Calling All Devs - Hammerhead Missions & AC Game Modes

So it's a bit of a loose question because Item 2.0 isn't one thing. It's many things and it's a way of working. So essentially, any new features that we add just extend that. So probably a better question or answer would be what's left of Item 1.0 to be converted to Item 2.0, or what announced things for Item 2.0 are still in the pipeline. So in terms of what's left from 1.0: thrusters, there's a big thing left that's being worked on at the moment. And then we have things like countermeasures and missiles. 3.2 actually had some of the next big... all the weapons were changed over to Item 2.0. So that was a big, colossal amount of work to get that over. And yes, we started doing the power stuff. So that was the start there. The power work also included heat work, which is less obvious than the power side, but it is there. And that in turn starts working on the degradation and the wear, which is in-game and working already. And the next steps are the negative effects of degradation, so items misfiring and causing calamity when you stress them out too much. So that's what we're working on at the moment. So when that's done, you're going to have a much more complete feature set for ship items. And that would probably be a good state to say Item 2.0 for ship items is done, but like I said, everything uses it, so it's always ongoing.

Yeah, and you made a good point. Item 2.0 is a collection of features. There may be something down the line like, okay, we need to add this because of this gameplay, whatever, that gets rolled into that. But for what's left of 1.0, it's just thrusters? What else?

Thrusters, missiles, countermeasures, and there's a few one-off used things kicking around. But the vast bulk of things have been converted over now with 3.2.

So the speeds and accelerations are all controlled by the size of the quantum drive items on the ship. So a size one drive in a ship behaves differently to a size two item. And we did that to make the ships work together. If everything moves at the same time, then everything comes out in one instantaneous blob of stuff, whereas you don't get that nice... as everything comes in in waves. Because we have the linking and group system now, it's all putting you together in a group, but you don't get as much impact when everyone's out at the same time. You all look around at the same time, you're all there, versus the traditional sci-fi where you have that extended duration of ships popping in.

You want that arrival at the second Death Star from Return of the Jedi.

Yeah. And at the moment, the bigger the drive, the faster you go and the more acceleration you have. But it takes longer to spool up and it takes longer to cool down after using it. So these big ships, if you're in a group of mixed sizes, those small ships are going to ping off first, then the medium-sized ships, then the big ships finally get their engines going and off they go. And depending on the length of the travel, it could be that same order they come out, or on a really long one, the big ships are probably going to start overtaking the smaller ones. We've seen lots of cool in-game grouped videos of ships traveling together, and that's with them all the same size. But if you throw mixed sizes in there, you're going to see the big ships start to pull ahead. And then when you get to the other end, they're all going to be there waiting, and all the fighters and escorts are going to come out.

Okay. I mean, these guys might be happy to hear that the power-ups have been taken out of Arena Commander, apart from the swarm modes, where obviously you have to keep being able to repair and that; it's a war of attrition, right, the swarm modes. But yeah, the pickups have gone from Arena Commander now anyway. So first I had to go away, and I thought it was a really easy game mode to do, technically easy to do. I went away and asked around, and yeah, the game code side of it is fairly simple. You would just, when you die, get booted out back to the front end. And then the UI side of it is fairly straightforward. The resources for UI are so squeezed right now that anything is a nightmare to get, but they seem to be quite reasonable. If we were to, say, just replace Battle Royale and make it a real battle royale kind of thing, then we wouldn't have to do much on the back end because a game mode exists in that place, so it shouldn't be too difficult. And the complexity then came: okay, we might be able to do this quite quickly and easily, but should we? Does the game mode make sense at the point in the game development we're at, when the numbers of people playing AC right now are quite low and can fall off quite considerably towards the release and the taper off? Now, imagine that you're looking for a fair amount of players to go into these game modes to fight against each other. And then the moment you're dead, you'd want to get into another game quite quickly, and that also be full of players. That's quite difficult to do right now with the numbers that might be playing it. If we just take the numbers that are playing Battle Royale right now, that would mean you'd be waiting for quite some time for maybe those people who were just playing that game you were in to come out of it. Also, the maps aren't very big, and without pickups everyone goes in... Take PUBG, for instance. The reason that can last for 20 minutes, even people who die quickly might get five minutes out of it, is because there's a big map, they all drop in and they collect. Part of it is coming from a very balanced player that has nothing apart from his fists, and who can collect the best: an element of luck, but also skill and where you land. In our game, you come in fully loaded with things that aren't balanced. Some of the ships are obviously better dogfighters than others. So this game mode, the more I thought about it, is very hard to balance, and we may not have the players to make this an actually fun experience like you'd imagine. It took a lot of me struggling with this idea to come to the conclusion that basically we are not ready for this, even if it would be something we could possibly technically do quite easily. The game's just not ready for it.

It's interesting because Arena Commander isn't the game. We often get that confusion that people think Arena Commander and Star Marine are standalone products. They are not the product that we are building, they are not the product that we are shipping. Star Citizen is, and that's the persistent universe. And that's borne out in our numbers. That's where the overwhelming majority of our players are playing the game that we're actually working our butts off to design. Arena Commander and Star Marine were test modes. They were modes designed to get us to the Persistent Universe. And in recent months and recent years, since the Persistent Universe has come along with such good strides, work on Arena Commander and Star Marine has fallen behind. And we see that in the player numbers.

Exactly. Arena Commander has been ruined by our own success in the PU.

Yeah, so Erin mentioned earlier this year that we're considering the possibility of hiring a development team specifically for Arena Commander and Star Marine. We're not ready to announce anything in that regard yet. But if that happens, then you can expect development of these two side features to pick up again, and maybe we evaluate something like this again at that time. But right now, if you were to jump into a mode with one kill and one kill only, you'd be sitting in either spectator mode forever, at least I would be, or you'd be sitting in a queue that's even longer than it already is right now. So it's just not the gameplay experience we want to put out there right now. But definitely an interesting idea. When we talked about it for 30 minutes, I took this guy's side. I'm like, no, this is what he wants. There's lots of advantages here. I mean, yeah, it'd be imbalanced, but you could really expose those imbalances. Ultimately, it's a neat idea, I think. It's definitely something worth considering.

It totally is. And I was very excited by the prospect until I started looking into it deeper. It's still a great idea. The game's just not ready for it.

Okay. So, balance scaling, difficulty scaling, like, I accept this mission and I turn up in a Hammerhead and suddenly we've decided to spawn you bigger enemies, more enemies, whatever. That's not something we will be doing. What instead we'll be doing is just offering more difficult missions that people with lesser ships, or fewer people in their ships, smaller groups, would just not be able to compete in and complete. So that's the way we won't be balancing missions. We will be providing the full array of difficulties, so that if we build a mission for a Hammerhead, a fully loaded Hammerhead, but a group of five people in Hornets who are exceptional pilots want to try that, they can succeed and get double the reward. Double the risk, but double the reward should they complete it. We did used to have, back in the 2.0 days, we used to balance missions, and that was really frustrating actually for players because it just meant that they always felt the exact same amount of challenge. Even if they rolled up with all their friends, it wasn't a cakewalk. It was the same over and over again. And if you were outgunned in the way we balanced it, you would always be outgunned, no matter who you took. So yeah, we've gone away from it. I will say, though, the one place we will balance difficulty is the interdictions, because they are not your choice. You choose to take a very difficult mission and you die, then so be it. You took that mission. Interdiction, if you are in an Aurora and we spawn in a Hammerhead, we've done something wrong there.

I remember those days where it balanced based on the number of people you took into an area. So not only could you never gain any kind of advantage, but if you showed up in a multi-crew ship, if you showed up four people in a Connie instead of four people in Hornets, you were pretty much at a severe disadvantage, an even worse disadvantage then.

Those were the flow graph days. Those were the days before Subsumption, where we had to do things very, very simply. The other problem was you'd get out of your ship and be halfway EVA-ing, and then someone else would turn up and the things would spawn in and blow up your ship, and, you know, absolute nightmare.