Mission Feature Team developers explain the new Investigations story missions and Siege of Orison difficulty tuning. They cover 3.18 changes to crime and Kareah, a prison escape mission with a satellite upload, and the underground facilities art team.
So when we're building stuff, because of the scale of this game, we try to build things very modularly, and because we build very modularly, it means there can't be a lot of story injected into it, because injecting story into stuff is very difficult. So this is our way of looking not only at trying to build something modular, but also trying to inject heavy amounts of story into it to really bring the PU to life.
So, investigations are... the tech that's there for them already exists. So a lot of this we can push ourselves in MFT. And what that means is we can leave other teams alone to do their stuff without us constantly bugging them for a little bit of this, a little bit of that, because all the fundamentals are there. So it's something that MFT can sort of own and just push all the way without bugging anyone. And it's also quite a fun thing to do. Having an investigation, letting people think, come up with their own answers, potentially talk about it, have different answers. I think it's just a fun game mode.
There were a few other things. We have this sort of, I guess, list of things we'd like to do. But we kind of landed on investigations. One of the things I want to push is, on my Siege video, I said I don't like handholding, and investigations are very much non-handholding. So it's right up my alley.
So, no. Investigations is purely me making, as in the technical part of making it, along with an engineer, one of our coders. All our other designers on MFT are working on other exciting things, like Max here is also doing something else and will continue to while I build these investigations. But the other sort of dividing up of the work, there's potentially some work on, say, the props team for certain things we might need, but a lot of heavy work on the narrative side because, like I said in the CitizenCon, an investigation at its core is a story.
I think happy diversion. I don't think it's something you can do full time, because we don't want you to constantly repeat the same old story, because you're going to know the answers. It's not going to be fun and engaging. So because the story is the key to it, we have to make sure that we're constantly putting out new content. And the system we're hoping to create will hopefully allow us to get in a groove and pump some out pretty quickly and constantly, which will hopefully satisfy that sort of PI lifestyle. But it will also be just sort of like, you log on one day and, oh, I've got a couple of investigation things I can do. But you'll never do the same one twice.
TL;DRMaltby prefers giving players tools in a sandbox and tuning help based on feedback, as with Siege, but wants investigations to give little hand-holding beyond a marker and perhaps a clue summary.
Okay. So when it came to Siege, I kind of wanted to put you in a sandbox and give you tools and then hope that you figure out how to use the tools to achieve a goal. And one of the good things about having this sort of iterative development is we can try something and then hone it in over the course. And that's what we did with Siege. We put out the first version, we collected a bunch of feedback from players and we saw that, okay, some people didn't like that, the majority didn't like that. Okay, so we're going to just hone it in a bit, and not just go back to our complete old ways of marking everything or doing this or doing that, just sort of go, okay, well, we'll help here a little bit and we'll help here a bit and then see how that is. When it comes to investigations, I feel like we'd be doing a sort of disservice to the career path, the gameplay there, if I was to help out loads. Essentially you'll get a marker to tell you where to go, but the rest of the story from there on you'll have to figure out yourself. We'll give maybe a synopsis of a clue you found to help you understand what you're reading if you need it, but it should be on you to go, okay, I found this clue, so now I think I need to go do this, without me going, right, you found this, here's a timer, timer's finished, mark the item out in the world. I'd rather you feel like an investigator and find the item, because there is sort of a natural level of a cap for, say, ability. When you're playing combat-based missions, we don't exactly make them easier. You'll hit a point where you're like, right, I can't do this anymore. I don't have maybe the ship that I can battle against this other ship with, or I don't have the personal pilot skill. I can't play my bounty. I've made the bounty system. I can't play it. So you have that sort of natural skill level, and I think that's a good part of the game, that you can go, well, I'm at the super rank of being a bounty hunter, I'm the best of the best. And then some other person can be, well, I've solved every single investigation, and that bounty hunter could go, I've tried one and I can't figure it out.
TL;DRBalancing for short play sessions is hard, and while Siege was tuned through playtesting, markers are needed for now, with hopes to phase them out or replace them eventually.
Yeah, I think it's definitely a challenge, especially in our game when you can go and essentially choose to do whatever you want to do with your time. So sometimes even those players who play for a long period of time only have two hours on a day, right? And they want to hop in and get something done. And for us, when we're looking at balancing things around that, it's very hard to please everybody in every scenario. And I think Siege is a great example where perhaps the players wouldn't have seen us do this, but internally we did lots of playtesting and lots of changes to markers or information provided, and tried to find a happy medium between making it too obvious what you need to do and too difficult to find out what you need to do. That was definitely a time, at least for me, where I got to go through that iteration process and see what that is like. But for the rest, outside of Siege and big events like that, we sort of need markers in the game at the moment, with the way it is currently. But I think everybody wants them to be phased out more and more, or maybe even find an alternative to things like markers, giving players information through text and them having to decipher what that means, and then perhaps when you get closer, you get a marker. There's loads of ideas, loads of things we could eventually switch it to. But I think for now, markers might need to stay around for the foreseeable future.
TL;DRThe new 3.18 missions on the Siege islands, built by a designer named Yorit, expand modular bunkers into coordinated fire-team missions with multiple entry points, such as clearing three occupied buildings.
Yeah, so those missions are made by Yorit. He joined us just as we started Siege and he helped us on the level design. He built some of the environments, and then his first foray into building his own type of mission is to go into these Siege islands and take the existing modular eliminate-all bunkers and expand them to do more in the Siege islands, and make them more usable across the scope. And again, it's something we saw in Siege a lot: when people would play it, they'd be playing in fire teams. For example, Thorsten, the system designer doing hull scraping, his org completed Siege in 12 minutes. So they are very organized. I designed it to be like an hour, and he comes in, he's like, I did it in 12 minutes. I'm like, great. But yeah, we saw a lot of people banding together and strategically moving through areas, and a lot of good comms and sort of military-style playthroughs. So what we wanted to do is enable that. For example, in one of the missions, this island is semi taken over. There are three buildings that are currently inhabited by Nine Tails and you're tasked with getting them out. And it allows you to, say, split into two different fire teams, communicate through, I'm in building A, I'm in building B, I'm moving through. But it also allows for the thing that the UGF lacks, which is multiple entry points. You could get the shuttle from Orison to these islands and walk all the way there with your friends. You could take a ship and land on the roof and infiltrate and go down. You could take a ship and land on the ground floor if you wanted and take an elevator up. But it kind of allows for a new FPS area to fight in and more coordination from the players, through more enemies to kill.
TL;DRThe team is changing Kareah and crime handling so lower crimes can be paid off while higher CrimeStats have fewer places to clear, hopefully making Kareah a PvP hotspot, with other law changes like landing with CS1 or 2.
Well, we have some big changes coming to Kareah that someone on our team called Lars is working on. Big changes to the world as well in terms of crime as a whole. The lower-ranked crimes that you'll be receiving will be able to be paid off and won't cause you to go to prison. But if you do manage to get yourself into those higher crime stats, so CrimeStat 3 or above, you're going to be faced with a much bigger challenge now. Much fewer places to clear yourself of crimes. Kareah will become a big hotspot for PvP hopefully in this patch, and we will see a change back to the past, I believe, where it was similar to this. It's going to be really interesting to see the overall feedback from the community about what it's like funneling everybody into this dedicated area, whether it helps the PvE players as well as the PvP players because it sort of separates them out, or maybe PvP players are more focused in one area. But there's lots of data for us to grab from when the patch first drops and all these changes come in. I don't know as much about the specifics of the mission as Elliot does, so maybe you can give some insight on that.
So it's hopefully going to be a sort of player-run systemic thing, so you as the player can go and actually cause this event yourself. You can control when it runs. You can control, as long as you can survive, how long it runs for. But alongside this, it came with a sort of needed rebalance overhaul to our law system and how we do crimes, how much we award for crimes, how long it takes to get rid of crimes, where you can land with crimes. You can now land everywhere with a CS1 or 2, which you couldn't originally do. The fine kiosks that we have around the verse, you can surrender at, and it will give you that 20% discount off of your time, which means you don't have to go do death by cop in a ship.
TL;DRMaltby mentions tentative extras not yet ready to discuss, another Siege island takeover mission, and a change so Platinum Bays only list ships that can actually spawn there.
I'm trying to think if there's anything else. There's a couple of other bits and bobs I think we're working on, but I guess they're sort of tentative. We want to make sure that they are ready before we put them out. I'm not even sure if I'm good to talk about them. We're working on another mission for the Siege islands that will involve an entire island being taken over and the players having to do multiple things on that island to finish the mission.
I'd say one thing that did get put in that I'd like to mention, it was a personal pet peeve of mine. Whenever I play and I land at a Platinum Bay, I'm presented with a list, and I'm on my dev account, so I've got all the ships, and I can see every single ship and I don't know which ones I can spawn. We've now made it so that when you're at the Platinum Bay, you'll only see ships that you can actually spawn at that location, that actually fit the size. That was one of my pet peeves that I asked to put a task in for and we got around to it. So that's something I'm proud of. I see someone putting 'finally', so I've helped someone out, not just me.
No, so we have to design for both. Currently we have a design for how to sort of awkwardly use our current mobiGlas to ensure that we can give all the information to the players that they do need to see. However, we also are involved in the new mobiGlas and the new Contracts Manager we're doing, and with that we can sort of mould it for our needs as well, because obviously the Contracts Manager is pretty much used for us, the mission team. So we can mould it and see how it fits and make sure that we have all the information and styles that we need. So we have considerations for both.
TL;DRThe 15,000 credit reward is a placeholder, since rewards are settled last and Maltby had copied an existing easy mission record without changing its values.
The first thing we work out is not the mission reward. The mission reward is literally one of the last things that gets worked out. So whenever you're watching ISC or SCL or CitizenCon or anything, if you're looking at any numbers whatsoever, it's all work in progress. It's just thrown in there as we're working out the demonstration of stuff. Please do not ever take those numbers seriously.
What I can add to that is, it's probably on me because I'm lazy. How we boot missions is via a record, and that has, I think some are like 140 fields, and there's a bunch that have to be filled in for it to be able to work. So when I'm doing what's known as a dirty prototype, which is me just mocking it up in the most horrible way as a proof of concept before we move on to the actual one, I duplicate an already existing mission record so it takes all of their values across. So I think I duplicated an easy eliminate-all mission, which was 15,000, and I saw on the YouTube comments people like, I'm not doing this for 15,000, I'm not going to spend hours trying to figure this out. I'm like, it's not 15,000, I haven't touched any of that stuff.
Well, it went great, finally. It took a few tries, but we got it through. Yeah, so the idea was we felt like the prisons had gone through quite a long period of not very many changes. And it was definitely an area of gameplay that most players will encounter at least at some point. Some more than others, for sure. So we wanted to add some content to it to spice it up again. And given the changes coming to the rest of the game, it really made sense for us to add some more to the prison. So we've made a number of changes, including putting in a new mission that does exactly what you say. It allows you to remove your CrimeStat, by the help of a not-so-friendly friend that you'll make along the way.
It is, yes. So this is one of the other features that we've added to prison, unrelated to the mission. This is just to help spice up and spruce up the place a bit more. So we've added emergent AI that will spawn in the caves and sort of wander around. It really adds some life to it. These AI can also be killed and they will drop prison loot. So any loot that would be available to a player in the prison can potentially be on any of these AI. However, if you do so in the prison, you'll get a murder charge still. So you will increase your sentence by doing it.
TL;DRFriends can help, but the mission is meant to be solo and cannot be shared, so only the mission holder's CrimeStat is cleared while helpers who kill guards keep their murder charges.
They can. There's some caveats to it. This is meant to be done solo. That's the idea. They could call in a friend to come and help them at this point, but the problem potentially with doing that is you will get a crime for killing these security guards. And the mission cannot be shared. One person will get to wipe their CrimeStat, so if they were going to enlist help from a friend, they might want to make sure that it was the person with the mission killing them off, because you're going to get four murder charges from doing this, but uploading to the satellite at the end will wipe you clear of them.
They'll have a long sentence. They can essentially transport you. They can bring you here, but if they kill anyone, they're going to end up back there in Klescher.
So it's a satellite. So Ruto wants this data directly uploaded to him, not physically handed to him. So Ruto and his gang have conveniently stashed a satellite inside a derelict that you'll see just shortly here. So after the player has a short rover ride over Aberdeen's low-gravity planet, which is also very fun, by the way, trying to drive that thing over the surface, they will arrive at the derelict. And this derelict has got security from Hurston Security, who have gone there to investigate what's going on, which is why there is a Cutlass parked there. And the player will have to fight off the security that are here so that he can upload to the satellite.
One of the issues we noticed with the first escape route we had was that it really isn't good for a solo player, because they'll get out and they can put up a service beacon waiting for someone to pick them up. They're just stuck. So this kind of helps that solo player lifestyle get off. And plus, with the addition of the Platinum Bay, even if you've not taken the mission, you should be able to go and get your stuff.
TL;DRGriffiths grew up playing games, studied web design and 2D animation, did a master's to move into 3D, worked in animated film, then on Lego games, a VR studio and another game studio before joining.
So I grew up playing video games, like I'm sure a lot of people did who work in the games industry, and that's what I wanted to do at university, but my parents weren't really on board with that, probably a bit like a lot of other people as well. I really liked IT and art at school, and product design, and I went to university and did web design and 2D animation, and we're talking almost two decades ago now. Came out of that, hated web design. At the time I was doing Adobe Flash animation, 2D animation, and I did a couple of gigs with that, but the crucial thing for me was getting into that third dimension. So I went back, I did a master's, and that basically fast-tracked me into the 3D world. And then I actually started in animated film, and I was doing 10-minute short films for theme parks and attractions. So you know how Cineworld do that 4DX thing where you're riding around in the chair? We were doing that before it was cool. So I was doing that for a while and then I moved over to video games. That's where I wanted to go eventually. It just took me some time to get there. So I worked on a few Lego games for a bit, and then I went to a VR studio, then to another game studio, and then I came here.
So for the underground facilities, I'm the product owner. So it's on my shoulders to deliver this location. So it's not just doing the art, it's managing the team, doing the planning, checking everyone, unblocking people, working with other disciplines. Making sure that everyone's got what they need in order to do their jobs is my job.
Yes, I do. And I have been doing recently. So a lot of the stuff that you saw in the CitizenCon and in the ISC is some work I've been doing. So we're very much early stages, white box, just like I said in the video, just getting some content out so that we can play it within context as the player would play it and check that everything's working together. So I have been involved with that. And as the team grows, I'll be taking more of a, not a back seat, but the other artists will be doing the majority of the work. I'll be doing feedback and just the general smooth running of getting this location out of the door.
So in the last couple of weeks, I've probably been doing more admin and planning stuff, and that's what you saw in the ISC. But I'll be going back into doing art, so I'll be making my switch. I've been kind of 80% planning, 20% art, and I'm switching back to 80% art, 20% planning, because the plan is now done. So that's kind of where I'm at, but that will fluctuate over time. Sometimes it'll be 50-50, sometimes it'll split the other way as well.
Yep, so we've got Martin and Farouk, who are in the Frankfurt studio. Martin did the racetracks, for anyone who remembers those. And then we've got Luke in the UK, who's just started, which is great. And then on the design front, we've got Manuel and John, who are in DE, and we've got James in the UK. So it's not just art focused. Being the product owner, you have to be aware of design and how that fits into it as well.
See, it's funny, because when we filmed that, that was my latest and greatest spreadsheet at the time. Since then, I've revisited my numbers and they've fluctuated a little bit, let's say. But also, when we were filming it, the number of artists was reduced, so of course the number of days is going to be higher. Now we've kind of balanced the books a bit, but I'm not going to give you a concrete date because I don't know myself yet.
Yeah, person days. And this isn't including any holiday or sickness, because I encourage people to take holiday, and if you're ill, please stay at home. This is just the days it might take to deliver this location.