The narrative team explains how lore feeds gameplay, covering mission storylines, reputation changes, retcons like the Death of a Spaceman regen, and Xenothreat plot threads. They also touch on the Galdereen, Tevarin citizenship, Banu slavery and UEE law, the Vanduul, mobiGlas and the Banu Merchantman.
TL;DRYes, the goal is to add much more story and character to missions, but for now the focus is on building the basic mission mechanics, with reputation changes hopefully enabling more storytelling later.
Yes. I mean, that's the goal that we're trying to build towards. Obviously right now, a lot of it is sort of building the mechanics of the various mission types that we'll be able to do. But the idea ultimately has always been we want to take those missions and then start to apply much more story, much more character to get people more involved and stuff like that. But right now, again, it's about getting those initial framework blueprints out and functioning and refined, and then we can play around and have fun with them.
If you watched yesterday's Inside Star Citizen, we had a feature with Ben Dorsey on the changes to the reputation system. And a lot of the tweaks that are happening in the reputation system will unlock a variety of storytelling options for our mission designers and stuff, which is one of the really exciting aspects of that. It's a change happening internally that will then hopefully yield much more interesting and engaging quest and mission opportunities for the players. And those will all obviously involve the narrative team.
Yeah, I think sort of the idea of it was just that, again, we had a handful of known animals, but in the era of this time, they would have planets that were not terraformed, so they would have their own wildlife, basically, and some animal would be of note that would be a good inspiration for this weapon is the idea. But what it is, we don't know yet.
Yeah, it gives us a little room whenever the character team designs some cool animals in the future; that gives us one out there to be able to name it. And when we do name a bunch of things like that, sometimes there's a philosophy like two real, one fake, just kind of make up something that would be a word or a thing that could be in this world that kind of helps build a little mystery into it or give it a little history outside of what we know, just so it's a nice reminder to the player and everyone that, yeah, we're in a different time. So it is something we build in. And like I said, we need so many names for so many different things and the world keeps expanding. So it's nice to have a few of those there to be able to rely on whenever we might need a name like that. So we shall see.
TL;DRThey haven't explored whether Tevarin citizen numbers have risen, but Adam Wieser thinks the trend is toward more Tevarin presence in the UEE and sees it as a good topic for a future dispatch.
We haven't explored the exact details of that yet about whether the numbers have gone up. I think it would be a good place to go on to do another dispatch in the future that explores that. I do think that that's the direction that things are going for the Tevarin in relation to the UEE. I think with Suj Kozy being elected a senator and with just the resurgence of the Tevarin within the wider UEE culture, that's definitely how it's going. And I also wouldn't be surprised, with the war with the Vanduul occurring and a lot of that happening in or near systems like Elysium, where the Tevarin are originally from, that they have now been a part of the UEE long enough that they would be motivated to come to the defense, sign up, go into the Army and the Navy, and that is one of the ways you become a citizen. Yeah, I think seeing an increase of Tevarin presence and engagement in the Empire is definitely happening out there. And it's honestly something really cool I'm looking forward to exploring as we expand out the game. Because there's also another system which isn't technically in UEE space. It's called Branaugh. And that's where the largest population of Tevarin are. So even outside of the population in the UEE, there are some Tevarin who have gone to this other system and are starting their own culture there too. So they might not be citizens, but the cultural influence of what they're doing there, you might see start seeping into the UEE in other ways too. So yeah, there's a lot of fun to be had there and we're kind of laying these strings and we can't wait to start tying some of them together for the world.
TL;DRThey keep ideas deliberately vague so players can experience storylines as they develop and so artists and designers have freedom to build the details, rather than locking everything in up front.
Well, I think part of it is the hope that we want players to be able to experience it firsthand, that storylines will be developing while they're in the universe. Again, down the road, we want to be able to start making these have more direct influence on the actual players and what they're doing and stuff like that. Basically, if we were to introduce something and then resolve it purely in the fiction, then it's not something that the players get to ever experience. Again, the idea has always been to make this a living, breathing, growing universe. We want to allow for that growth with the players. It's not just something that we're doing arbitrarily on our own; we're creating all this stuff that players are getting to experience in real time as well, which is fun.
I imagine there's got to be some aspect of time management, too. You create a bunch of hooks and then see which ones resonate with the players, which ones don't, and then you take the ones that resonate further. You don't just spend hours, days, weeks developing a thing and then watching it fall flat. Because not everything works.
Yeah. And in general, it's also an extremely collaborative process here between the character team, design. And so we're also a part of a much bigger picture. And I know this is a metaphor that they've used a lot and I love to use, is that we're sculpting. And when you're sculpting, you're basically putting in the very rough base form first, the big general idea, and then you start to dig into the details. And not all those details are coming from us. So for that Tevarin sentiment on Branaugh, we need to let the teams go off and be like, oh, wouldn't it be really cool if their houses look like this? Or maybe they've evolved this way, to give them the breadth to be able to add some of their personality and their vision to the game. So yeah, there's also just giving that little bit of scope to put people in the right direction and then let them also help tell the story.
Yes, the Galdereen also is a good example, too, because yes, we could have sat there when we came up with the name and been like, all right, it's an eight-legged lizard-like thing that has huge claws and massive teeth and a stinger tail and all that stuff, which would be fine. But we kind of intentionally keep that stuff vague because once we have a creature designer, an artist or designer who are starting to actually build that creature, we want them to have the freedom to be able to do what it is they want to do and satisfy whatever gameplay needs they need to have, or combat things if it's supposed to be an enemy-type animal or something like that. And if we outline exactly all of these things, we create an expectation that it is all of these things, then they don't have as much freedom down the road to make it feel as fun or interesting or cool as it can be. So, yeah.
Yeah, I was going to say you really kind of handcuff yourself if you're getting everything too much. That's exactly what Jared was saying: you don't want to have everything just really, really locked in, and then if something kind of doesn't work, or if a design element thinks something else will be cooler, or something in gameplay affects it, right? That's a huge part of this, that this universe is a living, breathing kind of a thing, even in alpha to some degree. So it reacts and it does these things. And I think that's always been the idea with Star Citizen. Also, a bit of mystery is kind of fun because it stokes the imagination. Star Wars to me gets less and less interesting the more stuff we know specifically about it. And that's why the original stuff is cool, because it kind of throws out all these vague ideas that really stoke your imagination. You see things and you hear terms that don't necessarily have context. And not everything would, right? In a real world, you would hear people talk about animals that you don't necessarily know: oh, I've never seen that animal before, I wonder what it looks like, or whatever. And I think that's really kind of fun. And some things we may never describe, right? You may never see one of these things out there in the wild. It could just be something that exists somewhere off on a planet you'll never see or whatever. And I think having little pockets of that stuff makes the universe feel bigger and also does just kind of stoke the imagination.
TL;DRThe narrative team supports Squadron 42 missions as they are built and iterated, and in the Persistent Universe works with mission and AI teams, writes mission text and item descriptions, and develops the universe.
Well, it's a lot of naps. Each of those games have vastly different requirements as far as what we do on them. With Squadron, the storyline is a lot more locked down just as far as what the missions are going to be doing. It's basically helping the teams as they're building on them and iterating on them. We'll do reviews as levels are coming along and go, does this need additional content? How's it feel with the existing dialogue? Has the mission changed where we have to showcase a new thing that the player needs to do that maybe wasn't captured in the original line set, stuff like that. So it can be a bit more support stuff for that. It's basically to be on hand to help with whatever's needed, whatever team is working on whatever facet of the game they are at that particular time. Star Citizen, the Persistent Universe, is a bit more of an open thing. We'll work with the mission team when they're developing new mission types, sit extensively with them as they're figuring out what are the line triggers of the events in the mission, the mission flow, basically, to figure out when we need to have a line, when we don't. Writing mission text. I mean, we've alluded to it earlier, the item names, descriptions, all that stuff. And then we're even working with the AI team as they're working on behaviors, kind of similar to what we're doing with the mission team. We're like, if we need to have dialogue, what dialogue requirements do these characters have? What makes sense? What feels like too much or too little? And then that's just the active development stuff. There's also developing the universe. So we're still working with Britton on languages, iterating on those. Anyone else jump in? You could start throwing in tasks. We've got a bunch.
I love that you're even involved with things like graffiti. You don't really think about that as being narrative-driven. But yeah, even things as small as graffiti on the walls kind of gets run by narrative. Like, hey, does this make sense? Would this be in this area? What would it say? What would it look like? It's really interesting to me.
Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, too, we obviously interface with teams that narrative teams don't traditionally interface with a lot, like marketing and sales, right? Because of the unique nature of the way Star Citizen started, a lot of our marketing initiatives are sort of baked into this in-lore, sort of semi-diegetic thing; they walk a fun line there, which we've been able to have some fun with over the years. And because of that, there is a heavy narrative element to a lot of the marketing stuff. So even the big things that cross the line, like the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo or Invictus Launch Week, where it's technically a marketing thing, but that has this big in-game element that you can go and interact with and stuff, right? Which is pretty neat and pretty different than a lot of other live service games or whatever you want to call them out there. And because it is very narratively focused, it's not just the marketing...
Yeah, and as a narrative team, we're somehow both an upstream and a downstream team, so we can be involved on either side or both sides of a task. And when it comes to managing all that, having Blythe be around and be able to track everything and run down people and be able to say no at certain points is so vital to the process because, again, it's such a wide world and we are looped into so many things. So all her hard work and being able to track everything internally is just a job in and of itself on a whole other level, which blows my mind.
TL;DRLore usually serves as a flexible launching point for gameplay, sometimes matching it closely and sometimes changing, with lore adjusted or retconned when gameplay needs it; there is no hard rule.
I mean, again, in the early days of the project, we would use that vagueness with our dispatches. We were doing a lot more stories back then, as well as the news updates and stuff like that. The idea was that it was trying to capture the sense of what it was going to be like in the universe. That being said, we made a very conscious effort to not, kind of what we're talking about with the animals, get very specific about stuff. So usually, as far as how much lore influences gameplay and stuff like that, usually the lore starts as a launching place for the gameplay. So they can kind of go, what's sort of established? What's kind of the rough vibe of it? Back in the day, we would have Tevarin characters in stories, but we never described them; we'd maybe make a light allusion to a physical feature or characteristic, but we never were like, they're six feet tall, blah, blah, blah, they have 85 tentacles, none of that stuff. Because again, it was about capturing the feeling of it more than the nuts and bolts of it. So again, the lore will usually work as kind of a launching pad to start discussions about new things. But at the same time, it still tries to be flexible enough where if there's a gameplay reason to do something, they're not inhibited by lore. So it's kind of a give and take. So it depends on the situation.
I think lore is a lot like concept art. In a way, it's a fantastic exploration of ideas. It's a fantastic fleshing out of: this is how this can work. This is a jumping-off point for the game designers, for the artists and stuff to leap from. And sometimes it's a one-to-one. Sometimes what you develop in lore ends up exactly in game, or 99% in the game, just like it matches with the concept art. And then sometimes it deviates quite a bit. Look at how many variations the Freelancer went through before we finally ended up where we were at. So I don't think there's any hard rule. I think that's one of the reasons you struggle with answering that question, because there isn't just a hard and fast 'this is how it always is.' It's where it works, yes.
And also, you'll notice in our stories and fiction that we'll get more specific once the gameplay has come out. Because then it becomes a little bit more locked down. So then we can talk about nuts and bolts stuff and have it factor a little bit more into the storyline. But again, to use the sculpting/sketching analogy, initially the lore is that rough shape of 'it's vaguely meant to be like this.' It's still flexible enough where you're not locked into a specific form. And so you can make adjustments, is usually the approach we try to take. But yeah, like Jared said, sometimes the gameplay kind of lines up perfectly with what we've established. And sometimes, yeah, we'll have to kind of go back and go, all right, well, how can we sort of retcon the lore to fit with how the experience is actually going to be? Because ultimately, that's kind of the thing: this is something that people are going to be playing and doing.
Yeah, when you create so much dense lore, again, ahead, like you said, in the early days before there was a lot of gameplay out there, clearly, like with everything, things are going to change, right? As gameplay concessions are taken into account, and as people get in there and actually start playing it and see what's fun and what's not fun, all that stuff is going to change, right? So I think, obviously, it's a fool's errand to parse through all the lore and be like, well, in this thing, they put a data card in this one machine and you can't do that in game and that's weird. It's like, okay, don't do that. Don't nitpick every little aspect of a thing. Please complain to me. But I think it's very malleable. I like the concept art analogy. I never really thought of it that way, Jared, but I like that analogy. It's kind of cool. And like Dave was saying, those first sketches of it early on are more vague and more like it might go this way or it might go that way. And as it manifests in game, you can narrow it down and narrow it down until you've got lore and stuff that matches really, like you said, one to one, as opposed to being more of a concept.
TL;DRThey manage the workload by attending meetings to learn what is needed and when, tracking everything in a ticketing system, and prioritising and planning around due dates and who has time.
Very carefully. Yeah, it is a lot of work. Dave is in meetings like 12 hours a day, so I don't know how he writes anything outside of that, but he still does. It's fascinating. But there are a lot of meetings that we're involved in, which is really cool. And so we kind of track in those meetings what's needed from us, when it's needed. And then of course we have a system, this is all very boring I'm sure, but we have a ticketing system where we track all of our work in there and we figure out when is it due, when is it needed in the game, all these things. And then we create our priorities based on all of that. And that's just a matter of going through all those tickets and figuring out who can do this, when are they going to have time to do it, all those things. And then just planning appropriately. And that's pretty much a producer's job, just figuring out what you can do and when. And just trying to wrangle as much as you can, because there's just so much all the time. And we do our best to get as much done as possible. I hope the community loves it.
And Dave won't bring it up, but Dave also is out there directing things like PCAP shoots and stuff from time to time. Like when we were just out there in Europe last week or the week before, you were out there working on pickups with the female player character for Squadron 42.
TL;DRThey hope to keep retcons to a minimum by staying vague early on, and say the regen technology wasn't a retcon because it was introduced in the universe in real time.
Yeah. The regen. I mean, again, kind of what we were just talking about before with what's the handoff between lore and gameplay and stuff like that. Part of the reason why we were taking that cryptic approach and the vagueness in the beginning is to prevent us from having to retcon stuff. It creates a lot of a buffer and, again, a lot of flexibility for people to design within that. But again, occasionally something comes up where we have to retcon it, but the hope is that we keep that to a minimum. And actually, to be fair, the regen thing actually isn't necessarily a retcon because it developed in real time. So we wouldn't go back and say there was always this tech. This tech was unveiled three months, six months ago, or whenever it was in the universe. So it's kind of a new thing. So, I mean, Adam wrote that great Far From Home story about old Jagger trying to reconcile the notion of regen technology: what does that mean for a person and their sense of identity and their soul, and kind of big, heady questions, which is really cool. And so being able to have characters within the universe reacting to that dynamically has actually been a lot of fun. But again, hopefully there's never a situation where it's like, oh, there are dragons now, that type of thing where it has to be a massive pivot. So we definitely want to try to keep that stuff to an absolute minimum, just so people don't have to kind of relearn the setting. But if it happens, you know.
TL;DRThey don't answer definitively, but suggest such slaver trade would likely violate UEE Common Laws, might be restricted by trade accords, and offers rich gameplay possibilities, without wanting to lock anything in yet.
I mean, that's a very detailed, interesting question, and I think something where there could be a lot of interesting, cool gameplay, because, yeah, I'm going to assume those types of contracts would violate the UEE Common Laws, which UEE systems are supposed to uphold. But as you've seen in Stanton, UEE laws aren't always being completely upheld where they are, so certain Banu ships may be able to travel through certain parts of systems and maybe not run into any interference, but they could be in big problems if they do. It's going to be an interesting cultural question going forward. And I think it's also going to be the same with the Xi'an, as there's a Xi'an system in particular that is essentially run by gangs. And when humans pass through, it's like, what's going on here? Why aren't the Xi'an doing anything about this? Until you realize that in Xi'an culture, they have essentially authorized certain gangs to operate within that system. So there are going to be these cultural differences where from a UEE perspective, it's like, that's not right, that's not how we do things, but Xi'an space is different and they handle it certain ways. And instead of saying all gangs are bad, they say, all right, you few gangs, go ahead, you just do all your stuff here and we'll leave you alone. So I think that's what's going to be really cool and interesting for the players that go out there and experience and see what happens when they brush up against these different cultures and different ways of approaching things. So yeah, of course, we don't want to lock ourselves into something quite yet. But just by bringing up the question itself, you're realizing the possibilities and the storytelling and gameplay potential that comes from these kinds of fringe systems or just differences between the species in game.
And it might be one of those things, too, where, based on whatever interstellar trade accord the humans worked out with the Banu, maybe, I mean, the question specifically called out the slaver Souli, maybe they're not allowed to do business inside UEE space because it does violate the Common Laws and that type of thing. So maybe they don't venture into UEE space and they kind of stay in Banu territory and stuff like that. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunities for us to play with that, because it raises really weird, difficult questions from the UEE's perspective of how do they deal with that facet of Banu culture that they certainly don't agree with.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's a great question. It's a great thing to bring up because, sort of like we were saying, the lore sparks things in y'all and y'all spark things in the lore sometimes. So it's nice to throw it back once in a while. It's like, oh yeah, how would they deal with that? It's an interesting question, an interesting sort of political-economic question for the future.
TL;DRYes, there will ultimately be an overarching storyline, which will move forward once foundational mission systems are in place, alongside individual system storylines like Stanton's, though timing is still being decided.
I mean, yes, there's ultimately going to be one. Again, right now, as we talked about with one of the earlier questions, we're still building the foundational mission stuff. So sort of the expectation is that once that's in place, we can start enacting these sort of larger narrative things. No spoilers, but the conversation has been going on of, because we're live, when do we want to start introducing these larger things? And we've been doing it with the Xenothreat stuff in Stanton, and alluding to it in some of the dialogue for other stuff. And so there are definitely threads that we've been laying down. It's just a question of when we want to start moving that progression forward, is sort of the question at the moment. But yes, the hope is that, again, there's a large thematic conceit that's sort of guiding the universe. But again, the systems are all going to have their own little storylines going on as well. Like Stanton is currently locked in one where it's becoming this huge question about: the crime is spiraling out of control, is the UEE supposed to step in? The corporations who own the planets are supposed to be managing this stuff, but they're not really doing a great job. The UEE is like, do we interfere? The storyline within Stanton is in motion as well. The hope is that as we refine more of this stuff and get it in, we can start kicking off these larger, more sweeping storylines and stuff like that.
Yeah, I think recent lore hasn't focused on them as much because we have been focusing more on Stanton and the stuff that you guys are experiencing in game and are able to play and be there with. But they're definitely still there. And there are also ideas that we want to make sure we don't get ahead of. So as Dave was saying, yeah, we do have ideas. We do have plans. But we want to make sure that you're able to experience those in game and not just basically hear them secondhand from us.
I mean, we've sort of alluded to others out there. I think it's just they've become kind of the Xerox. Again, anything that we mention that you want to see in game has to go through a lot more teams. It's easy to sit and talk about something. It's another thing to represent it in game, because you have to get art and animation and design and all the technical aspects of it to get it in game. I would expect that there are still competitors out there. I think microTech just found the right design at the right time and has been iterating on it, and probably scooping up any competitors that come up with really compelling ideas and absorbing them into mobiGlas to maintain their stranglehold on the market, would be my guess.
TL;DRThey generally avoid making content the community already does well, such as dramatic readings, though they don't rule out an audio drama someday and one speaker may do an original audio piece.
Yeah, there is. We do have a great community that already goes forward and will read some of the short stories and the serialized fiction pieces we have and put them up online. I know there's a handful that I've come across that have just been sent to the lore team. When I first started years and years ago, I think someone had basically made an audiobook, I think it was of Cassandra's Tears. So I'd already read it before joining the company, but within the first few months of me being here, I was listening to that audiobook too, just to kind of get my head into the headspace. So I found that very, very helpful.
Yeah, people are also doing translations of them. I just actually got a message on Spectrum about one by Astro Sam, I think, who did a German reading of Cassandra's Tears. And Star Citizen News Radio back in the day, I know, had done Lost Generation and a couple of other ones. So yeah, the community's been great about not only doing dramatic readings of it in English, but doing it in a variety of languages so people can appreciate it around the world, which is great.
It's worth noting, when they asked if we can do a show, this was actually directed to me, and I didn't realize until halfway through. We generally try to avoid making content that steps on the content that our community is already making. Over the years, we've thought about doing just this, or series that do recaps of all the lore like AstroPub does already. And oftentimes the community is out there putting in tremendous time, tremendous resources, tremendous effort into doing these things. And many of them are downright professional quality already. You should absolutely not be dismissing them just because they're fan-created. It just raises the question: why should we spend our time and our money to take a thing away from these community members to give to these community members when it's already being done? So it's not to say that we won't ever do something. It's not to say that there won't ever be an audio drama or something like that. I'm not going to sit here and just take that off the table right now. But oftentimes, one of the questions that we ask ourselves before we do anything is: is it something the community is already doing? And is the community already doing it, quite frankly, better than we have the time or resources or money to put towards? And when the answer is yes, we usually back off of that stuff and leave it to the purview of the community. It's a great way to showcase the symbiotic nature of the community and the developers throughout Star Citizen.
Let me just shout out Meijer, too, who on YouTube has read Dying Star and One Good Deed. A great Star Citizen streamer just in general, but if you're into the lore also, he's got those up on his YouTube page, so go check him out. Yeah, it's always wonderful to see stuff like that come through, to see people responding to the material and wanting to share it in another way, because maybe English isn't a first language, or some people just don't like to read, or it's just better to have it in an audio format. So we do really appreciate whenever the community steps in and is able to provide the content in a different context for us. So thanks.
TL;DRJokingly, the speakers explain that the Banu are accommodating and want to sell ships to other species, and the Merchantman is open to the public as a marketplace, so it needs varied bathrooms.
So the Banu are very accommodating. And once they find something that works, a design that works, they just stick with it and they keep it in there. And they know they want to sell their ships to other species. They found out what the optimal human bathroom setup is, or at least in their mind, and they put it in. And for them, that's what sells ships.
Yeah, you might need to open those up to your customers, right? So even if you're Banu or human, if you're in Xi'an space and you have a bunch of Xi'an coming on board to buy your slaves or whatever, then they need to poop because they get excited when they are buying stuff from you. That's why. That's the answer.