The lore team answers questions on fixing the Cyrillic Lightning Bolt logo, Drake's reputation, the Tevarin, and the ArcCorp timeline. They also cover quantum fuel lore, in-game books and story missions, Imperator Costigan, the Walzer Massacre, and how lore works with design teams.
So it's something we're looking into. We'll get it addressed. We appreciate the comments. Anytime anyone posts stuff to Spectrum, we try to look at it and review it. So this one got put onto the back burner a little bit, but this was a good reminder, all those passionate votes, that maybe we should look into it. So we're going to check it out about addressing that. As far as the names of the individual weapons which have been called out, those aren't intended to be Russian words. Those are named after surnames of people in the company, so those will not be changing. But as far as the logo itself and the Cyrillic on there, we're gonna take a look. So hopefully we'll have something to follow up on eventually.
But it's also, sometimes it's easy fixes. If we can find a substitute for it, then it's just a question of actually putting it on the art backlog of...
Yeah, the UI team will need to redesign the logo, and then the environment team will need to model it to replace all the ones that are existing in-game, and then someone is going to have to make sure that that swap goes through. So it's not as easy a task as just changing a 2D asset, because it already exists in-game. So there will be some downstream effect that we'll have to notify everyone to do. So all these things always have ripple effects that we have to consider.
TL;DRThe team says the lore on Drake hasn't changed, only that older material had conflicting statements about its clean image versus who it sells to, and that Drake's character is developing under a new CEO.
Now, I want to say this right off the bat, since I was actually there during the show. John Crewe didn't state that the lore had changed. His exact words, if I remember correctly, were that there were some conflicting statements in the older lore. He didn't say the lore had actually changed. And we're not gonna sit here and parse what John Crewe meant, but I'm pretty sure what he was referring to is Drake's penchant for wanting a clean reputation, but selling to those without them.
Yeah, being willing. I mean, again, particularly with some of the brochures that we're doing, it's important to remember that, because they're written in fiction, a company is not going to say disparaging things about themselves. So it's written from their perspective. So they might kind of, not misrepresent, but flower up their language a little bit as far as talking about their own stuff and what their intent is, while their actual actions might be something different.
Now at the same time, though, even though we're writing these things in fiction, we're still beholden to a certain level of accuracy, because they're still provided to our backers to inform their pledge decisions.
Yeah, it's a weird fine line. It's a difficult needle to thread, because you want them to be true to themselves as a character, but at the same time it's a ship.
Yeah, so we're not adjusting any of the lore right now for Drake. It is what it is. It is what it's always been. It's continuing on with that. I mean, we've been doing some fun stuff with developing their character over the years, with the recent ouster of Dredge as CEO and the installation of a new CEO who's really trying to set them on the straight and narrow path with the launch of the Kraken that we did at CitizenCon, and that's kind of like the new Drake.
TL;DRThey can't give Tevarin numbers beyond saying there are few, and describe them as split between embracing UEE society and reclaiming their heritage, a deliberate point of flux for when they appear in-game.
Yeah, I mean, as far as actual numbers, I'm not entirely sure we could necessarily say how many. There's not a whole bunch of them; they're not rivaling humans as far as their population. But they've been going through an interesting thing, because initially they were part of UEE society but were on a self-imposed exile from it. They kind of weren't happy about it, so they didn't care about anything, they were just living their lives and ignoring everybody. With the Tevarin Senator storyline that we ran a few years ago...
Kosi, yeah. There's an element of them that want to embrace the UEE and are like, hey, we're part of this civilization, let's act like it and let's contribute and stuff like that. And so you get some who follow that belief, some that don't. And then also with the Kosi story, we were getting into a small group of them who are trying to kind of... Yeah, we're trying to set it up as an interesting point of flux for when we do get to introduce them into the game.
That there'll be interesting paths for them to take. It's not quite a clear path right now. It's like, do they fully acknowledge that we're part of the UEE now and we want our equal rights and we want to take hold and we're respectable citizens? As part of that, do they want to reclaim their lost heritage? Does reclaiming their lost heritage mean separating out from the UEE and living in Branaugh? And then there's still the people who have this kind of more lone warrior thing, and the Tevarin have a little bit of a bad rep from working as mercs or criminals. And all this stuff feeds in together to make a very complicated, interesting...
Yeah, I mean, the hope is that, because we've been asked on the forums about whether there are Tevarin in the military and stuff like that, and Suj Kosi was a Navy pilot, I believe. The hope is that when you meet them, there's a story behind them, like how they're behaving and how their personality is; there's inherently something fun and interesting about them. For me, actually, they're one of my favorites, although the Banu are rapidly sneaking up on them. They're very fun.
We haven't gotten into... There's a little bit for the Tevarin. I mean, the direction we're fleshing out right now is that I believe the Tevarin are going to be kind of dense-nutrient constant snacking. So little nutrient pellets, not like pellets, but like, you know those recipes for protein balls that everyone posts online? Kind of those all day long, just a little sack and pop them in, so a less formalized meal structure. That's my current thinking. This hasn't even been run past Dave yet, so you're getting it hot. But that's kind of what I'm seeing them as.
TL;DRThe Tevarin were the first alien civilization humanity fought, a warlike race who attacked first, lost two wars, and after their warlord's last stand were absorbed into the UEE, rejecting their old society.
The Tevarin were the first alien civilization that humanity went to war with. They were a very warlike civilization and, according to history, they launched the first attack. Basically we showed up in their system and they attacked us, and it sparked one war, we beat them, and then it sparked a second war. A few years later, one of their Tevarin warlords rose up and organized the remaining Tevarin to try and take back their homeworld, which had been colonized by the humans, and then basically started this long, protracted guerrilla war, which lasted for several years, and then he started to lose. Squadron 42, that's how they first esteemed themselves, in the battle that turned the tide of the war. And then he crashed himself and his fleet into the planet, his homeworld, as a last defiant act. And the remaining Tevarin were assimilated into the UEE and basically wholeheartedly rejected their old society and just stopped caring.
It's going well. It's still in progress, and we're working on it, and hopefully we'll have something to announce before too long and share with you all.
A good place to plug that: every other month in Jump Point Magazine, we have Galactapedia articles. So if you're a subscriber, you can get a head start on some of the content that's being created for the Galactapedia every other month in Jump Point.
TL;DRThe lore team works fairly closely with mechanics designers but mostly downstream, giving broad boundaries at kickoff and then fitting the designers' systems into the fiction, as with harvestables.
Pretty close. Usually, again, we were talking earlier about how we've been generating content for the game for a long time. And as the game is catching up to us and realizing a lot of those elements, we have stuff established. So there's usually a kickoff as far as mechanics go, where we'll present what information we've already released and what the expectation is.
We tend to be a little more downstream when it comes to mechanics. We let the game designers come up with the systems and the gameplay that they want the player experience to be, and then we'll take that and see how we're wrapping it up so that it makes sense in our universe. I know one that you were dabbling in recently was the new melee stuff that you were having a lot of fun with.
Yeah, a lot of fun. And again, we'll usually provide some very broad boundaries, just as far as, we don't have necromancy in the universe. Sorry, spoilers. But again, just so we establish the very raw boundaries. But yeah, as Will said, they should create the kind of experience that they want to create, and then we will do a pass on it and bring it into fiction if it needs to be, or figure out how to explain it.
There's, again, another Jump Point. In the upcoming one, we talked about harvestables, and I got to talk a little bit briefly about our role in there. Because it's such a big thing of, how do we collect it? So we really geared that stuff towards what the tier zero requirements were for the harvestables. In the case of the rocks or the minerals that they wanted to be mining, there needed to be a visual hint on them for this first iteration, because our scanning is still a work in progress. So it was important that they have that little bit of twinkle to catch the eye. And so for tier zero, design asked that we limit our list of harvestables to crystalline structures for the rocks, and so that's how that came about, that kind of back and forth.
TL;DRLore supplies short narrative write-ups and a kickoff, then environment and level teams build with wide latitude, and lore returns for detail passes; ArcCorp's missing ocean was a tech limitation, with natural areas hoped for.
Well, as still being in development, as being an alpha project, we will always bump into our current tech limitations. And so rather than waiting until we can do everything perfectly, we release in iterations. Like the release of ArcCorp and Area18, that's not the end of it. We're always improving. And so I think our experience working with the environment teams and the level design teams when it comes to planets is definitely different than the game mechanic ones, in that every location, as we've seen with our hundred systems, has a narrative write-up, and that's the seed of everything that starts when designing these worlds. They get those short blurbs, and again we do a kickoff where we expand it out. And as the art team moves on to their schedule of, now we're going to start building this area, we've been going through providing additional lore, getting into landing zones: okay, we mentioned these couple shops, but it turns out we need a lot more stores to go in here, or in the end we have too many armor shops now so we need something else here, and going back and forth. And the environment art team, they're amazing, so we give them a lot of leeway just to take our inspiration points of, this is an icy moon, and go to town on it, and what they come back with is incredible.
Yeah, and after that kickoff, the level designers will go off and start to actually build the ground-level blockout of the space and stuff like that. And from that, we'll get a sense of exactly the size we're dealing with and the scope we're dealing with. And then, as Will said, that'll determine how many stores there are, how many little nooks and crannies there are where we need to populate with people, possibly, and stuff like that. So it's a very collaborative thing. But usually it will start with a kickoff where we go over the narrative write-up of the system, just to provide a launching place for conversation. And then we spread out from there.
And then after they've done their initial passes, we also come in for our detail pass later on: additional branding, figuring out NPCs, and all that kind of detail work that comes a little farther down the pipeline. So usually narrative is at the start, and also downstream at the end for the finishing touches.
And to specifically address the ArcCorp missing ocean thing: ArcCorp not having an ocean was a limitation of the tech at the time when we were implementing ArcCorp. It wasn't that they decided not to make one.
Yeah, I'm only going to touch lightly on it, because the tech limitations I don't quite fully understand. There were some difficulties in blending terrain with urban environments without putting that solid wall around that we have. And so they're still working on being able to transition between urban environments and mountainous areas and beachfronts and stuff. And that's hopefully coming soon. And so the plan for ArcCorp is to have areas that are natural spaces.
TL;DRThey are gradually replacing real-world foreign text, like Chinese, with in-universe alien languages in places such as Area18, treating remaining Earth languages as nostalgic flavor rather than actively spoken ones.
Well, a lot of that stuff we're actually trying to replace with some of the languages that we are developing, using Banu and Xi'an and stuff like that, and hopefully Tevarin once we get to that, incorporating that stuff into it, so that kind of exotic flavor is more bound to our universe.
Yeah, because the artists like that exotic feel of when you walk into an area and you see this multitude of languages. And now that we have this awesome work from Britton, our linguist, coming online, we're trying to really switch it. You can see some of that already in Area18, with some of the food stalls that have Xi'an on the takeout boxes and Banu on the lanterns, which used to be Chinese characters. And so we're slowly swapping that out and focusing more on it being a combination of common for the UEE and then the xeno languages. So when you do see foreign languages, it's definitely less that there are active speaking groups, or that this is going to be a town where everyone speaks French. It's more harking back to the old days. It's more reminiscing, like how we use Latin now to evoke a certain sense of nostalgia. And I think that's how in the empire some of these old Earth languages are used.
TL;DRCoaxium isn't Star Citizen, but for quantum fuel they previewed an unreleased, CR-approved backstory about transients attaching to transisotopes in certain elements, harvested carefully, noting designers may still change details.
That's another sci-fi franchise. But let's talk about the quantum fuel. Can you tell us a little bit more about the lore behind quantum fuel, or the mining of quantum fuel?
So this is an interesting thing, going back to how we work with game mechanics. The design team was starting to look down the road at introducing quantum fuel mining into the game, and so we needed to come up with the lore behind what quantum fuel was and how it's found, to help guide them in how they were going to build it. And we got their design qualifications of, oh, it needs to be found in almost every system. It has to be rare for the price, but also slightly common so that you're not stuck somewhere.
One of the interesting things, sorry to interrupt, about the parameters that was really fun was, because we had quantum fuel before we discovered jump points, the idea was it had to basically exist in our solar system.
Yeah, we needed a way to find it in Sol, which was a nice little peccadillo. So we did a whole write-up, and it recently got approved by CR. And how these things work is our write-ups will change. Once the designer gets their hands on it and starts implementing what we came up with as a backstory, we'll find out, oh, actually, we need it to be more like this. We need it to be less common, more common. We need it to be more difficult. We need it to be highly explosive because it's more fun. And then we'll adjust based on that, or we'll have a discussion with them about, if not that, then this.
The basic idea, I can give a sneak preview of some of it, is that there are these particles called transients which can bend space and mass around themselves. And they were this really cool discovery, but they were very fleeting and hard to find. And then scientists, slowly after discovering this, were able to detect them in, oh, I'm totally blanking, what's the Hadron Collider kind of thing? The particle colliders were able to pick up on these, and eventually they were able to find that these would be stably existing temporarily in transisotopes, where these transients would temporarily attach themselves onto atomic particles and exist. And that was the main way we started harvesting them: certain elements are more prone to existing as transisotopes that you can then use to harvest the transients, and that gets turned into quantum fuel. So using scanning, you'll find a rock that's iridium, and then through scanning it you'll see that it's 5% of these transisotopes, and you'll have to harvest them quickly, and if you put in too much energy they'll devolve back into normal isotopes. So there's a high risk, and you have to be careful with harvesting and then transporting them to make sure that you preserve the transients until it's refined.
And design was involved in the conversation and all that. So this is on our internal Confluence page. This is a full write-up, with scientists' names and a timeline and all that kind of fancy stuff. We haven't discussed this publicly before.
TL;DRThey are rolling back ArcCorp's timeline, limited by other jump point dates, with new dates given for Stanton's discovery and corporate takeover, rolled out slowly with knock-on updates to other lore.
So yeah, actually we're going to roll back the timeline on it a little bit. Again, it's tricky because it can't go back too far, because it conflicts with other jump point discoveries and stuff like that. But yeah, so we're still slowly rolling out the changes, or will roll out the changes, on updating all of our...
There's a lot of lore that we've written involving the dates of when Stanton was discovered and the cities built. So basically, once we got approval to change the timeline, we've been looking at every single article that mentions this, making the changes offline, and once we have everything in shape, we'll slowly roll it out. It's weird stuff. That beautiful Hurston timeline that they built in Lorville is going to have to be updated, so there are knock-on effects. We'll hopefully get that all sorted. And the new discovery date for the system will be 2851, with the four corporations taking over in 2865. So it gives us a good chunk more time. We still wanted it to feel like it was an explosion of development, and that was important to the world for us.
And also, getting back to what we were talking about earlier with the oceans thing, once hopefully that comes online, it'll seem a little bit more believable that the entire planet won't be...
Yep. I mean, again, it's a tricky thing, because writing books is an involved process. But the initial quick fix was, hopefully we can translate a lot of the existing ones into downloadable stories, or stories in the universe that you can read.
Yeah, so a lot of the short stories that appeared in Jump Point and are now appearing on the site are considered by us to be fictional stories for people in the universe. So those will be books that you can find. One of the holdups is just getting the UI work in line, and they have so much to do that it's considered a slightly lower priority, as well as getting the props for what you're actually interacting with set up. And so these are all conversations we've had. It's just low tier.
TL;DRCurrent missions are written in lore but are dry and procedurally generated; they hope to eventually add branching, story-driven missions with design, but aren't there yet.
Yeah, I mean, it's much more immediate lore. I interpreted this question as, again going back to the Tevarin running for Senator thing, doing larger-scale stuff in-game.
All the current missions are written in lore. They just tend to be drier corporate missions right now. We're hoping to get more branching missions down the road, working with design on that, where stuff leads into other stuff and starts building up a narrative. We're not quite at that point yet.
Yes. More, I guess not protracted, but where you're participating in a storyline as far as missions, rather than just doing courier jobs and assassinations and stuff like that.
But yeah, a lot of these, the contracts that you pick up, the everyday business type missions, are just gonna be influenced by the larger lore of the game. So, oh, you're carting WiDoW from here, and there's a lab over here that's making the drug, and there's this gang warfare going on. The individual mission itself isn't really feeding you all that lore, it's just utilizing the background lore of the world to make that mission happen. So that's going to be a lot of the way that we do storytelling in the game.
And also, a lot of the ones that are currently there are more procedurally generated ones, so the idea is that we need replayability and variety, which is antithetical to a story-driven, character-based thing.
The way our timeline works is that one of the timeline posts shows his poster for 2928, but that's not when he was elected. That was a failed bid for Imperator, so he didn't get elected until 2940, and he's serving out his 10-year term, and you're only allowed to be elected once.
TL;DRArcCorp sustains its population by importing, at great expense, much of what it needs, supported by the UEE's wider economy and farming worlds, though natural areas may be added later.
But I think overall the UEE has this kind of interstellar economic powerhouse that does a lot of growing. We have Bremen, our breadbasket, that's shipping out all over. So I don't think every planet is considered in any way sustainable. There are some pretty hostile environments. On Lo, I think, it's got a pretty... Yeah, people living in domes and stuff. And so that's the major infrastructure of why you all have Hulls carting stuff out there, to provide sustenance for all these people living out in the wide 'verse.
Bremen, yeah, we said Bremen was the breadbasket. It was basically designated as an agricultural, an ag world type thing. So that was what they did during, I think it was the First Tevarin War, or the Second Tevarin War, and that's why they got left alone by the Messers.
I mean, we haven't done anything specifically calling that out as a thing, so I don't know. I guess it would actually be a design question ultimately, of whether they want to include it as a damage type.
We talked about radiation-level damage. I think if we did have them coming out, it would definitely be limited in the amount of damage. The UEE wouldn't condone the sale of planet killers to average civilians. There's no reason why the average person needs that level of firepower, figuring that most of the weapons are supposed to be defensive in nature when civilians get their hands on them.
TL;DRNo: there won't be general-AI androids, because AI would take human skill out of piloting and in-universe AI attempts went badly, so robotics instead means dumb AI and non-humanoid drones.
Yeah, the idea was that there would be non-synthetic human robots running around rather than AI-driven stuff. Part of it was originally just a stylistic choice. Part of it was to explain why, because obviously an AI would be able to pilot your ship a lot better than a human pilot would, so it was a justification for Chris of why he wanted people to be in their ships flying around. And so the second we started to introduce AI and these super brains, it would take the human ability out of the equation, because they would just be able to operate at such a faster speed, and it was not the style of world that he was looking to build. So that was the initial thing. And then we started coming up with all the lore trappings of all the failed attempts by humanity to try and develop AI, and it always goes wrong. There was the traffic incident, and obviously the Artemis was a huge catastrophe.
It disappeared. It was an AI pilot and the ship never came back. But yeah, I think we have very advanced computers that simulate human interaction, like when you're contacting an air traffic controller.
But I think overall, the path of advanced robotics in the empire headed towards complicated drones, building machines for the most idealized purpose and shape for what it is, and humans aren't the best at a lot of stuff. It was always that weird thing of, oh, you're going to build the ultimate fighting robot? You make him look like a human? No, you make him look like a tank with a big gun. And I think the complication of having basically these robotic servants that look like humans is also kind of a squidgy point in the empire, for their comfort level with having that kind of intelligent humanoid slaves, for lack of a better word. So very intelligent drones and robots and stuff like that, but just not human-shaped.
TL;DRFrom a lore view, the UEE might have a basic income or empire-wide minimum wage, possibly via public services or certified jobs, while Xi'an, Banu and Vanduul economies remain undecided and likely only seen through UEC.
I might have to get back to you on it. Check back in in 2021? Yeah, I mean, again, this would purely be from the lore fiction perspective, not reflective of gameplay or player experience and stuff like that, so I'm going to caveat that. But it makes sense to me, the idea that the UEE, because they have the Common Law thing, which is the basic rules that every planet in the UEE has to abide by, whether it's represented or not. These are the foundational rights and services that the public can and should expect. And it makes sense to me that they would have organized a kind of basic income level.
It might come out more in the form of public services, though, rather than giving you credits per se, like providing basic levels of health care, shelter and food that you can have access to. Because gameplay-wise, we don't want you to not be able to respawn because you're broke. So there's a certain level of health care that you can expect. But, as Dave was caveating on this, don't expect, if we do have basic income levels, for players to be able to get free 500 credits every day.
That might tie into our BLA certification for jobs. We have this certification process that legal jobs go through, which means they meet the safety requirements and the company is legit, and it might also be that they meet a minimum payment requirement for the job, and those are the up-and-up jobs when you see that contract. You know it's safe, it's good, and then of course the more interesting jobs will not be certified.
And lore-wise, we have some lore on the Xi'an, Banu and Vanduul economies. That is still very much a question up in the air, because all those species, well, not the Vanduul, but the Banu and Xi'an deal with humans in UEC, so that might be the way that you end up interacting with them for the entirety of the game. It's hard enough doing one good economy. So we'll see how it turns out. There's definitely been talk and interest in it, but it's definitely a down-the-road kind of, wouldn't that be great to have?
And it also might be, again, a disparity between the fictional universe versus the player experience. Yes, the Xi'an probably have their own economy, but will the players see it? Like Will said, probably they'll all accept UEC.
TL;DRTheir days vary, but they work on Squadron 42 written text, scripts and recording shoots, live design support, and lore tasks, following a roughly quarterly cycle.
That usually takes about 10-15 minutes. It usually takes 5 or 6 takes until we get it right. I mean, one of the really fun things about this job is it's tough to explain what you do every day, because it constantly changes. There are obviously ongoing tasks that we have. There's Squadron 42 support. There's working with live design on PU stuff. There's working with marketing on stuff. There's also the fun lore stuff that we do, like food or melee systems.
Yeah, it's almost cyclical by the quarter breakdown. At the top of the quarter, it's usually starting to chip away at a lot of the Squadron 42 written text, which we have a lot of, and we've been making really good progress on that stuff. And then as it heads towards the middle of the quarter, we start focusing on finalizing scripts for the upcoming quarter's gameplay. Now that design has had enough time to put together all the information we need to write the scripts, we start planning for the recording shoots. And then at the end, a lot of the new mission content and in-game stuff will be finalized, and we'll start doing some of the live design team support for finishing up mission text, which is a lot of what I've been doing these last couple days, getting everything shipshape for 3.7.
And also later in the quarter, we try to drop into the game a lot, just to see the PTU and stuff like that, and see what's working, what's not, and get ideas for stuff to do that would be fun down the road.
I want to clarify: you started talking about the written text for Squadron 42, and then you moved into stuff like recording that was PU-related. I want to make sure people understand that you were doing some written stuff that you find in Squadron 42, but then the performance stuff, you were just in the UK doing some performance stuff for the PU.
Yeah. Like some of the things, we were releasing New Babbage as a location, and so there's some VO work that has to come up there, like our spaceport, our air traffic controller for the area. So some of that stuff was coming online.
TL;DRThe Walzer Massacre was retaliation for the Cathcart bombing and re-bolstered the UEE's crackdown on outlaws around Nexus, part of an ongoing, rolling struggle to secure too much territory.
Demien. Yeah, and so basically after Keller's Run, security had reestablished themselves in the system, and Demien was this outpost where a lot of families of the security people were living, and everyone thought they were safe again. And the Walzer crew had been kicked out during the sweep, and they didn't like that, and so they attacked Demien...
Yeah, the idea was that they were going to take over the base and use it as a stronghold. They were going to kill everybody on the base and take it over, but Walzer was a kid, the son of an Advocacy agent, and sent out the SOS, which is why it was named... The Marines assaulted it. It basically sent a signal that Nexus was not secure, so it re-bolstered the UEE's attempts to crack down on the criminals that were refusing to give up their land. Weirdly enough, there were a bunch of events that were turning points for that war on crime, because Keller's Run is what kicked the whole thing off, and then there was the bombing of Cathcart, which happened in direct retaliation. It was part of their getting-tough-on-crime initiative, and then the Walzer Massacre was actually a retaliation for the bombing stuff, so it was a rolling mess.
Yeah, it's this ongoing struggle, because there was this tightening up of, oh, we're just going to focus our resources on the systems we can control and we're going to ignore these problem spots. But then the rot got so bad that the problem spots started spilling over into the nice parts, and so there was this pushback of, oh, we've got to clear it out and secure it. But then as soon as you clear out one nest, another one pops up, and it's this ongoing struggle of the Empire dealing with such a large amount of area to secure and to protect.
Yeah. Because the reason for the name Nexus was that it was at the center of, I think it was four or five unclaimed outlaw systems, Cathcart being one of them. Keller's Run, again, was the first time where they realized, we really don't have control over here, and it's actually very dangerous to have basically a small mini-nation within the heart of the Empire. And so that's why the UEE re-established dominance over Nexus, to break it up, to prevent them from being able to have a really large chunk of four or five systems that was uncontrolled.
But then the Vanduul attacks increased, and all the spending went towards the now recently claimed war effort, and now we see the repercussions of that in the new militia focus that's been happening, where the UEE is coming out and being like, you can deal with it. Which is exciting gameplay for you all, but it's kind of forcing the average Joe citizen to be out there with their gun defending themselves.
Maybe. We'll see. I mean, that's one of our fermenting plot lines with the Tevarin. So yeah, I think it will depend on a lot of stuff, on how it goes down in the universe.
TL;DRThe timeline mistake was acknowledged and hopefully corrected: the war ended early 2546, Messer then became High General, and later became Prime Citizen after the Tribunal was dissolved.
So, full no-prize on this one. After I called it out, I did my research, and there was a mistake in the timelines, which should now hopefully be corrected. So, yes, the First Tevarin War ended early in 2546. After that, Messer went from commander to High General, and as High General he kept petitioning for the dissolution of the Tribunal. While this was going on, all of a sudden there were terrorist attacks associated with the Xi'an that people later claimed were orchestrated by Messer himself, which The Path to Prime Citizen claimed were ongoing, so those happened in summer and fall of 2546. All leading up to when that final big attack occurred, Messer got his way, the Tribunal was dissolved, and he started the position of Prime Citizen, and, oddly enough, in the emergency election on December 15th, 2546, he won. So this should all be reflected now. Thank you very much for catching that. Please, as always, let us know when this stuff comes up.
This was an interesting question. We actually really thought about this. I would say no. I feel like they could reapply as much as they wanted to, because circumstances could change on the planet. They could make amends. I don't know if they would necessarily be told why they didn't make it, but they would get shot down and then they could reapply.
I think, as we just proved, we fix all the time. We're constantly, again, because it's seven years of lore, and that's updating based off of gameplay stuff and stuff. So yeah, we're gonna totally miss stuff, so by all means.
And sometimes if we haven't yet, it's because it's a really complicated fix or it has downstream problems, or sometimes something that is perceived as an error is in fact not. And that's also why it hasn't been fixed.
TL;DRNo completion date is given for Synthworld; they want such storylines to resolve in-game as missions players experience, rather than on the website.
We've introduced some of these storylines, like Synthworld, which is an interesting development for us, in that we want them to resolve in-game. So sometimes if it seems like a storyline has gone into the background a little bit, we're sitting on our hands a little bit until we can do it in the mission format of experiencing it, rather than just starting storylines and resolving them on the website.
Yeah, it's much more fun if you guys are around to maybe not affect the change, but just to be able to experience it firsthand. Because originally the idea with Synthworld, aside from being an economic drain on the UEE, was that it was going to be a resource dump. The idea was that it was basically going to be a mission hub where it just had a huge grocery list of resources that it constantly needed. So it was always going to be basically a source of employment. That was the under-the-hood type explanation for it. But yeah, exactly what Will said. A lot of the stuff we want to play out while you guys are actually able to experience it firsthand.
It's still a Ford Mustang. Even after Shelby's taken it and done their stuff, they may stick their logo on it. You may still see the Shelby Cobra on there, but it is still a Ford Mustang.
TL;DRSpeaking only from lore, Earth went through overpopulation and water wars, then recovered after humanity spread out, with possible light re-terraforming, more green spaces and preserved old structures.
They went through a rough patch before. Weirdly enough, I think it was actually in the architectural doc that somebody very fastidiously copied for the Chairman. There was a point where basically in the 21st or 22nd century, right before we were able to terraform Mars, overpopulation was a huge problem. And so it was almost reaching a tipping point. So there were water wars, and it got really bad and stuff like that.
Yeah, for developing this technology, was the fact that it was just to alleviate the pressure on Earth. And so thankfully they were able to do it after a disastrous setback. But yeah, it feels like now it's better.
Yeah, there was the great human diaspora. Now that humanity is spread throughout the stars, I believe we talked about how they may have done some light re-terraforming to get Earth back to its glory days in terms of the environment, cleaning it up a bit, and maybe there are more parks and green spaces preserved than there used to be.
We had talked, I think it was in Lost Generation, Tanya goes to Earth, and there was the idea that there were some old structures that were still standing that they had basically encased in a protectorate shell type thing. So it's definitely the pearl of the empire as far as Earth is concerned.