Star Citizen: Happy Hour w/ Dave Haddock

Well, I wasn't going to talk about spoilers and you just spoiled with the meat planet. Well, actually, for probably the first two years, a lot of it was very piecemeal just because the team was even smaller than it is. I mean, right now there's four of us. And it was just sort of slowly chipping away at individual systems and getting flavors. People would kind of come up with specific requests. And it actually wasn't until the star map started to become a reality that we kind of had to sit down and be like, oh, well, now we have to figure out the remaining 60 systems or whatever. With that, basically, we actually would do almost nightly sync-ups. It was Will, Adam, Cherie and myself just kind of sitting and brainstorming of, all right, we have Kallis system. What's exciting or interesting about that? That was usually actually the first question that we always ask: what is the specific character that that system would have that would make it feel unique and fun and be a place that people would want to go to? And also could theoretically be a nice generation pot for narrative and story ideas. So we always kind of started with what was the flavor and character of the system or the specific planet, and then we would kind of dig into it from there. And sometimes actually we would get ideas from the news. In one of the, I think it was the Orion Loremaker's Guide that just came out, we're talking about the gas giant Abyss, which is a coal black planet, which we had pulled from a National Geographic article. Because one of the things we learned very early on, because I know very little about science, is space is weird. And odds are that you can kind of say, oh well, this doesn't exist. And then weirdly enough, a week later, we would see an article that was like, oh, by the way, this exists. So it's very strange and it's fascinating and cool. So we were trying to pull real stuff when possible, but ultimately it always kind of came down to what was exciting or enticing about this place and would make it a fun, unique environment to go visit.

It's that slight sense of fantastic, I think, that will make things really stand out to people as well. Not quite a fantasy environment, like it could exist, but it's enough to wow you at the same time. With some of the concept artwork I've seen based on the ideas you guys have come up with.

Oh, I mean, the concept stuff is just insane. On a daily basis, it's amazing to look at. And it's a two-way process, too. The art teams come up with such fantastic visuals, and it's like, oh, well, we have to figure out a way to use that. So, yeah, it's definitely a multi-layered process.

That's a good question. Particularly with Squadron 42, we would do very, very intensive... Because, again, we have to sync up with design and we have to sync up with art and stuff like that. So we have to keep in mind what the environment is going to be and what the game flow is supposed to be and all that stuff. By default, we definitely had a process like that, because we had to lock down the flow with design and in conversations with Chris and stuff like that. It would be easier to write it out as story beats. You go here, you do this, you talk to this person, they tell you this, drives you here, you do this. That type of stuff, rather than just jumping right into a script page, because it would be entirely possible that you would be going down the wrong direction or something like that, and then you've wasted a couple of days working on a flow. I mean, sometimes you'll just write a scene just to be like, hey, I think this might be cool. And one of the great things about the game itself is that you have these opportunities to hang out with the various characters a bit. So not everything is plot-driven, which, as Chris has said in the past, is very different than movies, where you have to be very lean and mean, and you can have character moments, but usually they tend to be an aid to the plot because you don't have a lot of time. In a 90-page script, you don't have a lot of time to mess around. In this, we had to go, what does the janitor do? What do they care about? Because the player can go wandering away from, we can be dangling the beautiful story threads and they can be like, hey, who's that guy, and go off and try to follow him, and we have to accommodate that. So it allowed having these little unique character moments that I think are really going to make it amazing.

Collectively, we are hitting on several things at the moment. The main ones have been the mission givers. We've talked a lot about mission systems and stuff like that. The people who give you the jobs, which is a surprisingly broad, huge conversation, because, as we discovered with the PU stuff, Crusader alone is a pretty massive area of space. So how do you make that feel populated and stuff like that? We've been doing a lot of stuff with mission givers and also starting to flesh out the locations as far as environmental storytelling and set decorating and stuff like that. How do we sell the personality of Lorville on Hurston as opposed to Orison on Crusader and stuff like that? Because those are two almost diametrically opposed... Hurston is really just depressing and awful and rigid and almost dystopian. And then Orison is super, hey, look at the pretty clouds outside and sky docks. So, what kind of signs would they have? What is the tone and stuff like that? So we've been talking a lot with the environment teams and the designers and stuff like that to try and work out how we sell those things.

No, I mean, he was actually an interesting, he was sort of a test case for us, because the backstory for him, if you're not familiar with him, he basically runs a private security force. And we've actually had him appear in some of the news updates and stuff like that. I can't remember if it was an OpNet or the bounty hunter one. I think it was OpNet. He basically was talking about job opportunities and being a freelance operator and stuff like that. But the fun thing with him was that he sort of straddled the line, legal and illegal. He was fun in the sense that he would give out both missions. We were doing a test case trying to figure out what could be the most sweeping example. But the fun thing about him was this idea of, and obviously it's all a work in progress, understanding how reputation affects how you get these missions, why they give these missions to you and stuff like that. One of the cool things about him was this idea that he's sort of a slippery character. We wanted him to feel like, if I as a legitimate freelance mercenary who's looking for jobs and is not trying to go out and do crime or kill people, or not people who don't deserve it, if I get a call from this guy, I want to be able to have a working relationship with him and not necessarily know whether he's doing anything shady or not. He can call you up and be like, hey, I got an escort that needs a run, needs some protection. Are you free? And then you can work for him and you do the escort thing. It's perfectly above board.

Well, he's got to have his front business. He's got to have his legitimate face. So if you're living above the law, you could have quite a relationship with Miles Eckhart and you would never have an idea.

Yeah, he's kind of a gruff guy and whatever, but yeah, you wouldn't think anything weird is going on. Again, it's that fun thing that has been part of the DNA of Star Citizen ever since its creation: Chris's insistence on the shades-of-gray morality thing rather than black or white. The notion that there are just criminals out there doing crime, it's an odd thing. Sure, there are people who make a living doing that stuff, but you have a lot of legitimate people, or people doing illegal things who have legitimate fronts, and they're not necessarily all good or all evil. Playing with that sort of idea was just a lot of fun and gives you a lot of opportunities to create fun personalities and stuff like that.

It's a lot of conversation with design. We basically sit down with Todd and Luke and Rob and work out what kind of missions we want this specific person to give. There's a running list of very broad-scope mission styles. So, to break it down in a very simple way, mercenary missions, cargo missions, that type of thing. And within mercenary, you can have escort or protection missions or rescue missions or whatever. So you have some subcategories of it, but you go, all right, well, we need a mercenary mission giver in this system. And then you have lawful and unlawful and all that type of stuff. So usually it's a very clinical conversation of what need are they fulfilling? And so we'll talk with them and figure out what they're looking for as far as what makes the most sense for gameplay and fun and all that type of thing, and just talk it out basically to the point where we can go, all right, well, we need somebody here who needs to handle these types of missions. Also, it's important to mention looking at the broad scope of the system itself. In what will ultimately become the Stanton system, we have all these different locations. We have one person here and one person here and one person here. This person is a lawful mercenary person. Do we need an unlawful mercenary person to counterbalance that, so people have the gameplay that they're looking for? So, yeah, it's just a lot of conversations about exactly what's needed at the time. And then we will start to flesh out the character.

Well, again, it's nice to see that people like her. That's always fun, because it's, again, very one-sided interactions, and people seem to enjoy her kind of weird quirkiness. Originally, she was just a means to provide some easy, cheap mission content. Again, it could be one-sided and very simple. For that level of the PU, it was a very scaled-down thing. We did not have a lot of tools at our disposal. It will be interesting to see how we can fold her and characters like her into the PU as it grows, because it is a relatively cheap character, in a sense, because there wasn't any kind of mocap for it. It was purely audio stuff. But it's still a need. To add more Tessa lines, you have to write the line, get an actor into a voiceover booth, process the lines, hook them up, implement them, all that stuff. There's still a lot to it. It's interesting to see how we scale it and stuff like that.

Thus far it has been sort of, we will just get concepts, see what artists are working out and stuff like that, and try to make it work. Because again, we have so many different worlds ultimately that everything is useful. So, for example, if you say, oh, okay, here's a bunch of rodents on Terra, and we're like, oh, well, actually, this might not work on Terra, you could go, well, all right, then it goes on Vega or whatever, some other naturally occurring place where it could go. So there are a lot of opportunities here, and all this stuff, again, is super cool. One of the things that we're actually going to try and push forward with, as there's more focus on flora and fauna: I'm not sure if you guys remember, but we had several consultants go over our star map data and basically pull it into the realm of reality. Reality-adjacent. Because again, asking me to do this stuff is lunacy. So they would take our stuff and they would go, all right, well, you can't do this at all, but you could do this, which would give you a similar effect. And again, because our initial thing was mostly about the character and the flavor and the tone of it, we had some flexibility as far as what the universe is for. Anyway, long story short. One of the things we were talking about trying to do is just provide that information for the artists, so if it's for some reason helpful to know that the planet they're going to be sketching out stuff for has got an M-class dwarf star at its center and it's got this kind of gravity or whatever, they can incorporate that into it if it's something they can benefit from. So hopefully we might get a little bit more scientific with it, but again, it's all a work in progress, so we're just trying to see. But it's cool stuff.

You mean as far as actually recounting events that are happening in-game?

Yeah, just having all of the history and story. A lot of them seem like radio shows and all of that jazz.

Hopefully, yeah. I mean, it would be nice... I don't know. Again, I think there have always been conversations about in-game TV screen content. And a lot of these things have already existed for a while, in characters that people kind of know. So we have a wealth of stuff that we can draw from. Again, I have a feeling a lot of it will just be technical feasibility hurdles, because it's how quickly can we update this stuff and turn it around and stuff like that. As far as larger-scale universe stuff that the players might not necessarily have as much influence on, I think it's probably a bit more likely, doing a new show that's like, oh, hey, Admiral, there was this attack on Vega II, type thing, that we could have playing for a while, or of an event that we control the release of, basically. That seems like it would probably be much more feasible. But, again, always the dream has been, and whether this is one of those things that just stays on the Tuesday, gets incorporated into the Tuesday dispatches, is that thing of reacting to what players are doing in the game in a fun, dynamic way. So seeing that devastating outlaw fight that took place in Nexus made the evening news, but all the players in that are actual players, would be the dream and would be just incredible to see. Oh, hey, that was me. My crew were the ones who shot up that poor truck stop.

I don't know. I mean, it's, again, one of those things that's very far down the line. It might be closer with 3.0 if that's something we want to explore. I'm not sure. I think ideally, yeah, you would want that type of thing, because I've done several of those back in my World of Warcraft [days] and been really excited by them, and it was a really fun way to feel like I'm part of that world. So I definitely think it's...

I think there's a subtle difference between intentions and plans. It's definitely something we'd like to look into. It's definitely something we'd like to explore.

Oh, definitely. I can tell you that, just like the game is being developed, so are a lot of our tools and processes, including Game Master tools. And I can tell you that I've heard whisperings of that very topic being discussed.

It'll be interesting. But to answer your second question, as far as the challenges of that as a writing thing, yeah, it's one of those bold things when you do it, because you basically have to have result A and result B both ready to go once it happens. It is a weird thing because, understandably so, you don't necessarily want to waste content. You don't want to be doing these crazy, epic, cool things and then completely get rid of it and never be able to use it again because it is tied explicitly to this one event. But at the same time, yeah, it makes it feel, and again, going back to how Chris has always described the universe, not static. It's not that World of Warcraft thing where it gets very locked in place and then it doesn't matter if you just joined up or you've been playing it for years, it is what it is. Obviously with all their releases they've been updating that. I haven't played it in a couple of expansions, but obviously Wrath of the Lich King really blew up a lot of stuff, which was cool and made it feel like, oh, okay, it's going back to revisit it. I don't know. But yeah, it would be a super challenging thing. I think it would be fun. That live reaction to the players' actions would be really fun and weird and exciting. And I think people would get really attached to it.

Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, that's a very tricky question. I think, because on one hand, I don't know. That's another thing that's in constant conversation. And we actually have weekly calls with Britton, our xenolinguist, to talk about this kind of stuff. Because again, as he's digging into language, he's asking us questions like, what are their cultures and stuff like that. For me personally, I think it would be awesome to have the type of thing where your knowledge of their culture or their language gives you a slight perk, but it's not dismissive for other people. The sort of thing where if you say this to a Xi'an, they'll be super impressed, because they're like, oh, clearly you respect my culture, and I'll cut you a better deal. As opposed to you saying it this way, which is wrong, but they're like, all right, it's just a human type thing, and still sell me the thing, but they're like, here's what it is.

Will there be multiple pronunciations of the word Xi'an?

Yeah, that type of thing, like the Xi'an-Chan thing. Because, to me, again, this is me personally, I'm terrible at languages. I took five years of German in high school and I could not speak it. The thought of having to learn a whole language just to be functional in a game and not get penalized seems a little excessive to me. But on the flip side, having that thing in there where, if you're cognizant of it and aware of it, it gives you something kind of cool, I think would be a nice reward for the people who are interested in that stuff and are really talented and skilled at picking up that type of nuance. Long answer short, I don't know. It would be super cool, though. But we'll have to kind of see.

Well, the Xi'an actually think that we're super emotional and impulsive. The Banu, they just love us. Well, they love everybody. They think everyone's pretty cool. The Vanduul love us too, actually. For different reasons.

It's a different kind of love.

They are totally ambivalent to us. The one that we've really worked out is the Xi'an one. That's the one that we've actually delved into a little bit, which is this idea that, again, because they live for so long, they're like, oh, this cute little species who lives for a hundred and whatever years. That we're reckless and impulsive and act more on instinct and emotion rather than intellect and calculation. But yeah, the Banu will probably be, I mean, that's actually an interesting question. We should do a post-lunch conversation about that. That would be a fun one. But yeah, the Tevarin probably depends on who you talk to. I'm sure there are some that...

They have some bad history with us.

They've got some bad history, but they have a weird self-loathing thing. So there are some of them who just hate... But some of them probably still resent the horrible treatment by the UEE. Some of them are like Sushkasi, who recently passed a nice amendment on Tuesday, who is super supportive of, likes humans and things. The path forward is by uniting the two great cultures and stuff like that. So, yeah, they're a bit more all over the map, which, again, is fun, to have that kind of variety where it's more based off of character. But the Banu one, actually, you should look into that. That would be fun.

And what about the Kr'Thak? You thought I forgot about the Kr'Thak.

No comment. Well, actually, they don't know us. They've never met us. Yeah, no, we found out about them. Well, actually, it's unknown whether they know about us.

That is a good question. It's also a very technical one. We're trying to figure out... Because, realistically, there would probably be hundreds if not thousands of languages within the UEE alone. But in a game you're delivering, you have localization to consider. So there's having a bunch of different languages staggered throughout it. It's difficult enough when you have all of your dialogue and text written in one language. So splitting it up where you go, all right, well, these signs and text and dialogue need to be translated into this, but these are okay, but in the next set these, these, these and these need to be translated, but this one's okay. It's a bit more of a logistical thing to have to figure out. I think the plan was that there was a standard, in D&D terms, common tongue.

At that point, do you consider something like the Star Trek universal translator for people in the UEE, if you have to explain it lore-wise, or are you just not there yet?

Or the Babel fish? I don't know. That's a good question. I guess it'll be one of those things that, once we circle in on how this localization thing is going to be handled, that we would... It's a bridge we'll cross when we get there. Yeah, that we'll figure out a lore thing to do.

I think so. Again, it's one of those things, and this is just my personal taste: as far as references and jokes go, I'm a big fan of them and have done a bunch of them already. It's just funny names and references, referential names and locations and stuff like that. Again, for me personally, it's always important that it doesn't come at the expense of the universe, if that makes sense, where if I don't know the joke, it's going to take me out of the thing. But if I know the joke, I go, ah, I get it. That's a very funny thing. They had a really clever Silence of the Lambs one in World of Warcraft. I can't remember where it was. Some undead thing where there was somebody named Clarice and something named Starling. That was very funny. But if I didn't pick up on it, I could look at it and it would still make sense as this weird character, and I just wouldn't understand what they were saying. So, yeah, I assume so, because, again, that stuff is a lot of fun. But for me, it would just be about not making it seem like we're making fun of our own universe. Because that, I think, starts to get into parody, and then it starts to get a little weird. And it's tougher to take it seriously when you're actively laughing at it. So, I don't know. It's always a weird balance.

Like all things, there's a balance. My favorite thing along those lines that I've ever seen in my life was in Tenaris, with the tire tracks that go into the mountain, and on the other side of the mountain, the tire tracks that come out of the mountain. Because I'm a Buckaroo Banzai guy. So it was a nice subtle thing. If you didn't know it, it wouldn't mean anything to you.

Yeah, the other one I always look to is, I don't know if you've ever read any Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. There's a great one called Lean Times in Lankhmar. I would highly recommend it. It's a very funny story, and it's a fantasy, but it's not... I love Terry Pratchett stuff, but it can get a little goofy for me. But the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stuff is weirdly light swords and sorcery stuff. So it always takes itself seriously as a universe. But the characters are so extreme and quirky and weird that they can have funny stories and you still take the world seriously. So that's always been a standout for me as something to model after and aspire to.

Yes, technically those fall under the Fair Chance Act. So yeah, there are technically growing civilizations that are currently under the protection of the UEE to prevent people from uplifting them or messing with them or stuff like that. So, again, how that will actually play out, I'm not sure. But, yeah, technically there are a handful of more primitive civilizations that are growing.

Well, we saw one of them in the Constellation commercial. Now, the Constellation commercial was a commercial within the universe. It's not necessarily representing real life.

Well, actually, technically it is, in a fun way. If you look at the legalese at the end of it, it actually says do not do what these people did. It's highly illegal and highly unethical. So technically, the Constellation commercial is acknowledging the fact that what these people are doing is super illegal. But it's part of selling the aspirational vision of the ship.