Chris Parry · Systems Designer

Sure, so going back to that full loop we want to establish, I guess it's a little bit of a step away from the med gun, but just in general: costs for using medical beds. And that's for regen and also for healing injuries. And you might think, well, why is that so important? Well, it introduces the aspect of resources being required and also players being able to charge for the use of their medical beds. So if you wake up in hospital, you get charged. If you wake up in a player-owned ship, then you can get charged for that or for using the services. Make money out of these things. I think as well, again, this is a bit of a divergence, but it's within the same wheelhouse. At the moment, the drugs we've got are purely medicinal, but we want to basically expand those so that we've got utility drugs. So one of those would be sedatives. So it ties into the bounty hunting stuff and what JJ was saying before about the various different non-lethal weapons we're going to have eventually. But there's also performance-enhancing drugs we want to introduce, and those will start to leverage the drug level a lot more, introduce things like aftereffects, consequences for taking stuff, coming down from the high of being able to shoot people repeatedly and whatnot. And then obviously there's the whole death of a spaceman thing where, as I said, it gives you a reason not to die. You don't want to die because eventually you'll die forever and lose a lot of your stuff. You have to spool up a new character and then they'll inherit your stuff. So yeah, there's lots of consequence we want to introduce. That gives lots more weight to everything else within the system. JJ, do you want to talk a bit about the armor specializations?

Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems Designer

Yeah, I guess this is a bit further down the line, but we are, and I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, essentially slowly trying to specialize the armor in different directions. So it's not just armor is armor, heavy is heavy, light is light. We're trying to push things in slightly different directions. We've talked about having a support line of armors where it's like, OK, these are still going to be good for most of the things that a regular suit will be, but it skews it into a slightly different direction. So it'll still have some inventory space, you'll still be able to put weapons on it, you'll still have some room for a couple of throwable devices or a multi-tool, things like that. But it will maybe have more consumable slots so you're able to go around and heal people more easily. We've talked about almost bespoke backpacks which might have special functionality for holding medical fluid for the med gun. And we even talked about a couple of ideas for what we can do, because we want to do a light support and a heavy support, and how they differ from each other. So a light support might be a bit more like a first responder. They've got lots of consumable storage. Obviously in a light suit, you'll be able to run a lot faster than heavy. And again, there's more iteration to do on that too. But then the heavy is a bit more like what we've been calling the battle medic, where you're wearing heavy armor for a reason, you want protection. Or it's the big heavy suit that you want to go and rescue someone in from, say, a really hostile environment as well. And that might have some special functionality, because, all of this is theoretical stuff at the moment, it's not going to be in game for a little while, but it might be the biggest power producer in the game, in terms of, it's a support suit, it's got a lot of systems on it, it's dedicated in that direction. And we've talked about things like, eventually we want to recharge energy mags, so that suit would be able to do it a lot faster as well. So someone wearing the big heavy suit might actually, from a support side, still be quite good in combat. So lots of ideas floating around there. And obviously it ties into how medical gameplay is pushed further in this more specialized direction, if that makes sense.