The developers walk through the Tecia Pacheco mission: its one-off design, the underground facility on Lyria, the virtue prerequisite, the Blackjack Security counter mission, and the prototype Cutlass loan. They also touch on dynamic missions and the planned actor status system.
TL;DRMissions start from the needs of a release, such as a new mission giver or location plus its lore; this one tried gifting a ship, and the original idea fell through for lack of required features.
So when we come to plan for a release, we may have a mission giver for a start, or we'll have a new location, and that obviously entails us coming up with a mission for them, or a mission that suits the lore of that location. Tecia Pacheco in this case. We decided to reuse the underground facility for that location because we hadn't used them enough, basically.
Yeah, and we're putting more effort into those as well as we speak, actually, making some more entrances into them. So we get the requirements, like you need to make a mission for Tecia Pacheco. We get the lore for Tecia Pacheco: who she is, what she does. She works for the Antari Company, which is like this kind of cartel, but is also a shady business, I think, as well. And they're trying to move into Stanton and push out all the other competitors. Obviously drugs is just one part of the criminal empire. Trying to be clever with it as well.
We always, when it comes to mission givers, there's an excuse to really experiment and try and do something new. The thing we tried to do new in this mission was to gift the player a ship. In the future, we want to properly gift them for the duration of missions, so they go and use all the systems that they currently are used to, like go to an ASOP terminal, and they'll find it gifted in there, and then we use all those systems.
Yeah, exactly. We get a little extra support on these guys, so we try and do something different. So in this case, another thing we wanted to do is give them a ship. So we thought up a mission where they'd stolen a ship from the Nine Tails and they wanted you to take that to Klim, who's another mission giver, and he's a drug dealer. So you've got the Nine Tails and Klim who are at odds, competitors in the drug trade, and kind of frame the Nine Tails, or kind of start a small turf war between these two while the Antari Company moves in over the top. We really wanted to sell that these guys are not scrapping on the street.
But unfortunately, that would have needed several things that we didn't have. I forget now exactly what the issue was there, but that didn't pan out, unfortunately. So we then thought, what can we do that allows them to have this ship and use all these drug packages we found? Because we also realized that criminals, or the unlawful, as it were, didn't have enough to do when it came to trading. There was literally just, I think, WiDoW. Maybe one or two.
So I'd gone, we need more. We need all these other drugs. So we put some effort into those. We'd gotten them made to be destructible, because I had an idea we might use it like this. I didn't ever think we'd use it to this extreme when I was asking for those assets.
TL;DRMissions have prerequisites based on virtue and reliability; this one is deliberately generous, accepting players from extremely bad virtue up to a small positive value, so more players see the limited content.
Yeah, we realized it's far too early. If there's little content, we want players to get as much of it as possible. And obviously we want them testing, we don't want missions that no one ever sees, and we wipe so often, obviously, so to build your way up to those could be quite difficult in that time. So these prerequisites are really just virtue and reliability. Virtue you can knock down just by killing people, basically, or being naughty, whereas making it go up is a lot more difficult because you have to do missions. I guess video games are bad for this, but it's hard to do good things and be rewarded for those. It's really easy to go around slapping people.
Yeah, exactly. So anyway, for this particular one, we've been fairly generous and we allow you to accept this mission all the way down to extremely bad and up to 0.1.
No, you can do a few. It's a kind of sliding, exponential kind of curve. So as in real life, if you're a bad guy and you're known for being a bad guy, if you do something bad, it really doesn't make much of a dent, because you are known for being bad. But if you do something good, if you rat on someone, suddenly you're way back at the start. They don't think you're bad anymore. And it's the same if you're good. If you're extremely virtuous and you do something, you'll fall from grace and fall back to zero. So it's like that. The more good you are, the harder it is to get good. And vice versa.
TL;DRCounter missions send players to the same location with conflicting goals, rather than direct PvP, so greed in the main mission creates tension and brings players together without forcing them to fight each other.
Well, the idea is that what we don't want to do is build this location and all these assets and everything like that just for one mission. And we also want to really bring players together as much as possible, because obviously it's an entire galaxy. It feels empty if they don't meet someone quite often, so we try and make concrete reasons for them to come across each other. In the previous mission Gareth made, the Clovis mission, we pit you basically directly against each other. So one person has to steal a chip from a downed satellite and then go and rip it at a...
Yeah, exactly. While the others chase it. And so that's fine, but some players don't like the direct PvP. So on this one, we decided that we would have it so that they're guided to the same location, but they're not necessarily there to take out each other. They just happen to be in the same place doing conflicting things.
So in the mission that Detox is playing right now, you're out to get one very specific item, a box of particular drugs for Pacheco, and it's Maze. It's a very rare drug that's worth a lot of money. I think Maze is Tevarin. And it's this thing they use like, I guess, the Native American peace pipe kind of thing. They use it in ceremonies. But it's very rare, and a small amount of it can make a lot of drugs, I guess like LSD kind of thing. You need a small volume, but you get that and it's worth a lot of money.
So she's sending you out for this thing because she's heard through her contacts, like obviously the Antari Company have a few security on the payroll, and they've got wind that security forces are going to do a drug raid, basically, on a competitor. And what she's trying to get you to do is get there before this goes down and steal this one particular item. You are sent there to basically wade through 300 boxes and try and find the one in particular that has been very vaguely described to you and bring it back to her. Which sounds straightforward. Obviously you get there, there's going to be some people to fight, maybe, hopefully. There'll be turrets and stuff like that, because this is obviously a working drug lab at the time you're arriving; the bust hasn't happened yet.
So where the counter mission comes in is, we could have just done that mission and that be it. But we wanted to inject some possible tension into the mission, because we also tell you in the description that you can steal anything else you want while you're there. We don't care. Pacheco doesn't care. She just wants the box. That's all she cares about. You can steal the rest. So there's plenty of opportunity to be greedy, and in a game, that's a fantastic idea, that you can get greedy and maybe if you get too greedy, bad things will happen.
No. Actually, she only has one. The issue there is, well, obviously time and resources. But the idea is, we could either go down the route like we used to at the very start, where we give everyone lots of very generic missions. And I don't want to do that. I want to focus on every mission giver having their own one interesting mission to start with. And then as we build more... The moment we can gift a ship, the next plan is that we make a return to Battaglia and give her a mining mission, where she lends you a ship so that people who don't have their ships can have a go.
Because obviously what we'd really like is the ability to use the systems that already exist. All players are used to being able to unlock their own ship and then have all their party members pilot it. We haven't been able to do that for this, which is why, obviously, the work needs to be done to properly loan you ships via the ASOP terminal. So basically this does not work like you'd expect any other ship to work. And that's not the intention. That's step one. It's like a proof of concept.
Yeah, it may be three of them. I think there's actually only two varieties of them, sadly. The procedural tools that we have, we got two of them, I think, made with this. It was like an upstairs and a downstairs version. I don't know if you've seen that, but we could have many more versions of this. I mean, beyond the upstairs and downstairs, there's not going to be that great an amount of variation, but where certain rooms are, where you come into it, which direction. There will be more.
TL;DRThey don't tier missions; this one is ready for release, but missions are always works in progress, with the ship loan, rooftops and underground facilities likely to get more work.
We don't tend to class missions like that. I mean, this is ready for a release. Obviously, we've been talking about the fact that the ship is not lent to you in the correct way. We'll obviously have to go back and address that. The rooftops themselves, maybe that's not classed as the mission, but I tend to class it as that, the rooftops may get some more love. The UGFs will get some more love and many more varieties. We don't tend to really tier missions in that way. Like I said, it relies on so many other things.
All of them are. Back in the Star Citizen 2.0 days, when these all went in and were built in Flowgraph, like the Tessa Bannister missions and the security guard at Kareah, and all the bounty hunting missions, PvP and stuff like that, they were all built in Flowgraph. Then when it came to turn them into Subsumption, we had to cut a few, or just obviously focus again on the ones that gave us the most bang for buck. Obviously, Subsumption is here to stay, thankfully. We won't be doing anything like that again, but a huge thing could change in the tech that means that we have to rethink them or rewrite them or something like that. So I'm never going to say that anything's done until the game's done.
Well, yeah. Tony's working on the dynamic mission system, which is more about making different things happen in between. We build the content, like, these are all the possibilities that could happen, and we stitch it together in a way that says this could happen here, 50% chance or whatever. So you could be double-crossed, that kind of thing. So we can start going back and giving all the mission givers more, well, you might think of them as more generic missions, but that send you to more interesting locations or have a much higher chance of something interesting happening on the way, so it's not just a straight delivery or something like that. We will be able to do that. But for now, we focus on bespoke because what we're trying to do is build up our toolbox, almost.
TL;DRThe mission is offered one at a time, with a limited number available, so the best approach now is completing other missions, aborting rather than failing, to raise reliability and the chance of being chosen.
So she should have... It's kind of strange that she didn't offer all of you this job right now, but maybe she offers them out one at a time. At the moment one's accepted, then she'll offer the next one. She's got four to offer, and that number comes basically from: we don't want literally every person on the server to get this mission, because there'd be no one to play the counter mission or such. And also, obviously, there's a number of locations we can put down. There's no limit to the number of locations, but every one we add we have to maintain.
So right now, if you want to get these missions, any mission from a mission giver, the best thing you can do is do other missions and complete them. And if you can't complete them, don't fail them, just abort them for now. Because reliability is built up by completing missions currently. We want reputation per player and such, per mission giver. We don't have that currently, so there's this overall reliability stat. So go complete missions, and you will have a higher chance of being chosen when it comes to the random choice that they pick of getting any mission.
TL;DRNo particular CrimeStat is needed now, though high CrimeStats used to block more missions; invites are currently offered across the whole system, and players who don't want one are encouraged to decline.
No, no. It used to be the case that a CrimeStat would actually impede more missions, especially the higher CrimeStats, because why would anyone, even a criminal, hire someone who is being actively hunted by bounty hunters?
It is an interesting question, because before, we had mission giver missions only be available based on locality, but then we decided to make the invites available globally to make it more available for everyone.
Yeah, it's a real difficult decision to make. What we want these missions to do, because they're so special, we think, compared with the others, is a player would maybe want to travel some distance, and maybe that's the impetus for them moving from Crusader to Hurston. They get a mission giver mission, and that makes them travel to a new location, and then they have new adventures there. That's a really good intention, but it does mean that a lot of people don't want to travel. So we basically offered a mission to someone who will not play it, and that sits there for a time on them, and someone else could be playing it. Like Jared really wanted this mission, but it was on Detox, and Detox may not have wanted to play it. So we have to be very careful about how we do that. We are offering it from across the solar system, so if you want to play it, you should be able to get it from anywhere in that solar system. Whether it stays like that, we'll see. But you can be kind and immediately decline the invite and then at least free it up for other players if you don't want it. But obviously, we don't expect that.
TL;DRThe counter mission is easy to get: once someone accepts the main mission and nears the underground facility, anyone with positive virtue is offered it, and up to four can accept.
Oh, that's very easy to get, thankfully. As long as somebody accepts this mission and gets close enough to the UGF, the underground facility, anyone with a positive virtue, so that's like minus 0.1 to 1, they will be offered the mission. They will be offered it, and up to four people can accept that.
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UberNerdCommunity streamer
Yeah, I saw it offered on my screen as well. That's the Seize and Destroy mission?
Yep. So the Seize and Destroy mission is from Blackjack Security, and they're the people that obviously have heard about this underground facility and want the drugs taken, destroyed, so they don't hit the streets. They're a local security for ArcCorp, a kind of private security hired. And you will be hired to go in there and destroy the drugs by any means possible.
Yep. Very soon, I think we should be able to actually spawn AI, like the security forces that are coming in as well, using kind of monster closets and things like that. But for now, we're relying on players.
Yeah, so the longer you take, the more chance that you get shot in the back, or that you load up the lift full of all of these drugs, and the person whose job it is to come here and destroy them presses a button and gets delivered exactly what he was looking for. And they get annihilated.
TL;DRNot currently, but they hope the actor status system will let drug effects, possibly even through a helmet, affect players and AI, though there is no guarantee.
Not now, but very soon, we hope. We're putting in the actor status system. It affects what these drugs have on you, but it would be really interesting to see if you're firing at AI and they're taking cover behind these things, because taking cover behind dynamic objects is what the AI guys are going to be working on as well, and you manage to clip a SLAM, which is the blue crystal thing, that will enrage them and make them able to just take bullet after bullet as they run towards you. Whereas if you hit the E'tam, maybe they'll just get very, very mellow, very chilled.
Talking to Todd about that, obviously no guarantee, but something we definitely want to work towards is that actor status system. So when you start blowing up the drugs, if you're not wearing a helmet, you could fall under the effects of those drugs, and maybe even some of the drugs aren't filtered by the filtration system. So maybe even if you're wearing a helmet, it might still get through.
I don't want to give too much away, but I'd love to know if anyone had figured out a quick way of destroying these drugs, because we added the little thing in the underground facility, and we just wondered if anyone had figured out why.