Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

So, high level, what was it, three years ago, we had introduced this concept of regen. So it was basically a fictional way to justify why players are respawning. Came up with this lore behind it of the Ibrahim spheres and imprinting and stuff like that. And actually did it in the timeline of the fictional universe. So it happened while players were playing. We introduced the tech. We kind of showed how the Imperator and the other people were reacting to this type of thing. But now basically, for whatever reason, the efficiency of the technology has been failing. Spoiler, it's not affecting the players, but for the majority of the NPC population, the efficacy of the regen tech has been dropping significantly. So basically death is now becoming a thing again. They thought they'd conquered it, and now it turns out that they're not. So currently the UEE and the Imperator are basically trying to scramble to figure out a solution, to research and science their way out of this predicament, to hopefully try to restore the tech to its former glory.

Will Weissbaum · Assistant Narrative Director

During the run-up to it, the tests and stuff, as much as they tested the technology before it came out, once you increased the sample size to several billion, it started really quickly showing the cracks. And all of a sudden all these people who thought they had their imprint safely stored away in a hospital, because everyone went out and got their imprints to protect them, it wasn't until they put it to the test months later that they realized that the imprints had gone bad. And so it's kind of like these small incidences of, oh, this whole shipload of people got into a wreck and none of them came back, that's weird. And then it started piling up to the realization of, oh, this technology is not as dependable as we first thought.

Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

And you kind of ran into the thing too where people were starting to effectively get kind of cocky of, oh, it doesn't matter, I can go and fly my ship into a wall and bounce back and everything will be okay. So not only is the sample pool increasing, but people could start abusing it, basically over and over and over again. And again, that could kind of raise the failure rate.

Will Weissbaum · Assistant Narrative Director

Yeah, so it turns out a large percentage of the population doesn't take well to imprinting. Maybe they only have one imprint, maybe none. And just like the player population is the part of the universe who owns spaceships and goes on these great adventures, they're also the part of the population that takes really well to imprinting, for the most part.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And this is a story that, obviously, we've just introduced with 4.1. This is a story that will continue to be revealed, and players will have more interactions with it as the months go by later this year.

Dave Haddock · Narrative Director

Yeah. So, as we had talked about in one of the Inside Star Citizens, the idea is we're introducing these ongoing storylines. And so this is the inciting incident for what we're calling our B story. So the threat of the Regen Crisis is kind of looming, and it's moving pieces around the board, whether it's corporate interests, government interests, stuff like that, to make decisions that the players will get to see as they go throughout the universe.