Star Citizen: Happy Hour Interview - Game Systems in 3.0

Yes. What's been previously called the star map, you've probably seen the mobiGlas mockups and things that have been coming through. That's just the map now. If you're in space, it's a space map. If you're on the planet and you zoom in, it becomes the planetside map. It's a single map, one system that does everything. Imagine you keep scrolling out of Google Earth and then you just keep going all the way to solar system. It's a single map system rather than building two separate maps.

Built right into your mobiGlas. The mobiGlas you have, whether you're in a spacesuit, whether you're in civilian clothes, you'll always have that map there with you.

Yeah. For me, there is a good caveat to that. It only shows what's known. So it doesn't destroy the exploration aspect. Because obviously, most games, you get a mini map, you open it up, and it's got nearly everything on it. Don't really want that. You want to go to a planet and be like, ooh, where can I go? It says I can go here. There's a thing here. But what's over that mountain that way? So that's kind of important to me that it doesn't necessarily have absolutely everything on there. So you can go in and find that derelict that maybe nobody's found yet sort of thing.

So, yeah, it's actually about as fun as you think. So insurance is obviously just a fact of life. So we wanted to make it as straightforward as possible. So for 3.0, we've been looking at lifetime insurance. Every ship has it.

Well, every ship that's been bought with it. Folks who came on the second wave, they don't have it yet. But many, many, many ships have it.

So we wanted to make sure that that made sense. So we were looking at kind of where we are, how people use insurance, how Chris wants people to use insurance. So for 3.0 lifetime insurance means, as before, if you lose your ship, you're going to get your ship back. That's not a thing you need to sign up for. That's not a thing you need to pay as you would other insurance, like real life insurance, where you've got to pay a monthly or annual fee. You have it. That's great. And when you lose a ship, you have to pay a percentage of that ship's total value to get that ship back. A premium. So, simply put, lifetime insurance is just you pay to get your ship back at a reduced rate than what it would be to buy it brand new. And that's a free policy. So, yeah, you'll get your ship back. You'll get it back with the gear. And it'll come back to the space station that you made a claim at. So what we're going to do is we've got the Ship Summoner. I think it's got a better name than that, but we kind of call it the Ship Summoning. I've heard all sorts of fun names. Valet at one point. But yeah, you've got your list of ships and you see what you want. So there'll be an option there to claim a replacement ship. And when you do that, then money will come out of your accounts. If you can't afford it because you've not made enough at this point, or you've lost a very expensive ship, at least for 3.0, that price will decay slowly over time. So instead of paying financially for it, you have to pay for it through time. So it's like, oh, I can't afford this right now, but I need a ship to make money. You're going to have to wait a day or so before that's come down to a price that you can afford. Eventually it'll be free, but then you might have had to wait weeks. Those times are still to be confirmed. But yeah, the idea is that you will have to wait for some time and then you'll pay for your ship and then you'll have some processing time and then your ship will be delivered back to the station that you made the claim from.

I think what you were referring to before, every ship has insurance, because every ship that we've sold has not had lifetime insurance, but it's had some version of insurance. Whether you bought it at the last anniversary sale and you've got four years of insurance, or you bought it off-season and it's only got three months of insurance. Every ship has insurance. So for 3.0, which is our very first rollout, it is not the final version of how insurance is going to work. We have to start somewhere. This is where we're starting. Every ship has insurance. You don't have to worry about losing your ship right away. In the case of lifetime insurance, it's just that you don't have a three-month limit on it. You don't have a six-month limit. You don't have a 12-month limit. It goes on. You still have to pay a premium when your ship is destroyed. That premium will decay as time goes on. I think right now we're thinking a 24-hour period.

There's two separate. We're looking at something like it's going to come down 1,000 UEC an hour or something like that. The other thing that will happen is your premium will go up for every subsequent claim you make in a 24-hour period. If you're a high-risk pilot, let's say you like to get into a lot of fighting, your first claim is at X percent. You make your second claim, it's at X times 2 percent and so on and so on. Your fifth claim that day is five times what you'd be paying normally. It's like a bad driver hit. So every hour it drops in cost. Every 24 hours, we forget everything after 24 hours of that thing. So it's like, if you've had a bad day, spend the rest of your evening trading. Don't keep looking for a fight. You come back tomorrow and it's forgotten kind of thing. So it's just kind of like a session-wide thing of just like, just chill. Unless you could afford to pay for it, in which case, go nuts.

And of course, like I said, this is the first iteration.

Yeah, the insurance system we have at the moment, you just claim ships, which is counter to what the system should be about. I think Chris is in conversations with how he sees a player's connection with their own ships is very much like, that is my baby, that is my Millennium Falcon. I will move heaven and earth to make sure that that ship, I can nurse it back if I can, rather than just like, it's got a ding on it, I'll just claim a new one. We want to foster that feeling of connection of, I'd rather do anything than make another claim. The first step is just putting a nominal fee onto that and then we'll look at, is that fee too high, too low? Is the 24-hour refresh too lenient? Is the 1,000 per hour too punishing? Those values are our, let's get something on the table and see if claims go up or down, how is the feedback of player use going to affect the system moving forward? So absolutely, it's the next logical step in insurance, but it's certainly not the last.

Further down the line, yes. Policies are what we're going to be keeping an eye on. Lifetime insurance will be your default that you will have and you won't need to. Don't worry about it. It can go flying and I've got a base level of coverage. We're going to be looking at high risk insurance, the people who are bounty hunters and those kind of people who are like, I'm going to get into fights. I need an insurance policy that's going to cover this stuff. So it's like, if you are within this bracket, if you've got a certain bounty hunter reputation, certain policies are going to open up for you. If you're a trader and it's like, I am avoiding every fight. I don't want to have to pay any kind of insurance if I don't have to, but sometimes I'm going to run foul of pirates. Like I want an insurance for someone like me who's not looking for a fight, but sometimes trouble finds me. Can I have an insurance policy that's going to protect the way I play? So we're going to be starting to come up with policies that reward the way that those kind of players want to play, but at the right financial cost for them. If you want to be a high risk player, you're going to have to pay for it because that's the way you want to play. Things like contents insurance are things that we're going to add to some policies but not to others so that if you lose some or all of your cargo hold, it gets stolen or it gets destroyed, you can see some return on that, but maybe you don't want contents insurance for a different way of playing.

Yeah. There's high risk flying, but there's also high risk just piloting in general. You're going to be pushing your vehicles, your Dragonflies or your Razors or your M50s to the limit. And you're going to be putting in the most expensive engines you can, the best cooling systems, whatever. But you're going to be flying right on the edge. So we don't want to discourage players like, I might risk blowing an engine, I might risk seriously damaging it in the pursuit of that personal best. We want to have an insurance policy that's just for races, like you're a risky flyer, but it's not because of combat. So let's come up with a system that's just for you. Whereas if you put the bleeding edge engines in a fighter, then we're like, that's very expensive equipment and that's too risky for us. But it's like, oh, but you're a racer, so you've got racer's insurance or something like that. So yeah, it's different coverage for the different ways we want to play.

And of course, as far as what the premiums are going to cost, we're not trying to turn Star Citizen into an insurance simulator. And we're not trying to take away people's ships from them. So when we say expensive, we're meaning a relative term to what the base is. Insurance should never be something that is going to break people's banks.

No, no. I mean, the entire idea of it is to protect, like save you money. God, I sound like an insurance agent. It's actually saving you money. But yeah, the idea is that you end up paying less of a percentage than you would if you had to buy this new. People are going to be buying top of the line gear and be like, I just bought this thing and then I crashed into a wall on the first corner. Oh my God. It's like, don't worry about it. You've got race insurance, get back into the race.

Yeah. So the idea being that because we don't want to have like, oh, I've got three separate policies with three separate types of ship, it's like, well, you could just put everything on one policy and forget about it, because like you're saying, who cares about insurance really deep down? They want to be flying. This is just a way of encouraging a responsibility and consequences so it's not just, I get another ship for free. But yeah, we want it to be as painless and as simple as like, you buy a ship, if you've got lifetime insurance, you don't even need to worry about it. But if you want to start taking care of it, then you start seeking out, if you've got a good reputation, all of a sudden these people will open their doors to you and then you can get better insurance. So it's kind of a way of having the consequence of if you play like a decent human being and you're not a scoundrel, then you get rewarded for that. And if you play like a scoundrel, then you don't get those great deals, but then maybe there's a kind of a pirate policy. But there may be all sorts of pirate organizations that want to take care of them. Bounty hunter guilds and criminal syndicates that will take care of you in a different way that's not necessarily an insurance policy, but it's a different kind of deal that would kind of be the analog on the criminal side.

We hope to. Technical issue that I'm sure Mark Abent is going to be thrilled to look at very soon about object containers. If you saw the Bugsmashers being inside the coordinate system inside a ship, once you've got that threshold correct, then you can put cargo down and it's fine. If you're outside the ship, you're not inside the object container. You're using essentially the planet or the space or whatever that coordinate system is. We've got a hookup problem that is being investigated at the moment. We hope to get it sorted, but we've got the internal ships in with grids working and now we're looking at the externally stored stuff. We hope to, but it's not there yet.

I mean, we're going to get it sorted. There's no doubt that it will get fixed. It's just a question of whether it's going to make 3.0 or not.

Like if I have a cargo crate, can I trade it to Gareth? And now he has the cargo crate.

You can give it to Gareth, but the way the market's set is that you will go to a market and they are essentially initiating the trade. So if I've got content, I can sell it to a shop and I can buy from that shop. But by myself, I'm not a trades person. So for 3.0, you are just trading with markets.

So Gareth could steal my stuff.

They're an in-game item. I could come along and blast you and steal your box. Yeah, you can just pick it up and take it. Or I could be friendly.

So I guess you could potentially... I guess that comes down to do we have the ability for me to give you money? Because if I just left it there and then you picked it up and then all of a sudden $3 turns up in my account, you've essentially done a trade, it's just not a codified system.

We won't have the system you see in a traditional MMO or RPG where you open up a trade window and there's his inventory and your inventory and you drag things in there.

No, but I think that is something that's intended, but I think for now it's just going to be ad hoc.

Yeah, phase one.

But I guess that's all predicated on do we have money transfers between players and I don't know about that.

Yeah. We're looking at it now, surface races. Yes. They're not necessarily maps. They're just going to be placed, whether or not they're for 3.0 or they're just in the future, but it's definitely where we're looking for racing right now, to kind of piggyback off that Grim HEX thing, is we're just looking at very straightforward waypoint-based races around. I mean, the beauty thing we've got for the moons is we've got a lot of space. So waypoint racing around a hill or something like that is kind of where we're looking at the moment. Like, can we find a good canyon in 5,000 square miles of area? It's taking a while just to scour the whole thing.

I know that's something you're looking into, you're exploring. Whether it's going to make 3.0?

Yeah, at the moment, we're just working on it. And obviously, there's so much content looking for 3.0 that it's not the number one priority. Obviously, we've got some really big systems that need to be delivered. And we don't want to take resources away from that, but at the moment we can, just using the planet tech that Gareth's been looking at, we can just put some stuff down there and take a Nox or the rover and drive around.

The basis of a race.

Yeah, we've been looking at it together. Don't take the Greycat buggy round because it is no good. It's so slow. We were like, okay, well, we could race the little Greycat buggy against the rover. And it's just like, bye.

Yeah, that's something we want to account for, right? When we do have them, we want to have leaderboards for different vehicles. So it's not unfair. So there's not always a Nox at the top of the leaderboard, so there's a rover one too.

So yeah, at the moment we're just having fun seeing what works and is the speed at which you turn corners and things like that, does that all work out? Which is great as well for the handling guys in tech design because all of their fighters and things like that have been tuned for combat roles.

Enormous spaces.

Yeah, how quickly can I get my guns on someone and things like that. They've been tuned for combat. And now we're saying, hey, we want to tune something that's not for combat.

There's so much about races, about the way you take a line and the handbrake for the corners, acceleration and everything. And on the surface, it's a whole different ball game, really.

You clip on a little bit of a rock and all of a sudden your whole time is scrubbed. So it's been interesting to get back into that because I've not done a racing game in maybe about four years. So it's kind of like, ah, feels like a comfortable pair of shoes to get back into. But it's also super weird to come to making a game where racetracks are kind of handcrafted by artists. And then it's just like, Gareth, how do you drop something on the planet? And then you're done. And it's like, oh, and I just race. The tech is so incredibly easy to put together some prototypes. I'm very annoyed to work on a game that's not necessarily a racing game and then be able to make races quicker than you would in a racing game. It's just like, oh my God.

It's an important part of being able to use all that space is being able to do it quickly because there is so much of it.

Sure. I'm sure everybody knows that for 3.0, it's the Crusader planetary system, which is a planetary system within the Stanton star system. One of four, in fact. So what I've done is I've actually built the whole of the Stanton system and the Crusader planetary system is the polished one. But what I can do is I can just take a planet, drag it in, make it like a parent planet, like say, Stanton Star is a parent of the entire system because everything is orbiting around the star. And then I can drag in, say, Yela and Crusader and make Yela a child of Crusader, Crusader a child of Stanton. And then it just does this amazing orbiting and rotating based on who belongs to who. And then I can set the distance away from Stanton. So Crusader is however far away. We're talking AUs, which is distant. Ridiculous distance. It's the distance from, I think, Earth to the Moon is an AU? Earth to the Sun.

It's time, it takes light. So we're eight AU from the sun because it takes eight minutes.

I had to request the guy that made SOLID to give me an option to change it to kilometers so it was a value I could understand. I was like, can I have kilometers please? So I can just tell that it's distance and then the distance of the child. And then I can drop, say, Port Olisar in. Port Olisar belongs to Crusader, and then it'll sit there nicely and I can say how far away that's going to be, can move it up and down and all sorts.

We made missions in a very, I would say, traditional sense for previous releases. So they're very much A to B to C to D and back again, whatever, and it's the same every time. First iteration. They're not bad missions. I think there's some awesome ones in there. What we've got now is modular missions. So the start and the end are typically, say, cargo. You need to collect cargo from an outpost and deliver that cargo to an office somewhere. So it could be Port Olisar, could be Grim HEX, could be anywhere, really. But what it does now is it will choose based on the box, type of box, say it's food, luxury food. It'll go, well, that's a hydroponics type item and that can only spawn in a hydroponics outpost. So it's got a vast array of outposts and it'll just pick one based on whether I tell it to pick one of a certain type or just one at random. And then it will find a storage room in there and it will spawn the box on a shelf in that storage room. So you could be playing the A to D mission, which is deliver, but it could be a completely different type of object and a completely different moon and a completely different outpost. Maybe somewhere you've never seen before. And if you're a criminal, it could be delivering some illegal substances from a stash house or something like that. The core of the mission is the same, but it's different every time. Does that make sense? That's why it's modular. That's what we mean by a modular mission.

Yeah, absolutely. There'll be missions for, say there's a wreckage in space, someone's been blown up. You might have to go get that black box, but the criminal syndicate who perhaps destroyed that ship, who knows, doesn't want you to get your hands on that black box and the records. So players that are classed as criminals through their actions, obviously, you're not born bad, will get a mission to stop that person getting that black box and then it can pan out either way. It kind of makes people meet in really exciting places in an exciting way.

So someone will be doing the mission to rescue it and someone will be sent another mission to stop that person.

Yep. But you don't know what that person's behavior is. That could just be someone who's decided to come along and help you. Because you'll be wary. You'll have that black box in your hands, and then you'll see a person, you'll be like, does he want me? Does he want the box?

So you're saying that in a simple mission, A to D, take this from there, you may encounter resistance, both AI and possibly other players who are on a counter mission.

Yep. That's the plan. That is what we 100% want to do. That was the downside of having these very traditional style missions. It's hard to bring people together because it would always be in the same place as well. People start to learn it like a multiplayer map if you started doing that. Now that we've got the modularity and we can switch it up, it's a good time to get it in.

Yeah, we have a service beacon. I think it's been talked about a few times, this idea of creating my own missions so I have a thing that needs doing and I can bring on extra hands to help me do it. That is a more codified system whereby if I need Gareth's help in something, I can create a mission that Gareth can accept as well as all the missions that are on the job boards around. He could accept a mission that some other player created and then it's a legally binding contract. I have promised to pay him X amount of money if he helps me kill a bunch of wrong'uns. And then on a certain level of wrong'uns having been killed, it's considered mission successful and that money will transfer and you did a good thing. If you didn't do a good job, then you don't get paid and reputations will be affected and things like that. Unfortunately, that's not for 3.0. So it's where we're aiming for in terms of like, let's have user generated missions, but it's the next step in missions.

We need missions first.

Yeah, we need this new modular mission system and then we can put in user generated. So unfortunately for 3.0, you're just doing it out of the goodness of your own heart. But we've all got hearts and we all want to see our fellow Star Citizen do well, so it shouldn't be a problem, right?

That's a short-range ship that should... Yeah, currently, there's some debate about that. We want the beds to be important in the logout system. Obviously, not all ships have beds. There's some back and forth. There's very vocal discussions happening from different sides of the design department about should we encourage through the systems, encourage players like, you've got a short range fighter that doesn't have a bed, you need to get back to civilization. It's not a ship for going exploring in. We want to encourage a certain level of use. There's another school of thought that is equally kind of like, well, why not let them? So for 3.0, I think we're currently veering on the side of letting people regardless of bed, but it changes week by week.

I wanted to illustrate that we have many of the same conversations that our community is having on Spectrum, on the forums, on Reddit. We have many of those same conversations internally. And it can take a while to build a consensus.

Yeah. Sometimes it's like there's an equal argument for, it encourages players to play this way, and that's the way that we see the game going. And on the other hand, it's like, but are we deliberately making it harder for those players for no other reason than theme? So are we making a worse experience for those people who aren't necessarily bothered about the theme, who don't really roleplay, they want to play the game their way? Are we taking away people's ability to play it their way? What is the bigger message here? So it can be hard where it's like, oh, they're both good arguments. So sometimes we do just put one out and see how it plays for a bit, or who shouts the loudest in a design meeting.

No. For now we've got the first pass of this for the cargo grid. So everything is cube shaped because we need to efficiently organize it. So for tier zero, everything needs to stack properly. I think all of the cargo you will buy commodity-wise from a shop will all be wonderfully packaged in little cubes, so it can be stacked deliberately for that reason. Later down the line, you will absolutely be able to pick up loose items that are irregular shaped, but they won't be able to be stacked. They can sit on top of something, but nothing can be stacked on top of that. And then that's a decision you need to make about if I put this tank of this gas or something and it's kind of loose and it's not properly secure and you can't put anything on it, you're giving away cargo space for this thing. So regular standard cargo units will stack and that's kind of the point of, if you want to optimize your cargo grid, get it in a square box. But you can absolutely, later down the line, put in irregular stuff. It's just going to cost you space.

Diablo in the future. Like trying to manage your little grid of shaped objects.

The Ursa was sold individually without insurance earlier this year because we hadn't established insurance for ground vehicles at the time that we sold it. So I can already tell you, there are conversations happening internally about granting an insurance to the Ursa. We're exploring our options. But right now in the game, the Ursa is the only item that's been in the pledge store that does not have an insurance attached to it because it wasn't attached to it when it was sold.

Yeah, I could see some exceptions.

Yeah, if you got the Ursa with an Aquila, it comes with the insurance that the Aquila has. So if you bought it with the Aquila, it has the LTI. It's a platform limitation that's been in there since the project began. So it automatically inherits. It's one of the reasons when we do multi-ship packs for new concept ships, you can get other ships that have LTI when they're in the same package. But when we did the standalone Ursa sale, they were sold without insurance. So we are discussing, we won't leave you out in the cold. We're not ready to announce what the solution is. Also, the Greycat doesn't technically have insurance because it was sold in the Voyager Direct store. The ground vehicles that we have sold up to this point have not had insurance, but we will have an answer for that. So we're working on it.

Because I might want to race those very soon.