Are force reactions going to force us to seat in ships one day? Currently it's just a gentle sway unless hitting something hard, is that the intended goal?asked by adelys

So force reactions as a system, this is kind of our second drop that's gone live. So first, for somebody who doesn't know what force reactions are, force reactions are basically the reactions that your player character undergoes when they receive an impulse. And that impulse can come from a direct impulse, so for example something physically hitting you, an indirect impulse, such as an explosion, or sustained forces, things like wind or g-force. So what we went live with in 3.11 was the twitches and the knockdowns. So essentially, if you split down the force reactions into low impact, medium impact and high impact, what we shipped with is the twitches, which are kind of the physical procedural motion, so you see the character doing little small twitches when they get shot. And then we went out with the high impact as well, which is the knockdowns. So currently at the moment, in the ship, if you receive a really high impact, your character can fall over. And then we have the leaning. Now the leaning is kind of classified as a low impact. And as I described at the start, when we have direct, indirect and sustained, leaning is kind of your sustained twitch. It's the character bracing themselves, pushing themselves into that force. So for example, if you're on a ship at sea, you're steadying yourself, and that's what it's supposed to be. But what we don't have live in 3.11 is the staggers. The balance right now is that if you would stagger, we've just said, okay, you can just lean for now, because we didn't want to go, okay, you're going to fall all over the place. But eventually, for upcoming patches, we're going to be releasing staggers. So staggers is split into two forces. There's one-shot staggers and then there's stumble staggers. The one-shot staggers are where you receive an impulse and your character staggers. So if you've watched any film where they take a broadside or something and the character's doing this and then they're coming back, almost like that stumble, then you're back into the game. And then the other side of things is kind of what we call electrifying. It's like a stumble locomotion. So the stumble locomotion is where it might force you into seated or bracing onto something, because bracing is going to be part of it. So the stumble locomotion: say one of the thrusters on your ship has gone and it's rotating and it's giving lots of acceleration and forces, that's where your character is going to be like, okay, I'm out of control. Almost think of it like drunk locomotion. Your character is not going where you want it to go, but you've still got control of your character. You can still trigger actions. You can still do things. So what we're going to be doing when we do staggers and stumble locomotion is that you'll be able to brace onto things. So if you're sat down, if you're in the back of a Valkyrie and you're seated, if you come in as a dropship, then you're going to be braced, because that's part of it. So the long answer is what I just gave. The short answer is yes, in the future. But force reactions is such a huge system. We had to piecemeal it like this to give ourselves room to understand the premise, because when we talk about every force that's coming your way, I mean every force that's coming your way. You step out into wind, and if the wind is hurricane force, and we use realistic wind speeds, so if you're stepping out into an eight on the Beaufort scale or a nine or a ten, you're going to fall over. And then what we do, we actually simulate your character getting up, and they go into the effort set, which I think we first showed off at CitizenCon, with the hand coming off, you've not got a helmet on, and your character actually braces themselves. So what happens there is in the wind we have this sustained delta. So for example, if you go out in the wind and you see someone fall over, they're not just going to keep triggering falling over, falling over, falling over. They'll actually then stand back up and be like, okay, I'm bracing myself now. I wasn't ready for it, but I am ready for it now. So force reactions is going to be an ever-changing feature, but 3.11 is probably our first significant drop. We've had previous drops with it in terms of the twitches and the procedurals, and we're going to be doing further work on it. But hopefully that gives you an idea of the entirety of the feature as a whole.