Star Citizen Live Q&A: Vehicle Gameplay, Design and Balance

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Well, TSG will be introducing the need for different ships and for multiple players playing together, working together and basically coordinating themselves and going in with a big group to resolve the mission. I don't know how else to describe it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We have a lot of ships in the game and they all have very different roles, and TSG finally sort of brings together the requirements for Person A in Ship Archetype 1, Person B in Ship Archetype 2, and they can work together to complete the mission, because TSG is not like 'do one thing, mission done.' It's a layered, staggered, sequential series of events that one ship is not... you don't need one ship to do it, you need multiple types.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Using different types of gameplay, different objectives. We've had this concept, it's been around since 2015, that we're building this spaceship MMO where you need to bring together fighters and repair ships and capital ships and bombers and stuff like this and bring them together for a coordinated attack. We've had this promise for a while, but a lot of our content, and I don't think I'm telling anybody anything they don't know, a lot of our content tends to be very FPS focused, for this reason or that, as systems are being developed, as flight models are being tuned and retuned and stuff like that. This is the first major step forward. We're not gonna hit everything we wanna do in this first thing, but TSG represents this first major step forward at these coordinated, extended PvE spaceship experiences for the game, and there's literally no content drop that I've been more excited about, which is why it was the centerpiece for CitizenCon Direct last year. So it's a really exciting time for Star Citizen.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Okay, so part of that is just how things work during development. A lot of the older ships, so Polaris and Perseus, for example, the actual concepts of them are in 3D, but they're very low-detail 3D, and then they have all the details painted over it in 2D in Photoshop or whatever. So when you actually come to put it into production, you don't have any of that detail. You put the corridor pieces in and they are just flat sections. And as any artist will tell you, that's not good looking. So you add these details, and the Perseus built on the lessons we learned from the Polaris, which we talked about many times before. We went with a sort of brutalist style approach to it, which we liked, lots of people didn't like, so we wanted to sort of course correct a bit with the RSI style. So the Perseus is a lot more detailed in those corridors, and you'll see more of that evolving in with the Galaxy, although toned down a little because it's not military, it's civilian. So things that were amped up have been toned back down again for the Galaxy, but it's all built from that same kit style. And you sort of need that level of detail to make it look good. You can't just have flat walls that are the RSI trapezoidal shape. It just doesn't work. So as you're in there, you need to build and add layers, whilst being mindful that it's not 'here's this wall section that I've made as an artist, and I want it to be the best wall section I've ever made in my life, and it's gonna look really great on my portfolio,' and it's repeated 30 times down the corridor. It just overloads everyone's brains and eyes. So you have that and then you break it up with lower detail bits just to give eye relief. At scale, you need more irregularity.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Otherwise, the repetition becomes far more in your face.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

When you have some of those corridors, it's less so the Perseus, but still you have corridor sections that are like five, six segments repeated. You need something irregular to break that up, otherwise it just looks copy-paste, copy-paste all the way down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's also something to be said about new people who have joined the project since a ship was concepted. People come to the project and they come with new talents, new skills, new experiences; technology improves from the time when something was concepted. And the idea that you just come in and just have to Control-C, Control-V something that was designed years ago, it's uninteresting to everybody. We've all learned so much. We've all gained so much experience. Of course, we're going to apply that to these ships as we build them. And that means changes will occur. I say this often: the ships that are made today are better than the ships that were made last year, are better than the ships that were made the year before that. So yes, they may change so much, but almost universally for the better. It's one of the few things where you can kind of just draw a line across: the ships get better every year.

Richard Tyrer · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience team

Short answer to that is yes, but the long answer is, they are relatively close. So our light fighters are actually pretty heavy and pretty big themselves. So it's no surprise that that kind of range of ships does blur the lines. But we've been putting a lot of work over the past four months on the new flight model. And we're really working on how we make these ships interact with each other in different ways, so there's different advantages and different weaknesses in each archetype. Also, we've been working with Torsten on the weapon balance and the armor changes, and that's already started to have an impact on how these ships interact as well.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Actually, it's something that we discussed a lot lately in the vehicle leadership meeting that we all have, where we need to treat fighters more as its own bucket. But in that bucket, we also need to treat the fighters differently so that there is a clear identity between the fighters. And this is something that we have been working out. The new flight model that Rich and his team are working on is also moving us into that direction, that there's better distinction between the fighters. But something that also came out from the feedback that we received with all the armor rework that we have been doing is, because we have right now in the game in 4.7, in 4.8 hopefully not anymore, this hard gap between heavy fighters and medium fighters and light fighters. So there's even a stop gap between medium fighters and heavy fighters. So we decided that doesn't paint the picture of fighters, because fighters have to fight each other, rather than there's one sitting outside that is immune to light fighters. So one consequence of us discussing in there was also bringing that closer together but still maintaining perceived differences between these fighters. So there's still a meaningful choice that then also plays into all the content that we are doing now for spaceships, where you better bring a heavy fighter, but there are also opportunities for the light fighter.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's something we've talked about before as well that I want to reiterate, is that you don't do like 20 hours of light fighter, 'I've done light fighter now, so now I'm going to upgrade my role or career into medium fighters and then heavy fighters.' They're tools for different jobs. They're not linear power upgrades. You can obviously upgrade, but it's a choice of how your gameplay is to go from light to medium. You could stay in a light fighter for all your game time if you want and have a perfectly great time. You don't need to go up the chain if you don't want to. It just gives you different opportunities and different experiences.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think there was this big expectation when the F8C came out that it was just going to be the 'I win' button.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

And it's not. It's not intended to be. It's something that we have been trying for ages already, that we want each category to have its own purpose. Sometimes we hit it, and it's actually working out the way that we intended, but sometimes we have to do slight adjustments, and we are right now in the adjustment phase, especially for the fighters, and they have a focus right now, especially in the new flight model testing. Focus very hard on the fighters, that they feel great, that they feel different. And no, I'm actually looking forward to the future for fighters in our game, because I think we are on a good way there. We just need more testing.

Richard Tyrer · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience team

So in the current game, I think we've got a really good flight model. But it's lacking some of the levers that we want to pull to make the ships feel different, to do the light fighter to heavy fighter, but also not just fighters, to make our large ships feel like massive ships that you're really pulling through to turn and move the ships around. So I do think our current flight model is really good and it's a really good testament to the team, but we've learnt so much since we've introduced it. But I would see the new flight model as not just how the ships fly, but it's the overall flight experience that's going to change drastically. So we aren't going to rush out there and just put out a piece of the new flight model and not have the rest. So we're looking at this as: as soon as you take off in your ship, that is the flight model starting, and then you go all the way to the full new quantum experience. And that's going to be the new flight experience, really. So it's not just a flight model and how the ships fly that's going to change. It's the entire flight experience that's going to come as one package.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

And even that is just an ingredient, right? Because it's also the bullet speeds that will change the weapon behavior. Let's even describe it more broadly; that's what adds a lot to the experience as well there. And there were again a lot of discussions just the last couple of weeks around what we can do to actually improve the feel, because CR wants this very cinematic combat that we are now getting closer and closer to. And that's the reason I would even describe this as our red line in our iteration over all the flight experiences, flight combat and flight changes that we have been doing over the years. We always try to aim for what CR was envisioning, and there was always some information that we got additionally, and then we could improve a bit more on what we actually wanted to achieve. And I think we are now getting close to where we would get the CR seal of approval here. And especially, we did some tests last week with some weapon changes that will not make it into the game the way that we tested it, because we are not ready for that yet, but we will do a step in between for that. That is increasing the ranges for weapons and slowing down the bullet speed. It gives already a more cinematic approach to all the battles, or all the fights, and it helps also tremendously with... even though with lower speeds it might sound a bit contradicting, but actually with lower speeds we have a more agile combat, because we have to bring [ships] closer together. You are able to dodge bullets more than you were previously. The goal for these changes is to have an agile combat in a closer range, which is exactly what CR wants for this game. And then with all the flight changes that we are working on, we are moving slowly into that direction. And the reason why we have to move slowly, and it's not a negative thing, it's something that we learned last year, when we did all the changes at once for engineering gameplay in one PTU cycle, and we learned, no, that was a bit too much. So what we are doing right now is we do these increments now. I think we talked about that in some of the other SCLs. We have a very focused view on what we change, and we can iterate, or we gather data untainted from all the rest that we did. So we know exactly, when we put something out, all the feedback that we receive is around that topic. For the next patch, it will be... so we did some armor adjustments based on the feedback on the armor release in the last patch, because we only released the armor changes in 4.8. We will do some bullet speed changes, bullet range changes. So we will get feedback on that and then we can iterate over that. And in the next patch, there might be something new for flight behavior, combat behavior.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think the 'it's always around the corner' problem is, for Star Citizen, it's all interconnected. If you change flight speeds, you have to change projectile speeds, lifetimes, shields, and there's a lot of ships and there's a lot of content, and you have the PvE side, so you've got to do all the AI side as well as coping with the player side. A lot of this work was done in Squadron a long time ago, and compared to Star Citizen live, it's a very constrained scenario set. We know exactly what the player's going to be doing or should be doing, against who, in what formation, and you can quickly iterate there. But when it comes to bringing that over to Star Citizen, you're 10, 50, 100 times the amount of work there to get that same experience at a larger scale. It plays really nicely. Everything gels together really well, but we can't just piecemeal parts out without some big drops, like we did with engineering, where it was too much and then the feedback just goes everywhere and it's disjointed. So it takes a while to roll that out.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The wheel side is something we want to do. It's not connected to the new flight model in any way. It would be different programmers doing that. But yes, we have a lot of Origin ships. I think most of them have wheels, as well as some other manufacturers. And in fact, Chris was talking to me about this very subject. Maybe he put this question in there, about when can we get proper steering wheels and landing wheels on the Origin ships.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes, so this starts with the Alien Week in June. And I think we will see a couple more this year, alien ships that are not combat.

Richard Tyrer · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience team

So we have a big missile rework planned at the moment, where the core aspect of what's wrong with missiles right now is just it's really hard to predict where they're going to land, because they're so quick. So we've got problems with networking. The missiles are very small and agile; they're way more agile than the ships. So the inaccuracies you see sometimes are just how they are predicted to hit at the moment, and that prediction isn't hitting the mark all the time. But also it's to do with countermeasures as well. So I would say we've got a linear relationship right now, which is either a countermeasure and the missile misses... But that's not the intended goal of how the missiles work. We want more clear readability of where the missile's coming from. Because at the moment, if you've got a missile coming at you and you don't countermeasure and you get hit, it's bad. And you don't know where it's coming from. So we want a much more clear readability of where the missile's coming from, but it means we've got to change the flight of the missiles themselves. Because at the moment the missiles fly in a fully decoupled way where they can change direction very, very quickly at the last minute as well. So again, it's that predictability at the end, where they do go suddenly like this to you. But we want that to be much more predictable. So we want to slow them down a little bit so you can actually evade them. But also that slowing down makes it easier to predict where they're going to hit as well. And then we've got systems. We want to do stealth gameplay, so you can do things on your ship yourself to make you less susceptible to missiles, but we need all these systems to come together as one big package of how missiles work. But that's where Torsten comes in as well.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Yeah, actually, we did some steps already to improve the missile gameplay. So not on the missiles themselves. There are issues that are even quite high on our immediate fix list for that. We don't have feedback right now, visual feedback, that the target lock is completely done. So this definitely needs fixing. So we already started working on the UI improvements. There are reasons why it's not in yet, so we are still actively working on that, getting all the changes across, but at least it will help for the initial missile gameplay that we currently have in the game. As Rich already said, the speeds of them, now with the updated bullet speeds for the normal weapons, are also disproportional again. So that means that this is definitely something we need to tackle afterwards. And for the stealth gameplay, actually we did some changes already around that. So engineering gameplay influences the EM signatures; IR signatures are also driven by the cooler functionality. So we already have player decisions impact the signatures. Also, actually a shout out to Michael Smith there, it's basically his doing that the cross-section is only detectable now by active ping. So it's actually something that was brought up in our vehicle leadership meeting and we just acted on it because it works out quite well. It has the downside, though, that the cross-section missiles now need an active ping, and there are also some visual indicators missing. So we have a list of things we need to improve even for the missile gameplay that we currently have in the game. But we also are very aware that the missile gameplay is the gameplay that we can improve a bit more even after these quality of life changes, because we have dedicated missile boats, we have dedicated ships with a lot of missiles on them, and we have to make it fun for missiles. It needs to be an exciting gameplay, and right now it's more like, and I'm very sorry to be that honest, but it's more like a side thing to do. The benefit though, and I have to advertise it, is missiles ignore the armor checks because they do so much damage. So if you have a small ship and you want to crack the armor, use a missile.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It seems like one of the more difficult tasks, because if you have a ship with missiles, you want them to be amazing, you want them to be effective, you want them to be devastating, because they cost a lot to reload. CR is always on about how replacing a missile or a giant S7 torpedo should cost you a lot, just like it does in the world. So if it costs you a lot, they have to be effective. But on the flip side, if you're on the other side of that missile or torpedo, you need to have options to defend yourself, to survive and whatnot. And no matter what you do, somebody is going to be like, 'yes, that's great,' and somebody is going to be like, 'that is the worst change ever.' It's very hard to find a middle ground there, because if you get killed by a missile, missiles are terrible; I should have had more things to do. There are a couple questions in here; we've sort of hit all of them, so I'm not going to ask why there's no lead pips on shooting down torpedoes and stuff. We wanted to make it easier to shoot down the torpedoes, but if you do that, then torpedoes become less effective. So this constant give and take...

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Yeah, but even with the torpedoes, right now with the lead pips, it's basically impossible because they are traveling so fast. So we have to reduce the speed again so that they feel also correct for a torpedo, because a torpedo should not target a small fighter, because they are meant to...

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Everything's interconnected. If you mess with one thing...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's always got to be this element of chance. You can't make it so that you can always shoot them down, because then they're ineffective. And you can't make it so that they always hit and destroy their target. So there's always got to be this gray area of chance.

Richard Tyrer · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience team

Yeah, and it's a really fine balance, because it's got to make sense for both parties that what happened happened. If it hit or missed, it's got to make sense to both people that are on either side of it, which is a really difficult thing, because it's a really hard thing to communicate. Because in real life, if you've got a missile coming at you, you have one option: press the button and go evade. But if you get hit by a missile in real life, that's it. You've got to go down, right? So it's just a question of balance, and it is really fine tuning because it requires so many systems to come together. It isn't just flight, it's the emissions and everything else. So it's just a really fine balance, which we get right sometimes and we get wrong other times.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

But overall, I would really say, and it feels like I'm repeating myself, with the decision that we do smaller changes continuously, we are now way better suited for where we want to go, in comparison to where we threw in a lot of changes all at once, how we worked a couple of years ago.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

So there are different endeavors we have around that. So there's one big one that is more global for the game itself, which is all the social work that is planned to be improved. Because I think we even talked about that, was it last SCL? Where it's like, yeah, for an MMO, our social aspects can require some improvements.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The social teams that Benoit's team is working on will be essential to a huge part of this.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

So that will also help a lot with communication on your same ship. So voice over IP is always a topic that, if it works really well, can be really good, especially for communication in close proximity on the ship. So that should help. But there are also issues that we are aware of and they sadly didn't get prioritized yet. But because of all the content that we now have targeted to multi-group purposes, the sharing of markers and helping at least communicating where to aim at, these are definitely something that we have on the list. There's also all the marker improvements that have been discussed at this point for two years, that we are still working on. Also, as with a lot of things, right? There's always a clash of priorities. There's always someone coming into the room and saying, no, this is the highest priority now. So we have to shuffle things around a lot, but it doesn't mean it is forgotten. It is at this point just not today. It's maybe tomorrow. And especially the marker work, I think, will help the most: making it easier, again, to share markers, share targets, having even better visuals of 'this is the target that is supposed to be the target.'

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

And gives, again, someone a role on that ship to be the person to do this.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's absolutely essential for these capital ships, the Idris, the Javelin and stuff. We've seen these images of the map table. Having there be a role that is, 'all right, that's our new target,' being able to click it and for that to go to every turret gunner and be like, 'this is your target. When this guy comes in front of you, that's who you're doing.' It's absolutely essential.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Especially for that, we even have very, very clear long-term goals. I think we briefly mentioned it in our Road to 1.0 discussion from Rich Tyrer. It's in the Road to 1.0 stuff. So we have this fleet management as an opportunity for you to do tactical decisions on your ship.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Even on that, we have some improvements already in the works.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Like what?

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

The teleport. I don't know if we should talk about that, though.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

This is the show to talk about it, my friend.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

So right now, it's not signed off yet, because we have to fit this work into the theme of Star Citizen, and if I phrase it now the way that I will phrase it, you understand why it is really hard to put it into the framing of what we sell as Star Citizen. It's the teleport to party leader, where we want to allow players, in certain situations, to be able to quick travel to your party group or your party hangar and then be able to go on a mission. So we want to reduce the time for you to gather dramatically with this feature. But it's a bit challenging.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, it's challenging. At first glance, it seems against the ethos of Star Citizen. And that's why he's saying it's not a signed-off feature. You've heard me say it: we have the same conversations here that you guys have out there, just three months earlier. Probably just as contentious, to be honest. But we have to explore those things, even if we never do it. Even if a teleport feature never comes into Star Citizen, and it may not, guys, we still have to discuss it. We have to discuss it, we have to explore it, we have to build a prototype, we have to try it. Anything that can make the process of getting into the game and playing the game more enjoyable, more effective has to be considered. That has to be a major priority, especially as we go towards 1.0. As we go towards 1.0, that priority becomes more and more important: making the game accessible, making it possible for people to get in and do the things that they want to do. So there may be some things here and there that are like, 'well, that makes it less like a space sim.' Sure, but it makes it more like a fun game that more people can play.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Lots of people complain about lots of things, but one of the common ones is just the time it takes for you and your friends to go do something in Star Citizen. And we share that pain as well. Not everyone has two or three hours to play the game. Some people might only have an hour. You don't want to spend half an hour, 45 minutes of that time getting everyone together. Some people will do; not everyone does. And then spend 15 minutes quantum traveling somewhere.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

And maybe it's positive me speaking now, but I think we have a good idea of how we can make it fit for Star Citizen. And I think you will still like it; the way that it is being discussed is you will still have advantages if you do the travel by yourself. But we are very, very aware that not everyone has three hours for a gameplay session. So we want to tailor to those. And yeah, happy to talk about it once we are signed off on that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes, I mean, it is a very short answer. We've talked before about how we have a huge matrix of size, class, manufacturers, and we want there to be options in every one. We don't want there to be a singular, like, if you want to do this size and role, this is the only ship for that. We want there to be a pool of ships to pick from. So even though we have gaps in some areas that we will fill, even ones that are filled, we will still expand. So, I don't know, let's pick heavy salvage. That's the Reclaimer at the moment. The Reclaimer is not going to be the only ship ever that fits that category. If you don't like Aegis, what are you going to do? Do you want something maybe RSI or Argo? They do the same job, but people are very attached to that manufacturer aesthetic and lore. You gotta look cool. You gotta look cool doing spaceship stuff, feel good about your spaceship. You have very polarizing fan bases for manufacturers, like a Drake ship and an Origin ship that are doing the same role. Under the skin, they're probably doing that role identically, but how you visually perceive them is two very different experiences.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Actually, for crafting, we have one element that we have been talking about that is still missing. I think even in the last episode, we were talking about refineries. And that definitely is one that is very high on our list, also because we sold the Expanse.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

And there are other ships that have refineries built in.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Yeah, so there's the [unclear] that has a refinery on it. And the benefit of us working on that is it opens up a lot of things, right? So we also talked about base building already. So us working on refinery not only adds another very important element to crafting, it also opens up for ships to be developed with that, and base building allowing us to have refineries at those. And then the station refineries also get more depth.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

And a lot of the ship gameplay loops that we don't have at the moment also tie into base building. We'll go back to the Merchantman example: it needs player-based shops. You need that for base building as well. So you would have a, I guess, a module, but I can't remember what the correct phrase for the individual building archetypes is. There would be a player shop one, and that will work the same way the shops would work in the ship. So you do one, you get both, and it's the same for refinery. You have a refinery on a ship, you have a refinery module on your base. Ground extraction in a ship, ground extraction at your base. They sort of build from each other, and it adds: maybe I don't want a ship to do this, maybe I just want to have a base set up to do all these things.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

You're not forced one way or the other. You have multiple options. And especially with all these features, right? So refinery is definitely very high on top of our list of priorities that we work through. The shops as well, because we see the interest, also with crafting, that there's this high interest in allowing players to comfortably trade the resources. So that is also quite high on our priority list. There are things that are now impacted by the feature work that we have been doing and what we observe in the community, where the urges are higher or lower. The benefit of us being a bit agile in these situations is we can adjust some of our priorities. We still have a plan until 1.0 of what we have to reach. But within that plan, we can shuffle things around a bit at least, and prioritize one thing over the other. But also the repair gameplay. Now with all the engineering gameplay work and so on and so forth, right now it is very exclusive to the hand tool. Now with 4.8 we have the in-hangar repair for the capital ships. So that's also a small addition already. So we now have that as a gameplay feature for ships. But there are also the dedicated repair ships. I personally try to avoid that as much as possible, and John and Rich can confirm, in the vehicle leadership meetings I try to avoid that, because we have some plans and I really would like to invest some time into that. But right now, I really would like to finish the crafting stuff first before we tackle that. But that is me saying that. That doesn't mean that at some point someone says, no, we now need a repair ship, and then I have to shuffle things around.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Torsten always tries to avoid all the repair questions I give him. But if we talk science module for the Endeavor...

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

I still want to strike a deal where no one checks what I will do about that science module and I can go free. That is a deal that I still want to do.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

So if you mean if it is a full profession, we treat it as a full profession. So it has the depth that crafting has.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So there will be people like, 'I'm going to spend today refining,' and there's going to be gameplay and all the things you need to do?

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

There should be a reason for you having a dedicated refining ship in comparison.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes. So from a vehicle content side, we have started the work to make sure they are all up to spec in our ships. So we have the prototype for what will hopefully be the initial rollout of functional suit lockers. Obviously, we have suit lockers in all of our ships, but I think most people use them as temporary jail cells for people at the moment. But again, I don't want to speak on behalf of the feature team doing the work, but we have got our templates there and we're going through all the ships and checking that the volumes are correct and you can interact with them in a quick and clean manner, because we don't want it to be: you go to your suit locker, press button on the door, world's slowest animation of a door opening, you interact, swap your equipment, and it goes back up again. So there's a few ships where the doors need changing or just removing. And hopefully in the initial release of that, which I'm not going to give a date for, there will be a pretty comprehensive selection of ships supported. Not every ship has suit lockers. Not every ship is going to get suit lockers. So if your ship has suit lockers now, it's going to support it, hopefully. If you are in a ship that doesn't have any anywhere, there is probably a reason it didn't have that, and we don't particularly want that level of gameplay there with that ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's the whole 'not every ship is supposed to do everything.' There are supposed to be choices. There are supposed to be sometimes some hard choices. That's intentional.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Again, speaking from my point of view, I don't want a Mark II Caterpillar. I want to pretty much fully redo it to its current state, not as a Mark II, and give it the modularity. So we've recently been working on the Caterpillar in a very limited scope to support the command module feature. And that sort of highlighted just how old that asset is. Again, like you said, every ship we do, we learn from. So going back to something that at this point is probably about 10 years old was quite an experience for some of the artists who worked on it. And yes, we still want to do modules. The Caterpillar, as you know it and love it, will look broadly the same when we do that, but expect it to be brought up internally to the current standard that you see in the Ironclad.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Do you want to talk about any of the modules you're considering?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We never officially disclosed any, I believe, but...

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Okay, multiple layers to that. So, obviously, it needs to have reached a point where it just isn't fulfilling its role in the game. And we use the Aurora Mark I as the example here, because that had both the gold standard and a Mark II. So the Aurora, one of the first five ships in the game. It had changes quite a long time ago, but Star Citizen now as a game, compared to where it was, say, five years ago, is very different. The missions are different. The gameplay is different. What we wanted to do with that ship just couldn't be done with what the Mark I was without fundamentally changing it. So at that point, we decided let's upgrade the Mark I to current methodologies of how we build ships, make it look really good, give it as much as we physically can in the space we have available. That's gold standard. You can play the game with it now. You can competently do things. You can't do everything. And again, it's a starter ship. Not all ships should be able to do everything. It gives you a great taste of the game. Mark II: same ethos, current styling, visuals. So Mark IIs are for where the Mark I is fine, but we want to radically change the visuals, primarily, of a ship. Mark I Hornet to Mark II Hornet: both medium fighters, both have pretty terrifying gun loadouts, visually very different. Aurora's the same, very visually different. As to how and when, primarily that's a resources point of view. There's only so many people that work on ships. They can't do everything all at the same time. We have to pick and choose. We're doing the Kraken at the moment. That's a big investment of time with people. If we weren't doing that, we could do a lot more smaller things. So again, at the director and executive level, we're deciding almost a year in advance where we spend our tokens to develop things. So we have to hit that criteria of: there's a valid need for it; do we have the staff available to do it; and also, is it something the community wants? Not to dismiss some ships over other ones, but there's more value to things like the Aurora and the Hornet that have been here a long time getting a gold standard and a Mark II than a more modern ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You say most of the 2027 ship schedule is already set. That's how far ahead of time many of these decisions are made. Sometimes we can fudge a little bit here.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We try very hard. When we start a ship, we don't stop it. We try. On occasions... We try, but it can be very disruptive internally, stopping: are we releasing this, are we not releasing this, are we stopping, are we starting? So once we start something, we try and see it through all the way to the end. And some of these ships can be 6, 12, 18 months of development. So I could say here today, we're going to do X ship. You might not hear about that for another year or so.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So, again, for Squadron, because like you say, tons of people play PC games with controllers. I do it myself personally: I connect my DualShock controllers up to my PC so I can play it, and then when I go to my PS5, I'm not having to relearn everything with muscle memory. So there's been a lot of work on the Squadron side to improve that, that will come back to Star Citizen. Again, it's not just a 'oh, why doesn't someone just copy the file from here to here and make it work?' The flight systems are different. The hints are different. It's a very different tailored experience. It won't just work out of the box. So it does need some fine tuning again. The flight model is different in Squadron to where it is right now in Star Citizen. The quantum experience is different from where it is right now in Star Citizen, so you can't just copy it over. But a lot of work has been done to make that experience better, and for a whole range of other peripherals. It's not just the big ones.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

If you can say one thing, Star Citizen is very supportive of all the different peripherals that exist.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Chris is a champion, of course, but really, it's Benoit. As long as Benoit is here... I've never met anybody that's more engaged by peripherals and any piece of interactive tech, whether it's Tobii or whether it's VR or whatever, it's D-Box and whatnot. Whatever we can do to allow people to play this game the way that they want to play is going to be a priority for our technical teams. And that includes gamepads, but not at the exclusion of full sim rigs and stuff. Maybe we're silly, but we want to do it all and we believe we can.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

So some of the stated ideas in that statement should already be true. So energy weapons are more efficient against armor in comparison to ballistic weapons. Maybe the difference is not that distinctive. So that's something that we have been working on for the 4.8 release. There are some changes coming in for the 4.8 release, as I think we already stated at the beginning of this show, that hopefully fix some of the major concerns. For example, a very prominent one that just popped into my head is a Scorpius cannot damage a Scorpius. So Scorpius fighting Scorpius is an infinite fight, except using missiles. The armor system that we put in, as much effort as we put into it to make it right, it is just... and 'just' is even the wrong word... it's a stopgap filler for Maelstrom. Maelstrom is the system we always wanted to achieve. We have been advertising Maelstrom for ages at this point as the real physicalized materials, where we go for a full physical damage model rather than a health bar model. So everyone that dislikes health bars: not a thing anymore with Maelstrom. But as long as we are not at that point yet, we at least want to see how the game feels once we get the full experience of Maelstrom. And one of those feels is the armor. The armor right now is a very binary system. I do agree. It is by intent, though, because we wanted to have this clear distinction where certain projectiles will just ricochet off of your armor. Sure, there are things that we have been discussing in our, I've been mentioning it a lot, but this is the topic we are talking about in our vehicle leadership group. And as with all the other things, we don't want to overdo it with changes, right? So for 4.8, we want to iterate over what we got. And the iteration is basically fixing all the issues there with the inconsistency between certain fighters not damaging each other, certain weapons not being clear enough as an advantage over the others. But overall, I feel comfortable in saying at least the majority of that statement we will have in a better state in 4.8. There are just things that we cannot do with the armor system that we have right now. I've seen people reach out to me with a lot of suggestions. They are good suggestions. I don't disagree. But that means we need to invest more time into that. We need to do some other feature work that we are doing. So there's a lot of considerations. And I think what we have right now is something we can build on, we can improve.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That isn't too much wasted work while you're waiting for Maelstrom?

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Correct. Yeah, that's the big topic.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Every minute you put into this is work that has to be replaced when Maelstrom comes in.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So not every minute, but there's going to be some calculus here. At least we try to be smart about some decisions that we take now.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it's always the problem. I mean, John, you and I have done enough of these shows where it's like, we would love to do that, but we know we'd have to replace that afterwards. So rather than do work that you know you have to throw out, let's work on things that we know actually have a chance at staying and continuing. And I was surprised when I saw the armor stuff go in, because I thought we were doing Maelstrom and stuff. But again, there are experiences that can be tested now. There's data that can be gathered now by doing this work with armor today while you're waiting for Maelstrom. Like you said, you wanted to test out how this feels and that feels. You can get that feedback now without having to wait. And then maybe it would affect certain things.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Yeah, I can already say that some of the observations and some of the feedback that we got definitely ended up on our notes list for Maelstrom once it comes to the PU. So there are some things that we see where the armor system is already a direct copy of how Maelstrom works. But then we notice, okay, we have to adjust those. So we already have notes for Maelstrom to be adjusted exactly the way that we are adjusting the armor system. So it helps us in the long run. We have to spend less time iterating over the Maelstrom system, because we are already doing that in a different system, but it's the same.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And for those who might take this like, 'well, if that's how it was, then this must not mean very good for Squadron': again, single player, curated experience versus massively multiplayer online space game. The distinctions are night and day. It can work wonderfully for the curated experience that we're building there and just not here, which is where all the additional work comes from.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

So drones are a big topic for us, and that is base building. I think we talked about that at CitizenCon, did we show? A little bit. So drones are a key or an essential part of base building. And the moment that we have that tech, that opens up all the opportunities for, again, right, so many ships. So it's basically, again, from crafting, base building into drones, into opening up all the features that we have ships with.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

And for that very specific Nautilus turret mine example, yes, you would have the drone side of it, but also the turret on it would function how PDTs work. But there's also things we want to do to PDTs between now and then to make them better. At the moment they're very binary: they're powered, they do whatever they want. We want to give you the control of, maybe don't auto-engage immediately, maybe wait for my confirmation, only target select things, ignore this. Don't target fighters, don't waste your ammo on fighters, only go for torpedoes. Internally they have a fixed threat order of, like, do torpedoes first, then do missiles, then do ships, then do other things. And maybe you don't want that order. Maybe you want to have ships first. We want to give players that control. And when you have that on your PDTs and then on a drone, then in the Nautilus, then it's a much more compelling experience.

Richard Tyrer · Lead Designer, Vehicle Experience team

So the two things are connected. We wanted to complete what we think is the new flight experience first before we moved our resources onto the ground vehicles. But, well, it was like three years ago now, we did do an update in a very limited slot of time we had, to introduce a new tire model, some new suspension physics, and just generally how they behave. Now, by going this route of how the flight model behaves, in terms of going for realism but accessibility and just things feeling good in the game, it made the ground vehicles better, but also introduced some of the problems of the ground vehicles, because we freed up the physics to react more realistically, which inherently makes them look unrealistic at times, because we're hitting solid objects with the bottom of the vehicle or with the suspension, kind of funny, and the vehicles would do strange things. So we've got a framework of the ground vehicles. And interestingly enough, we've got a meeting very, very soon to discuss the ground vehicle 1.0 plan of what we want to achieve with ground vehicles. Because as we do base building, as we do combined arms, the ground vehicles can become even more important for the universe. So we've got a plan to improve the tire model, the suspension, but just the general way that the vehicles interact with our world, so when you hit rocks and stuff, the vehicles don't flip over and crash all the time and feel very strange and feel like they don't have mass. Because the vehicles do have mass, but the force that is generated is a very hard force. It's a very simple calculation of just: you hit objects, force generated, force is applied to the ground vehicle. But we're going to start controlling that so it feels much more natural. And also, we're looking at converting the ground vehicles to the exact same systems that the spaceships work on as well. So they'll have an engine, a power plant, and everything will work as a normal Star Citizen vehicle as well. And this overall will make a much more natural feeling ground vehicle in the end, once we get some time to work on the physics of just how it interacts with the world. And I'm kind of excited by that, which will hopefully allow us to do more interesting gameplay and for the vehicles to actually have a purpose. Yeah, just be able to do more in the game and have that purpose, where you can go take your Ballista, park it somewhere and have it in the right spot that you want it, so you can use it for that purpose.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Actually, there were these big facilities we have on the ground, distribution centers. Those were our first intent of making ground vehicles more viable, because we equipped those distribution centers with very effective turrets so that you should land further out. Our planet environments weren't built for that. So we had a bumpy ride.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

One of the biggest problems the ground vehicles have are the very beautiful looking planets. We don't have nice roads on them, because part of it is they're not habitable or, I can't think of the word, civilized with infrastructure. So there aren't roads there. And a lot of people underestimate the scale of Star Citizen, and they're bombing along in their Cyclone, which they don't realize makes a Humvee look small. And they hit what they think is a small rock, but if you stood next to it in real life, it's two meters tall. So a vehicle traveling 40 meters a second hitting something that essentially has infinite mass in how it is in the world... In the real world, you'll just go pancake into it. But our vehicles have mass; that thing doesn't have mass. Like Rich talked about, it was changed to a more realistic model and then we had to rapidly change it, because the physical forces that were being imparted on the vehicles were just insane. So there's lots of things we've had to do to tone it down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

When I saw something like Stormbreaker for the first time, I was excited. A big area that doesn't allow you to fly ships in and stuff like this. I'm like, great, do something like that where you can do vehicles. Imagine the entire patch content was ground vehicle related. And the answer I got back from creative director Ian Leyland was, we'd love to, but playing in ground vehicles right now isn't that great. So if you do an entire patch of content that requires everybody to roll around in ground vehicles, you better make sure the ground vehicles are fun and actually work.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I want them to be just as good as the ships, and maybe to the point where you never even want a ship. You're just content with your base-built location, ground vehicles, tooling around, doing all the game loops with ground vehicles.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Adding to that even, right now it's also not the most convenient thing to call your ground vehicles. So that is something that we have had on our list for ages at this point, which is ground vehicles through freight elevators, or nested spawning of ships with ground vehicles. So good news is we have been working on that. I was about to say, we proved it with the Atlas, but the Atlas is technically not a vehicle. No, it has been on our list for quite some time, because the moment that we allow ground vehicles to be more comfortably stored, or pulled up and then stored in your ship, I think they also will be used naturally more than what they are right now, because right now it's, pardon my French, a bit of a pain.

Thorsten Leimann · Assistant Design Director

Good news: refueling. At least for one of those. Now, we are aware that sometimes you need extrinsic motivation to try out gameplay loops in our game. And refueling is one of the few ones where, when we released it for the first time, there was a lot of that, because it's a new gameplay. People were coming up with their own goals. They organized themselves. We even had a brief moment where the Fuel Rats came into our game and were distributing fuel. They left again, but I think, at least I've stopped noticing them there. But anyway, derailing. So it worked for a short time, like with all intrinsic urges you have. It's a smaller timeframe rather than when you get an external reward. And for the next patch, there are finally some external rewards for that, because we will introduce refueling missions. So all the owners of Starfarers and other refueling ships will be able to refuel stranded NPCs. So if an NPC runs out of fuel, they will pop up a mission, and you, in your Starfarer or fuel-giving ship, will be able to head over there and refuel them. So there is suddenly a purpose.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Or other fuel-giving ship that you might have seen a sneak peek of in the weekly newsletter last week.