Developers discuss the planned slowdown of combat speeds and the item rebalance that depends on it, including fighter, turret, shield, cannon and stealth balance. They also cover gold-standard passes for the Polaris, 600i, Retaliator, Starfarer and Constellation, plus tractor beams, modularity and ship prioritization.
TL;DRPhysicalized damage is still being worked on, with armor following from it, while physical components are independent and are being put into older ships, a slow burn for many months with resource network work possibly shown late in the third quarter.
So they always get lumped together in one thing, but they are somewhat independent systems. So physicalized damage, that is still being worked on. Physics guys are still working on it. They've got a few more test cases, found a few more issues. They are looking at some smaller scale problems to solve. Rather than going full hamster on a spaceship, they're trying to solve a lot of these questions on smaller environmental assets, because if you can solve it on that, it's much easier to then scale it up for a spaceship. So they're still working on that. The VFX team are quite heavily involved in doing a lot of tests, like simulations for the whole breakability side of it, rather than just nice clean breaks, but having a bit of crumpling. I know I said VFX, people think, oh, it's just particles. It's not. They do a lot more than just particle work, like mesh simulation; that knowledge is within that team. So deformation and twisting and bending of assets, that's with those guys. Physicalized armor is like a byproduct of the damage systems that will come with that. Physical components is sort of independent to that, because we can do physicalized components without the physical damage side. So we are looking in the very near future to start going through some of our ships and putting those components in the right places. If you look at our newer ships, say multi-crew ones with interiors, Carrack and Starlifter, you will have seen all the hatches, and when you open them up, the components are actually there. So for new ships that's built in. We're looking at going back to the older ships and updating those, which is obviously a lot of work. So it's a balancing act between updating the older ones and delivering newer ones. But we are putting more of a focus onto going back to those older ships and updating them, because we do need those ships to have the items in the right place, to have the resource network, which is the thing we've shown in the past with all the nodes and the links. And I'm sure we'll see more of that in the coming months on ISC as that progresses. But yeah, that side is in progress. That's going to be a slow burn for many, many months. And you might see in coming patches ship interiors changing a little, but not see any gameplay side of that. That's all the prep work for that.
It's worth noting, not to bury the lede there, that dependencies are at the core of all of these things. We're here with the vehicle content and feature team, the design team and stuff, but that question is mostly work for other gameplay teams, other design teams, other effects teams, and stuff that then needs to get integrated into the vehicles. And you are right. We will see more of the resource management stuff in quarter three of this year, probably towards the end of quarter three, maybe even the beginning of quarter four.
TL;DRThe team is still working out why some medium fighters are too strong or too weak, and plans to lower combat speeds so durability and turret speed matter more, which is the next step.
So obviously we've learned a lot with the rebalance that we did with the light fighters, medium fighters, heavy fighters, and we're still finding out what really makes a fighter stronger against another ship, especially when it comes to size and especially when it comes to the addition of a turret on that ship. So we have been working on some of that balance in the background. We've been doing various tests ourselves to figure it out, because we basically need to figure out why the Hurricane, for example, is actually quite strong. But it's probably a little bit too strong, whereas the Scorpius, for example, even though it's quite a good ship stat-wise, is not being as effective maybe as we thought originally compared to the stats it has. So we're still figuring out why this is the case, but also we're looking to move the combat speeds down. And this will really help bring in both the durability of the ship and also the speed of the turret. So once we bring down the speed of the ships, those other two factors will become much more important in terms of combat strength. So that's probably when our next step will come with these ships.
TL;DRSeveral ships in the pipeline will use tractor beams, much of the handheld work carries over, but it isn't ready for player release because UX needs work and vehicles are currently hard-coded not to work with it.
Yep, so we have a few ships in the pipeline that make use of them. The work done for the handheld tractor beam is probably 70% copy and paste into the vehicle ones. There's obviously some number twiddling behind the scenes in terms of the force and mass, and the VFX team want to upgrade the visuals of it, because obviously it's a very thin, spindly FPS one versus one that you would find on a larger ship. And it sort of works out of the box in the use cases we have. It is of limited use right now; it will be more used for the cargo refactor when you've got physical crates to load and unload, and that's why you don't really see it. And there is some UX that we want to improve, because on the FPS one, you have all your information on the back of the multi-tool. It tells you your force, limits, everything. That is all getting transported to the remote view on the turrets, or if you're in a manned turret, having it on the turret HUD planes. Because whilst right now I could jump in game and use a tractor beam turret on certain ships, I have to know what all the buttons do and all the limitations, because it's not being presented to me. So it's not ready for player release. And then towards the end of the year, we're going to be doing some work. So at the moment, vehicles are just simply hard coded to not work with it, because there are some quite interesting technical problems to do with IFCS and tractor beams. IFCS is basically built on the assumption that one person is controlling the flight of the vehicle, and that becomes not true when people are grabbing it with a tractor beam. So we know what we want to do with it. We just need to do that, because that's what everybody wants to do with tractor beams.
TL;DRRichard agrees progress looked slow, saying the earlier pass got the game to a good place and the team is now building features to bring combat speeds down rather than making small iterations.
Yeah, that's a fair comment. So we basically moved the game as far as we could at the time, with the resources we had, to a point where we could move forward with the game. So it meant bringing all the light fighters in sync and all the items in sync and the weapon balance, and doing a complete pass on almost every single item, every single weapon in the game; almost every single ship was retuned. And that's put us in a really good place to move forward. And since then, we've been working out how we do our next steps. And we're working on a couple of features in the background that will enable us to bring the combat speeds down. And this is where the next step comes, which is the combat speed. So once we get the combat speeds down to a reasonable amount, we're going to be able to really push forward on making ships more unique. So even ships that are similar in size, there are still unique properties to those ships that make them what they are. And we're going to be able to move those ships much more accurately and precisely within the bubble that those ships operate in. But we just decided to work on these features first, because there's no point doing small iterations, because that will stop us from doing the big iteration, which will keep delaying the combat speeds from being moved down to the right speeds. So this is the quickest way for us to move forward and get the combat speeds down.
TL;DRSlower speeds keep combat close and avoid nose-on-nose fly-bys so weapons and ships matter more, and John says traversal won't be crippled but declines to explain how yet.
Yeah, so it basically works up to a certain point. So in combat, there's a thing we call combat geometry, and it's how ships interact with each other. And at a certain speed, this falls apart, and it becomes basically a nose-on-nose fight. If you go towards each other, you just fly by each other. Jousting, yeah. Then basically, by the time you've looked around, you're two or three kilometers away from each other again, and it repeats. So what we want to do is bring that combat closer, and you have to slow things down so it works at a much closer distance. And then we can work on a much more accurate weapon system for different velocities of weapons, so the weapons can have their strengths, and missiles become more effective outside of these ranges so you can cover there. And it just allows us to control what the combat looks like and make it much more interesting, so that it's much more about the geometry and trying to get an edge on your opponent. And then once you get the edge on your opponent, being able to accurately win against them. But it's a challenge to get there. And bringing the speeds down just allows us to keep the distances close. And then you can use the different ships we have in the game for the actual different purposes they have, rather than just everything going quickly by each other all the time, where basically you're shooting at a very small point. It allows people to get an edge on their opponent, and then you can face them and you've got a full-face ship to shoot at, which we didn't really have before. So it's about moving the game towards that style of combat and allowing all the systems we have and all the weapon types we have to make a difference and matter, because at the high speeds everything just becomes about high speed, and the differences don't matter as much.
It's something we've been working on behind the scenes for quite a few months. We're going to probably say quite a few times today 'bringing the speeds down', but we're not going to explain how we're doing that here, because we could spend a whole hour or a whole separate ISC talking about what we're going to do, so we'll save that for another time. Yeah, the goal is to have those slower combat speeds because that improves combat. But then we've got another plan for not crippling traversal around the universe, because we're not just going to go, oh, ships are only going to go 300 meters a second now. Bam, tough. We are aware that combat is just one aspect of the game. There's a whole lot of traversal that needs to not be hindered by that. So we'll talk about it more in depth another time.
TL;DRStealth has had small signal reductions on a couple of ships and is planned to matter, but it must wait until combat speeds are lowered and all items are rebalanced.
So we've already sneaked in a couple of changes with a couple of the stealth ships we have in the game right now, which lowers their signals a little bit. But we do have a plan to make stealth and basically the entire radar system matter in terms of those ships. But again, we're at this point where our focus is combat speeds. But also the reason why that's holding things back in terms of stealth is because once we get to these new features, that requires a complete rebalance of all the items in the game, and it's the items that define the stealth aspect. So we need to get to this point first, and then once we get to that point, we can start looking at what makes stealth ships, how we bring the signals of those ships down, and then what downsides those components have, without really taking away from the purpose of the ships. But yeah, we've got to get to that point first, and then we can start balancing the game towards those things.
TL;DRSlowing combat speeds should make ship and turret speed more decisive, turret ships have already become stronger, and cost, travel time, physicalized damage and resource management are expected to make multi-crew ships more worthwhile.
Yeah, you're pretty much right that this comes down again to the speeds. So with the current speeds, obviously with a turret, you're limited by the speeds of the turrets, but once we slow everything down, the basic speed of the ship and the speed of the turret will become a much more determining factor in the combat success of that ship. And also we're still figuring out the strength of these turrets as well. The game isn't final. We're still working on this. As I said before, we're still in a situation where some ships that do have a turret are much more powerful than others, and we're still working out what that means. Is it the turret speed? Is it the weapons you attach to those turrets?
The changes we did a few patches ago to introduce capacitors did make quite a marked shift away from this whole 'let me bring two ships instead of one multi-crew'. If you go look at the analytics, which are not the be-all and end-all of balance decisions, they're just part of what informs changes, those ships that have turrets went from being well below the fighters in all the applicable metrics to being at the top end. So even now in combat, they are becoming more strong. In the future, and now to a lesser extent, the simple cost and maintenance of running multiple ships will be a factor that people have to pay attention to. It's going to be much more time- and fuel- and insurance- and cost-efficient to all pile into one ship to get to places. And especially with things like Pyro coming online, getting those smaller ships to one location is going to be quite a chore, versus you all pile into one with a larger quantum drive that can do the jumps quicker, that can get there quicker. That sort of time sink aspect of it will become more important, which is perhaps less clear in the current game. Even now, if one of you spawns at microTech and one of you spawns at Hurston, that's a good chunk of time to meet up. That's only going to get longer in the future. So being in a single place, in a single ship, will just get that experience happening quicker for you.
Yeah, because at the moment, if you're in a turret you go, oh, I'm not doing anything all the time I'm not in combat. Whereas there will be things to do outside of combat for those additional crew members. I get the aspect where, if we're both in two single-seaters, we're both doing something all the time right now. That's true now. That's going to be true in the future in a multi-crew ship.
TL;DRDifferentiating shields and other components is tied to the post-slowdown item rebalance, with trade-offs and physical placement mattering, and John says future physical shield emitters could add per-ship variation, though he doesn't promise it.
Yeah, so we've got the base tunings right now, and we're still settling on where the base tuning of the shields lines up and everything, and the grades of components. So once again, when we come back to combat speeds and we go through the big rebalance of all the items in the game, we're looking at what makes a difference between these items, what makes a military component. Is it stronger but it produces more heat, or it uses more energy? Or is it weaker but you get a super long lifetime with this component? Or does it give off a really big signal, but you get really good power all the time and it's really strong and it lasts forever? There are all those factors we have to consider, and then we basically put them in a big pool. And then we look at the items and go, right, that item is this, and it should pull more towards this direction, because it's that item type. And that's the future plan for items as we go through and add these. And as John said earlier, the items become much more important as they become physicalized within ships as well. So where they are in the ship will matter. So that might affect your choices. Because if you've got a ship where the item is right on the edge and it's not very protected, you might want a strong component that can take more damage or take more distortion damage, stuff like that. So we want all these factors to be a consideration when you're choosing the loadout of your ship, because it's a really important step when you get your ship. You go, right, what do I want that ship to be? Because it's got a purpose, obviously, but you can still customize that a little bit towards the goals you have for that ship. If you want it to be a pure energy ship and fight distortion, you might pick a certain item type throughout the whole ship. So we do want to give players that choice.
Yeah, and one other thing specifically regarding shields that is missing from the current live game is shield emitters. So what everyone has at the moment is the shield generators, which, as the name says, generate your shield. And they sort of have a bit of the emitter functionality built into them at the moment, where they dictate your shield faces, like a bubble shield, front-back, quadrant, whatever. But in the future, we want the shield emitters, which will be physicalized things on your ship. They are essentially the projectors for your faces. And that's going to be somewhat locked to your ship. You might have multiple emitters per face. I'm not going to say this is going to happen, but we'll use it as an example: a Hammerhead might have multiple emitters for its front face. So it has that sort of layered redundancy, in terms of: I can't just shoot one emitter to pieces and it brings down the front of this Hammerhead. I've got to take them all out to do it. So it's not going to be a simple one-to-one mapping, but that will be adding another layer of, not customization, but sort of complexity to the ship. You might have two light fighters that have a different shield emitter setup out of the box. So you could have the same generators on them and they give a different experience. So customizing these generators alters those two ships in different ways. So yeah, there's a lot of things going on with shields.
TL;DRSpawning vehicles with larger ships is still wanted, but the developers were reprioritized, so for now it's manual loading that hopefully persists better with persistent entity streaming, with a proper interface wanted long term.
It's definitely something we want to do. I've said this before: the people that were working on this unfortunately had to be reprioritized onto other things. It is frustrating. You can do this now, but it involves you manually loading it yourself, and it usually, fingers crossed, stays between sessions. That will get much more reliable with persistent entity streaming. So hopefully you just have to do that once. And then for all your future play sessions, like you've loaded your Carrack up with your Pisces and your Rover, that's it done. You do that pain once and you're good to go. But we definitely want to still have it there in either the ASOP or an equivalent terminal.
Yes. Long term, we don't want people to have to do the manual legwork of putting it all together. You should be able to choose it up front. Like, here's my 15th character I've got in my account for whatever reason, and I want to have this Rover and this snub ship in it. Bam, spawn it, as long as they're all at the same location. Put them all in, put it on the landing pad.
TL;DRLimited ballistic ammo was intended and may change, but no guarantees; slower combat speeds should improve accuracy, and restocking is wanted, though players shouldn't expect huge default ammo counts.
Yeah, so we're always evaluating the balance in terms of ballistics. We do recognize this was a massive change to the game, having limited ammo, but it was always the intention. Again, it's that in-development cycle. It was always the intention to have limited ammo, because that's the trade-off with the ballistics. It's super powerful, but there's a limited amount, but then you've got your energy weapons, which last forever, but they're not as strong. So we're always evaluating it. We were doing playtests this week where we were changing the ammo of some weapons just to try it out. So yeah, it's always subject to change, but I can't give any guarantees on what will change, because we've got a big step to move towards with the lower combat speeds. Once we get to those lower combat speeds, the bullets will be more accurate, because you're at lower speed, so more of those bullets are going to hit, so they're going to be more effective. And we just need to figure out where that balance lies. And also it's the lack of ability right now to restock, because you've got to go so far away to restock your ballistics and stuff like that. So there are other choices we have.
We definitely want to have that ability to restock ammo, even if it's something as crude as, hey, I loaded 10,000 rounds of ammo in the back of my Cutlass. I'm going to go in the back, pick up a box and EVA out to my ship and whack it on the Gatlings. That would make a huge difference to it. And yeah, like Rich says, ballistics are always going to be limited. That's a core design decision. How limited will change as we go, but definitely don't expect hundreds of thousands of rounds by default.
TL;DRJohn hopes newer ships all have an intended escape route, but working escape pods depend on physical damage, so they're a planned future feature rather than current gameplay.
I hope all the newer ones have a marked escape point. A few of them are quite hidden. They are a very subtle panel line cutout of where the panel is going to pop off, and they might not always go the way you think they are. Just because they're on the upper floor of a ship, they might not be coming out the top; they might all be coming out the bottom just because of the way we've routed stuff inside. But they all do have an intended way out of the ship. And sometimes some of our suit lockers might look like escape pods, which might be confusing to people, because they're the big vertical standing things. But it's usually the vertical standing escape pods; side escape rafts, like you see in the 890 and Idris, where it's a hexagonal box; on the back of the Argo... it goes outside; or it might be ejection beds, like you see in the rear of the Freelancer. But in terms of, hey, how do I get to them, because my ship just explodes right now: again, this is tied to physical damage, so I wouldn't expect escape pods to become a thing until that comes online. Because until that point, we do have the whole 'hey, my ship has 10,000 health, it gets to zero, it goes bang.' We don't have that finesse where, well, with physical damage there isn't a health pool. So it's basically degrading your ship to the point it becomes non-functional, at which point you go, hey, it's time to get off this ship. So you will have that grace period, which could be seconds, depending on if shots end up going into your power plant. But ideally, it's going to be multiple minutes, if not hours, where your ship is crippled, non-responsive, and you go, right, now is the time to get off this ship. So it's very much a future thing. It's planned in for the future, not for the current gameplay.
TL;DRRichard says the team plans to move to control surfaces so aerodynamics drive atmospheric maneuvering, making hovering harder and giving VTOL ships an advantage, but control surfaces and their controls must be worked out first.
Yes. So at the moment we have aero surfaces on these ships, but it doesn't fly like a plane. So they're still driven by the thrusters, but we do change them based on the planet they're on, so they do lose some power in atmosphere. But the thrusters, to generate the performance in space, have to be set at certain strengths. They have to generate the accelerations that we require in space. And then when we fly in atmosphere, you lose some efficiency, but we still need the strength in the thrusters to be able to push the ship through the air. And actually pushing aero surfaces through the air takes a lot of strength. So we are limited: to get the maneuverability in atmosphere currently, we still need quite strong thrusters, which means you can hover quite easily. But that's not always going to be the case. So in the future, we are going to move towards control surfaces. And this is going to allow us to move the movement of the ship from thrusters to aerodynamics. So it's going to be the aerodynamics driving the maneuverability of the ship in atmosphere, and the thrusters are just going to help a little bit. They're going to help move the ship and allow the thruster layouts to do their work, but it's not going to be the primary source. So if you're flying a Gladius, for example, and you go really slow, it's just not going to have the power to keep it up. And that's where the VTOL ships are going to come in, where they can transform and fly in VTOL and hover. And that's where they'll have the advantage. But we need to add control surfaces first and work out how we do all the controls with that as well, because it's quite a complex problem to solve without going full flight simulator, for example.
TL;DRJohn says the old hover mode was the right idea with the wrong implementation, and heat from straining thrusters could be added as a penalty for hovering, tied to the resource system being redone.
To an extent, yes. But that sort of tried to solve the problem in a different way. And some people liked it. A lot of people didn't like it. And it was the right idea with not quite the right implementation. Another thing we can look at, with all the stuff Richard's talked about, is heat. We don't really use heat at the moment, because the way heat works in our game is not how we want it to work long term, and this is something that, with the resource system, is being entirely redone. But for ships like a Gladius, as well as needing that control surface to keep it up in the air, if you're not going fast, those thrusters can start overheating as an extra penalty. Because in reality, you could just upend your Gladius like that and balance it on its main thrusters, because they're powerful enough to do that, so they should be powerful enough to do that. But they're going to be working so hard that that heat is going to build up, and we can cause intentional problems that way to stop it. I've seen people landing their Scorpiuses on the wings that way, and that sort of stuff will start being a lot more rare.
TL;DRTurret lights are being fixed on the Reclaimer first, then the Mole can follow, while the brightness dispute between design and art will likely be solved with high and low beam settings.
Yep, so I'll start with the turret one first. There was a problem with turrets that didn't allow us to have lights on them back when the Mole came out, and that's something we are actively fixing on the Reclaimer at the moment for supporting salvage, because it has a very similar problem. The pilot of the Reclaimer has the humongous floodlights that illuminate what's in front, but the little salvage turrets next to it aren't necessarily always going to be looking that way. So we've got some lights on those, and we're just working out the quirks with the system. At the moment, they're all connecting to the same light controller, so the pilot can turn them all on and off, which is less than ideal for those in the turrets when the pilot decides he wants to turn his lights off and their lights turn off. It's the goal to have them on, and then when that's working, we can go back to the Mole. For the whole 'lights are too dim' slash 'too bright', that is a classic video game developer art-design standoff that we've had for years and probably every game studio has. Design is like, I want a light that can see five kilometers ahead of me, which means it has to be a certain brightness. Art go, that's too bright. It just blows out all the art. Everything is just bright white. It's a common complaint I see regarding paints on ships as well. In some lights, they look completely different to other lights. It's a similar problem with light intensity there. Things look good at certain light levels, things look bad at certain light levels. So design always want the brightest lights we can possibly get away with, so you don't crash into rocks. Art want things to look nice, which means nice balanced lights. And the way we're going to likely solve this is literally having a high beam and a low beam setting. So if you want nice, big, bright lights for flying super fast, you toggle your headlights into... Night vision: I know Todd is very keen on having some night vision. I am as well. But in terms of headlights, we do want that, maybe not fully dynamic, but some control over the intensity.
TL;DRCannons are still in and can technically be used to dogfight; after a weapons rebalance giving each weapon type a purpose, they suit heavier targets, and balance is still being learned.
Yeah. So again, it comes back to the big rebalance of weapons that we did. We tried to give a specific purpose to weapon sizes and types of weapons, to give reasons for choosing that weapon depending on your purpose. If you want to destroy a light fighter, you want quick, sharp weapons. But if you want to destroy something like a medium to heavy starship, you need something more impactful, like a cannon, for example. So yep, we are still learning lots with the weapon balance and how we can redefine the different styles of weapons we have in the game, and what it means for the different ships you can fit these on as well. Because you can have certain weapons that work well on a certain ship, but then you can fit that weapon on pretty much every other ship as well, if it's got the right loadout and stuff. It's quite tricky getting the balance right. But we'll start opening that up as a battle in the future.
TL;DRThe speakers say ship balance is complex and a moving target, no ship is protected or tied to a meta, and the Arrow might lose performance if combat speeds are lowered.
Well, I'm going to go nerf the Gladius and Arrow right now. But on a serious note, it's not our intention to look like we're just nerfing certain ships. But the balance of ships is quite complex, because there's everything we're trying to do. We're trying to build ships that work as fully functional ships. And even the shape of the ship defines a large portion of how well that ship performs in combat. So we've got a ship like the Arrow, for example, which is seen as an over-performer, but it's such a small ship. And its shape, which again goes back to the combat geometry at lower speeds: at the moment, with the combat we have, that nose-on-nose where you're aiming at such a small part of the ship, we want to change. So ships like the Arrow might actually lose some performance when we lower the speeds right down, because you'd be aiming more at the top or the bottom of the ship, where there's more surface area. But as far as not wanting a meta, all ships have a purpose. And then we've got a window where that ship operates, but I wouldn't say we're ever tying that ship specifically to that kind of meta. And that's what we mean. We can have a ship that is defined as a light fighter, but it doesn't mean we're just going to go, oh, well, it's a light fighter, we give it 50 points here, 50 points here, 50 points here, because it's a light fighter. And that's basically what we mean. That doesn't generate a meta. We want all these different factors that define what a ship is to matter in different ways. It's how all those different ways come together. And as I said before, it's a continuously moving target as well. So it's a challenge to get right.
Yeah, whoever asked that question must have forgotten about the time where we removed half the Arrow's shield generators. It was never supposed to have two. It was supposed to have one, but it had two for over a year. And there was a big outcry when we corrected that back to where it was supposed to be.
I wouldn't say it's even the best. It's certainly a strong choice, but there's definitely no protected ships in Star Citizen that get special treatment over the others. If something is way outside of its intended range, it will get looked at and sorted out one way or the other.
That's probably more one for the Arena Commander feature team. I know they are at the moment looking into a few racing-specific things, but it's not really my wheelhouse to divulge their information, but it's definitely been looked at. The lowering of combat speeds is not really going to remove racing from the equation. I know that there's a, I'm not saying small, there's a dedicated fan base for it that we don't want to exclude from the game.
It's a box. I use this as a get-out clause all the time, but it is genuinely true: the cargo refactor will make it be a thing. I'm not going to promise it's going to come with the patch that the cargo refactor comes in, because there are some asset requirements to adjust it. But we will not be blocked from making it be a thing at that point.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure what the specific issue there is, but it is something we are aware of. I think you just lose the marker, which is a bug, because you have your last known ship marker, which naturally, when you get in your snub ship, is the ship you're in. So you then lose the marker for the Constellation. And that's something we want to fix in the future, but that's less vehicle team, more UI feature. The new starmap will help with that. The new marker system will help with that. Being able to pin things on the starmap, even if you don't see your ship, but you go, hey, I left my ship here. Bam. You can send that to your friends, whatever. Being able to mark locations will be a big help.
Yep, still planned. Again, like the answer I gave earlier, the people working on it were reprioritized onto other Squadron work, so no progress since I last talked about it. It's still planned, still something we want to do, still going to support it. People think I have a secret vendetta to cut player-facing modularity from the game. That is absolutely not the case. It's something we want to do. There is a place in Star Citizen for both modularity on ships and baked variants, not just one or the other.
Yes. These are all the people that want that one fuel tanker that was in the background of the Vulcan concept. I know Paul Jones really wants to make it happen. Because after spaceships run out of fuel, you can get a Starfarer to come refuel you. Ground vehicles currently don't use fuel, but we want them to use fuel in the future. So then, naturally, that would need to be a thing. Because I can only dread people trying to refuel a little ground vehicle with a Starfarer planetside. It's not the best application of tools to fix the job.
We'd love to do some boats. We've got the tech to do it right now. I'm not going to say why, but for the PU, like a lot of our vehicles and ships now, we want to deliver them alongside the gameplay. And at the moment, there is no gameplay for having boats, and there aren't really enough environmental locations to even have them. Hurston has some water on it. I think a couple of the other moons have some water. We've got the river, but there's not enough to justify boat gameplay at the moment. Today, right now. Absolutely in the future.
TL;DRThe Polaris got a hefty internal reconcept: it's slightly longer, has a standard-metric small hangar fitting standard fighters, buffed components and a proper docking collar, and looks nearly the same externally.
You heard correct. I think I said that, and that is still true. It had a full reconcept. Well, not full, quite a hefty one, mostly on the internals. It grew a bit. I can't remember the number off the top of my head, but it grew a little bit longer. Not Foundry 42 doubling the size like it used to. The big thing is the hangar is a standard metric size. I can't remember which one it is, but it is the closest one to whatever it was, just not bespoke anymore. So it was this weird trapezoidal hangar, and it still is, but the area inside it is the metric for, I'm going to say, extra small, which extra small internally is, I think, small backer-facing. So all your standard fighters will fit in there. No more theorycrafting and Reddit images of 'here's the top images of these ships, which will fit'. Components got a little buff up as well. And the interior: I don't think it ever had a docking collar on it. It now has the proper size docking collar on it.
So from the player perspective, the small hangars that they can land fighters and stuff in, that's what it's got now. So if it fits in a small hangar...
And then the concept changes are to the interior, which mostly hasn't been seen or shown much anyway. Stuff that the backers are familiar with, it still looks like the Polaris.
Yep. Still a big flying Dorito. Externally, unless you had the old one next to it, you probably wouldn't notice any difference visually, aside from being maybe 5% longer.
No. Let's say, without making a promise that I am not in a position to keep, we will revisit this idea around IAE and see if that seems like an appropriate time to do this again, because that's the next big thing after Fleet Week. So we'll see if we can't do a little segment on the new Polaris concept interiors then. It's not saying it's going to happen. It's saying we're going to try.
TL;DRThe 600i got a concept repass: a docking collar outside, and a more sensible interior with less up and down, with the modular room moved to the rear.
So again, it's had a concept repass on it. Externally, very similar. It has a docking collar, which is the big-ticket exterior change. Internally, though, it's been quite a major rework. It still has a lot of the same feel about it, just with a much more sensible layout. There's a lot less up and down to get places. The big-ticket thing is the modular room is no longer in the middle. It's at the rear. So everything that was in the rear is sort of moved into the middle, so all your crew habitation and engineering, it's all there. So the front two-thirds of the ship internally stays the same between the modules, and then it's the back that changes. So on the touring one, in the current version, we have that back room with a big panoramic window that suits the touring one better. And then exploration has all the exploration stuff in the back there as well.
TL;DRThe Retaliator gold standard was paused again because resources were needed elsewhere; remaining work includes updating the cockpit dashboard, matching the exterior to the widened interior corridors, and adding the side docking collar.
That got paused again. The resources on it needed to be used somewhere else. So what we showed last time, with the updated central room with the docking collar on the side and the bigger lift on the other side, infinite drop hole through the top and bottom of the ship, that's where we pretty much left it. We had widened all the corridors so AI can successfully navigate around it, because it was too tight. What's left is the cockpit dashboard needs to be brought up to current standards. It's a bit old school, both in terms of visuals and setup. So the work we've done for the Gladius will sort of get transplanted and upgraded into the Retaliator. And then we need to make the exterior match up with all the interior changes, because those corridors have got wider. They don't stick out of the hull, but it leaves very little room. The shell will get a little thicker in places, but not massively. And of course the docking collar is going to go on the side, which would necessitate the wing thrusters moving a little.
Not going to answer a when question, but I will say that we absolutely are going to redo the interior of that thing. There were some reasons, which I can't go into, why we couldn't do it, but we now can do it, and we've been given the green light to do that. So I think some aspects of it will stay as they are, like the cockpit and the section behind that in the neck and the chin area; that will stay the same. The cargo area will stay the same. But outside of that, it's probably going to get a whole refresh, because it's just not that good to navigate around.
TL;DRThe Ares changes were a balance fix for the current game, not final; they'll revisit the ship once weapon tech changes allow a more impactful Ion, without committing to where it goes.
Well, the reason why I did it, it's just a case of balance. It was a case of where it fitted in the game with the current energy weapons we have. We basically had to fit it within what works for the game now. And as I said earlier, the game now is different to what the game is going to be in the future. And we've been prototyping different weapon solutions, especially for the Ion, where we want to make that weapon feel much more impactful, because it's a big weapon; it's got that purpose to it. And we can't quite deliver that with the current weapon system, because it requires some changes to the core tech behind the weapons for it to work properly. So once we have that figured out, we'll definitely be revisiting that ship. And then on the ballistic side, again, it depends where we go with the ballistics. But also we see that ship benefiting from the ability to restock much more easily than it can now.
We tried a few things in PTU and Evocati. Some worked, some didn't work, but a lot of people only really saw the PTU changes, and a lot of the 'hey, why don't they do X and why don't they do Y, it would make it so much better', we'd already tried even before Evocati, and it wasn't working. So what we have now is, like Rich says, what works for the game right now. It's not going to stay like that. It will change, but where it's going to change to, we don't really want to commit to. A lot of people said, oh, it's a big gun, if people stand in front of it, they deserve to die in one shot. And yes, that is true to an extent, but a lot of what we saw in feedback, watching people play internally and externally, and the analytics, was not people standing in front of it and getting one-shot. It was almost being abusive in how it was being used in combat. So we had to do something quite radical to nerf that, to give us the time to look at other things. And there was quite a big uproar about it. It is still a pretty good combat ship. It's just been slightly hammered by various factors.
TL;DRThe Constellation will get a big gold-standard interior pass, mainly replacing outdated components and bays, keeping its art style, and trying to remove the worst cockpit struts, though nothing is promised in detail.
What I'm hearing is people love struts and they want more struts in the cockpit to obscure the view. Yep, like gold standard on all the other ships, when we get to the Constellation, a big thing for it will be putting the components in. People will see there are component bays in there already. They were done a long time ago. Components have changed in how they are used, the quantities, even some of the sizes of them. It shows you how old it is: I think somewhere it says it's got two quantum drives if you go look at all the hatches in there. So we'll be going through and ripping all those out, putting proper ones in, which will necessitate other interior changes. So we'll collect everything up in one big pass and do a big pass across the interior. Not going to say it's going to look wildly different. It's got a very key art style that we want to keep. We do want to do something about the struts on the bridge. We had planned to do that with the Taurus. But instead, we spent the extra time we had available to us on the pilot seat, which is why you see it has all the buttons and flip-up displays now, which benefits all of them. We had hoped we could reduce some of those struts in the forward view at the same time, but we just didn't have time. And that would have only fixed two or three of the variants; we wouldn't have had time to do the Aquila as well. So when we get to gold standard, we'll sort them all out so they all have a good view out the front. It's still going to have struts, like the Carrack has struts, but we'll try and get rid of those particularly annoying ones that are through the center view.
TL;DRNo single reason decides ship priority: it depends on team resources, needed gameplay arriving alongside, and artist workload, and older large ships lack the gameplay required, so they can't be scheduled.
This is another thing to write a book on. There is no one answer that applies to every ship. It is a combination of the resources we have at the time. If I could click my fingers now and put the Polaris into production, that would take out a big chunk of the UK team for maybe 12 to 18 months, which means we can't deliver a constant flow of other vehicles in patches. So you could go multiple patches without any vehicle release or any support for other features coming out. So we have to balance that across not just delivering vehicles, but supporting the other teams. For the last few years, we've been trying to not push vehicles out without their gameplay. So things like the Crucible: we could make the Crucible now, but we don't really want it floating around without the repair gameplay to go alongside. So whilst I can control the production of the vehicle, I have to rely on and work with other directors to get their side delivered alongside it. And the problems that affect me, of 'hey, we've changed our minds for IAE, we want to do this instead', also affect them for other things. The feature they're working on now might be delayed for another team, which delays the feature I need for this vehicle. So we chop and change a lot. And then also, if you have artists working on this big ship for 18 months, you don't want to put them on another big ship for 18 months afterwards. You want to break that and give them, hey, here's a nice little snub ship to do. So that's why you might see a random ground vehicle come out from nowhere, because they are relatively much quicker to do, and it gives those people a nice palate refresh. So yeah, we're not actively ignoring the older ships. A lot of them have gameplay consequences and gameplay requirements that I don't have an answer for of when they will come online. So I can't plan developing those ships at that point.
And not for nothing, the larger ships: I mentioned the Banu Merchantman in 2013, but there's also the Idris from 2012. It's like this multi-crew gameplay and resource management. Even if we could make an Idris right now, because most of it's part of Squadron 42, and put it out there, it'd just be like driving around in a giant canoe. You need the multi-crew gameplay. You need the resource management in order to have a capital ship experience. To put it out right now would be disappointing. I know people want to have it. They want to walk around and take all the pictures, and then after you're done with that for the first eight hours, you go, well, now I want to do something with it.
Another one I want is a humongous ground vehicle. We have a metric for large ground vehicles, and the Nova and Ballista are technically medium, to give you an idea of how big this large one would be. It'd be like a multi-story ground vehicle.