The narrative team explains how lore and design feed each other, using Stanton, Orison and the 3.19 salvage missions as examples. They cover the Galactopedia, the Xi'an and Banu languages, the Nine Tails and XenoThreat, Pyro's factions, and Tessa Bannister.
TL;DRIt is usually a mix: established lore gives designers a loose framework to build from, leaving artists room to be creative, while new mission ideas are sometimes fitted into the universe afterwards.
I'll kick it off. Basically, it's usually a little bit of both. Because we've been building the lore of the universe so expansively for the past 10 years, there's a lot of stuff that we've already established, so sometimes it's about taking something like that and the designers finally getting around to building it, so they're working off of a loose narrative framework of what a planet was intended to be or conceived of or something like that, and then they use that as a launching place. And then of course we work with them, because one of the things that we've always been trying to do is be very cryptic, as far as trying to infer tone or characters as opposed to specifics. So we give the artists the ability to be creative and apply their skills to it to make it even better. So usually it'll be like, hey, we're going to build this planet. Here's the established lore for it. Here's what we were sort of thinking, and then working with them. And then sometimes it is, hey, we've got this new mission idea that we want to do. How can we incorporate it into the universe or location or whatever?
TL;DRExamples include the Stanton system and Orison, which began as narrative seeds, and a racing organisation that began as a design request, with scope the main constraint rather than where ideas start.
I mean, Stanton system. What's interesting is a lot of the location stuff on a high level begins with the seeds that we planted, or Dave specifically planted, a decade ago, where: what is the system? What is the scale of the system? What are these four worlds? And of course, we do iterations on that, and once we plant that seed, art and design get their hands on it and make it better. And then we go back and we make sure that the narrative matches the final product. So I think that's the biggest impact. Arriving on the cloud city of Orison, that was a narrative idea of a cool location that would be fun to go visit. It's pretty awesome getting to see those ideas realized and being able to experience them as a player in the game. And then Jeremy can talk about it, recently Wildstar Racing, the org behind the racing. I guess it technically started as a design request because they're like, we need a racing org. But what they are and what they do, that was all Jeremy working on that.
Yeah, I mean, there's areas where we're still trying to develop a lot of the gameplay infrastructure for things that people want to see in the game. Salvage is another great example. But what I've found in my experience is the teams are just really collaborative. And so though there might be a mandate that starts from design, everyone's very open to talking about how that can be elaborated upon. And I think the biggest constraint is less where do the ideas start and more what do we have the ability to execute on in terms of scope management. And so Salvage and Racing both had contributions where, on those missions in particular, I was doing a lot of the writing and got to work really closely with those designers to integrate the lore and the design and make sure that they each supported each other.
Yeah, I mean, I think usually it starts off with a meeting of some kind, which I know everyone in the community loves so much. But once we've had an opportunity to sync and see what they're thinking from a design standpoint, it's about looking at the lore we have that's already established and saying what exists that can support it. And if there are opportunities within that, then we try to build upon that, with either the mission premises that design has already come up with or by suggesting new mission premises within the scope of that activity, like salvage, which grew in that process.
TL;DRThe team added a mission giver for salvage missions, a new lawful salvage organization and a new outlaw group that sells salvage-location rights, with more salvage mission types hoped for.
Yeah, so the introduction of the mission giver mission into that. We've been doing a lot of work to just be really on top of which mission givers could use additional content. We're going to get to do a lot of stuff with salvage, particularly in this case. If someone else wants to take it, I feel weird being in the spotlight.
I mean, one interesting thing that I think we worked on between narrative and design is this idea of these early missions as salvaging is matured, because it's still a tier zero, newer system, not fully as robust as where we want it to go eventually. We were talking to them about, all right, what is the end of the mission? Are the players returning the recycled material composite? And that was feeling sort of weird, in that why would this mission giver care about collecting a big pile of scrap material? And so then it sort of evolved through our conversations with them into, oh, maybe they're selling you the rights to a location. And so the missions themselves are more like buying the rights to the location of a ship for you to salvage. Whereas, of course, players can go out and find their own salvage. But sometimes it simplifies it: if you're willing to drop some credits, we'll give you an exact location of a ship totally ripe for collecting materials, and you get to keep all the profits after that. So that was something that had a little bit of back and forth that we helped influence, of trying to figure out why is this organization offering this mission? What do they want out of it? Does this make sense? And often we tweak stuff with them where they have multiple possible paths and we hone in on what feels best and what makes the most sense.
In that process, we ended up creating a new organization, Adagio, to handle more of the lawful salvage. And when we were figuring out new opportunities, we assigned the new mission giver salvage mission to Clovis Darneely, who will be handling that. And just breaking down, I know when MFT was on here, they talked about the three different kinds of salvage missions that there are, but there's going to be more than just those three that we're building and working towards, and hopefully salvage will continue to develop beyond that, just because it's a really fun gameplay loop and it has a ton of cool opportunities. I mean, just the introduction of the soft death mechanics, I think, does fundamentally change things in the verse. And so seeing that supported with narrative mission content and procedural mission content, I think, is really exciting to me.
There's also the introduction of the new outlaw group, the Tar Pits, coming in, where they have a fun little backstory. TAR stands for Tow and Rescue, and they're known for using fake tow ships to trick people and attack them or steal their ship when they're pretending to be a tow company. And so they're basically selling you salvage rights locations because they have too much work on their hands. They can't handle it all themselves. And so they're giving you an opportunity to buy one off them, kind of thing. And there's more risk in the locations they sell and stuff like that. So it's interesting.
So not only do we have players using service beacons to lure and trap people, now we have NPC organizations that are like, yeah, we're coming to help you, and we're not.
TL;DRBesides the spray paint, throwaway details from commercial scripts, like the Banu cube and the Tevarin-style helmet, became real in-game items after people wanted them.
I mean, yeah, so that's a good example of something like that, where we wanted to get that into the game, and that was originally pitched as something that would be fun to put in as just a visual thing you could find once it happened in the series. And they made it happen, which is really cool, and that was super fun. There's some other times that it's happened more accidentally, which is a funny kind of weird thing. Take for example the Banu Defender commercial a few years back for that ship. I wrote the script for that and included in it a sort of MacGuffin piece of alien tech that the woman in it picks up and it kind of glows or whatever. And it was really just meant to be like, ooh, we're in an alien environment with things that they don't understand. And props came up with this weird little cube, and it was really just a throwaway thing in this commercial to establish tone. And then they eventually made it as a real prop in the game, because people loved it or something. It was like people demanded that we be able to have the Banu cube. It exists in real life now. That's really crazy, that it's come full circle from something that was totally tossed off in a script. And similarly, in the Tevarin Prowler commercial, in the original script there were supposed to be these mercenaries whose face masks were painted as sort of vaguely avian, bird-like, almost skull-like. And it was, again, just supposed to be a flavor detail, because the Tevarin are these bird-type aliens, and it was meant to just be evocative of that. But characters came up with a really cool-looking helmet. They took it and ran. Instead of just having a decal, they created an entirely new thing that then everybody was like, oh, well, we want that. Everybody's going to want that. So we actually made it as an armor and then had to come up with lore retroactively for why. And then we had to literally come up with some lore for what company put that out and why they did it, because, again, something that was meant as just flavor in a commercial then became a real life thing in the game and in the world of the game. So these things can come from accidents and then end up in the game, or things that we generate as background details then become fully fleshed out things.
TL;DRA typical week starts with a Monday stand-up, then members tackle varied requests independently and escalate reviews, and ends with a weekly hour-long narrative jam; no week is really standard.
It's a shame Blythe isn't here. She would be able to walk you through it step by step. I mean, usually, a standard week, we kick off on Monday mornings with a stand-up meeting with everybody, talk through what current tasks are on the docket, if there are any major priorities, if anyone's been working on anything that has got blockers or issues that have come up, talk about their goals for the week and stuff like that. And then that ends with a fight club. But basically, we will assign tasks. Again, we have a lot of different requests coming in, covering a lot of different topics, as everyone's been saying. So it can be a bunch of item descriptions, proposals for mission types, new organizations, rep charts, scripts, meetings with design to talk over level reviews, stuff like that. So one of the fun things about this job is that there's no such thing as a standard week. You're always getting weird curveballs, and there's unusual things to be working on, and you switch up your mindset and stuff like that, which can be a blessing and a curse at times. It certainly doesn't get boring. But then everyone just goes off and starts tackling the things that they were looking to tackle. And we will source each other if we need to, and reviews move up the chain. So we do rewrites and iterations, and if it requires things with the outside teams, or dependencies, or stakeholders, we'll have those meetings. By the end of the week, we usually have a thing called our weekly narrative jam, where it's an opportunity, a scheduled hour-long meeting where we can bring the entire brain trust together. And so if people have questions that they want to put to the entire group, like: hey, does mustard exist? And if mustard does exist, what kind of mustard is it? Have we finally kicked spicy mustard to the curb? Are we finally embracing yellow mustard for the great condiment that it is? That type of thing. And then talking it out. Or it just becomes an opportunity for everybody to hang out and talk movies and exchange memes, stuff like that.
TL;DRThe lore posts began as a way to bring people into the world and later helped designers and artists, with hopes to bring some of them into the game, though porting is a lot of work.
Yeah, that was an initiative that Dave started with basically the Time Capsule series in the run-up to the initial crowdfunding campaign, just as a way to bring people into the world, to show them the type of world we were thinking of building and highlight some elements of it. And it just kept going for years and years as the game was being built, because we found that if there were certain aspects of the game that weren't ready to be experienced, being able to tell stories or show these different shows and these different viewpoints of the verse would help fill out the world for the players. But also, as we discussed earlier, for designers and artists that were also working on the game. To circle back around to your earlier question, there are times when a designer or a character artist would come to us and say, hey, I'm about to work on this. What have you established? What can I read? And then we'd have this backlog of material we'd be able to feed them, which would then help them do their job, or at least put them in a certain direction. So we just found it was a really fun way to get people into the world, to introduce it for them. And this extended into Jump Point, into the lore pieces that we have there, the different adverts for some of the subscriber items that were always in Jump Point. Whenever we had a chance to just make the world seem alive from different angles, we decided to do it that way. So whether it's an SET, which is a fake TV talk show, or a TV talk show in that current age, or whether it's Parker Terrell and the Plain Truth spitting conspiracy theories about the future, or a news post, it was always a really fun and interesting way to dip into the world and to show people our intention for it. So while it's not tactile in game, we will hopefully bring some of those posts into the game. It's a lot of work to be able to port all that stuff over, but it still exists in the framework of the wider Star Citizen universe. So it's just a part of our job to help fill it in and add that color where we can.
I don't really think of the Galactopedia as an out-of-game project. It's the first place it's showing up, but that was 100% written because we want the Galactopedia as an in-game asset. So that is still being actively pursued; that is our goal. But in the meanwhile, while we're working on that: the Galactopedia is our in-lore encyclopedia. It's a collection of articles about a lot of different topics that you can imagine in the universe, from important people to companies to locations. So it's all in there, housed in-lore at the Ark, which is a large repository of knowledge created with the goal of collecting not only humanity's knowledge, but also the Banu's, and to borrow knowledge from across the universe.
TL;DRAlien languages make alien civilizations feel real and believable, opening possibilities like environmental storytelling, though how a player's understanding might help is still being figured out and learning them isn't meant to be required.
They're fun. They're complicated. I think it was just that thing of, again, with a lot of the initiatives that we try to do, it didn't feel right to just have aliens and they're just doing weird garbled nonsense. We wanted that level of immersiveness of, this is a civilization, and one that players are going to have interactions with, and again, make it feel like it's real and believable. Working with Britton, our xenolinguist, to develop it opens up a lot of really interesting possibilities, from environmental storytelling to interactions in our environments, looking for opportunities where a player's understanding of a language might give them an edge. Again, we're still trying to figure this stuff out, so it's not necessarily like you have to learn a new language in order to benefit, because I barely struggle with English, but opportunities where it gives you just a little bit of insight or a little bit more character or backstory or something like that. It just makes it feel like it's a real living world if we actually spent the time. And working with Britton has been amazing, because he's so incredibly talented when it comes to constructing these things, in insanely detailed ways, making them feel, from a linguist's perspective, not human. For me, one of the details that was really, really exciting about it was the fact that if someone understands language and how language is constructed, he was trying to build these in a way where they would look at it and be able to see fragments of human language built into it, but it didn't feel like a human language, which I thought was a really cool approach.
TL;DRXi'an and Banu have been released as community guides, while ancient Tevarin and Vanduul languages are also in development, with less public detail so far.
Xi'an and Banu have been released as guides to the community, in the form of the Rust Society Guide to Banu, which is a really wonderful document for diving into the culture. And touching on what Dave said, developing these languages has really allowed us to think about these species in ways that we wouldn't have, just coming at it from our more gameplay mindset, or even creating a full verse and talking about politics and stuff. Britton a lot of times, for his language development, needs to know details that we wouldn't really dedicate time to, like, can Banu choke on something? That was a question, because he was going down this word development and was wondering, would he borrow humans' word for choking, or would they have their own word because they choke on stuff all the time? Like, okay, sure, let's have a fun 15-minute conversation about this. So that's been great. And then, not as public so far, we are developing additional languages for ancient Tevarin, which in the lore was used pre the first two Tevarin wars and fell out of favor and has recently been having a bit of a cultural resurgence, as among the Tevarin there's been a growing movement to reconnect with their cultural past. And then also, of course, the Vanduul is being worked on.
That Rust Society guide has a pretty extensive Banu language dictionary in there already. It's not completely filled out, but it's become a great resource for us, because as we develop and release more Banu items like knives or weapons or ships, we'll often refer to that dictionary as a source of inspiration for what a name might be or things like that. And that document is extremely long, and a lot of it is cultural, just to give you an idea of who the species is, like Will was saying. And then there are just pages and pages of literal translations, and sometimes going through and just seeing, and this is where Britton's brilliance is, a word, what it's related to or how it ties in there. So that I think gives an insight into the species. So yeah, it's very informative and very interesting.
TL;DRStanton is a divided corporatocracy of megacorporation-owned planets, poorly governed by those companies, with growing discontent among residents and criminals exploiting the limited lawful presence.
Sure, yeah. So the Stanton system is kind of a divided corporatocracy, where all the major planets are owned by megacorporations after having purchased the rights to these planets and kicked out some illegal settlers and all that. They've taken these planets and turned them into HQs for their companies that also work as full cities with governments, and as you might expect, a lot of these companies aren't great at being governments. They're not necessarily doing the best job, and so within that you have a lot of discontent brewing amongst different parts of the populace for various reasons, as well as a lot of criminals encroaching, whether from nearby unlawful systems or just within Stanton itself, where there's not yet a massive lawful presence as the companies are figuring all this out, trying to take advantage of the opportunities and the commerce that's available to be pirated, stolen, etc., that's all transiting through that system.
TL;DRTessa Bannister is still on the team's minds and a plan to bring her back exists, but nothing concrete can be shared yet and she is in the backlog.
I mean, she's still there. I talk to her all the time. Did you all just upset her in some way? She doesn't want to talk to you anymore? She is still very much on our minds. Matt, you have some feelings.
M
MattNarrative Designer
There have been conversations about Tessa. As someone who played the game back in the 2.x days, I think it goes without saying I'm excited to see her back. We're talking with the other teams about what would be the best way to do that. So we don't have anything concrete to tell you yet, but we all know we want her back. We know you guys want her back. So I know it's not the answer everyone wants to hear, but there is a plan.
I mean, there were some technical things involved with the decision to remove her in the first place. And then it's always that we have the same bucket of people working on a bunch of stuff, and where does Tessa fall into their schedules? Because missions have come a long way, and there's refactoring and adding new stuff and really making her the character we want her to be in the game. So it's not as simple as flipping a switch back on in order to get her in the game again. So it's taking us some time. We have it in the backlog, and hopefully she'll be slowly moving into the pipe till we get to her.
What the Nine Tails want is a bit unknown at this point. But yeah, there's a portfolio on them, where they started off as a for-hire gang that was out there pulling big jobs in other parts of the UEE, and for some reason decided to settle at Grim HEX station and take it over and take full command of it, and focus all their efforts in and around the Stanton system at this point. So the reason behind that decision, or what's going on with that, is still up in the air, but they're causing a lot of headaches when it comes to the Stanton system in general, because Grim HEX is technically in the control of Crusader, and they don't necessarily have the best security protocols or desire to do it. But with it obviously being a quick QT to any other place in the system, it's easy for them to go hit another planet, hit their infrastructure, hit their shipping lanes, and then just duck back to Grim HEX, where Crusader doesn't seem to want to do a full-on assault on their own, and the other corporate entities in the system don't seem to have the muster to get together to try to take on the problem. And the UEE is like, hey man, we sold you guys this system. It's your job to keep it clean. So the UEE doesn't want to get involved. So they're sitting in this nice little gray zone, just causing trouble for some reason.
And in recent times, the UEE has been approving the CDF, the Civilian Defense Force, to deputize people to help out with the Nine Tails. But that's always kind of a reactionary measure of, this is an immediate threat, so we need all these hands on deck to help deal with that security situation. Whereas the idea of, oh, why don't we stage a massive assault on a full station full of people and evict them, is a different matter entirely. So it's kind of: how do you deal with this known encampment that's at Grim HEX station?
A little bit. Crusader is the main sphere of influence. There's other gangs that we're slowly hoping to introduce and see more of as we expand content. We have the Dusters, who are a gang who specialize more in the high-end ore theft, like raiding other people's claims, doing illegal processing, that kind of stuff. We just talked about the Tar Pits earlier. We have the Nova Riders. There's also, in Hurston, the Hurston Workers United, who are trying to struggle for labor rights but are deemed outlaws because Hurston doesn't like what their message is. So I think we're trying to get a variety, but the Nine Tails definitely have one of the larger influences across the system, even with their focus on Crusader.
TL;DRPyro is a lawless system unclaimed by the UEE and torn by gang civil war, meant to contrast with lawful Stanton through a shifting power structure with big gameplay implications.
So Pyro is going to be an interesting addition to the game in general. Basically, at its core, Pyro is a lawless system, so it is technically unclaimed by the UEE, which is our reigning human government body. And it got its name from the idea that the star at the center of it is very unstable, and so it is a kind of unpleasant place to live. That's why the UEE basically deemed it as, we don't really care about it, let people mine it for a bit and exploit it, but with no intention of settling the planets. With that vacuum of authority, it became a place for criminals, outlaws, people who were trying to live off the grid or away from the UEE, and it sort of became just a lawless place. So the idea that it's introducing to the game, which is very exciting and the source of a lot of meetings and conversations, is: this is a lawless place and Stanton is a lawful place. It has massive gameplay implications for a lot of things, as far as infrastructure and missions and who's there and what the reputations are and what carries over, what doesn't, stuff like that. So it's going to be an awesome place to wander around, but that's a lot to process. But the core of it is basically that because it's a lawless place, it's in constant civil war among several of the reigning gangs in the system. And the hope, the ultimate dream of it, was that you would see that power struggle going on. So as compared to Stanton, this was a place that had a shifting power structure. So XenoThreat might be in charge one month or six months or one year, and then the Headhunters might be in charge because they take control of it. And so you see that power dynamic change in the system, which for me has always been one of the most exciting aspects of it.
TL;DRNot everyone in Pyro is bad: they discussed a neutral faction of people just trying to live, plus possibly an org instilling law, and some people want to avoid UEE rule.
Yeah, I mean, that's actually been one of the conversations: what is the draw for the lawful characters that want to go there? One of the things we've been talking about is a new org that would be trying to instill law in Pyro. But the bigger one would be a group that I nicknamed the Survivors, which are a neutral faction within it. They're not outlaws or criminals, they're just trying to eke out a living and not bother anybody. And the idea being that if I'm going out there as a lawful player, this would be the faction that I would probably align myself closest with. They're not trying to cause trouble, but they will have jobs for people to do and stuff like that. And the idea is that they're networked over a bunch of different worlds, so you can have a presence.
Yeah, because there are members of humanity who don't want to live under the UEE's rule, and there's still opportunities and money to be made in the Pyro system. We've identified on the narrative side these historical waves of interest in the Pyro system. First discovery of the system, and Pyrotechnic Amalgamated moving out there trying to get as many resources. And then a big push when shield technology proved it was all of a sudden safer to fly in Pyro, closer to the flare star, and that brought in more people. And the discovery of new systems that connect to Pyro has brought with it a new wave of interest, people looking to get the resources there and make profits in that system. And when the Stanton system really kicked off, all of a sudden there was another renewed interest, because the Stanton system is an economic powerhouse in the universe. And so how did that affect Pyro? And so I think there's all these individuals who end up in Pyro for various reasons, who do just want a life, who want to be left alone, who want to make their way as best they can. So hopefully the players will be looking either to help them out or severely take advantage of them and make their lives a living hell. So we'll see what they want to do.
That's the hope. I mean, they're a kind of political terrorist organization based out of Pyro. So the idea is that hopefully you'll be able to hit them. They've been launching attacks in Stanton to push their anti-corporate, anti-alien rhetoric, hoping to spark a revolution among the people against the UEE. But yeah, hopefully there'll be a point where we can hit them at home.
TL;DRThe team says lore changes with the game's needs, such as making Pyro's worlds less harsh for gameplay, and tries to avoid retcons but sometimes finds them unavoidable.
I mean, that is how it goes. We don't want to be a team who digs in our feet and says, well, we wrote this paragraph six years ago, so it has to be this way. Especially because our goal, just like a lot of the other teams, is to have the most fun gameplay we can. So our narrative is always in service to making the game fun. And so with Pyro, we've talked about this a little bit, but it turns out that it's more fun for some of these worlds to be slightly less harsh than we had originally envisioned, being a little more forgiving environmentally so that some of our other gameplay systems can exist there. So we're looking at adjusting those original write-ups. A lot of how harsh the system was had to do with our very original idea that landing zones were going to be fairly limited, and of course over time the amazing Planet Tech team has come in and created all these fun sandbox environments. We want to be able to take advantage of those. So we still want to have those harsh environments. We still want worlds where you go there and you have about 10 minutes before your health systems are going to kick in and start killing you. But we also want to scale back the other side of it and have areas where players can do missions more on the surface than we originally thought. And we're also coming up with in-between ways, like, are there ways for outposts to survive on these really harsh worlds, and talking about that with the design teams and expanding those systems. And on the subject of retcons, we always do try to avoid retconning when we can. Regen tech is a good example, where we introduced it as a change that was happening for the characters in the universe. But sometimes, when it's like the temperature of the planet, we weigh it: is this something that happened now? Is this a new development? Or is this how it has always been, and we need to do a retcon and have it be that the old facts never existed? So we try to avoid that when we can, but a lot of times it's unavoidable and that's just the simplest solution to go forward.
Just to also say, we do really appreciate everyone reading this material and learning it and becoming invested in these write-ups. That's what we were trying to do, spark your imagination and make you excited about this stuff. So I know it can be difficult when you're learning and trying to get a sense of what Star Citizen is, and then we shift something and you have to relearn it. So we don't take these changes lightly, and we do appreciate your investment and passion for it, and always pointing out the inconsistencies that develop over time, and we try to address those where we can. We've talked about this before, but anytime we write anything, it takes like an hour of research, going through our history and consolidating all our facts. And that's a big part of our team's job, trying to ensure a consistent history to the project. And so we appreciate the community's help in saying, hey, this year doesn't make any sense, the system wouldn't have been discovered yet. And we're like, oh yeah, we totally missed that. Thank you.