Persistent Universe Game Ideas Forum

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's saying that given his stature within his group, it makes it more of an issue when you attack a member of that other group, such that they're more likely to respond.

But I think that's kind of what we already have, because that's how the reputation system works. Well, I'm not going to say it already works that way, but the design of it is that you have a reputation that's not just your own one, but also the kind of associations you have. So therefore, if I'm a member of Pirate Pack 1 and I go and attack some other group, I'm doing it as me and also as a member of Pirate Pack 1. So therefore, there'll be hostility from that other group against Pirate Pack 1.

But he's saying the extent of their retaliation would scale according to your standing within your pirate group. In other words, if my group is 1,000 strong and I'm the low guy and I do it, it's probably a non-issue. But if I'm number one on the list, then that's it. They're going to war. It's reasonable to me.

No, I'd agree. It seems reasonable to scale it. But it's purely a factor of how much you do it. When you're talking about organizations with 100 or 500 or 1,000 players, it's kind of like the economic simulator. You don't want one player to ever be able to cause two gargantuan organizations to go to war. And so it may scale. It may become two, three, five times as significant as a lower-ranking member.

I would say your ranking probably is a multiplier on kind of a reputation adjustment when things happen. So the higher ranked you are, instead of adding two hostility points, it adds six hostility points on the reputation.

Yeah, actually, the conception of the design would be that you can specify your characters, and the ones that you aren't playing, you could have as NPCs, or you could control them. But you're not limited. The conception of the design was that, say, I've got five characters, right? And I've got Han Solo and Chewbacca, or Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and C-3PO, whatever. I could play any one of those. I can have any one of my friends play the other ones. Or I can have them operate as NPCs.

[Audience: How many total?]

I'm not going to tell you how many total. We don't know. We haven't ascertained how many actual players we can get in one instance yet. We want to get as many people as possible. That's the process we're going through right now: optimization on the game server side and on the characters you're running, so we can get as many people and as many ships in an instance as possible. But it's a pretty big ongoing optimization job.

Well, yeah, we talked about this. This will be a longer-term thing in the game. It wouldn't be at the beginning, but part of the long-term plan is to have more procedural exploration, so we add more systems and we generate landing zones that you could go and land on. And then at some point, one way to really add game content is you start a colony, and then there's all sorts of missions to bring in the basic materials for the colony and build it up. So you sort of make that a player and NPC thing. I'm not promising we're doing it.

But I'm just saying we'd start small, in regards to before you actually get to the point where you can establish your own colony and build something up from scratch, you would probably have the ability to seize control of something that exists within the game that we've constructed and basically operate it, manipulate the levers to maximize production or whatever that particular production node does. And then once we've got all of that functionality refined and working, then we would move on logically to allowing you to actually build these things from scratch, which would require more interface work, more back-end logic. I'm not talking about making it like a SimCity where you're like, oh, I placed this building down here. No, I'm just talking about nodes.

I would say that longer term, that's basically one of, if you want to call it, the end-game style gameplay, where we're deliberately going to have parts of the game that players will work together to take over, to defend, to build up. So we've already mentioned space stations and asteroid bases. They're two examples of places that players can take over or would defend. And building out a colony in the future would be a place that you would build up. An earlier version of that would be building up an economic node, so you take over this small little weapons factory and you can build it up into one that produces five times as much stuff, but you need to make sure you've got demand, you need to make sure you've got the equipment, you need to make sure you've got the employees to do that.

Yeah, and there's a whole slew of information that we would need to provide you behind the scenes, and levers we'd need to give you to operate, to actually make that not only an enjoyable experience, but one where better players do better than others because they're more adept, they've practiced more, they've got better insight, they're paying more attention to what's going on around the system.

Earlier, there was a part of the panel where I was going to say there are some things that we have been asked a lot by fans and organizations and backers that we're just not ready to talk about, because it's not something we're doing in the next 12 months kind of thing. And crafting is one of those things, because there's a lot of edge cases that we need to figure out, and there's also a lot of base technology that we need to do before we do it. So basically his question was, for player crafting, are there ways we can deal with situations like a player makes an item that is not as good as it could be, or makes an item that is perhaps superior, and how we would deal with that in our crafting system? That was a great idea, and I'm glad we recorded it.

I mean, we already have the overclocking stuff where players can overclock items.

He's just wondering, when you actually modify them and then sell them at an auction house, if players that are bidding on them could actually see the custom modifications, which to me seems like something you would certainly be able to do.

Outside of whether you're customizing or crafting stuff, one of the big gameplay ideas is that you will go around the universe and basically collect. So the idea is you can't just go to some global Amazon site and buy any item you want. Typically, the best stuff will be distributed around the galaxy, and so it will be hard to get. So you may potentially have this one planet that's out in a very dangerous area of space, near Vanduul space or something, and it has some crazy mad hermit that makes absolutely the best ballistic repeater, and that ballistic repeater does 20% more damage than any of the other ballistic repeaters and produces less heat or whatever. And so the concept would be that players would trek there to buy that item. Or another player could make a business out of going and buying a bunch of items, loading them up in his Freelancer and flying them back and selling them to other players at a premium in Terra or somewhere. So that's all part of the game design, to encourage players to travel around the universe and come across things and experience things. You will not be able to just, with an infinite amount of money, sit and order everything online. Now, you could potentially, with a lot of money, offer to pay other players to go get you stuff, and I could definitely see there will be commerce in that. That's the kind of gameplay that we're focusing on. And so naturally from there onwards, there's the additional stuff of overclocking weapons or crafting, or finding an alien piece of technology and then taking it to another location where scientists can use it to make a special kind of weapon. That's kind of what I think people are thinking about on the crafting side, and that's what we're thinking about. And all that will happen down the road in the game.

One of the things that you mentioned was if your arc welder slips or whatever. There's a bunch of things that we're doing in our gameplay design that are very skill-based, like the way you do the mining and the way you do the wormhole jumping is all very skill-based. I don't want to say twitch-based, but you need to move this stuff correctly. That's definitely part of the things that we're considering as we're doing these kinds of designs.

Yeah, and that's actually a goal across the entire range of occupations: basically to eliminate as much as possible the concept of press a button, wait five minutes, and something happens. That's not fun, it's boring, it opens the game up to all sorts of farming exploits and various other things.

Well, I think Tony can answer a bit more of this, because his background was writing the AI for Ultima 7 a long time ago, and he's got a huge amount of AI experience. In Shadow of Mordor, they're all orcs, so they basically all want to kill you, and there's not really a lot of discussion that goes into that, right? It's basically, I killed you or you killed me. They're kind of all nemeses. But we talked about having the idea of meta AI. So beyond just the typical AI in most games, like, OK, I'm a grunt and I know how to tactically deal with this situation, he's my enemy, I'll start shooting at him, I'll duck behind cover. I think we've already talked a little bit about what we're doing with the AI, but people have their own goals. It's not just what they're doing at this instant. It's not even what they're doing that day. They'll have full day cycles, but it'll be what their goal is. I'm a pirate lord, and I want to take over this area of space or something. That concept applies to more than just someone that you would be in opposition with. It could also be an NPC that's a merchant prince, and he's hiring people. I think what you're asking for is pretty much what we have in our plans.

It's very similar to the conversation we had a while back, and extended email exchanges. Everything we've described to date has been more NPC logic at a microscopic level. And so it sounds like what you're saying, and certainly what Chris has told me in the past that he wants, is another macroscopic component on top of that, where you can have NPC concepts of things like ambition and greed, and those would effectively allow these NPCs to evolve over time. And not only that, but they would actually understand how to pull levers other than just the simplistic, well, I'm going to shoot you or I'm going to help you. They would actually understand the value of blockading ore from getting to one system, because they know that will cause the assets that they have under their control to skyrocket in value. And so it's a more advanced, higher-level NPC AI that will inevitably wind up getting bolted onto the low-level stuff that we're developing now.

Well, I think you definitely will be able to join an organization. If there's an organization fighting another organization, and they're open to having people join, you can join them. We're planning that there will be missions that you can take, sort of mercenary missions that will be supplementing UEE actions. So, for instance, maybe there's a push against the Vanduul in one star system, and missions will be out there: we need 10 pilots to join the fleet to take out this station, stuff like that. So that's already part of the plans. And we also do have plans for various factions or organizations to be in conflict with each other, based on the way the economy simulation works. Maybe let's not call it an economy simulation; a universe simulation would be the best way to talk about it. It's sort of a meta universe simulation, and it simulates 20 million or whatever AI agents, and that's the one that's deciding what these organizations are up to, what the big goals are, and then that basically trickles down to what you see on the game side.

Yeah, and one other important point to add to that is that this whole universe simulation is not something we're setting up and then just letting it run according to its own devices. We're actually investing quite a bit of effort on the back side, such that we will actually be able to visually inspect, see what's going on, and monitor what's happening in every system at a kind of godlike level. And part of the reason why we want to do that is to see when things are reaching levels such that we basically want to step in as designers and institute some kind of change. For example, you may have a system that's completely quiet, with very little in the way of conflict, and we notice that it's been like that for the last 12 hours. It's reached a nice state of equilibrium. And so then we can go into the simulation and throw in a big Vanduul swarm that invades that area. That's going to wind up having all sorts of ripple effects, not only on that system but on neighboring systems. And that would wind up playing out, affecting everything from commodity prices to the availability of ships to what missions are...

Well, I was just going to say, if we're talking about collecting stuff, that's another part of the design, the idea when I talked about going to different parts of the universe. We're specifically trying to have, think of it like the seven wonders of the universe or whatever you want, where you have places you go and it's an amazing view, or from this place you'd take a flower, from this other place you'd take a weird animal, or from another place you'd take a little statue of Terra Tower, like you'd get a little Eiffel Tower thing if you went to Paris. So that is part of what we want to do on the collection basis.

Well, I thought that you were saying flora and fauna in regards to terrain. In other words, you would actually be able to venture out from the cities, which is more of a longer-term goal.

Well, I actually think, yeah, so we'll see. But I actually think that we may have some more naturalistic landing locations you could go to than you would think, because that's actually something that's quite easy for us to generate in CryEngine, and to a certain extent procedurally. Actually building out a city with all the shops and everything is quite a lot of work, even when it's prefabbed up. So we have talked about having some simpler areas where you land where, for instance, a mission could be that there's a scientific research station up a mountain or something. And so we basically have the landing pad and the area where you would take your rover and load supplies that you've been contracted to take to the scientific station. And you would drive up the mountain pass and deliver it. And maybe there's some wild animals along the way that attack you or whatever. And you go back to your ship and take off. So that's an example of the sort of first-person universe encounters that we're talking about doing to open it up, so it's not all just you land in a city and it's concrete, or you're in space.

Yeah, it's like the Constellation commercial. I mean, we definitely want to have experiences like that, right? To encounter other things and conceivably cage it up and bring it back. That's something that I would like to see.

Well, you'll definitely have flowers, fish, all those things. Whether it's a mountain lion and you're taking that back in a cage, that's another level of code. And I think for good reason, we're just not going to touch the whole strip club thing. My point is you harvest trophies, right? You can harvest a trophy by picking a plant. You can harvest a trophy by killing an animal on a planet. It's all the same. You get an item, and you put it back in your hangar.

I want one of those too. So I'm the resident gun nerd, by the way, and I'm pretty sure that I'm driving Chris and a lot of the concept artists crazy, because I see these concept pieces and I'm like, how does that even work? They'll put an LCD panel where the action is or where the ejection port ought to be, and it's like, there's no way this is going to happen. Anyway, I want a 1911 as well, because the 1911 is at this point 104 years old and I don't see any reason why it won't still be working. You can have a combustion pistol today. It's not necessarily a 1911 Colt, but it's close enough. But it's such a good design that there's no reason why it won't be working 300 or 400 years from now, right? Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and make sure we put one of those in the game just for you.