Calling All Devs - Voyager Direct, Medical Gameplay & Group Missions

I guess first I want to say there are missions currently in there in 3.0 which you can play kind of co-op. They're either not fun or some of them are not even accessible due to the bugs that are on there at the moment. But generally, in the short term, we are working on the back end for getting players to be able to transfer funds and make their own player-created contracts. Simple ones like, I'll give you an example, distress. Like a distress emergency rescue kind of thing. If you get lost, your craft gets blown up, you can put out a distress, put you as a little marker, if people accept your mission, with a reward that you can set yourself. Another example would be like a bounty mission. I don't like this guy, I'm going to put money on his head. And that's a mission that other players can accept.

This sounds like something Todd mentioned last week called the service beacon system.

Yeah, that's the service beacon. So we are actively now working on the back end for that. So I'd say longer term, though, if you want to play missions together, you'll be able to accept, like, one player accepts a mission, it doesn't matter what mission it is, you can then share that with friends. Or say he takes a mission that says it requires two people, but maybe it says it usually needs about four people, right? So you can just get your best mate to come and help you out. And if you two are great pilots, say, and you know you're going to really easily win this mission, and just take a bigger cut than if you were to play with four players, you can do that. Or if you've only got one friend, and you want four people because you know you're not that good, you can kind of re-advertise that on the job board, on the contract manager app, and let other players accept the other roles. And what I like about that is it leaves all the management up to the player, because right now the missions that we have in there that are co-op, we have these kind of arbitrary timers on there, and the timer is there just to say, okay, these are the two people who have accepted the mission, but they haven't shown up at the mission start. We can't expect the people who are there to wait for much longer than this. So, arbitrary timer, boom, they're gone, the mission starts. But obviously, if it's left to the player, he can wait as long as he wants. He can get tired and just say, screw it, we're doing it, just us two. And for me, that's a lot more freeing as a designer. I don't have to be so restrictive, but it's freeing for the player because it's all down to him then.

So regarding the medical part, we see this split into two major parts. It's the field medic, which is what do you do there on the spot if you just got a wound, you got hit, your health is low, stuff like this. And there will be different, let's call them stim packs, which will refill your health, will replenish your whatever. Let's say you have minor radiation sickness and you'd have a stim pack that will solve that for the moment. What happens over time, you will get so much damage that there will be long-term effects. And the heavier they become, you will start being forced to find a proper medical facility. Your field equipment will not be enough for what you need. And this is where we'll have these facilities in every major landing zone. You will have to go there. You will have to talk to the personnel and get yourself treated properly. There will be several machines that they'll put you through to find out what's wrong, and they'll have a cost. It will take some time to get you healed. For example, I'll give you an example: if you have multiple leg injuries, eventually you might get a fracture. You will not be fixing your bones by stitching them together; you have to limp all the way until you get to the hospital. You might require some friends to take you there because otherwise walking there is going to be painful. But you do get there and then you will have to get yourself fixed. It will take, as I said, resources, time from that. Regarding the level of immersion for this when it comes to the medical facility, as a first release it'll probably be fairly minimal where, let's say you go there, you talk to the doctor, they go, yeah, yeah, you're fixed now, and fade to black and you're back in again with the proper leg now, the fracture's fixed. But eventually, as time progresses, we would like to make this more immersive, where you actually see yourself going into the MRI scanner and try to figure out what's wrong with you. Again, we're planning a lot of long-term diseases and problems that you can have from visiting all kinds of environments where there's hazardous environments. The easiest one is space. You get decompression sickness. That you will not be able to just have an injection and it gets fixed. You will have to go there. There's radiation, there's broken bones, there's fractures, all these things. There's a ton of them that we can play with and create interesting gameplay. Each of them have different effects on how your character behaves. Either they blur your vision, they distort stuff that you see, and they affect how you walk, they affect whether you can carry a two-handed gun. So all of these, you will have to get them taken care of, otherwise your character is pretty...

That's a tricky one. I think the experience at the moment that we're trying to push is to make the cockpit more accessible. We're pushing a lot more stuff onto MFDs. We're kind of moving away from AR stuff and actually making those screens useful. So I think as of right now, the focus is definitely on making those make more sense, be more accessible. That's really where our attention is in terms of the cockpit. That's not to say that we wouldn't get around to it further down the line, but as of right now, making sure that everyone can use these better, that's really our number one goal. So never say never, but it's not in the near future for us on this.

We've had this conversation, not just you and I, but a couple other designers in the past. It'd be interesting and it'd be nice. I know a lot of the more dedicated flight sim folks out there, they build their custom cockpits with the panels from Saitek and stuff like that. That stuff is cool. And I'm absolutely certain it would be something that Chris would be interested in, but we have to prioritize these things. And right now and for the foreseeable future, our work is definitely on the cockpit experience, because it's better than it was, but it's still not where we want it to be. So that's where our focus has to be, on the stuff that affects everybody.

And I'm sure once we reach certain points, going back and looking at what can we do more of, what can we streamline. So it'll be a constant process, but as of right now, let's get this.

Something we'll consider down the road, but no commitments. At this point, it's too early to commit to it, is basically what we're saying.

Well, that's a really great question, and the timing couldn't be better. I don't know how you did that, but it's of actuality. So the backstory of this is that, for those who don't know about that, there's a store that you can access to purchase items with your UEC. And that will basically load up your inventory and make sure that you can actually access these items in-game. So this is a really old piece of tech that we built early, after the pledge campaign actually finished, first year. And so people have items from Voyager Direct. So to answer your question, our plan is to basically move on from that system. So we want to deprecate the Voyager Direct web store to move to an in-game equivalent that is more dynamic, that is tied to the universe, tied to the economy. And so we're currently exploring this. We have a high-level plan that we're looking into, so take this with caveats. So we want to deprecate this. So in order to do that, we will most likely give you guys the choice of melting back your Voyager Direct items for UEC, if you so choose to do that. For items that you want to keep, you'll probably be able to keep that. We're still investigating exactly if we're going to do a blanket reload; that's still being talked about. Because there are items in there that are no longer available, and so we need to figure out what we're going to do with that. This might cause issues for other items, but the goal is to basically give you back your UEC, and that counts as a cap. So for this to come online, we also need to be seeding your aUEC wallet from your total UEC. Since the game is still in a state where we wipe persistence to reset the system to try it out: when a new patch comes out, like when 3.0 came out, we wiped the persistence database to restart the wallets and everything like that. So instead of giving you a fixed, right now we're working with a constant amount, we're going to give you your amount of UEC in the universe. This will allow game designers to see the economy in motion with real UEC values in aUEC. And so as you spend your aUEC, this will stay in game; this will not affect your platform-side UEC cap. Right now, if you purchase UEC in the meantime using real money on the web store, this will actually credit you aUEC in game. If a new patch comes in, 3.2, we wipe the persistence database again because we're testing the system, your aUEC wallet will be initialized to your total UEC value at that moment. And so we keep on rolling like this. The goal is to basically migrate this entire system in-game and provide you the equivalent in-game. Yeah, that's the goal.

So if I understand, let me clarify here. We are planning on getting rid of the Voyager Direct store on the website. We are planning on converting whatever Voyager Direct items that people don't want into UEC, the real UEC, the core UEC that will be used in the Persistent Universe. We are still exploring whether we're going to do a blanket wipe of everything, whether we're going to give people the choice on which items they want to get rid of, or some mix thereof between the items that can be used and the items that just can't be used anymore. We're still exploring how best to work that. But the plan is to give people the UEC back for that stuff. Then we're going to move the store inside the game and people will be able to spend...

That's right. One thing that I want to add to your explanation too that I didn't mention is that we also want to start supplementing that value with the value contained in your pledge packages. So the famous starting money UEC that is stashed right now in the packages. We want to start accounting for that in our calculations to start this up. The goal here is to get the economy started with real values instead of a blanket fixed value for everybody.