The writers discuss lore for nukes and weapons of mass destruction, the three human political parties (Universal, Centralist, Transitionalist), a 150-year life expectancy, and why human-alien hybrids are unlikely. They also cover humor, horror derelicts, the arts, backer lorebuilders, and how they write lore.
TL;DRThe writers work both from their own ideas and from designers' pitches, use a worked-out outline for Squadron 42, and the lead writer reviews nearly everything while the other reads along.
Will Weissbaum:: We do... like you kinda mentioned, we do both processes, where sometimes it starts from an idea from us, and other times we're handed kind of a design pitch, and a designer will come to us demanding high quality lore - which we always deliver! You can go either way really... and so we talked about that a little bit before, but probably the interesting thing that we have haven't talked about is kind of how we coordinate between each other, and how being in the same office is fun and helpful. Oddly enough when I first started here I was, like slightly farther away from Dave and-...
Yes, yes. But yeah, I mean sometimes we do take-... it sort of depends on what we're doing. For the Squadron 42 based stuff we have a very kind of rigid-... not rigid, but "worked-out" outline, that we're sort of going through and we're starting to work from. Particularly because as things come online asset-wise, we're sort of jumping around - we're not writing it from start to finish. Whereas something like a news dispatch for example, which we sort of alternate on, week in and and week out... I mean sometimes we'll sort of say, "hey, I got an idea. I'm thinking about doing this for Tuesdays's thing. What do you think?" and maybe talk it over, and other times it's just sort of a, "hey, I wrote this out. What do you think?" type thing. I mean, we review all of the stuff we write.
Yeah, Dave definitely reads pretty much 99% of everything that goes on, so he takes his Lead Writer position very serious. So, you know, it's of unified content through him. I don't necessarily look at everything, I try to read along, but, uhh... it's pretty great.
TL;DRThey have been saying about 150 years, deliberately kept below about 200 to avoid immortality, with medicine mainly improving the quality of those years rather than extending them.
150-ish, yeah. I mean, that was-... in the early days of the "Ask a Dev" that was a raging discussion, about age and stuff. And a lot of people think that with medical advances as they are now that the life expectancy would be much, much larger than that. But I remember early on in conversations with Chris, there was this sort of... we wanted the-... there was this idea that the universe should-, that people should not be living beyond, like 200 years - just because you start to get into immortality, and you know, wanting to have these various phases of human development, that were sort of isolated to themselves. Like the fact that there aren't any humans that were alive during the Messer Era speaks a very different thing about that era, because it's all through, you know, historical fact rather than personal recollection.
Yeah, so we're kind of thinking that human bodies have a shelf life, as much as we can extend it. But probably was tech HAS done is improved the quality of those 150 years medically speaking. Like, the senility and other kind of problems that come with old age-DH: - genetic disorders -WW: ... and that kind of stuff has probably been eliminated, so you get fuller, healthier, full 150 years, more bang for your buck kinda thing, would be one way to think about it.
TL;DRHuman-alien hybrids are probably not planned because they would be too much to build believably, but mixed crews, an integrated Tevarin presence and multi-species trade ports are hoped for.
I think "no" for that, just because mostly I think it was an art thing. I mean, you can get into-... I remember there was a little bit of a discussion about this, about physiology, and biology, and DNA-based lifeforms versus other lifeforms, and that type of thing. But at the end of the I think it was actually just sort of a technical thing, like if you have human-alien hybrids you have to have degrees of that. So, you know, what is a 10% hybrid? What is a 20%? 30%? You know... and it's just, it's extrapolate-... it's a lot more stuff that you'd have to build in order to make it believable in the universe, rather than...
And, hearing you talk I'm wondering now if the question - because of "relations" - if you're asking by "hybrid colony", like, Xi'An and humans building a city together.
Oh, in that regard, yeah! I mean, I think there would-... you know, or even just are there interpersonal relationships regardless of producing offspring? I would think, sure. Yeah.
Yeah, I think there will be mixed crews. I mean, Tevarin - we're hoping to have a fully integrated-... even though there's some political and social issues going on with the Tevarin people, they are part of the UEE. And then we're also talking about having ports where there's a lot of inter-species trade going on. So you'll have Banu, and Xi'An, and humans all living side by side in one city, and kind of seeing how that melting pot will develop will be real interesting for us to explore and develop. But basically, yeah, you're going to be able to get your Banu best friend!
TL;DRThey imagine Shakespearean sonnets and other arts survive, but haven't covered them in depth because mentioning poets or authors would mean writing their work, and such works probably wouldn't be as prevalent.
Yeah, I mean, we haven't gotten into it, 'cause I guess the thing is we've sort of made references to uhh... and we even had a "Lore Builder" about celebrities - you know, artists and painters, and stuff like that, that you guys actually provided. I guess the thing that's tricky about it is, you know, if you start talking about prolific authors, and poets, and all that type of stuff, then you have to kinda write the stuff in order for it to exist, and that's just a lot to-...
We made a mention of a... not a performance artist... like, an abstract artist, that the Banu guy who discovered the "stretch-goal system" was enamored with - he loved what she did. He named the system after her.
Ah, just in the more recent "Lore Builder" we talked about one of the pastimes that people can do is, like, crafts. So, you know, turning, and people are still carving, and whittling and building stuff to pass the time.
Right. But as far as like the historical stuff too, I mean specifically the Shakespearean sonnets I imagine, even now as technology has allowed us to save and preserve stuff, it probably won't have the prevalence, social prevalence, that it would have today. But, you know, I mean think about Homer (not Simpson) - like, "The Odyssey" is still one of the classic novels of humankind, and that's survived for... 3000 years? Something like that.
Yeah. I mean I think it's that thing... what is it, the Isaac Asimov quote that, to the common person technology is indistinguishable from magic. You could have something that could be conceivably, to our perspective supernatural, that is just simply because it's outside of our current realm of understanding. But I think we're still bound within the realities of the universe that we're building, so it's, you know, zombies...
Yeah - Hades system, good example. But yeah, the floating derelict ship where there's just bodies and you don't-... I mean, that's a classic. You gotta at least kinda shout out to that!
TL;DRWriting has shifted from planning-era brainstorming to specific content as game systems come online, and mission stories haven't been started yet because designers are still working out the mechanics, with a more even exchange expected later.
It's certainly become much more interesting because it's-... now that we're having things come online - conversation systems and actual mechanics and stuff like that - you get more of a direct plug-in of like, you need to write something for this, that needs to accommodate for this system. Rather than before, where it was-... for the early news updates we were trying to write about what the plan was for game design aspects, and now we can actually kind of write about game aspects.
The project has definitely gotten to the point now where we're starting to really focus on specific content, and churning out scripts, and getting things done for moving into recording stuff, and really heading into the production phase of things, and moving out from more of our kind of brainstorming and dreaming-of-lore days. So that's kind of fun to see that switch happen - get more focused and lot more panicked... panicked all the time.So the second question - when making missions and things do we create the stories first or do they get based on gameplay requirements?
I think at this point we're still building a lot of the mechanics around the PU, so we haven't gotten into specific mission stuff. We're sort of-WW: Tony and the guys have been doing a lot of experimentation with figuring out, like - without story applied on top of it - just how the missions work from getting the player from "here to here". So, we're gonna - once they sort of have a handle on that - we'll be able to dive back in and start building up with stories, and how to tie it into this bartender and going to this system, and you know, what are you carrying that's interesting?
And yeah, maybe one the process gets equalized it might be a half-and-half type thing. If we come up with something - because we have a better understanding of how it could be implemented - we could theoretically pitch ideas and they could just pitch stuff back to us and go, "hey we have this new thing - could you do a mission for us?". So it's probably gonna be a bit more even. Right now we're sort of taking cues from them as to how they wanna-, how they see that sort of mechanic working out.
Yeah. And we'll come in more, definitely, on those missions that are gonna be designed to kind of twist your expectations or be a spin on the normal everyday missions. That where we'll come in and-... Squadron 42 - even though you didn't ask - with that it's kind of more we start a very high-level story that sets the initial road map down of where we're going narratively, and then the designers take that and plan locations and more specifics of gameplay. And then they pitch that back to us, and we take it and we start saying like, "oh, well that's interesting! If they're gonna be in a fight right before they have this big heartfelt talk then maybe we can adjust the fight. Maybe we can, rather than being a big battle, we make it just a one-on-one fight with this guy cos it'll be more impactful," and Design says, "no, that won't work - how about 3 guys?". So that kind of finding that beautiful middle-ground between gameplay and narrative.
TL;DRThe writers say they definitely want humor, ideally from lively characters in serious situations and arising from within the story rather than characters mocking the world, to balance out darkness.
Yeah, I mean the thing is, it's important to remember, as long as it's not-... there's a weird thing with humor - I've always looked at it as, it's great to have funny people in it because you can have funny people in a serious environment. Hudson from Aliens is always my classic go-to example - like, he's a funny character who's in a very serious situation and he takes the seriousness of the situation seriously, but he reacts to it in a funny way because he has a dynamic personality. But yeah, I think you need that, you know. I was actually talking with Chris about this last week. He was like, "if you have too much-... if it's too monotone and too dark, and angry, and violent the entire time, it gets overwhelming and it feels flat. You need this levity to kind of punctuate the darkness." And you know, that's one of the great things about Firefly too - that's a show that can get very dark and get really violent, and part of it is because you have that warmth of the comedy to counterbalance it, so when it gets dark it feels really dark and really bleak, 'cause you have these big personalities who are scared.
Yeah. And I think I try not to - when I'm writing a lighter, funnier moment - not to have the characters poke holes in the world, or make fun of the world, but rather have the humor come from a place with inside the story, and evolve out of that. 'Cause you know, it can be an easy joke sometimes - one of the more obvious ones would be, "isn't it stupid that we're doing this," "isn't it stupid that I have to go get this box," but then you're just kind of shooting yourself in the foot rather than trying to build up to something.But yeah, one of your wingmen will just have a horn that he honks as you're flying around!
TL;DRThree human political parties exist so far, but the alien ones aren't ready to discuss; the writers say fringe groups, like Banu wanting to end trade with humans, could exist but would be small.
So at the moment for the humans, we have three political parties that we've established. There's the Universal Party, Centralist Party, and the Transitionalist Party. We haven't really gotten into the alien ones yet... specifically the Banu one-Will Weissbaum: Well, we're not ready to talk about it quite yet. But basically though, because we want to have a lot of variety in the things that you can do in the PU, you can always be unsure to whether it's not a majority of the population believe something... you know, I'm sure there is a group of Banu that would like to cut off trade from the humans. Whether its just two guys on a ship and they're trying to sabotage this other thing, you know, it all comes down to we want to have the full rainbow of beliefs - it's always just about how many people believe that weird thing. Like, the more fringe the belief is, the less people you'll run into in the universe that believe it.
Right. But you know, it could be one of things that, is it something that could happen down the line? Maybe - but they would have to grow in power, or something would have to happen that would shift them, or something like that.
Yeah. And I'm sure there's just as many humans who want to cut off trade with the Banu, and the other things, as we've covered in a recent news update.The party that I wanna join is the after party!
TL;DRThey probably will keep asking backers for flavor content, though they may pause for a while, and after launch it may take a less formal shape since community actions will help fill in the lore.
Probably! I mean, we're kind of getting to the point where we have so much of stuff that we might hold off for a little bit... I don't know why I'm saying this... but, yeah, I assume we're going to continue that practice of, when we need things, of looking to you - the backers - to help us fill in the universe. Like we've said, once the PU goes live a lot of the Galactapedia stuff is gonna be filled in by your interactions and what you're doing, so...
Right. It'll be-... it's interesting 'cause what I'm wondering is if, once the game is "live live" ("full live") ... just how you divide between the-... if we're going to be doing the sort of daily content updates that we'd do... I dunno...
And it's already functioning and, you know-WW: So it just might take on a different form, but it's one of our stated goals to have you - the community - affect the game, and affecting the lore is part of that.
TL;DRNuclear payloads have been discussed but nothing is decided; they say a line exists for "mil-spec" weapons that civilians can't buy legally, though exactly where it falls is still being worked out.
The funny thing is, at the end of the day, it is interesting - I mean this a society where common people can go out and buy really heavily armed... warships (in a nutshell). Fighters and stuff like that. So it's a bit of a different society. Mostly that's just because it's dangerous out there, you know - there are Vanduul, there are pirates, there are slavers, there's all sorts of craziness happening outside that, you know, you'd have to protect yourself.
Yeah. As far as nukes, I mean, specifically that's more of a design thing. I would imagine that yeah, if you're-... you've seen the size of these frigates - they're huge. You would have to use some kind nuclear payload to put a dent in that thing.
It's interesting because we have the notion of "mil-spec" weapons. Like, when we release a military ship to civilians we say that they don't include everything, so we have this line of there being some technology that's too powerful, too dangerous, or that the military wants to contain an advantage over the civilian population. So that's implying that there is a certain level of devastation that's considered inappropriate for commercial use, and in order to get that, you start having to go to the black market. So, like an off-the-shelf ship made by a major manufacturer wouldn't really have any forbidden tech in there 'cause they wouldn't want to lose their manufacturer license and put themselves long-, wrong end of the log-, wrong end of the-... what the hell am I saying? They wouldn't want to lose their manufacturing license!
Yeah. So there is a line. It's just that what that definition of the line is-... 'cause the thing also, I mean, part of the devastation of nuclear weapons is atmosphere. Radiation, fallout, air carrying particles beyond the blast radius and the fallout zone, and all that stuff... which you don't really get in space I would imagine.
Yeah. So maybe nukes lose a little bit of their luster? You know, obviously I don't think it's restricted to nukes - I don't think you could try and do an orbital strike on a planet - they would shoot you down in a second.But yeah, so I guess it's a long way around - yes, there's a line because like Will said there's the "mil-spec" thing, but what that division is I think we're still sort of trying to figure out. And a part of that is also just with game balance. With Arena Commander there's a huge amount of focus put on making sure that what weapons does what, and is countered by what, and what are it's strengths and weaknesses, and stuff like that. So just getting a basic baseline understanding of what civilian weapons do, then you could figure out what the mil-spec weapons do, and why they're so much more powerful.
Yeah. And just like we're gonna have to handle you walking around with weapons on a planet's surface, I think it'll be the same way of like, when you're flying into ArcCorp and you have a nuclear payload missile, we'll have to figure out ways why you're not firing 5 of them off into the middle of the city. Not sure what, but something to think about!