Star Citizen Live: Master Modes

So Master Modes is basically our way of fixing the combat in the game but also allowing the ship experience and the ship roles to kind of fulfill themselves. So early on in the combat we tried several things which the community knows about. We tried to patch on things to help combat, to help fix it, and none of them really worked. So we looked at what's the fundamental problem with the kind of combat and the ship geometry that we have in the game right now, and the common denominator was speed. But we didn't want to come up with a way which was, right, let's just blanket cap the speed because if you go too fast, it breaks the game. We just didn't want to do an overall kind of cap, because there's still so many things you're doing in Star Citizen beyond combat. You spend a lot of time traveling from A to B, and the distances we have in the game are crazy. We travel millions of kilometers all the time in the game.

And I do want to clarify, when you say speed, you're saying high speed.

Yes, high speed.

Too much speed. Because I think from a layman's perspective, from an outsider's perspective, for those of us who watch racing and watch combat movies like Top Gun and everything, more speed seems to be a good thing. It seems to be the thing that makes stuff exciting, makes stuff visceral. Everybody likes bobbing and weaving through canyons as fast as possible. But you're saying too much speed actually hurts the combat experience.

Yes. So if you're traveling very quickly, the distances you cover in that amount of time become really large. So if you're having a dogfight with someone and you're flying a thousand meters per second, within a very short amount of time you could be three or four kilometers away from your target if you turned around, and then you're flying back towards each other. And then you basically repeat the action and you start firing at the nose of your opponent. And that's not really fun, because it makes it really hard to balance. It makes it really hard for the weapons to make a difference, the different types of weapons we have in the game. So the goal for this was to bring the combat closer and to make it much more about kind of outmaneuvering your opponent. So if you can get the edge on your opponent and you're trying to do this and that, move around each other, there's going to be key moments in this where you get an advantage and you can use the distinct weapons you've chosen, your special loadout you've chosen, and those things will be an advantage but also be disadvantages too. But we want it to be about those moments where you really engage in combat and it becomes about outmaneuvering your opponent rather than this kind of slingshot, nose-on-nose combat we've kind of been used to.

So the one state is basically your combat mode. We're still talking about whether it should be standard control mode or actual just combat mode. This is the mode in which you do the majority of your gameplay in. You're going to do all the combat stuff. You're probably going to do mining in that as well. And the other mode, which you swap your ship into, it was called QCM in our presentation. Recently, we're just going to call it NAV mode because it's a more descriptive name for it. And this one allows you to use your quantum mode and it allows you to unlock the high velocities, but it makes your ship very vulnerable, in terms of there won't be shields or weapons working during that time. And basically that is the idea which Rich just alluded to: we're separating these two gameplay systems apart from each other. So you can either choose to be high-performant and dangerous, or you can be fast, right? And travel and navigate around the verse, but you can't do it both at the same time.

So we tried nerfing things based upon the speed of the ship. So we tried some sort of shields, I think, at the time. And just trying to make the tuning work as well. We looked at what we needed to get from the ships as well. And nothing really felt right in what we were trying to do. It just felt like we were solving one problem over here, but it was creating another problem over here. And that's the real difficulty with this problem: we had to come up with something, I'm not going to say it solved everything, but it solved the majority of issues without really causing another problem, which was the kind of loop we got into before with changing the way the shields work and the weapons and stuff. We were always creating another problem with what we were trying to solve. And that's something we definitely think we've avoided with the master modes.

It was interesting because we were never going to be able to stop the high speeds in the game. So we knew we had that problem. And I would say it was a sort of eureka moment, but also we faced some challenges trying to get this through as well. So it was kind of like, yes, we've got a really cool idea, but we've got these problems to solve.

You had a problem getting Master Modes into the game approved? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, it was more like, just because it's such a major change to the game, we had to convince people it wasn't going to break racing. It wasn't going to break [garbled: "Madden"]. It wasn't going to break all the other systems we have in the game, because it's so fundamental to the way ships work. Because we're saying we've got a combat mode where these systems work, now we've got navigation mode where these systems work, and it's such a fundamental change to the game. It has to be approved by so many people, which is never easy, because everyone is trying to look after their futures, which is the right thing to do. So it was definitely a challenge trying to convince other teams as well that this is going to be the best solution for everyone for the game moving forward.

Well, as Rich said, there was no eureka moment. Usually when we develop stuff like that, we're going step by step in our iterative processes. It was easy to identify that slow speed combat works a lot better simply by limiting the velocities ourselves. Suddenly, the geometry and so on looked a lot better. So when you say testing, it actually covers quite a lot of time, from checking what do we do with the velocities, how do we actually limit the velocities when you go above boost and so on, right? Because what never felt good was, for example, just boosting to your maximum SCM velocity and then being stuck there. Being stuck in that maximum velocity in all directions was one of the problems why combat felt stale, right? Because it doesn't allow you any more interesting tactics. And so we slowly went in adding stuff like the post boost or the above-SCM boost boundaries and all that, making sure that the boost is applied in a non-spheric way, but it's actually more egg-shaped. So basically when you boost backwards, you burn a lot more energy than going forward, which just forces you to go to your target and turn around. And all these things we just went through step by step. It's not like we're living under a rock or so. We read and watch YouTube videos of so many backers, or players, I should say. And there's hours and hours of dogfighting analysis. We looked through it all, and a lot of these points were actually true. So we kind of built our requirement list out of that, and then we just tried to go there step by step. And testing is basically, we have testing slots every week. The last two weeks were horrible in this regard because the builds were just crashing on some other parts. But I mean, this happens. But we just test the game every week with our PT friends, so that's Bayer's team. And then we knew we were on the right track when, it was a couple of months ago, we were just fighting with master modes around, and one of the PT guys was critical about one specific aspect. It wasn't really important, right? And then I was a little bit insecure and just asked, yeah, but do you like the master mode system in general? And they were like, oh, yes, yes, of course we like it. So this gives us enough confidence to know that we're on the right track. And the process itself with the testing works, right? We just slowly go step by step to the solution that we would like to see.

Yeah, so there is a time difference. It is ship based, but it can also be component based as well, because you've got the shields going up and down. Because we didn't want you to be able to press a button, boom, gone, and you're just in different modes. Because we want the player to make that key choice when they're in the master mode for combat, for example. We want them to be in that combat mode because they want to do that thing that they've chosen to do. But there's consequences to that. And it's the same with flying in navigation mode without the shields. There's a choice to that, that you can go fast and you're just doing your A to B stuff in Star Citizen and you don't want to get involved in combat. So there is that consequence: you can't just press a button and it's instant. So if you go from combat mode, for example, to navigation mode, your shields will have to go down. And then to go back, your shields will have to go back up. But it's not an instant thing. And it will vary depending on the components as well.

That adds so much tactical choice though. Now during fights, when you're being raided by a pirate or whatever, it's not just flip a mode and get out. You have to determine when the best time is going to be. You have to know your ship and precisely how long it's going to take your ship versus their ship to make these switches. It opens up the door for tons of customization with the ships between the different components and the tunings, so that it's going to allow people to fine-tune their ships and have a reason to do so.

Yes. And that's the great thing about this, is it gives the player choice. That's something we're really keen for: we provide the underlying system, but we provide the choices within that as well. And that's really key for us as a gameplay team, is players have those choices. Because people play the game for all kinds of different reasons. Some people like to go out there with all guns blazing, for example. And they can do that. But if they do that, the other players are going to know that they're in that mode and they're all guns blazing. So it's a disadvantage to that, because they're going to be more aware that that person's in that mode.

So you slow down very aggressively and your face almost comes off. It can be a very aggressive slowdown from that speed, and that's another thing that's going to be a critical choice. If you have to do that hard speed, there's going to be a reason that you've done that, but there's going to be a consequence to it.

It's actually quite interesting, because when we tested that first, the decelerations we got were up to 50, 60 Gs, something like that, right? So that's obviously nothing that you can survive easily, right? But we didn't see this effect, because our G-force tuning doesn't react to decelerations that take that short amount of time. So basically nothing happened. But what we actually want to achieve is, if you flip the switch too fast, and maybe even take into account that you might have high G's, then this is supposed to knock you out. But that specific part is not in, but it is planned, so that you need to prepare when you actually want to slow down. So you cannot just single click and then flop back to SCM or so. There will be consequences for that.

No, it's a good point. It actually came up from one of our playtests: what happens to racing, because the actual speed of combat was probably just not enough to make racing feel exciting. And then it's actually had a fundamental impact on the choices we've made with the design for master modes, to make sure that racing works. So we've got boost now, which works outside of the actual combat mode. It might work a little bit differently, but we're going to have boost outside of the combat mode now. And that's come specifically from racing and the needs of racing. Because, as I say, we're building lots of different worlds now where racing is possible. We're actually doing a lot more support for it now, to build it officially within the game, because it's come from the community. They're the ones making all these interesting levels out of the worlds that we build. And now we're going, right, we're going to start making this as part of the actual game. So we have to support this. A big part of master modes was the roles, and we want the racing ships to be, well, racing ships. So they're going to go very quickly still, they're going to be light, they're going to be agile, but you're not really going to want to do combat. Even if they come with weapons, you're probably not going to really want to take them into combat. But the balance for us is making sure they're quick enough to escape, but there's still that risk there in combat.

So we might get some of what I'm talking about through components and tunings for racing-specific ships, and then the boost change that you were talking about.

There's a bit more to it though, right? Because the SCM mode is supposed to be the high performance mode that you're in, but racing doesn't work well when the velocities are too low. And there are actually some sequences from the Squadron team as well where they want racing-like structures, right? So we are looking at this very deeply. The thing that might change, or what we're currently testing there, is whether or not the capacitor systems have a little bit of a different power output. So where you can, for example, regenerate your boost pool in SCM within maybe 10 seconds or whatever, it will take considerably longer when you are in the nav mode, but it just frees up a lot more potential to do fast racing. So you basically select: do you want to go fast and take care of your boost pool, or do you want to risk going into the slower speed but then get rewarded with a higher boost regeneration? It will be along these lines. This is currently in testing. This is actually the thing we wanted to check last week, where the builds were busted. So there's no definitive answer how that will look, but we'll figure it out. It will just be part of the normal testing iteration.

We've seen a lot, both good, but also there's a lot of questions. And I think that's the main thing: there's been a lot of questions about how does it affect this, how does it affect this, and what are you doing to combat this problem which the community think is going to happen because of combat modes. But we've been doing a lot of testing to make sure that we don't just fulfill our own prophecy of going, right, we'll fix this. So the testing has also been kind of outside of our little remit a little bit, which is we don't just want to reinforce our own ideas. We've playtested this on the basis of what a player's feeling when they actually play master modes. So that's been a big focus of ours. And I think it's going to be difficult to answer a lot of the questions until we start showing it working and we actually show the results. Because that's what we're really excited about, the results from this. And what we've seen internally has been really positive. Things are much closer, and the differences we want in the systems, both in terms of the components and the weapons on the ship and the style of ship you have, are making much more of a difference in those key moments. But that's just something that we're going to have to prove out.

Yeah, and that's the big thing for us, is that this is a lot of work. Releasing it to the PU is a massive feature for us, because it changes almost every single component in the game. It changes every single ship in the game as well, from a ship performance perspective, to make sure that ship is within its performance window, but also its health as well, and just how it behaves in the game. We have over 100 ships now you can fly in the game, and that takes a lot of testing and a lot of tuning to do. And also we've got a lot of multiplayer testing to do. We've got to make sure it looks correct, so the players understand the master modes on the UI. So there's a lot of work to bring this feature together, but we've got the fundamental feature together in terms of S42 now. It's in there, you can change all the speeds, but that's on a very limited amount of ships and on a very limited amount of components right now. So to get it in the PU is a lot more work, because we don't just want to release this as a work in progress and say, right, this is on five ships right now, go try it. It's just not something we can do, because it's so fundamental to the entire component structure we have in the game.

Just to add to this point, there are also heavy downstream dependencies, because right now most of the master mode UI, for example, is beautiful coder art. And if you ever saw coder art, it's very simplistic, right? It doesn't respect the aesthetics that certain other people in the company would like to see. It's functionally working, right? But it wouldn't be fun at the moment in the PU, because, A, we have only tuned a couple of ships for it, and B, most of the nice UI is missing. And there's a couple of other things in the PU as well which don't add up well yet. For example, travel distances: we likely would need to tune them slightly differently for Squadron versus PU, because in the PU you're going to freely jump from planet to planet; that's not strictly always given in the frame that Squadron gives you, right? So it will be a while until players can see it. But when we're ready, we're probably not throwing it right in. We will try to test within the Evocati groups and so on to get feedback on whether or not it's working in the PU, and then do adjustments before we release it to the wider public.

Yeah. I mean, I was talking to John Erskine in Frankfurt at the Frankfurt Christmas party, and we were saying when you're really doing it, when you're really in it, you're just on high alert. In the lead-up to October 10th, there were so many balls to catch and plates spinning in the air. We just didn't know. We thought it was going to go well, but we weren't sure. Did I tell you Chris was singing? Chris is not a great singer, but he called me from Germany. You know that song, Big in Japan? He was singing "Big in Germany" badly, because all the journalists had brought old Wing Commander boxes and they were raving about the prototype. And he thought, well, maybe we have something. Maybe it's going to be good. Because Sean Tracy, Hannes, they all thought it was good. And I'd seen the prototype. I thought, this is something. But you never know. And we'd set up the website. And I was doing everything at the time. I mean, everything. I was his personal assistant, the meeting organizer, dealing with publicity, everything. I booked Chris into a broom closet in London; we were on a budget. And of course, when he got up to give the speech at GDC and the presentation, and then we launched the site, it crashes. I just was like, oh my gosh. It was in that moment I thought, oh my gosh, it's over. It's so done. It was horrifying. It was all that work, and then you're thinking people are going to go away and not come back, because the world's so fast and fickle. Then it just snowballed from there. It kept going.