Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Core Gameplay Update

So player healing is kind of the next iteration of what we classified as Actor Status. So Actor Status T0 we released around CitizenCon, probably about a year ago now, I think it was like 3.9, around about that. But that kind of covered the first iterations of the statuses that the player covers, such as eating, drinking, hypothermia, all of those kinds. So this is the next iteration of that, which covers essentially injuries.

So we already have in the game right now, the player has global health. So when you look on your HUD, you have the little first aid symbol and it says it's your global health from 0 to 100. What some old backers probably will remember is that we also have the little man, and the little man comprises the different body parts on you. So you've got your arms, you've got your legs, you've got your core and your head, and they are actually individual pools of health. But that's what I say about some of the old backers: that used to be the only thing that you could see. You didn't have the global health. We introduced the global health widget when we released Actor Status T0. But the way it works under the hood is that your limbs take damage. So say I get shot in the arm, and let's say I lose five health points in the arm. What happens under the hood is it goes, OK, let's remove five health points from the arm, and then it removes five health points from the global health. And it was always doing this. You just never saw it. So you would only ever die when your global health got to zero. It didn't matter that your limbs could get to zero, it was waiting for your global health. So if I just kept shooting you in the arm, even though your arm might only have 20 health points, your global health might be 100 health points. So I keep shooting you and your arm is now ruined, essentially, and then I could keep shooting you and eventually you'd die.

There was always the intention that your limbs would basically have these statuses based on their own individual health, and then that would tie into the greater healing gameplay that we're talking about. So basically now what we've taken is that system, and now we're starting to introduce the injuries that will apply to you when you take severe damage in your limbs. So you can have a traumatic head injury, you can have a traumatic body injury, you can have leg injuries and arm injuries. And the way it kind of works is that we're still using the health system, but we're kind of tracking this invisible number behind the number in the back end, which is kind of like body limb wear. So essentially, imagine I keep shooting you in the arm, because we're talking about the arm. And you might lose all your health and that's fine. If you then MedPen it up and heal your arm back up as we do now, if you haven't given it a lot of time, so you're not taking care of yourself, and you keep getting shot in the arm and you keep getting shot in the arm, basically that wear is going to keep building and building and building until you get essentially a broken arm.

And we have three tiers or severities of injury. Tier one or severity one is the highest, that's the worst. Then we've got tier two and then tier three. So essentially, when you get a tier three injury, it's basically going, hey, now you're going to start suffering consequences of that injury. And you can't just get a MedPen and go, cool, I'm just going to use my MedPen. Your MedPen will heal your limb health back up to full health, but the injuries on your arm will give you different effects and different statuses. And that's why I'm saying it's the next iteration of Actor Status. As you start to suffer from dehydration, as you start to suffer from hunger or hypothermia, you start to undergo these different states. So your stamina: you can't run as far, you can't sprint as long. We have lowered max health, and we have all the different eyeball effects that start to come on, whether there's the blood vision or the double vision and things like that. Or whether you're cold, you start to shiver, or you're under severe pressure. So what we have is all these different statuses that trigger these internal body reactions to you suffering these injuries.

So with the upcoming healing status, what we're doing is that you can then suffer this injury. So let's say you've suffered an injury and let's say it's a severity three or tier three. So that's the lowest severity injury. So let's say your broken arm, it's like a fracture. Say you've got a hairline fracture in your arm. So you can still use your arm, but maybe now you can't hold your gun as firm, so you've got a bit more weapon sway and so on and so forth. So you start to notice, thinking, OK, I've got this injury. Now my little man is showing my arm is red, and it's showing I've got a tier three. And it's like, OK, I need to go back to a medical facility to remove this injury. There's no way for you to remove the injuries out in the field. You have that injury, you have to then go and get it sorted.

So you can then go back to a medical facility. And with medical facilities, there are different classifications. We have Tier 1, 2 and 3. So a hospital or a physical location is going to be what's classified as a Tier 1 facility. That's the best facility you can get, so they will always be able to heal everything out. And you can see where I'm going here: Tier 2 is the second and Tier 3 is the worst. And the way that we're tiering it is that Tier 3 can heal any injuries that are Tier 3, Tier 2 can heal any Tier 2s, and Tier 1 can heal Tier 1 and below. By the way, I always wanted it the other way around, but we'd already committed to the tiering, so I was like, okay, fine, that's fine.

I could do a whole segment someday on the way that we tier things in all aspects of our development.

Exactly. So essentially what we have is this injury. So you've got this injury and it's affecting how your character plays the game. It's affecting the effectiveness of your character, whether that's in combat or in mining or how much you can carry or how much you can sprint, how well you can see, all of these different things. So if you've got a traumatic head injury, for example, you might start to suffer double vision. Your stun resistance won't be as high, so if you get hit by force reactions, you'll fall over easier, things like that. So what we're introducing is this severity, and then when you get to the Tier 1 severities, that's where you've taken significant amounts of damage. You've gone down, you've been revived, all of that kind of thing, and you're in a situation where with Tier 1 you might have a multiple fractured arm where you can't use your arms anymore. You might be able to use your arms for that one moment, like if it's life or death dependent: look, I need to get over that wall and I'm just going to do it. Great. But you're not going to be able to climb a 20 meter ladder. So if your ship's got a ladder, then you're in big problems.

So this is where we started to introduce the healing and medical gameplay. So what we're doing for the healing and medical gameplay is that we have the multi-tool healing attachment for the multi-tool. And then we have the dedicated healing gun. So the multi-tool itself will be an improved version of the MedPen. So with the MedPen, essentially, what you'll be able to do is use it to heal up your health, it won't heal injuries, and you'll be able to use it on other people as well. So you'll be able to go and jab it into other people and help heal up some of their injuries. What the multi-tool does is it allows you to heal up, not injuries, it allows you to heal up the health, so you can heal up the limb health and your global health. And it also allows you to scan that person and understand what is wrong with them.

Because the other thing that we're introducing as part of this pass of healing, or Actor Status T1, is the downed state. So any time where you would have probably died in Star Citizen, or should I say 99% of the time, because there is going to be a 1% and I'll explain that in a minute. Most of the times where you would have died, now you would go into the downed state. And the downed state is where you are unconscious. You are not dead, you are just unconscious, but you are slowly dying. And that slowly dying might take two hours. Now at any point when you go down, you can choose to release and respawn. But later down the line, when we introduce death of a spaceman and dying is a real problem, you can wait for somebody to come and rescue you. So you might have a buddy. Let's say we're playing together, I fall down a cliff or I get shot, I go down; you can then come and revive me, either using a MedPen or using the multi-tool healing attachment. So I'm now no longer below zero health, I'm healthy, I can now stand up. I might have injuries, I might not, depending on what took me down, but I'm back in the game. So death now has a way for you to be brought back.

And this is the 1%: if you receive more damage than your entire health bar, so let's say you go from 100 to minus 100, aka you get shot with an Idris railgun and you're on EVA, you will go straight to death. That's like, go to jail, don't collect your 200. That's it. Actually, I should not say go to jail, because I think you have to go to jail. So that was a Monopoly reference, for the purposes of being very clear. It means that you just die and respawn in a hospital or in a location.

So if we go back down that road, we have this downed state, so now people can revive you. But let's say I revive you and you're back, but now you've got the worst case severity. You've got a tier one injury in your legs. So you can't even stand up. You're locked in prone because your legs are shattered. So how do you get around? And I say shattered as in they're really bad. Okay, so I don't want to get into the details of the medical issues of what you're actually undergoing, but let's say they're the worst severity injuries and it prevents you from standing.

So what happens is, obviously, if you then go into a tier three, we're introducing these different levels of drugs. And this is where you will have medical pen versions that you can stab in. So if you've just got the multi-tool and you found somebody, it might say, oh, this person can't stand on his legs anymore because the pain is just too great. It's crippling him. Okay, I'm going to stab him with my anesthetic pen. We'll have specific lore names for them. Or I can use the dedicated healing gun, and with the dedicated healing gun I can scan them and I'll be able to choose which drugs I can then administer to the person who's injured to get them back on their feet. Now it doesn't heal their injuries, it just removes the symptoms. And it removes the symptoms so that that person can then get back to a location, a medical facility.

So for a Tier 3, maybe the Cutlass Red would be Tier 3. The 890 Jump or the Carrack medical facilities, that might be like a Tier 2 facility. And then the Tier 1 facilities are the dedicated hospitals, the physical locations. So you can get back to a medical facility and then go into a medical bed and heal yourself from these injuries, and then you can continue. So essentially, these things aren't going to jump up on you. They're going to be things that happen over time. Like I said, it's like a wear in the background. It's almost like your vehicle's wear.

And then what we also have is this thing called the drug level, and that's what is monitored on your HUD as part of all of your Actor Status widgets. So this is your suit monitoring the amount of basically external drugs inside your system. And that could be alcohol, it could be MedPens, it could be all these other drugs that we're adding. I know that we're adding four bespoke drugs to the system. And then you'll have to balance how much you can apply with the dosage, because you don't want to overdose somebody, because if you overdose them, they'll pass out. And then you'll have to decide which ones you want to use, and that will give you a timer. So you'll be able to understand, OK, this is going to give them an hour here, an hour here. That's enough for us to get back to the ship and get back to a hospital location, or a medical facility if you have a ship with medical facilities.

So essentially what we're introducing is the healing profession. This is you, you're the first responder. This could be with or without your friend. So they've died or whatever, or later down the line, the whole profession around where death is going to be really important. And obviously with this death comes inventory. So you'll lose your items on death if you choose to respawn. So people will be able to bring you back, give you drugs to alleviate the symptoms that are specific to your injuries so that you can function to get back to a location. And if you don't have those drugs, you'll then be able to body drag somebody back to your ship. And then you'll be able to take them to a location that has medical facilities and actually drop them off at an emergency elevator. And you'll have a synchronized animation of putting them into the medical bed, and then basically send them directly to hospital, or heal them in a ship if you're putting them in there.

So that covers the healing gameplay, the healing profession that revolves around healing your limbs, the statuses you're going to be receiving, the different hospital tierings and medical facilities. And then on top of that, the one thing that we're adding is the respawn, which is where you're going to be respawned. So now when you die, you won't just respawn in a hab, you'll respawn in a hospital facility. If you've respawned in that hospital facility, you'll be in a medical gown and then you'll be able to access your own inventory. Obviously, if you've died somewhere outside of a landing zone, your gear will be left with your body. If you've died in a landing zone, for whatever reason, what we're saying is that security have come and collected you and they've taken you to hospital, so your gear will be in the room. So you'll be able to then take it with you.

You'll also be able to choose which hospital you want to respawn at. So if you want to go and choose, I want to always respawn at microTech, you can go and say, this is my respawn point where I want to respawn. Only Tier 2 and above facilities or ships will have the ability to respawn. So that means Tier 3 medical beds won't allow you to respawn. And Tier 3 medical beds are what's in the Cutlass Red right now. So that's going to be a loss of functionality versus what it currently has. But this was always the intention; that was always a placeholder solution when we added it to the PU at the start of 2020, if I remember correctly. And clearly we want to be able to have major hospital facilities at all of the major landing zones. We want to have clinics at truck stops and things like that. So essentially you're going around and choosing where you want to respawn. And then obviously that ties in later down the road in terms of death of a spaceman, DNA integrity, which we've talked about previously, but I won't go into too much detail on that. But the detail that I've talked about here is what's coming in the first iteration of healing and the healing gameplay.

In just the T1 that comes in Alpha 3.15.

Correct.

So obviously, I think healing was a complex feature, so there were lots of things going on. I know that the community is interested to hear where we're at with that, so I think it's good to get that out there so people can have their say.

I think in terms of inventory, obviously, we've talked about inventory already a lot. What we're trying to aim for, to go in alongside healing, is that you leave your stuff behind. Essentially, we won't be having this infinite bag of holding that you have right now with the PMA. We want to remove the PMA so that you're using the inner thought system that we're implementing, which you've probably already seen if you've used the Greycat ROC and gone in and brought up your interface. So essentially, the headline situation with healing is that we're going to local inventory. So you'll only have access to the things that you've put into the inventory at a landing zone. If you go into a ship, you'll only have access to the things that are inside that ship, based off the inventory. It's still accessed by location, so you have to be in that location, then you can access that inventory. But the fundamental headline is, if you're outside on a planet, you only have access to the things that you're carrying, the things that are in your pockets or in your backpack, and that's it. And when you die or go into the new downed state, you will obviously leave your items there if you go and respawn back at a hospital. So that's really the crux of healing. Obviously, people are already familiar with the system itself. And the biggest thing is obviously the removal of the PMA. You'll be able to move your items directly onto your character with the inner thought system. And also, as part of that release, the Asset Manager will be coming. So you'll have a mobiGlas app that'll be able to show you where all of your stuff is. So you'll be like, OK, where did I leave my Gladius, or where was that armor or this gun? And you'd be able to go and find them and go, okay, that was in Area18, okay, that's at Port Olisar or wherever. So that's kind of healing in a nutshell. We've talked a lot about the intricacies of healing before, but that kind of covers it.

The other two are FPS radar and scanning, and hacking. So I'll cover FPS radar and scanning first. So with FPS radar and scanning, we are exactly the same as the ship radar and scanning. So we worked with VTT, and myself and my team designed the radar and scanning system for both ships and FPS. We wanted to make sure that it was using the same systems. It has the same promises and the same premise, so that if you have a really large signature, it's dampening all the other signatures. So I always give the example: I'm in the shower and my wife's shouting to me. I'm like, I can't hear you, because all I can hear is the shower, but she can hear me. She can clearly hear me responding back, and she's responding, and I'm like, but I can't hear you. So that's what we've implemented as part of it, so that we have this gameplay of cause and effect. So on the FPS side, you'll be able to go in and turn on a generator and maybe hide with that noise. Maybe you can't hear yourself, your emission is low, but maybe they can still find you or whatever. So there's definitely some signature gameplay that will be introduced on the FPS side.

It's definitely not intended to be bat vision. It's not like you just go in and turn it on and then you have it on forever. When you do a ping, there will be consequences. People will be notified that they have been pinged, and you flare up all your signatures. So when you do a ping, what you're actually saying is, I'm shouting into the dark, but I'm giving away my own location. So there's a bit of cat and mouse there, where it's like, okay, I'm here by myself. Do I want to give away my location? Or do I want to go, no, actually, I'm in a position here where I can flee. I'm going to see if there's anybody in there first, and I'll ping out: there's five guys or whoever, I'm getting out of dodge. Whereas sometimes you might do it and you're like, I haven't seen anybody, because somebody's maybe hiding. Maybe they've turned off their flashlight, they're not using their guns.

The one thing to highlight about the differences between FPS and ships is that ships passively detect all signatures, so EM, electromagnetic, IR, infrared, and CS, which is cross-section. Those are the three that it passively detects; cross-section is like visual cross-section. On the FPS side of things, it only passively detects sound, so sound replaces cross-section. And then EM and IR are the same, and you can only ping for EM, IR and dB. So your radar, when you're just passively walking around, only looks for sound. So if somebody threw a grenade, used their weapon, is running, it might pick it up and you'd be like, oh, there's somebody in that direction. But when you've pinged, you're looking for all of the signatures, and that's when you're giving yourself away.

And then the scanning side of things is pretty much identical to the ship side of things. You bring up a scan mode, you can scan that person, find out all the different information about them: what they're carrying, what's their actor status, what's their org, do they have a criminal record, because you can run their name, and so forth. So we have that kind of gameplay alongside, so you can correctly ID someone if you're bounty hunting and so on and so forth.

And then with hacking, hacking is almost a standalone, encapsulated feature. So what we'll be doing is basically repurposing the hacking chips that we have right now. So the hacking chips will still be around. You'll have a hacking chip, you'll need to use that. And the way we're working with the environment team right now to go through all the locations is, where you can hack something, essentially you're going and using the maintenance access. So let's say you come to a PC or a ship or whatever, you're plugging into the maintenance access, where somebody would come in and go, okay, I'm an IT administrator, I need to get into the system. So they have a skeleton key, should we say, they're putting it in and they're helping fix the problems. You've obviously got an illegal skeleton key, essentially. You're then plugging it in, and then that brings the hacking mini game up on your visor, where you essentially have to manipulate the 3D board to avoid the AI and collect fragments of the passcode that you're trying to find. And then when you find these passcodes, you can put them in, and that gives you access to whatever that is, whether that's opening a door, terminal access, power access, elevators, whatever the content guys decide they want to do. But essentially that's the premise behind it.

And we have a scaling difficulty across hacking. So we have versions without AI where it's just simple and you can just do it yourself. Then we have versions that are time limited with multiple AI, and the board's much more complex. And the premise is that a manufacturer in the world has created this 3D program to help people hack without actually having to script or program. So that's kind of where we're at with hacking. And that obviously will slot into some of the FPS features to create some of the more interesting FPS missions that the guys are working on in the background.

Absolutely. I mean, to be honest, we're pushing the game towards what Chris has always had in his head, that vision of the game. Anything that we add is in line with what Chris wants to add to the game. I mean, all of these features have been prioritized by Chris to add to the game. And space is scary. It's dangerous. You're exploring these unknown planets, or known planets, but if you just went to Africa or you went on a North Arctic expedition or you were going to go on the Amazon or anywhere that is not just your familiar surroundings, you're going to have to prepare for those environments. So is it going to be hot? Is it going to be arid? Are there going to be bugs? Am I going to have to take tablets? Do I need certain clothing to help me? And just as you're going on an expedition on Earth, we're talking about going to all these different planets, these different moons, and all these different cave expeditions. And as part of that gameplay loop, you need to understand you're only going to have the things that you take with you. And so it's up to you. And also, when you store stuff in your ship, if your ship blows up, those are the things that you can potentially lose on that ship. So you're going to have to make meaningful decisions, and then those decisions will have consequences. And that will create a feeling that you are more immersed exploring this universe, rather than just, oh, I'm in the bottom of a cave, I'll just bring up my PMA and I have access to whatever I bought, thousands of it, which is like playing a game with cheats on. It diminishes what you're trying to achieve and the fun that you're trying to have, because the challenge is there for you to overcome. So, yeah, it's good to start getting some of those gameplay loops in there.