Star Citizen Live Q&A: Alpha 3.23 and Beyond

I don't go home very often. So that's one. Ultimately, I've set up hierarchies on both of those teams to be able to work independently of me when I'm not there. But I spend a lot of time reviewing both sides, from Squadron and Star Citizen. And if they were very different games, it would be a very different beast, but obviously they share the same features, they share the same aspects that we want to get from the games. They're obviously different content, but I have to work with Rick and JJ. All three of us were on the core gameplay pillar and then we did Squadron and then we've done SC, so we've kind of all been all together. You have to build up the teams to understand that they can... give them the authority to be able to deliver on decisions and make those decisions, and you trust those people to do that. And then ultimately I'll be reviewing the game and give my feedback. But yeah, it's a lot of meetings and a lot of discussions, but it's very enjoyable.

A bit of both. Whenever there's a new design, we all come together and make sure that we're all on the same page, and then we kind of split off and divide it up amongst ourselves to get it done.

Yeah, the biggest thing is that it's something I've been very cognizant of. I've always wanted to make sure that we're a trio of partnerships, to make sure that we're all on the same page, because we've got such a large team. We want to make sure that we're giving consistent messaging to the team that we're working on. So any new designs or anything new or any new content will always have an initial brief amongst ourselves before it propagates wide. But then, as Rick says, we definitely do divide and conquer. So JJ tends to look at the events and work with Elliot on Mission Feature Team and System Design. Rick is obviously more technical and, from a technical background, is working with Joe on the tech design team. And then obviously myself is more broad, but we definitely divide and conquer to help. But it's never isolation. We always come back and spread out again and come back and spread out again. And we've all got different expertise in different areas, so it works well as a team.

Yeah, we're all sat right next to each other. There's not a day goes by we're not talking to each other.

I'll take that one. So we've got Space Cow and also Space Whale, and aside from the cool names, we've also got Space Worm, all these really cool creatures that we're working on in the background, but each of those has their own unique challenges that are going to take a little bit longer to get out. So with the Kopion, we picked a creature that we knew was going to fit some of the early missions that we wanted to do, a ground predator, land-based, that we could get in the game within the timeframe that we had. And then the other cool thing is the Marok is our first boid. And our boid technology is something that will allow us to scale the number of creatures that we can have on planets in the future. So it's exciting to test that feature early.

Yeah, and just to summarize what a boid is, if you're not aware, in very simple terms, it's basically a lightweight AI. So you have a human AI, which is fully fledged combat, what people have been familiar with in 3.22 and previous. A Kopion is the equivalent of a human AI in terms of its complexity, in terms of its animation, sounds. A boid is kind of just a lighter version of that. So obviously a bird doesn't have all of the same parameters. A fish, for example, would be a boid. So anything that's got flocking, that you want to have as a group, flocking together. It's just a simpler implementation. So as Rick says, they were two creatures that allowed us to hit the things that we wanted to hit. It doesn't mean that we're not going to push the Quasi Grazer and the space whale further down the line or into the game at some point. These two were good ones that we needed to get out from a technology standpoint.

So we wanted to basically review a bunch of our major items in the game. So looking at armor, weapons, ships, and basically start to apply more logic to why they are being priced that way. We started with the weapons and armor, basically. So we started looking at things like applying value to different aspects of them. So looking at pure size and associating a rough material cost: a pistol is obviously going to be less material cost than a bigger rifle or a shotgun or something that's a bit chunkier. So obviously there is a weight of value associated with that. Then also looking at things like manufacturers, because some of them have a manufacturing quality associated with them, or a prestige. Looking at the different tech levels: we've got some very basic ballistic weapons and we've got some very advanced electron or laser weapons that are going to have manufacturing costs associated with them. So people can go to the shop and look at the different weapons against each other and go, oh, okay, this makes logical sense, because this is rarer, or this looks more expensive and feels more expensive to use. And we did the same thing with the armor too.

Then we started looking at some of the bigger ticket items like our ships. So again, we applied very similar logic to those, where we go, okay, let's look at the size. Let's look at how they're being used. Are they used to make money? Because if you think about a commercial vehicle in the real world, typically they cost more because you're going to be able to make money with them. And then looking at manufacturers, quality: is it a luxury ship? That then applies more value as well. And then obviously weighing that up against the actual prices that you're paying real money for as well, and making sure there's an association there as well. And that also allowed us to look at a lot of the outliers that we had previously and go, oh, okay, some of them are sitting way far above everything else for some reason, and some of them are sitting way far below everything else. So it's been a way of leveling it out and applying logic to a lot of that stuff as well.

There were a couple of other things that we looked at too. We also looked at balancing salvage out, because I think that had not had a thorough pass before, and we saw people just getting millions upon millions of UEC through salvaging. So we felt that that was basically flooding our economy with alpha UEC, and that was causing problems: the value of things just goes down so much, and it becomes meaningless when you can exploit a system like that. So we've applied some more logic to that and brought the gains down on what you can get from salvage. And then we also took a look at balancing mission rewards. So instead of everyone having to default to salvage to make money, we're now looking at the effort versus reward algorithm that we're applying to our missions and basically going, hey, how much effort, how much risk, how difficult are they? What are you putting into these missions? Is it super difficult? Okay, you should earn more money from it. Is it long? You should probably earn more money from it as well. So overall, things should feel a bit more as you would expect.

And this isn't the end of that tuning in 3.23.

No, this is just the first pass. Well, the next pass anyway.

Yeah, on that note for economy, I think I touched on this in the Letter from the Chairman. I think a lot of these systems have been around for a long time, like claim timers, insurance, obviously the economy values for missions. And they were balanced correctly as and when they were done a long time ago. The game's been out for a long time. But we need to start bringing these systems a bit more cohesion in how they talk to each other. So going forward, I think the players and the community should expect to see some significant changes to those systems as we move towards trying to create a more cohesive experience in the game. Because I think right now, if you just take 3.22 as a good example, if you really know where to go, like JJ said, you can just make millions upon millions. And once you've got so much money and everything is linked to progression with money, you can just buy your way and that's it, right? You lose the desire or the motivation to keep playing the game. So I think we want to build that motivation in, that, okay, I'll go and do this because I enjoy doing salvage and it gives me this reward. And then obviously the other side of the coin is we don't really have a lot of money sinks in the game right now. So in terms of insurance, your ship blows up, you just claim it back immediately. You die... we've talked about Death of a Spaceman for a long time, but we want to start bringing all these systems in place. And I think going forward, we will have some more changes on that front.

Yes, so we're going to look to wipe alpha UEC and rentals, I believe. And that's purely because if we don't, all of the analytics that we get back from people playing the game are going to be basically false reports, because people are going to be using all of their banked cash and it'll just be like, oh, people are just buying all of these now more expensive items, for example, and that then tells us, oh, do we need to make these more expensive? No, not really. It's just that people are using giant cash reserves that they've been keeping for a long time. So while it might be disappointing for some people to lose the money they've built up, it really helps us in informing us: have we pushed the economy in the right direction, so we can keep making iterations and informed decisions going forward.

And that's a good thing to note as well: we're a live game. Just because we changed the prices in 3.23 doesn't mean we'll then change them in 4.0. We want to put them in; this is our first rebalance or re-leveler. We'll evaluate, and that's why we want to do that. We'll evaluate, okay, look at the data, and then base our next decisions on that data.

Rep-based hostility wasn't really for 3.23 so much as future. It's setting us up for success in 4.0 and Pyro and the systems that we want to do there. The system itself is cool. It allows us to set up factions that you can gain rep with, and they become your allies and help you out and come to your aid when you're being attacked. And vice versa, you can piss somebody off and they're mad at you and they'll attack you on sight. You're not going to see a lot of that implemented in Stanton right now, but we wanted to get it in so we could start testing it in Stanton ahead of Pyro. The first place we want to do it is in Grim Hex. We're planning to set that up as a neutral zone in the near future, so we'll see more of it then.

And we do have some settlements, I believe, with the Dusters faction in 3.23, where if you do encounter them, the AI are neutral to you. So you might have a delivery mission to that settlement; they won't attack you unless you attack them. So there is some small instance where, like Rick says, we're testing out that feature, and then it's really more of laying the groundwork for the future.

We just need more feedback on that feature as we continue to roll it out.

So sniper glint was basically our first proper foray into giving you some good feedback against someone who's using a sniper rifle. So this was actually a very low development cost feature that we wanted to basically try out. And it's not to say that there are other things we can't do later that might be better for the game that we're heading towards eventually. But this was something we wanted to try out purely because we start adding more and more systems into the game that lead us to this Death of a Spaceman kind of future, which for people who don't know is basically there's going to be more punishment through death. Death is going to be a very big deal. And if you have a moment where you die and there was nothing you could have done about it because you had no idea about what happened, that's where it becomes a big frustration. If I come and kill you with a shotgun, you probably could have heard me coming and you could have prepared for it and shot me. You see me as part of that process. Whereas when we start looking at shooting people over the massive distances that we have on our giant planets, if you dial in your scope right, you can shoot someone from over a kilometer away and you're not going to be able to see them. So it was our first attempt at looking at what kind of feedback we can start providing people to cut through some of that frustration. Now, there are other things that we can do in the future that I think support that as well. So looking at bigger muzzle flashes that you can see at longer distances, and improving our whiz-by system and hit reaction and feedback and things like that. Those are things we can work on, but they take a lot more time to get right. So ultimately, we want to play with the sniper glint system, see what people think, see what we think, dial it in more if we like it, or if we've decided it's not the ideal solution that we eventually want, we can always turn it off. It was very low cost, like I said. So ultimately, it's good that people are giving us feedback because it's going to inform us on how we want to move forward.

Well, first off, I think, the fact that we're working on a live game, the issue is that we should always be looking at, even if we've got a system that's out in the wild, evaluating it: does it deliver the gameplay that we want, that the community wants, that Chris wants? So when we looked at the combat as a whole, and we're talking a long time ago now, I was probably still on Star Citizen, it was probably pre-Squadron when we started talking about Master Modes. A lot of the combat that we saw across the broad spectrum of the community, not just the new players and not just the very well experienced players, but the broad spectrum, basically became jousting, and we felt that we could do better than that. Now, I know that there's a lot of discussion points around Master Modes where we're talking about lowering the ceiling cap. That was never the intention; that's not our inspiration. Our intention really is to try and create a system that is fair to use for all players, that allows players to come on and still feel like they can engage in the game and compete, but still reward the very best pilots. And Master Modes, the iteration that it is today, has been through probably 20, 25 iterations of different tweaks and changes, and we want to try this and we want to try this. And even the iteration that we're going live with in 3.23, that's not the end. That's just the beginning of that process. We will put it live. I already had a meeting literally this morning to discuss with Yogi spool times between SCM and NAV, or what are we going to do with snub fighters that don't have a quantum drive? Do they have a NAV mode? And I was like, well, yeah, they should do. So the expectation is that Master Modes came from the goal to try and improve the overall flight experience for both combat and non-combat in the game, so that if you want to be a space trucker, that's cool, you can switch in, or if you want to be a trader or a miner or combat. So it's about taking something and making it accessible to new players, that has a lot of depth for existing players to then take advantage of. And really, that was the inspiration. There's never really a moment in time where you start going, this is a problem, we just need to fix it. It's more about you evaluate these systems over a longer period of time and then start to think of solutions about how to improve it. And then those solutions grow and grow into a new system that you go, oh, this could be a solution that we could do. And with Master Modes, you mentioned all the times that we've talked about it, but we've also done several tests with the community before we've even got here, outside of just the 3.23 Evocati and PTU. We tested it in Arena Commander. We tested it with players a long time ago. So this is the result of a lot of effort and work by a lot of people to get it where we are now. And I believe in it. And now it's about getting it to the broader audience, and then we evaluate that feedback and we tweak it and tune it and get it to where we think it could be. Because I think you always have to change the foundation before you can start. You either have to do revolution or evolution. And I think with the previous system, the evolution wasn't going to give us what we wanted from the end result. So we had to go slightly back a bit to then go forward.

To be honest, I've been playing Master Modes for a long time in Squadron, getting a feel for it. Does it feel right? Sometimes you have to sit with a feature and play it and get the everyday scenario. You can't just take half an hour and go, oh yeah, it's approved. You have to play the game and play it for yourself in all the different scenarios and then make a judgment, and then get that feedback, and then we can tweak and improve.

I think the interesting thing as well is, because it's been going for quite a while and obviously we've been playing it internally a lot, we've had a lot of very passionate pilots, aces and pilots at the company, who at first felt averse to the change, like some people in the community are as well. But it's been amazing seeing them playing with it, spending time with it, and coming around on it and going, actually, this is really fun. I prefer this now. So it's been very cool seeing that process happen internally, and it's going to be interesting to see how it develops in SC as well.

Well, first off, we're evaluating all of the analytics that we get back. There's obviously the Issue Council reports that are very useful for us, that people go out of their way and spend their free time testing the game and working on the game for us and giving us the Issue Council reports that we take in. We also obviously have our own internal teams evaluating that. And the interaction lag itself seems to be linked to the network side of things, where the network is getting throttled, and it's essentially related to the RL and the server separation. So it's something that obviously we haven't experienced before in 3.22, but it's been very tricky to try and find out what is causing that problem. And one of the biggest things that we've seen that exacerbates that problem is when the server performance dips below a certain value; that's when it starts to back up. So there wasn't really any silver bullet. There never really is when it gets to things like performance. It's always death by a thousand cuts. So when we're looking at the interaction lag, we've had pretty much a lot of our top engineers from both the Core Technology Group and the gameplay side looking at performance improvements that we can do to basically mitigate the interaction lag as much as possible. And I think in the last EPTU or PTU that we went to previously, it was very minimal. Because obviously we catch all these reports; we have debugging in there that captures all of the data, and that debug actually creates performance problems for us because it slows down the performance. We don't get that debug in live. So we think we've got it, and we think we've done enough to make it so that we're not seeing it anymore in the PTU reports. There are obviously still certain bugs and things that might appear as interaction lag and are not interaction lag. And when you come to performance, it's never black and white, unless you find something like, oh, this ship is intercolliding with a wall and it's causing massive amounts of stalling. But the interaction lag was just one of those ones that was very difficult to track down. And fingers crossed, we think we have done that, but only time will tell.

Well, I don't want another 3.18, if that's the short answer. The long answer: you have to evaluate two points of view before we decide whether a patch should go live. I think the first point of view is the fact that you want to evaluate the gameplay experience. Have we made the gameplay better? Are the new features in there polished and working as intended? Are the existing features working? Have we lost anything from a previous patch cycle that we want to make sure is fully functioning? And that is a whole team-wide effort. That's not an individual person. That is from all the reports that we get. We then obviously canvas live QA. We have the player experience team. We have publishing. We have the development leadership. We're all playing it ourselves, getting a good sense of: is the quality of the game what we want it to be in terms of the gameplay experience, in terms of the features, when it works well? Then the other side of the coin, where it becomes trickier, is because we're an alpha product, we are releasing foundational technology into the game, into the wider audience. So for example, this one is the replication layer and the server split, which is the precursor to server meshing. 3.18 was another foundational moment, where we did persistent entity streaming. I don't believe it will be the same as 3.18 personally, but I'll soon find out. But when it comes to that foundational technology, similar to what I was discussing in terms of the interaction lag, when you put it to Evocati and then EPTU and PTU, we're only getting a fraction of concurrency compared to live. So when we're looking at some of the issues that are performance related and stability related, we might think we're golden, and then you go to a live audience and something else pops up that we're like, oh, this is a problem, we need to hotfix it, we need to evaluate it. We could spend the next two years just trying to get it to be absolutely bug free and then go live and it still have issues, because it's such foundational technology. It's not like we've bought something off the shelf and gone, slot it in, it works as intended, great. We're proving something out that's never been done before, or at least we've never done it before. So we need to make sure that when we're testing this, we test it as broad as possible. And then that is the balance between: okay, is the gameplay what we want it to be, but we might be introducing something that is potentially reducing stability or reducing performance. And when you look at reducing performance, that then has an impact on all the other things. So interaction lag, for example: people going up to doors and going, the doors are broken. Well, actually, no, that's just interaction lag. Your interaction's being backed up. Or the elevator's not working, or I'm stuck in my cockpit seat and I can't get out. It's not because your cockpit seat's broken. It's because the interaction was being absorbed and it was being queued in this giant queue trying to get through. So ultimately you have to look at all of these different parameters, the performance, the stability, the new technology that we need to test, and all of the gameplay side of things, and you have to make a judgement call about whether it's beneficial for us to put it into the live audience so that we can get as much feedback as possible, to then continue to work on it, to continue along the development pipeline towards where we ultimately want to be, which is: we've released server meshing, we can have servers that have got hundreds and thousands of players playing all together. So it's never as black and white as just, it's good enough, let's ship it. It's always about, okay, are we going to accept that we might run into more issues than we'd like to, but we need to do this to test this thing? And when we say testing a specific thing, it's also not about saying, oh, well, this issue was live on PTU. Sometimes that issue is live on PTU, but we don't know where it's coming from because it's so complex. That's the big one. And then it's like, well, we can keep putting speculative fixes in, and speculative fix and speculative fix, and optimize this area of the code and optimize this, and is it the networking? Is it the player interaction system? Is it game code? Sometimes you need to go broad to be able to find it, and I think that's where it's never as easy as it sounds.

I'm so happy you said that. That's the big thing that I think gets lost in the 'you should just let it cook' argument. It's that we can see this is broken, this is broken, this is broken. That's not the same as seeing the cause. And in order to find a solution, you have to find the cause. So we can see all these things, and we're looking at the same thing that our players are looking at, and see that, okay, that's broken, that's broken, that's broken. But we're not finding the root cause of it because concurrency is only at this level. So putting it on our live alpha environment, the big thing that environment can do for us, it stresses it to the point where now causes reveal themselves and solutions can be built.

Yes, exactly. And to be clear, we'd never push something out that was just broken across the board. We would never want to do that, because that would just be a poor experience. People would stop playing the game, and then we wouldn't get the concurrency for us to be able to find the issues. So we're always going to want to strike that balance: we are not a fully live, polished game. We are an alpha game, and we have to strike that balance with: we want to keep improving the game every patch so that people come to it and they enjoy the gameplay experience. I mean, that's my ultimate goal. But we still have these technology ambitions for us to be able to achieve the overall goal, and those are steps along the way, and this will be the same when we do server meshing. We will have scenarios with server meshing where it's such foundational technology that we will find things and we will fix them and fix them and fix them, but I can guarantee it right now, when we put server meshing live, we will find issues that either have been exacerbated by something or X, Y, Z. So that's just the nature of the beast.

I think from my perspective, and ultimately I was responsible for this, so this helps: go big or go home. I didn't want the transition of features from Squadron 42 into Star Citizen to take like 12 months. Because what it would have done is, first off, people have seen these features for a long time. And if we're spending six, eight, nine, twelve months getting them over into the game, I think it would have detracted away from all of the features that we want to add to Star Citizen. So I wanted to make sure, and I wanted to push the team, to deliver the features into Star Citizen in a good manner, so that we could then transition on to the features that are more specific to Star Citizen, like cargo, like resource network, like base building, the features that are not going to be in Squadron. So I wanted to make sure that we tried our best to have that be the shortest period of time possible. There's the old adage: if you've got four weeks, you'll take four weeks. And I wanted to make sure that we tried to get it in in as good a manner as possible so that we can start moving Star Citizen forward. And ultimately, that was my decision. I stand by that decision. That's the reason.

I think Tyler made a post on Spectrum yesterday about what our expectations of 2024 are, what we want to hit. We want 2024 to be a watershed year in the development of Star Citizen, with some pretty big milestones this year. So a big part of pursuing that goal is you've got to get all this Squadron stuff in there now, get it out of the way so you can start on the new stuff.

Absolutely. I needed to get that stuff done so that I can move on to the things that we want to add to the game this year that I think will start to define Star Citizen as a massively multiplayer online game.

I often say there's very little difference between the people who make Star Citizen and the people who play Star Citizen. I think sometimes we're just as anxious to get to the next thing, to get these features in, as our players are to play them.

Absolutely. When I look at Star Citizen itself, it's a concatenation of a lot of features and a lot of content. I want it to be a cohesive experience that is all tied together, and I want to get there as soon as possible. I want somebody to be able to play the game and understand all the things that they have available to them, and I want that to be a good onboarding experience, and then to have thousands of hours of gameplay and content for people to be able to play. Now don't get me wrong, we have a lot of gameplay already in the game, but it's in isolated pockets. It's like, if you want to just be a miner, great. You can go and do mining. You can do that loop. But I want the connections. I want the interwebbing. That's the difference between features and content and a game. And I want to push towards that as quickly as possible.

This one's me as well. So I played cargo. I loaded it up. I went through the flow. I went to my storage access. I requested all my personal gear. It was delivered to me. I then went to the ASOP terminal. I requested my ship. The ship came up on its ship elevator. I went down, and then I went to my freight elevator. And then I requested my goods, and we had some issues. And those issues have been resolved or are in the process of being resolved now. Ultimately I was able to step through those issues to be able to get to the point where I could get my cargo and then manually load my cargo up into the ship and then take off. If you look at cargo, nobody can play the game without going through cargo. It's a foundational feature. It's like inventory. It was a foundational feature. You can't play the game without interacting with the system. If you want to get a ship, you interact with the system. You want to get something from your inventory, you interact with the system. So we can't be in a position where we're releasing it in a state that is essentially golden from the get go. So we needed more time to be able to do that. And akin to what I just said, if you've got four weeks, you take four weeks. I didn't want to push it to the next patch. I didn't feel it was needed to get to the next patch. We are pushing hard to get it into a dot patch for the 3.23 cycle, and that is currently the intention, but we won't push it live until it is working and is infallible, because it's a core feature in the flow. It's the first thing you do. You wake up from your hab, go to your hangar and you get your ship. So it needs to be solid and it needs to be really good. So we just need to make sure that it is the best it can be before we push it live.

Hopefully Rich isn't next, because this is quite a quick answer if you wanted a break. So basically we're not doing a full reset, so your home location is as it was when you last set your character. When we do a full reset in future, that will give you an opportunity to choose a new home location. But I believe, and people will probably correct me if I'm wrong in the chat, you can use the character reset function on the website. But, and I'll look into the camera when I say this, this will mean that you lose everything that you've earned in game. So if that function is there and available, just be mindful when you actually use it, because you'll lose your UEC, you'll lose your bought ships in game and things like that. So if you are really desperate to choose a new home location, I believe that is an option that you can pick and choose.

So we'll just assume that's off the table, because you don't want to lose all your stuff.

Correct. I would wait or move your things manually to a new location.

So, not in 3.23. This question coming up actually spurred me on to go and investigate this more, to find out what was involved. We do actually, funnily enough, internally have Grim Hex as a developer location, so it's set up to be a home location for us, but there are potential knock-ons with that, so we can't just switch it on and assume everything's going to be okay. Because if you think about the landing zones, they're huge. They've got loads of facilities. Some of them are set up for the new player experience and things like that. Obviously Grim Hex is a much smaller, condensed location. You've also got the problem that if you start to leave the station, you're more than likely going to be around other people who are going to be ready and willing to shoot you. So if a new player then accidentally picks Grim Hex, not understanding the implications, that could be very frustrating. So there's a few things that I need to look into and chase, but it's something I want to do. So I think we can definitely do it in the future.

I mean, the three of us spent a lot of time working on Theaters of War. It's something we're very passionate about. We're excited to do things with AC, but the priority right now is Star Citizen. And one of the ways that we're leveraging Arena Commander is that it's a great testbed for some of the features that aren't quite ready for content. So something that may not be ready for an actual patch, but stuff that we want to test out, like resource networks, engineering, stuff that we can test in a specific game mode in Arena Commander and get some insights before we go full content with it in Star Citizen.

Well, hot off the press, I did have a conversation with Jens this morning about potentially, 'potential' is the specific word here, that we might use Arena Commander to validate the new spawn closets for FPS AI.

How's that going to manifest?

Well, we've never had PvE FPS in Arena Commander. There we go.

Yeah, so for us, it's a much more gradual process. There's not really one moment in time where it's like, is this thing ready or not? It's more of a constant review of how features are progressing. And we like to be very hands-on with the team and with the features. So typically, we will be playing the features regularly, individually, as a group or with the team that's actually making the feature, giving feedback, trying to harden it, and also at the same time evaluating where it's at. So there are several moments in time as we're going where there will be a point where we have to decide, is it ready or not? But there's no line in the sand necessarily where we go, this is definitely not going, or this is definitely going. There'll be points in the process, like we had to do with Cargo, where it's basically like, this is a core feature, it's not where we want it to be. At this moment in time, we want to push it a bit further out to make sure we've got the time available for it. But ultimately, as I say, the process has changed for us in that there used to be more one date, everyone's working towards that date. We are constantly trying to be on the ball with all of these individual features and knowing exactly where they're at and if we're happy with them.

Well, for Cargo, it was... You came to me on the day of ISC and were like, is it in 3.23.0 or is it in a .x? And I was like, I'm still deciding.

You want to air the laundry? Okay. So the day that our cargo episode was supposed to air, or did air, was the day of the go/no-go. So I had two versions of hosting, as we often do: one where it's still targeting 3.23, and one where it's not going to be in 3.23, it's going to be in 3.23.x. And you might remember we were so good this season about getting all our episodes out at 8 a.m. Pacific on the dot, because we moved editorial over here and we've done a lot of structural improvements thanks to David and Tom over there, who've made things a lot better. We had a great streak going of every episode right there at eight. And then I was like, well, what version do we put out? And he's literally in there surrounded by everybody playing it. That whole story he's telling you, playing it, going through. And I'm just pacing out behind, breathing on the window. Which version? Just to see whether it gets the go or no-go. And it was: we still don't know yet. We're going to give them another two weeks, and then we're going to make the hard call. So it was like, all right, so we go with what we call the truth in the moment. The truth in that moment is that it was still targeted for 3.23, so we go out.

And I wanted to give the team every opportunity to be able to get it into the game. But it needed to pass a certain level of quality bar to get in there. And ultimately, they didn't manage to do that. And that was the decision I had to make.

Well, Pyro is a good one. Ultimately, I want bad guys. I don't think bad guys are always the bad guys. If you're a pirate, you might have moral motivations. But essentially, we want gameplay to be associated with areas that are lawful and unlawful. So obviously in Stanton, there should be a greater risk and greater reward for you being able to pirate, but then you're going to run into the issues that the question alludes to: you get a CrimeStat, you're going to be hunted down. So when we start to have Pyro, and we start to develop those systems, and we start to develop the gameplay between multiple systems as well, we want Pyro to offer lots of opportunity for players to be able to roleplay as a pirate or a gang member, or they will have the opportunity to work more in the shadows, more like organized crime. So for example, you can then go into a lawful zone as an organized criminal and be able to perform more criminal activities, but from the shadows. So the expectation is that we want to create gameplay loops, and we've actually discussed those internally, they're planned out, and have guilds that you can join that offer unlawful activities. And at the start you might just be a thug with a ship, but by the end of it you might be John Wick. So it's about having that progression within the game. And the other side of things is piracy or unlawful gameplay doesn't always have to be against lawful players. And that's something where in Stanton right now, if you want to go and be a pirate, you have to pirate the people who don't necessarily want to be pirated, right? And that always leads to a winner and a loser. And I think when you're looking at a game, and this has come up a lot in Stanton: are we a PvE game or a PvP game? From my perspective, we're both. And I want to create loops that support both. And that means on the PvP or the piracy side, where you want to become a pirate, I want to offer you to be able to pirate PvE and AI players, or should I say AI agents, and obviously players, but I also want to provide activities within Pyro that are beneficial, that force you against other pirates as well, so that you can have really cool, engaging PvP combat against people who want to have really cool, engaging PvP combat. And that means putting systems in place so that, A, you can find where that is, and bringing people to areas where they know it's going to happen. So there are definitely lots of plans for both bad guys and PvP and lawful guys and lawful PvP. So I think the first aspect, though, is that we need more than one system that is just fully policed by the Advocacy or the UEE. We need to have systems where it's more appropriate.

I think there should be a lot. Obviously, if you want to be a solo player, just because we're a massively multiplayer online game shouldn't preclude you from playing solo. I've played many MMOs where I've just played by myself and got through to the end game. There will obviously be certain prerequisites as you move towards the larger goals in the game that are going to make it difficult for you to achieve as a solo player. For example, if you wanted to try and earn an Idris in the game, and earning reputation to be able to figure out how to manufacture your own Idris, and then you need to go and gather all the resources to be able to do that, that is a very large initiative. Almost to the point where, when you actually even have that Idris, you're going to need multiple people to fly it proficiently. So I think that doesn't mean that there is not going to be a large amount of content that is achievable by solo players, that they'll be able to have enjoyment in, from combat to trading, to mining, to salvage, to all the other aspects of gameplay that we want to be. If you want to be a farmer, you can go and be a farmer, right? But the expectation is that we are a massively multiplayer online game. We will have a large amount of content that is available to solo players. But that does mean there will be some content that is easier to achieve with more than one player.

We're not putting hard limits on. You can always try and do it yourself. You can get all the materials for an Idris. You can build it yourself. In fact, in the future, we've talked about the possibility of being able to hire NPCs to help you fly your ship and stuff like that. That's probably far down the road, but it's something we want to do to enable that kind of gameplay.

So night vision. So I've got some good news. I saw and was playing with night vision on weapon optics yesterday. So we have got it to a point where we can put them on the optic lenses using our new optic tech that came in with 3.23. This is not to say that this is coming out with 3.23, to be very clear, but it does mean that we can look to a fairly close release whenever we feel like we can get the content out to people, so people can actually start using these. And it works: it exposes more light when you're on the dark side of a planet, so you can actually look around and see what you're trying to shoot. And it's a little bit more uncomfortable to look around in a well-lit environment, kind of as you'd expect. So that's the good news. The slightly less good news is that I know people are probably going to start asking when can we get it on visors and ship cockpits and things like that. The answer there is we need to assign some more time to it. It's a bit more complex. The new optic system gave us a really good opportunity to play with some of those settings, but the visors and the cockpits aren't set up in the same way as those. So it's something that we're going to start looking into and finding where we can fit it in the roadmap, because we definitely do want to provide that for people. But we've got some design questions to answer first and some engineering to do as well.

Two things to add to that. One is that we've broken the back of getting it working, so now it's more of just a content and scheduling problem rather than a technical problem, which is great. And it is really good, by the way. And the one thing is that I want to make sure that everyone's clear: it's not true night vision, it's light enhancement. So when you're looking at something, even though it's on the dark side of the moon, you still get a very good clear picture, you can still call things out, but it's not what you'd imagine as stereotypical night vision.

It's like upping the exposure on a camera.

The difference between projecting a light, like an infrared light, and seeing the red infrared light, versus just amplifying the light that's already there, like starlight.

So from the player's perspective, it will give them what they want: they can see, and they'll be able to pick things out in the darkness. But I just want to clarify, that's what we're working towards, because that's a more achievable solution for us. It still gives us what we want. And like JJ said, we do want to then propagate that to the visors.