numbers, but the relationships of kill-death ratios on all ships, for example, have flattened out a lot. A lot of the time in the past, we always had one or two ships which basically were responsible for most of the kills in the game, and that's not the case anymore. We also have more players with, let's say, more diverse levels of flying and combat skills enjoying the game more, so I would count that as a win. But there's a huge amount of stuff that is on our list to do. There's typical examples like ESP needs to be improved. The 1v1 dogfighting needs to be improved. There's also a couple of things we want to try out with the flight model, like using an X-shaped velocity space to combat the backstrafing problem. Whether that works or not, we'll see. In general, we want to improve the combat distances a bit. There will be more stuff happening with the 4.0 tuning patch concerning weapon speeds that also might help with the distances. And there's a couple of bugs, like the camera shaking is sometimes inconsistent, the G-force zoom effects are sometimes inconsistent. And of course, there are a couple of ships that feel out of whack. One of the Hornets can at the moment pull 35Gs upwards. That is, of course, not intended. So, yeah, there's lots of stuff. But as I said, overall, I'm pretty happy with the current progress. Is it the final state? Of course not. But there will be more stuff happening, especially with the resource network, because of course these new feature sets also require some changes in the flight model or the way we target certain parts of the ships.

Yeah, I can echo Yogi's comments that we're personally really happy with how it's gone. There's definitely going to be more changes. A big challenge for Master Modes for us in terms of release was just how much around Master Modes changed. It wasn't just adding Master Modes to the game. We were fundamentally making some big changes to the aiming system and the flight model itself as well. So we had a lot of changes going in that went alongside Master Modes. This was quite hard to manage. But that's part of the fun of working in games on this: we're always trying to improve things, always trying to change things for the better. And we're going to carry on listening to the feedback from the players and also looking at the data as well. That's a big part for us: we basically need to be accountable for what we're doing. So any changes we make, we've got to prove that they're actually having the impact in the game that we intended. So that's going to be a big part of moving forward with the general balance. But yeah, there's going to be lots more changes. We're going to fix up some of the ships, because we definitely missed some of the ships for various reasons. We changed a lot of ships, and there's some ships that inherit certain records from other ships. Sometimes that can catch us out a little bit. But we're basically working on identifying those ships, which we are in the process of doing, and we'll fix those up. And then we'll move towards 4.0 as well, where we basically expect another round of big changes to the balance.

I would say yes.

Of course.

Of course it has a future.

We've got to sound more confident, guys. Come on. Yeah, racing's got a future.

Racing has a future. But really, the Master Modes tuning patch, of course, affected the current racing tracks that there are. The speeds got a lot slower and so on. And so some of the tracks right now might not work as they did. But the level design team, for example, also asked, hey, should we adapt the racing tracks now? And we're like, we're not completely done with our Master Modes changes with the flight model development, so maybe hold off on doing extensive changes for a while. But racing, I mean, we're celebrating ships, so of course we invested in racing. Specifically for the racing community, we added something to the flight model back then that was addressing the lack of certain acceleration when you're not using digital input devices and so on. So yes, racing is really important to us. And actually, today I got a question from Knabel, one of the German podcasters, YouTube streamers. He asked if we could add smoke pots to racing ships. I have not discussed it with anyone, but I think the idea is really, really great. Just putting this out there. Rich, say more about racing.

It's definitely got a future, because I come from a racing background. I've done a lot of sim racing and I'm a big fan of racing in real life. And that's the key thing with Master Modes: it's going to allow us in the future to give more freedom to allow the racing variants to excel at racing. And that's something we're really keen on. Because one of the issues we've had in the past is balancing the combat experience with the flight experience and the racing experience. If you have a really good racing ship that can use all its guns at the same time and everything, it can suddenly be the dominant force in combat, which is probably not intentional. So we're looking at ways where we can balance that, so we can allow racing ships to be the best handling ships or the fastest in a straight line. And then basically, as Yogi said, it's about the tracks as well, because the tracks are where you're racing. So it's important that they're designed around the current flight model. And as we've made a lot of changes, we need to now take a step back and look at what tracks are going to make the most out of the handling that we now have in the game.

Well, I wouldn't go for a racing master mode, because racing, if you want to go quickly from A to B, this is what Navigation Mode is for. But we should absolutely do something like a racing operator mode, where the heads-up display is cleared and shows racing-specific information. We actually have a stopwatch on the HUD. I'm not sure if players know about this, but this is, for example, something that we should then just have on by default, or having a bigger TVI and giving you expected deceleration times and stuff like that. Stuff that's important for the racing experience itself.

On the mission side for racing: in the PU it can be a bit difficult to do racing missions compared to AC, because we have the respawn flow set out for us. So it can take you a long time to get back to the racetrack where you want to do your races. So we're investigating ways we can speed that up. I don't want to speak to any specifics; they might change. One thing we are doing is we're going to be adding open track versions of the current racing missions that we have, because currently how you unlock the next race track is via completing the first one. So what we're going to do is just give out a version where you don't get a reward, you don't pay a buy-in; here's access to the track. We'll time you like we do in the mission as it is. It's just so you can keep practicing. And then going forward, we'll have more advanced races. But races aren't just in ships. They're in ground vehicles; we have the Daymar Rally that the community do, and that's a lot of fun. But they can also extend to on-foot races. Recently, we prototyped a time trial race in the escape route of the prison, where we timed players who could get out the fastest and then awarded them merits for whoever got out the fastest. But we didn't feel like it fully fit. So we can do it, and maybe in the future you'll see it somewhere in the game. It was a lot of fun because we tried to be suggestive with the direction, so if you didn't know the escape route, you could really mess your time up.

Yeah, unfortunately that was another change that wasn't really caught in time to fix, but it's also been fixed. So basically, the vehicle you saw as a player was actually the server vehicle and not the actual player vehicle in the player physics. So it caused a lot of glitching, but we've corrected that. And the ground vehicles are now back to being fairly stable ground vehicles. It is fair to say we're still looking at improving the general ground vehicle experience to make it as good as ships, because it should be. They're all vehicles in the game, and all vehicles should be up to the same standards. So we're definitely looking at improving the ground vehicle experience still. But we're pretty happy with the major physics overhaul that went through with it. We just need to make it a little bit more game-friendly for our environments, which are massive planets with loads of different terrains.

This one, we're not quite sure. So we got reports about this midweek and we started to do our own investigations across different teams to figure out what's going on, because we've changed some of the stuff in the handling, but the backend technology hasn't changed. But again, with a game like Star Citizen, the fundamental game engine is updating all the time and there can be negative consequences on completely different features, because a feature might use some part of the game which works a certain way, which now works a different way, and that could have an impact. It's about figuring out where it's gone wrong. Because we're definitely not happy with the overall Grav Lev experience, and we're definitely looking at improving it. Because that's one of the key parts of racing as well, because Grav Lev racing can actually be really cool. When it works really well, it's probably one of the cooler race experiences in the game. So we're definitely looking at what's gone wrong in 3.23 for Grav Lev.

So there's been lots of discussions about ground vehicles in our game and how we use them on the mission side. The main thing we face is that when we balance a mission and balance the economy, time is a huge factor in it. And if you can do it in a ground vehicle, you can do it in a ship a hell of a lot faster. So it becomes this thing where we try to make an experience around ground vehicles, but then people just do it quicker in a ship. So then we have to lower the price to not break the economy, and people just stop doing the mission. We want to add a benefit. We want to add a reason for people to actually use ground vehicles. Recently, in the distribution centers, there's massive gas spheres, and the ground turrets will shoot spaceships, but they won't shoot ground vehicles. So we've seen some players using the tanks to destroy them so that they don't have as much resistance. But we also need some tools or features that help us encourage it. A recent thing that we were investigating for ground vehicles was to do with the Kopions that got added to the game. We were having a debate about how the player discovers them. And one of the discussions that we came upon was that maybe the ground vehicle radar would be the only thing that could find these Kopions, so that if you wanted to do the mission, you'd have to land, take your ground vehicle out and use that to try and locate the Kopions. But we weren't really happy with that, so we've kind of thrown it out. But yeah, we're always looking for new ways we can encourage it. And me and Thorsten have been talking about ways that we could do it, so I'll hand over to Thorsten.

Yeah, there are some things that we already started discussing, and I think one of the most important parts is that environment matters. So depending on what environment the mission takes place in, it might be worth bringing your ship or your ground vehicle or even going by foot. So for example, we already have the case where you have to enter a cave and you cannot fly in. We have some where you can fly in. We have some where a ground vehicle also fits in. But in general, if you have a cave mission, the way to go into that cave is by foot. But we want to expand on that in the future. And we don't only want to expand on that by how the environment looks. So for example, a vast forest: you cannot land with your ship, but you can drive into it with your ground vehicle. But we also want to utilize the weather conditions, for example. So a strong wind will block your ship from actually landing safely. So it's better to be outside of that strong wind area, drop the ground vehicle, and then avoid the strong wind by driving in with your ground vehicle. Or with Pyro, you might have already seen it in the CitizenCon demos with the solar flare: when your ship gets hit by a solar flare, it basically drops down because it's turned off. So dropping from the sky is something that you would avoid if you had come with a ground vehicle in that situation. But there are also other things that are related to the weather, like limited sight, where it's safer to go with a ground vehicle versus a spaceship and stuff like that. So there are plenty of scenarios that we are currently investigating, what we can do to actually make ground vehicles more usable or even required for missions.

So as of now for 4.0, let's start with life support. So we will have life support that has the fire system in it. So life support is also a valid counter for fire that you will see on your ships. We will have room propagation. So you opening a door to the outside will basically evacuate all the atmosphere of your ship to the outside. We have atmosphere maintenance, where you as the player are responsible for making sure that your life support generator runs well enough so that there's enough breathable atmosphere inside the rooms. So the Life Support Generator is a new item that we will introduce. And the Life Support Generator will then create a new resource. Right now, it's still called Life Support Resource; we are really, really creative with names. There's a filter that is also a new item, added as the consumable for the Life Support Generator. And yeah, that's just the life support segment of the resource network release. Talking about engineering, here we have the power management that will be introduced. You were not able to see it yet in the Arena Commander mode because we were not ready yet. So especially UI is still a lot of work for us, because we need to get it right, accessible. It cannot be this highly scientific method of you basically measuring the joules of the power plant. We have to make it accessible for the general player audience, but still interesting for those that are really interested in those engineering mechanics. We will introduce the relays as the connection point between the items, with the fuses. So these are already things that you even see in live in some of the ships that are already prepared. So for example, the Retaliator already has the relay boxes with the fuses inside. And in the Arena Commander experimental mode, you can actually witness their functionality. The huge thing, and that's more on our side, on the design side, is the rebalance of items again. But as already mentioned, with all the pre-work that has been done for 3.23, we have a very, very clear goal of what we want to achieve here. And that is we want to really facilitate the items inside the resource network. So items should be more meaningful in ships. So we have a meaningful difference between item classes, for example, where there's a huge difference in the look and feel in terms of gameplay for the civilian and military components, as well as the grades. So this is our internal high goal for the release: that we have a meaningful difference there, so that player choice actually matters here. And also what we want to achieve here is that the differences are clearer. So players understand what's the difference between a civilian and an industrial item more easily, and it's very clear to players what to pick for the journey they want to take. Something that, sadly, I had a discussion yesterday, we will not make it for 4.0, as of now, is the batteries. So we might push the batteries to a later release. Doesn't mean that they won't come. It just means they come at a later point, because this is such a crucial feature and we need to get it right. And every time that we can spend on polish is better invested than actually forcing additional features in. So we would rather spend time polishing the feature and then just making sure that everything is in. I think no one would like it if everything is in there and it's not working, or it's not working well enough. That's the best safe phrasing I could come up with.

I hear you, and I appreciate you sharing that with us. Obviously, when ISC comes back in about a month, one of the stories we'll be telling on our journey to 4.0 will be another revisiting of engineering and life support, and you'll get to see how it's all working out there.

Because I'm not done. So there's more. There's simple repair. So we have the repair of ship items that you also can already witness in the Arena Commander experimental mode: exchange of fuses, exchange of broken items. And we mentioned at the beginning of this show that there's now a distortion counter. And that basically leads to the last bit that we will introduce with the resource network engineering gameplay, which is malfunctions. So here we will start with three malfunctions. The initial release will come with those three, which are fire, damage to the item, and distortion to the item, because we now have dedicated counters to them, so that we can actually introduce meaningful gameplay and you're not just suffering from whatever malfunction the item will suffer from. But we made sure that the malfunction system is so vast that if we notice that those three are not enough yet, in later patches or later releases we can add more bespoke malfunctions, so we can slowly widen the gameplay. Because I can tell you, it's already quite a lot that you have to manage and learn. So it will be fun, but it will also be a huge learning curve that some of us have to go through.