Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamSo actually it's two reasons. So one is the restructure that will happen next year. So meeting the folks that come over from the Squadron team and get to know them, because they were working closely with me on the PU. And the second, more important for the community, is actually the release or the soon-to-be-released Structural Salvage, because we have our go/no-go at the end of the week, and because of the importance of the feature, we decided it would make sense to come over and help the team to get it ready.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamSo the first thing is that soft death is a bit of a temporary solution. We don't have the full damage penetration. We showed a placeholder for it at CitizenCon. I think everybody saw the Maelstrom presentation with the ships breaking apart. So that's going to be part of it. What we right now have for soft death eventually will be more of a systemic thing, in that some ships, if they kill your power plant or they kill all your relays or you have a very bad crash landing and you no longer have wings, or your ship is no longer able to fly or to move under its own power, there will be some degree of repairs you can do manually if you get spare parts or you've got engineers working on it. But as you mentioned, the SRV is also the solution when that ship cannot fly. There's no way to repair it in the field. You just tow it back to a base and do the regular repairs there.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunitySo right now we have this soft death. The entire thing doesn't just destroy, it just becomes kind of a potentially useless hulk. But with the SRV, we'll now be able to grab it with a tractor beam and pull it back to a repair station and get it repaired instead of waiting for the insurance payout.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamThe repair isn't in yet, so you will be able to move it, but repairing, we didn't prepare it for that yet, so there are no drop-off points yet with the SRV. But for the future, that will be the case, that you have the dedicated drop-off points where you can then fix the ships that you cannot repair on site anymore, especially the bigger ships, because there's the concept of size one and size two ship items you can replace, right? You can pull them out with a tractor beam and pull something or push something back in, whereas with the bigger items, size three and upwards, you cannot remove them, so if they are destroyed, you lost them, and then you need to bring the ship that is now dead in the water into the hangar and have it repaired there.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamSo it will be harder, but it will only be harder if you have a ship that already has a certain age. So if you have your brand new ship that you just pulled out of your hangar for the first time, the wear and tear is non-existent on it. So that means that there is no maintenance required. So if you prepare the energy management on the ship, no matter how big the ship is, you can fly it on your own. But does it really make sense? Because then you are suddenly on the move, then you might get attacked. So parts will get destroyed on your way. That will result in, yeah, you from the pilot seat have to get up and then walk over to those destroyed pieces and repair them. So yes, you can do it, but it will be a real pain to actually maintain your ship.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamAnd that was always very important to us, that we make sure that we don't block away the content for players that really would like to fly out their ship. And it works. They can travel from A to B, and if they avoid combat and if they make sure that they maintain it when they have the time to actually maintain it and bring down the wear and tear again, sure, it will run smoothly, like with fresh cars, right? So you can also have a fresh car that just doesn't break that easily.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, and it also comes down to the difference between single fighters or any ships with interiors. If you're in a fighter, you lose a component, well, that's it. Your wing is gone. You cannot stop and attach it again. Or, well, any of your internal components get hit, you are dead. When you're with a multi-crew ship, you can just take that damage and accept that you no longer have shield generators. The difference, obviously, is if you have a crew, they can put out fires, they can really mitigate that damage or find solutions for stuff that, if you are solo, well, it's going to be more complicated. But again, the ship works. It's not like we're going to purposefully make multi-crew ships bad. If anything, it's kind of the opposite. A multi-crew ship with a crew ends up being more survivable, more effective, because, again, it has all its redundancies. If it's on fire, you can put it out. If there's a missing component, you can replace it, which is something you don't get.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityIt's building an effective baseline for a single player and then finding ways to improve the experience by adding friends.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamYeah. I mean, it's going to be the same if we're talking about turrets. Obviously, you have friends in the turrets, well, you can shoot better because you actually have access to those guns. Or if you get boarded, you have more friends inside. Well, again, that's also a plus.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamSo there were plans for having more bespoke repair, but that will not be part of the initial release. We will just go for the simple solution first, and then we will observe how that is actually perceived by the community. And if there is the necessity to actually make it more complex or more bespoke per item, then sure, we will think about that. But for now, it is really a very simple repair mechanic for the items. And then we will see, because what we don't want to do is that you need to read a handbook to actually understand, okay, what item do I actually need? What resistor do I need? What capacity? It doesn't make sense that we have to make people study our game to actually be able to play it. So it's still a game. We are a simulation-driven game, so we want to tailor to that, but we really want this feature also to be out, so we don't want to overcomplicate it and then block the release of it.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamThough that applies to actually repairing the item with the beam. Obviously you still have the damage control of the whole ship, which involves, you can have fires, you can have bad atmosphere, you can have actual loss of atmosphere or toxic atmosphere due to a fire, or you could also have relays being knocked out and you need to figure out which items to turn off or turn on to compensate and keep fighting as well as you can until somebody can repair that. So there is already a degree of complexity to the damage handling. But yeah, the main thing is going to be, right now, for repairing, just the beam, and we'll see.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamBut actually, you mentioned that we already have some items that need bespoke repair. So we have the fuses for the relay that need to be exchanged. So that is a type of repair. We also have life support, that is its own type of complexity, with the scrubbers that you need to exchange, because at some point they will deplete. So this is also something that can be counted as maintenance or repair in this regard. Then, like Guillermo just said, fire is its own danger. So that is definitely something that has a bespoke counter to it, which is the extinguisher or even venting the rooms. So there are some things that are already a bit more complex in comparison to what we showed at CitizenCon, repairing the power plant, which is you use the beam to repair it. But yeah, as said, we have already a lot of complexity, and well, I wouldn't say that our team is the best in handling multi-crew gameplay, but we try to be good, and it's really hard to manage. Even with the amount of people that we had on the ship, you saw us fail in the CitizenCon demo. We blew up. That wasn't intentional, that we blew up. We wanted to have a nice success at the end of the demo, but I was like, yeah, okay, let's leave it in. But yeah, so there's a lot of complexity already there.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamSo, I mean, I guess the fuses for the relays are part of the subcomponents we have. The life support system also has a set of subcomponents, the scrubbers, for example. Not only the scrubbers, but yeah. Well, we're also thinking maybe some components we were thinking about the other day may need to be subcomponents of maybe the CPU or of the avionics system or of the power plant. So yes, the way to say it would be like, yes, we have some components that are still going to exist in some form, but only if it really makes sense, if it's adding some functionality, because that's where just modeling health with...
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityYou don't need to drill down on every single thing just because we need to drill down on every single thing.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, that's like our credo, or it started to be our credo, which is we really want to have meaningful gameplay rather than complex gameplay for complexity's sake. So this is something that is starting to be very, very important for us. But also to answer concretely on that question: we have them on our plan. They are not currently planned for the initial release, because there are several reasons, but especially content would just kill us if we would just say, by the way, we want to have subcomponents for every item, and then, yeah.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamAnd especially, something that we always have to consider: every bit that we add adds to the time it actually takes to get to the gameplay that you actually want to consume.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamNo, I think actually one subcomponent that you may see, since the resource network doesn't apply only to ships, it also applies to locations. And one example is for puzzles, for repairing a sub-network in a particular location as part of a mission, you may need to swap out these parts, which may be bespoke or may also be the same kind of parts we use in ships. So it really depends on the level of complexity we want to add to a particular area of gameplay.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamSo all of those actually go through the same set of relays. That means generally if you knock out a relay, all the resources you want to get to the items stop flowing that way. What we do have is kind of the opposite, is relays that do not allow some resources through. This makes sense if you think of a Starfarer: we have the external tanks on one side and you have the internal tanks, and when you are giving fuel to some dude, you don't want to be draining your internal fuel tanks. And as far as the game is concerned, they are the same thing, they're just fuel tanks, why can't I take fuel from them? So we added relays that do not allow that kind of connection between both sides of the network. But we still obviously can have an alternate bypass that is turned off by default, and if you want to do that, we would allow it. But yes, as a general rule, most ships or most situations, you're going to have all the resources going through the same route. And if you lose the connection, well, that's it.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamThere are actually two answers to that question. So the first part is every ship will have a somewhat bespoke layout of where the relays will be located and how they will be connected. There will be differences between military ships and civilian ships, with military ships having more relays than civilian ships to allow for more redundancy. There will also be differences between manufacturers, just because of the way that their ships are looking, because we have to fit the relays on them, and that also dictates how the relay or the resource network is actually set up. And so there comes the first difference from. And the second is ship item manufacturers. So it's less Drake itself. So if you have a very expensive power plant you put in your Drake ship, it will not suddenly work worse because it's sitting in a Drake ship. No, it will still... the wear and tear rate will be different. So if you invest more money in your ship items, they are less likely to be affected by wear and tear. Malfunctions might even be triggered less often. So item choice will matter in that regard. So even coming back to the single player: if you invest a lot of money into your ship and buy the best items ever, you even reduce the amount of interactions you have to have with items. So it's more likely that you don't have to run around alone in your ship and try to fix it.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, and also in addition to brands, I think we already have it in-game: you have the different classes of items, in the sense you have competition, military, industrial, civilian. That's also part of the balance in there. A competition item would probably have a pretty short lifespan, because we expect you, after the race, to go back, change it altogether or repair it, while an industrial or military part is expected to be in the field for a longer time. So that will affect the wear and tear rate and obviously, therefore, some of the other...
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamThe grades will get a different meaning, like the types will get a new meaning to that.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamOh, also, since again, this goes back to the damage system, because without damage penetration and stuff like that, we don't actually get the fires or the actual damaging of the components. There, the hulls also become a bit more relevant, the armor, what materials the manufacturers normally use. We already have some differences planned: this brand usually uses this type of alloy, which has certain properties, which is how you get lighter ships or heavier ships or less armored ships as a rule.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamWell, I mean, the obvious one is if something overheats; it's part of the things that drive into the malfunctions or the dangers popping up. So, yeah, bad heat management, for example, could suddenly lead to a power surge going through the ship and killing components, or a fire starting in front of you, maybe setting you on fire if you're unfortunate. So yeah, to some degree, you can make things worse. You can always make things worse. But obviously we're not going to insta-kill you just because you punched a component to fix it.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamActually, that's the good part of the entire change that will come, which is we are more item-focused. So it is less like a dramatic death with the entire ship directly exploding. No, you will start losing items first, and then you might be dead in the water for a long time, until someone picks you up. And that is all the consequence. So you're just dead in the water if the right components break at the right time. If the wrong component breaks at the wrong time, so if your quantum drive, for example, explodes because of a malfunction, that might have a consequence that is very similar to what we have right now, that the entire ship explodes.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, the power plant specifically. Soft death really, what it sort of models is either the power plant died in a peaceful way, so to speak, or you lost your relays, something like that, which, you just lost power. What we currently have for big explosions is more like the reactor took a critical hit, it went into its critical load, nobody did anything about it, it exploded.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamIt's something we've thought about, yeah. I mean, since you can also damage the components with FPS weapons. Obviously, you can just take out the fuses, or even small components, you can steal them altogether. There's a lot of damage a person hiding inside your ship could do.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityA lot of Star Citizens have come from a game like EVE Online or something where you pretend to be somebody's friend, you become a member of their crew. In the course of a mission, slowly pulling components out and tuning them incorrectly to cause malfunction. There's a whole gameplay opportunity there that's exciting.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamI think with the life support system, we have a very good counter for that, which is, once you find the guy, you can just throw him out an airlock.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamNo. Yeah, if there's an airlock, airlocks work like an airlock is supposed to work. They will actually cycle, probably ideally in a smart way. If there's good air outside and good air inside, no need to cycle. But in most cases, the airlock will behave as a real-world airlock should. On the other side, if you open the door of, let's say, you open the cargo bay of an A2 while you're in space, well, there goes your air. Not all ships are ideal for all scenarios. Some of them have these EVA suit lockers and they have these double airlocks and particular paths to get to space, which are safe. In others, they are not really... Obviously you can always vent your ship so you don't lose the air, but that also comes with its own challenges, and your engineer or whoever is on the console needs to manage it properly. So that's also where part of the ship roles will come in, which are better built for certain scenarios versus others.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamWell, we're going to have subcomponent targeting. It kind of exists in some form in the game, but it's not really... I think Yogi showed it even at CitizenCon. Yeah, actually, for the turrets; obviously, it will also be used for stuff like trying to hit the power plant or trying to hit any other internal component. At the same time, yes, if you know where each ship's components are, you already know where to shoot. Obviously, the targeting helps you, but anything you bother to learn or any experience you have is always going to be superior, I think. Especially when it comes back to, you mentioned sabotage. In that case, your use of scanners is a bit more limited. And knowing exactly where you need to go, how to deal the most damage, it's always a good skill to have.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamWe even had that already in our demo, right? So we had a faked penetration there. And because we knew where we needed to shoot, we could potentially target the power plant.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, and ships have weak points, not necessarily made on purpose, but simply because of the way they're built. The hull is not the same thickness in all places. The ship components are not distributed evenly. So knowing if your weapon can make it through the hull and the shields in that particular part of the ship, it's easier to hit the components. I think that's always something good to practice and learn.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunityIt's going to be interesting to see how that affects pilots and the way they fly too, knowing where your weak spots are and learning to not expose them during combat.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamAnd actually that is what we are all looking forward to, right? So we really want this, that maneuvering and knowing your ship well gives you an advantage over if you don't care about your ship.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamWell, your ship will be on fire. No, but currently, well, with the new MFDs, you're going to have probably a better display. You already know that you have this little picture of your ship in the MFD, and usually when you get hit, you see the red mark, and the components slowly go red from blue. That's going to be part of it. Obviously, you also get the messages. I think if you're playing the game right now, you already have this first set of misfires. These are the old ones, the shield failure or thruster surge, stuff like that. You're going to keep seeing that. That's also part of the new system. They are triggered using the new logic, but they're still the same effects. But yeah, in general, it's going to be mostly that, because as a pilot on a single-seat fighter, you have very limited action you can take against that. Obviously, you have your triangle, capacitor, well, wheel. You can put more power to the shields if your things are getting hit, but at the end of the day, if you are losing a cooler or something like that, other than turning off items altogether, there's really not a lot you can do, which is the weak point of fighters. They don't really have that same power in the end.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamYes. So it's even a bit more than just that the life support itself is connected to a relay. Each room has a vent that is then connected to its own relay. So it might even be that if a relay is destroyed or not connecting to the vent anymore, you just lose connection to one of the rooms. Whereas if you hit the life support, the life support cannot provide the rooms anymore. So that would be a total failure. But there's the concept of the vents that are sitting in each room, and they control the composition of the room, the temperature of the room. So if the vent loses the connection, you lose control over that room, and you have to go to the relay, fix the relay so that you have control over the room again, or you go directly into the room to fix what broke there. Or you could just open a door. It can be dangerous in space. You can do that. Actually, that is also a good counter, because of what the question was before: do we automatically cycle? No. And that helps there. So we can open the door to the room that is currently not connected anymore and make oxygen flow from one room to the other. Or even vent the other room, so that the room that is currently on fire, that you don't have any control over anymore, is then venting into the other room, so that you can deplete the fire there.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, well, that is an open discussion right now. So it might change. As of now, we have a tank that stores the atmosphere that you have in your rooms. So let's take an example with one room, and you want to vent that room. We don't vent the atmosphere in that room outside. We vent it into an auxiliary storage so that you don't lose it, because we see the atmosphere as a finite resource, and you should really care about your atmosphere in space because it's a precious resource, right? And so you vent it into the storage. So you have the room now completely empty of atmosphere. And if you decide to fill the room again, it takes the atmosphere from that storage back in. Sure, we also thought about, okay, what happens when you accidentally vent it? So we have some auxiliary atmosphere sticks that you can put in, and then by chemical reaction, magically create atmosphere for that room or for the rooms of the ship. But the idea is that you always have this storage that you have to manage. So you fill it and you have this concrete, finite amount of atmosphere on your ship that you have to manage.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamAnd we also separate it along the way, in the sense that there are tanks for oxygen and inert gases, but also for waste gases that we don't want in the atmosphere at all; there are different tanks. So yeah, it also limits how quickly you can get rid of good or bad air in both cases.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamBut also a nice way to catch atmosphere is actually, if you did mismanagement and your auxiliary tanks are empty and you're breathing through your suit and you're depleting the oxygen from your suit, what you can do is go into the atmosphere of a planet, open all the doors, and then suddenly all the atmosphere rushes in, you close the doors and go up again. You just have to make sure that the atmosphere of the planet is actually breathable. But that is also a valid way to fill your ship back with atmosphere.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamEvery time it's the same answer. Fresh ships: very unlikely for any malfunctions. There might be some that are happening, but very minor ones, so you can even ignore them and live with them. But if you have a ship that has several hundred hours and the wear and tear is really, really low or really, really high, then you have to maintain it more often. But we really want to make sure that it is not annoying for players. But this is something that we will balance once we have it out there and players give us feedback on it.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamFor the long-term maintenance, it's more about some items being a bit less reliable. If you keep using it, it's kind of a way of telling you, hey, use something new. And with salvage and all the ways you have to get components, it's really not that hard. Or you have to pay more attention to your components. But stuff like fires or anything really critical that is crippling, your ships aren't going to randomly burst into flames; it's more of a consequence of damage control. You're in a fight, you take a direct hit to a relevant component, you get an electrical fire. But you shouldn't expect to be cruising around Stanton and suddenly three rooms are on fire and you die.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamBut we also want to reward player choices there. That is, if you decide to run your ship at only 20% of the performance it could run at, like have the power plant always run at 20%, so basically underpower your ship, that also has an impact on the malfunction rate. So the less you push your ship, the more likely it is that there won't be any malfunctions. But also the other way: if you are in a combat scenario and you want more than 100% out of your ship items, sure, that will dramatically increase the chances for malfunctions.
Thorsten Leimann · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, sure. Yeah, but it's dependent on the wear and tear and the health of the item. So we have parameters that give us more control over when these are happening, but sure, there will be some RNG.
Guillermo · EU PU Feature TeamYeah, for some of them, the conditions are more like thresholds: you are overheating by this amount, you have the power throttle over this amount. So we know you're pushing your ship. At that point, we start rolling dice from time to time, where either nothing happens or maybe a minor malfunction happens or the moderate ones happen. For other cases, we just want to say, based on the wear and tear, even at that point it has to be very rare, in the sense that, yes, we do it randomly, but maybe the mean time is supposed to be days or something like that. Simply, it could happen, but we're more interested in the player choice aspect: overheating, running your ship at overclock all the time, stuff like that, which we think is more like the cost for that choice you made.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Sure. Well, I'm Jeff Zanelli. I write music for video games, for films, for television, for all sorts of different visual media. I guess that's been me in a nutshell for many, many years. So, yeah, that's it. And I'm writing the score for Squadron 42, which is an epic journey in and of itself, let's put it that way.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42No, it turns out that I can't do many things with my life. I can do only this with my life. And I say it facetiously, but it is actually kind of true. This is my one skill. But I always wanted to do this, though. Okay, so I became a musician pretty late in life compared to most musicians that I know. I was one week shy of my 16th birthday when I got a guitar. And that was what kind of started the journey, but I very, very quickly realized it was going to be a career, music anyway was going to be my career, and that I wanted to be able to write and change styles and change genres all the time. And that sort of naturally draws you into film music and media music. You look at the expanse of the types of projects I get to do, and it's very, very different from being in a band. Plus you couple that with, I don't really like getting in a sweaty bus and traveling across the country with five other people. So I was never going to be in a band. It was not for me. But I don't know that I chose it. I think it really was sort of the only thing that I really could see myself spending my life doing once I got even reasonably good at playing a guitar. It was like, no, this is the path.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42I definitely had that clarity of focus. That's exactly the way to put it. It was a drive. But I guess on the downside, I got my last promotion when I was like 21. I became composer, and that I shall remain.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Oh, right. Yeah, no, okay, I went off to Berklee College of Music, which is in Boston, and I studied there. They had an engineering production track, and they had a film scoring track, which is now called media scoring. And at the time, it was focused on film and television. It was actually kind of before games was even really an industry that you could consistently work in. I mean, I'm talking about the early 90s. This was like the beginning of game composer as a full-time calling. But when I finished at Berklee... I started interning, actually, even while I was at Berklee. I would come out in the summers to LA and I would intern for Hans Zimmer, who is a film composer. He was writing The Lion King score when I first met him. To put a date on it, I think that's 1994. And I was his intern until I graduated Berklee a couple of years later. And then I came out and worked for another composer who worked at Hans' studio named John Powell. That was really the first job that I had. I was John's assistant. And I did that for three years. And then I got my last promotion. I went freelance and became composer. So that would have been right around '99 or 2000 is when I went freelance as a composer. And if you look at my credits, you'll see I worked as what's called an additional music composer on John's movies, which means maybe I do a couple of the scenes here and there, but he was largely responsible for the score. Then I did that for Hans on a number of projects. And I suppose the notable kind of breakout project like that for me was the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, where it was written rather quickly. I think we had two or three weeks to write the whole score. So it was Hans and a team of like eight or nine composers, of which I guess I sort of moved to the head of the class, so to speak, on the project. And that was kind of the beginning of the real Jeff Zanelli as composer story, I guess.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Yes, well, that's an unusual circumstance. No, no. I think it's sort of well established. People know there was another composer on the project before, and that's what happened. So I get a call from Hans, who is now the second composer. The movie was on the final mix stage already. They were already doing the final mix, and they didn't have score. And Hans called me on a Saturday and said, you need to get to the studio. I almost did a Hans Zimmer impression and then I thought better of it. I used my own voice. You've got to get to the studio and watch this movie. We're starting right away. We're finishing in three weeks. You can't go to the Justin Timberlake concert. You're going to be working. And so I went to the studio with a whole gang, and it really was literally like Hans had this five-minute piece of music he'd written overnight, and he gave it to all of us. And then it was like, we just need to start writing music. Just go. And I sort of loved the chaos of that. It was really like being in the eye of a hurricane. Again, I had, I guess, that sort of clarity and focus. I was able to just put my head down and write music like crazy for those three weeks. And it's kind of nice to know when it stops. I know when I get to sleep again. Until then, I will work on Pirates.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42He did. But okay, that would have been long after I was [there]. But yes, he did. But Face/Off, funny enough, was actually what got me hired. It was John's first big Hollywood production. He needed an assistant right away. It was a similar thing. He had a pretty short schedule, not quite as bad as Pirates, so he needed someone right away to just kind of be there and run largely tech support. I was loading samplers and getting there early in the morning to make sure everything was working, so we could sit down and work right away, and that kind of thing. But I loved it. And that's the thing: someone let me in the studio door and I just never wanted to leave. It still doesn't really feel like work. I mean, of course it is, but...
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42No, well, I always did, though. It's funny because I'm a gamer with Atari roots, right? That's where it started for me. So I'm the old generation of video gamers. But I think, in a way, the 90s is really kind of the perfect time to illustrate when video game music got super serious. Do you know what I mean? That was when you started to hear fully orchestral scores. It was like for a minute there, games were promoting themselves as, oh, we have a full Hollywood-sounding score. And nowadays, I don't see that type of promotion, because I think the games industry has recognized very clearly: we're doing our own thing now. Do you know what I mean? It's a genre, and it's actually very different in some ways from film and television, which is also... it's almost like a third category. I'm a little bit lucky I get to do all three of those things, but some composers excel in games or they excel in television or they excel in film, but not the others. So, I don't know, I was always built in the way that I wanted to spread out and do something different. The conversation I have with my agent all the time is, what I want to do next is something totally different from whatever I finished, whatever that means. So I'm not necessarily the composer that's going to do only superhero movies or only sci-fi video games or only horror movies. I love, love, love that I get to just go all over the place. That's probably why it doesn't feel like work. I still feel like I'm playing around a lot.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Wow, let's see. I mean, Squadron 42, far and away the biggest video game credit, but I think it's probably the biggest video game credit for anyone. That goes without saying. I worked on EverQuest: Champions of Norrath, which was kind of a spinoff. It was not a persistent universe. I worked on one of the Shrek games, and then I worked on a series of Call of Duty games, which was for the Nintendo DS. So that was Call of Duty with the stylus and everything. It was really wild, but it was fun because they had their own identity separate from, I guess, the mainline Call of Duty games. It's not lost on me that Squadron 42 is the peak of my video game career thus far. Well, or probably ever.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Yes. That's exactly right. So, I wonder if everybody knows Chris made a very, very cool movie called Outlander, gosh, 15 years ago now, or close to it, which was kind of a take on the Beowulf story, but it's set in Viking times with, I guess you'd say, a spaceman, an alien man that crashes to Earth and brings the monster with him, basically, and then, using Viking technology, has to go fight this high-tech monster. It's quite cool. It's a monster movie. It's really fun. It's a multi-genre sort of sci-fi fantasy thing, which is exactly in the world of what I want to do. And I actually met Chris through... I would have been brought onto that project... let's see, maybe I met Howard McCain, who directed it. And then I met with Chris and John Schimmel, who produced. So we made a movie together. I mean, it really started that way. And I think really what happened then was Chris said, I'm making Star Citizen, and it's going to be split into really two worlds. We have the PU, which everyone's been playing for years now, and we have Squadron 42, which is narrative, very different story-wise from the PU. In the PU, the players are writing their own story. In Squadron 42, the player is involved in another bigger story that already exists. And that, I think, is what drew Chris to ask me about it, because it's very much designed to feel like you're moving through a very long epic. It's story-driven, and that's, I guess, the province of film composers. He recognized how I was able to tell his very complicated story in Outlander and then how that might expand out into the universe of Star Citizen, which is quite a big story to tell.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Yeah, well, we've never been in person together, funny you mention it, but we Zoom every now and again just to kind of sync up with each other, not necessarily to get the music to sort of cross-pollinate from one to the other. It's really not the goal. It's always been kind of separate identities, but we're both big supporters of each other's work. And I'm eternally jealous that Pedro's music is out in the world already and you all get to hear it. That's why something like Hold the Line, which you were talking about, is a little glimpse into the enormous amount of work that I've already done on Squadron that won't come to light until we get it into the players' hands. [Pedro has] like a rolling delivery where every few months you all get to hear his new brilliant work. So I just call him to tell him I'm jealous.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42Yes. Bagpipes. I'm going to answer your questions in reverse order, because bagpipes is the order of the day. So it's funny. Okay. Actually, that sequence, which you do see, the opening, it's a cinematic in-game, so that music was written very specifically for that sequence. And everything, obviously, is still a work in progress, but believe me, we're keeping the bagpipes. We experimented quite a lot with different instrumentation for that, for the fleet reveal. Let me back it up, actually. Initially, that piece of music is written as a UEE theme. It actually functions sort of like... most of the world's navies have a theme song, right? The U.S. Navy, I think it's Eternal Father, Strong to Save. It's a hymn. And so we started there. It was something Chris Roberts and I talked about. What if we had a hymn for the UEE Navy? What would their theme be? And in fact, there are even very wide variations of this piece of music already getting used in various parts of the game. We only showed one little glimpse of it for Hold the Line. But that is a theme for the UEE, for the Navy as a whole. And it works in all sorts of ways. It can be very emotional. It can be very somber. It can be triumphant, it can be officious, it can be used as score; there's a set of lyrics actually written for it. So that's a piece of music that's going to be heard many, many times throughout the game. But the fleet reveal is one of the first times you hear it. And I thought, well, what needs to happen here is it needs to be a piece of music that represents that the UEE is not one country or one ethnicity or one nation's purpose. It's the purpose of Earth. I mean, it's in the title, UEE. So the piece of music could represent really any culture and all cultures from anywhere on Earth, because here we are united in defense of our planet. So it meant we could go exploring instrumentation, anything really, anything that has the right grandeur for the moment. And so there was an orchestral version of that sequence that played nicely, but maybe felt, I don't know, not bespoke enough to the sequence. And once we got to the bagpipes, and there are also taiko drums from Japan and there are some drums from South America, so it actually is a combination of many cultures, to represent: this is our fleet. This is the gathering that we have put together to defend the planet. I realize that's a lofty goal for a 10-second piece of music, but this is the type of ambition.
Jared Huckaby · Host, CommunitySo you confirmed that this is music that people would hear in the game. It's the UEE theme.
Geoff Zanelli · Composer, Squadron 42That one is indeed thematic. Then the rest of the Hold the Line video is also Squadron music, but not necessarily being used thematically. It's more like, especially because of the way it's cut, we're going from location to location and event to event, and we're not necessarily showing it in linear order. So you're getting a sense of what some of the soundscape of the score will be, but I think there's a lot more than bagpipes that is going to stand out, I think, to make the score feel special for all of the different, especially places, but all of the different story arcs that we're telling with this. I mean, it's a huge story.