10 For the Chairman Episode 24. June 9th, 2014

Generally the hull breaches are going to be limited to areas like an airlock or a hangar door or something.It's not practical for us to allow you to rip a hole anywhere in the side of a ship and then breach there. Mainly because then we would have to build the inside of every single wall, we already do an insane amount of work and detail on the ships already, but we don't build the inside of every single wall and every single place, and if we allowed you to breach anywhere, you would have to be able to do that.So for us, we're having some pre-determined ones where you can breach, and when you are trying to breach, they'll be highlighted on your HUD or on the ship that you're trying to dock with, and then go from there.I mean it would be cool to breach everywhere, but we're not quite there yet, and I think you can all appreciate the amount of effort and work and detail that goes into the ships. Making that, doing that, would be another n-th degree of difficulty.

Yeah, I'm not sure we're gonna have a tool that will do that.I think you're going to know when you're purchasing some of this stuff, it will say like "this is a space suit for extreme maneuvering" and it's got a higher g-tolerance. Or "These are bigger thrusters" so the up side is you can turn faster, the downside is you can black out much quicker. And that would all be contained in the description in the fiction.But I don't think we're gonna have anything that would specifically say "You can have your throttle at this percentage and you won't black out, but this percentage it will."I'm assuming that what will probably happen is the community itself will break all that down, 'cause that's usually what happens so there's not really a tool for you other than the community being your resource and just the way we describe the items. There you go.

I think that what would probably happen is, if you had a loan on the ship, that you would have to pay some back and maybe there would be some level of auto-deducting, in the same way that, if you have a debt to someone, it can be auto-garnished from your wages.I think if you have a loan out for a ship, the deal would be "You can have this ship for this amount of money on the loan and we're gonna take 50% of all your commissions on all your missions until we've got out money back plus some." That would be kind of the way I would think it is.I'm not sure in that case if you miss a payment it would really cause you to have a bad credit score or bounty hunters, so I don't know.I think the mechanic would be you have to pay the loan back from the work that you're doing, and then at some point if you're not doing the work, then you just can't fly your ship around. Because don't forget, you're gonna have to earn money to be able to pay for landing fees and fuel and all that kind of stuff, so I think that system will work, but we haven't fully, 100%, figured that out.There is something nice about the idea of a bunch of people coming after you if you haven't paid your loan back, but that may be a bit tough, and it would defeat the purpose, because you'd be blowing up the ship that they loaned you money for.Anyway, that part of is probably still to be decided.

I think I've talked a lot about how I really liked Demon's Souls, I rarely play a game for that much time and that long.It sort of reminded me of the value of having something that you can lose, something that you can risk in gameplay rather than the modern day typical first person shooter or adventure game where basically you can just bully your way through, there's no penalty if you die, you respawn a second before.That wasn't the case with Demon's Souls, and I really... That made it that when I achieved something it was much more satisfactory. I mean it was kind of frustrating, and it was difficult at times, definitely, but the sense of accomplishment I got with Demon's Souls I haven't really felt with a modern game.I think that may be one of the reasons a lot of people have shifted to multiplayer vs singleplayer because singleplayer in Call of Duty or even Battlefield is not really... Ok, it looks pretty, but do you really feel that you've accomplished something?Whereas in multiplayer, if you're fighting against someone and you take a bunch of people out, you do feel like you've accomplished something. I think maybe the dumbing down of games over the last 10 years has also lead to the rise of why multiplayer has become more popular.So I like games that are tough, so obviously Demon's Souls, I definitely like the idea of... Like I'm a Battlefield person over a Call of Duty person mainly because I like to fight with a few of my friends in that sort of cooperative combat together against other players is something I really like from Battlefield, and obviously there are aspects of that which are going to be in Star Citizen.Use of combined arms is in Battlefield, which is cool, but on a more limited basis compared to what we're doing, but again, it's cool.So I would say of non-my-past games or general games out there, I would say the three big ones that I liked more recently, or four, let's say four, were Demon's Souls, Starcraft 2, I loved the balancing, I obviously loved the original Starcraft for the sort of rock, paper, scissors dealing with your resources all the time, and I want a little bit of that in Star Citizen.Battlefield really, the fidelity's fantastic, the fact that you fight with your buddies cooperatively against other people is great, combined arms is great from there, and then probably taking a look at the Naughty Dog stuff, the Uncharted stuff and most recently the Last of Us is just in terms of fidelity and attention to detail in terms of the characters and the world they're creating it was really great.Those would all be games that I would say would be things that I was impressed by, enjoyed playing, and was fairly influence by in the near past. Hopefully that answers that question for you.

In space it would mostly be like a Wing Commander, Privateer, Freelancer style which, you'll have options when you hail a ship, you'll be able to say "attack my target" or "stay on my wing", and that kind of stuff, and then on the planet side stuff we have a conversation system that involves how you engage or interact with people.Like whether you look at them in the eyes and generally handles your attitude around them and the game takes its keys from there.It won't be something like you saw in Mass Effect or Dragon Age, where you had a big wheel of different thing you could ask them.It's more about how you manage things and then you have choices where you can direct it. Like "Hmm, I wonder if I should ask if he's got any work for me" or "Nah, I'll just chitchat," those would be two sort of inner thoughts that your character would have and then you pick between them and that would determine the direction you would take it.I would guess that's a little in the line of what we did in the Wing Commander stuff with, obviously especially with Wing Commander 3 and 4, but the big thing is that we're doing a lot more about the action and the body language.So where you're looking, what you're doing, what your actions are is also being taken into account in terms of how you're communicating with the NPCs when you're planet side, for a more realistic, or a hopefully more realistic feeling. I mean generally when you engage people, you'll look them in the eye, and if you look away from them and stop paying attention to them, they'll get offended.We're sort of trying to build and model all that stuff in our conversation system. I think it's gonna be pretty cool. I would say that's kind of what we're doing, I mean I don't know this question could potentially be saying "do you want to have voice recognition or no voice recognition," or just menus. I would say our input mechanism is going to be either a combination of menus, or actions that you do.Like if I go up and I look at someone in the eyes, that means I want to talk to you, or if someone's looking me in the eyes and I ignore them and carry on walking on, that means I'm not going to pay attention to you.We're gonna drive a lot of the NPC interaction via your actual actions, which I think's pretty good. I mean you notice in real life that's kind of what happens, and action always speaks louder than a bunch of words.