Star Citizen Live: Engineer Scrutineer

Yes. One thing that is even now written behind me on my whiteboard, which is the main goal that we envision for the engineering gameplay, is that player decisions matter, and one of the decisions can be: it's not my gameplay, I'm not into engineering. And it's a valid decision. It's your choice, it's your game, it's your ship, whatever you want to do, you can do it. But that has the consequence that you probably will run with the stock settings for the items that you bought, and you regularly have to go to repair it. So you have to pay the money to actually be able to repair it. And sometimes you might even need to exchange the items for money, so you have to buy a new item to have it then exchanged on your ship, and stuff like that. But if you then have the other player type who is interested in, no, I can maintain my items myself and I can adjust them to my demands, you can get a bigger or longer lifetime of the items out of your ship, or you get a more effective ship, so you are more effective in the sense of...

Yeah, drastically. It was even just a discussion that I had today with Yogi, where we were briefly talking about the time to kill right now and where we should be going. We were especially talking about the multi-crew ships, because right now a Hammerhead, for example, dies too fast. So there's definitely something that we have to do. How it will look in the future, I cannot tell, because we have to try it out. But one of our goals, in addition to increasing the time to kill, is also that if you are in a soft death state, you are able to repair to a degree. So you might even be able to repair the pieces you are still in. And if the engine is still attached, you might be lucky to make an escape because you pulled your quantum drive out of the piece that is floating around and then attached it back into a socket that might be fitting, and then you somehow boot up the engine and then you fly away and you've made the escape.

There's a dedicated console that is constantly running, whose full purpose is to give you an overview of the state of the ship. And this can be used by whoever, whatever person you are. And once you interact with it, you can technically be called an engineer, because you're actually interacting with the system. And for the mechanic, you as a person don't have to be a mechanic. You just run around and you see something is broken, you pull out your multi-tool and fix it, then you suddenly are the mechanic. You are wearing your mechanic hat and actually fixing the thing. For the tuner it's a bit more complicated. Then you have to first pull out the item and then do some adjustments there and then bring it back in. Multiple steps.

When we talk about professions and stuff like that, I think what people can see with mining and what people can see now with salvaging, it's not a mode. It's not a thing that you check. It's not a thing that you enable. It is an aspect of gameplay and a system that exists for those who are interested in partaking in it. And the idea of three different hats is something to be determined by the crew of a ship: you're going to take care of tuner tasks and you're going to take care of mechanic tasks. But it's not a gamified "okay, I'm putting on my mechanic thing." So that allows people to freely bob and weave and dip in and dip out of all three.

For example, if you are the pilot, you can also wear all three hats if you want to. You can be responsible for the resource distribution in your ship. You can also run around to fix fuses. It might not be the best choice, because then you have to leave your pilot seat and actually do the things.

So A, it is dependent on... If you fly your stock ship, like the base example, we are still debating if we want to make it based on the distances you travel or based on the time you actually spend on the ship. Right now, my favor is to go on the distance side, so that we make it distance-based, because we don't want to punish players that are just jumping around in one system. Doing the comparison again with cars: if you have a car that you just use to travel short distances in a city, it lives longer than a car that you use to travel... Well, it's not entirely true, but you get the idea. So just to throw something out, you might have it once a month, once a week maybe.

So it depends on your amount of usage, depends on the kind of usage.

Exactly. But we are talking about different numbers once you start to tune it or once you start to travel to locations where there are environment effects. If you fly into a radiation cloud, the chances are higher that it might interfere with the ship items and therefore trigger a malfunction. Or if you didn't pay attention and you left a door open and suddenly the entire atmosphere... So basically any state that your ship is in that isn't the stock state will affect the chance for a malfunction.

So those people that are trying to Fast and Furious their components and push them beyond the red line, yes, they will have to contend with more engineering. You want more, you have to put more into it as far as gameplay.

But there's also the case when you basically underpower your ships, right? So this even helps you to reduce the chances of malfunctioning. For example, that was with the intention of allowing you to travel millions and millions and millions of kilometers with your Carrack to explore the vastness of space. So you basically would definitely undertune your items so that they are running with a lower frequency, with a lower capacity, with lower resource consumption, with lower power. And that would ultimately result in them being more reliable. That means they trigger fewer malfunctions. So there you might even end up with half a year without a malfunction. I'm throwing in numbers. But we didn't decide on that, because we have to keep it interesting. But we are definitely not talking about once every 10 minutes you trigger a malfunction. That would be crazy.

And I think it's important to state, and this is one of those things that we could probably reiterate every 30 seconds of this conversation, that all of this is subject to further development, further tuning, further balancing, and most importantly, further testing. Mining is a terrific example. Torsten and his team are the team that have done most of the mining stuff that you see. And if you've been following the project, mining has grown and evolved and iterated far beyond a couple of other systems. Expect that kind of thing from this. Whatever the first version is that goes out, expect it to continue to evolve, to continue to change and iterate and grow based on your feedback and our team's intake and understanding of that feedback.

Thank you. But yeah, we are already expecting that, once we put the values that we put in into a patch that will be playable by the players, they will directly react, and we tune the numbers so that they actually make sense and people are actually enjoying it.

My thoughts are that... we won't put any numbers there. We want to make it attractive, which is a kind of different approach, right? So we don't go in like "this ship needs five engineers minimum to function." We really want to make it so that you as a player recognize, okay, the overhead of things I have to do is just so high, I should really ask a friend to join and take away the mechanic part of my engineering role. But since players are really interested in numbers: for example, in an Aurora, you as the pilot are also the engineer, if you are actually interested in that, because you still can go to the shop and get the repairs somewhere. You don't have to. For a ship like the Cutlass Black, I think it's also still fine that it is one person. A second person will definitely help, because then you can sit still in the pilot seat and have the other person exchange a fuse or something like that, because the space also allows it. On the Carrack, my personal recommendation would be a minimum of two dedicated roles. So you have one that basically pays attention to the entire setup, because life support is also part of that, and gravity, the artificial gravity. So there's plenty to manage, while you should have a handy person running around there and actually fixing stuff.

I want to acknowledge that Torsten is answering these questions from the perspective of the engineering gameplay. There are ship teams and other gameplay teams that all come in. It's really going to depend on what you want to do with your ship and how you want to do it. I don't think it's unfair to say that, if we're a massively multiplayer game in a universe where the intention is to have many, many people there, if you bring one person to a situation versus two people, we should be providing players with the opportunities to make two people more effective than one.

It's not even more effective, but more enjoyable. If you're the only engineer on the ship and you constantly have something red flashing and you're just stressed out and you cannot keep up with the damage that has been done... For some players, it might be fun having this stress, but for me, no. I would prefer to have someone else to rely on as well. In my head: hey, you take the left side of the ship, I take the right side.

It's more where we are going. Right now our focus is on the engineering gameplay, and the next step that we then have to take is fine-tuning the repair gameplay. That doesn't mean that the engineering gameplay doesn't have repair in it already, right? But we really would like to take repair a bit further afterwards than what we will develop with the engineering gameplay. So the engineering gameplay might look like a more basic type of repair, where it's exchanging items, exchanging fuses, using a repair beam to bring up the health of your items, fixing the hull, which you already know from the hull scraping part of it. But because we are going in this malfunctioning direction, where there's non-visible damage that can happen to your items, there we want to go a bit more creative. So there are dedicated counters to the malfunction that you are facing, which is considered repair, right? So you bring the item back to its full functional state. So to sum it up, the engineering gameplay holds repair functionality, but we want to move it further afterwards.

Yes.

Do you want to elaborate on that at all?

I can elaborate on that. We want to tie it in with a hacking gameplay. We want to allow you to hook yourself into one of the items and then get access to... Imagine yourself being the aggressor on the ship: you plug yourself into the power plant. A, there's the option that you physically damage it, so you might punch it or use a hammer or a wrench on it or use a beam to destroy it. We have our beams. It's all about beams. Or you are the more digital assassin of the ship, where you just plug yourself in and go through the hacking gameplay. And then once you succeed, you get access to the states that we talked about for the item. So you can switch around the states of the item and mess up the ship. But what you can also do is decide to ignore the item and progress further through the ship. So you basically move from node to node inside the ship. Once you've successfully hacked this power plant, you will see all the connected items that you can then select and start the next hacking procedure. Then you can make your way to whatever item you actually wanted to target and then change its functionality: turn it off, or vent a room if you want to target the life support. Every functionality that you see on the engineering screen would be accessible through that hacking process.

Hacking has been in the cards for Star Citizen, for the Persistent Universe and for Squadron 42, for some time. Intrepid viewers of the public roadmap might remember there was a hacking card on the public roadmap for quite a while. We actually had filmed a segment for ISC way back when detailing how hacking was going to work, and it was filmed and it was edited, and then somebody had a great idea about how to change it, and it fundamentally changed. And everything in that segment became wrong. So it's one of the few segments we've ever produced that never got aired. The only constant in game development is change. It affects our video production as well. But we already know the time and the place where we're going to reintroduce folks to hacking gameplay and how it's going to manifest. So stay tuned, no other updates about that.