We are beginning the process of putting Death of a Spaceman into active development, testing these ideas and building tier zero implementations. Where do we start?

Well, we've already kind of started. Body dragging was the first feature that we released that gave you the premise to be able to manipulate dead bodies. But as Chris calls out, death is going to be a really important factor in Star Citizen. Now, there's kind of three deaths along the spectrum. There's what we're calling the downed state. So that's when your health has gone to zero and you're there. And when you're in that scenario, you'll be able to choose to stay there and be like, "OK, I need my buddies to come and rescue me. I need the law enforcement to come and help me," or maybe I pay for some insurance that rescues my body or something like that. Then there is the kind of you've died in terms of you've given up the ghost. Nobody's coming. You're like, "OK, that's it. I'm leaving that body there and I'm going to go back to a hospital and be revived." But that's kind of part of your DNA. That DNA is going to be re-impregnated into essentially a clone of you. And then you'll be able to go back to your location and you'll be able to see your dead body there. And as long as nobody's been there, you'll be able to retrieve your gear and so on and so forth. And then the third aspect, in terms of you passing on to your next of kin and that kind of thing. So what we're actually evaluating now is how this is integrated into the core healing gameplay and the actor status. So we already did some of the actor status with temperature, in terms of hypothermia and hyperthermia, and things like starvation. And what we want to do now in terms of the next iteration of this is what we call the healing and actor status T1. And what that will do is introduce drugs. So you'll have a blood drug level and you'll be able to manipulate things, but it will also introduce all the different statuses that are surrounding you as a character. So for example, when you're in battle and you take a really bad wound to the arm, you might say, okay, I've got a fracture, so my arm, I've got a permanent fracture. I'd have to go back to the hospital to get that repaired. Otherwise I'm going to start to suffer some status effects surrounding that. But if you keep taking damage and you keep taking more damage, that fracture might turn into an actual break. And then it might turn into actually coming out of your arm kind of thing. And the level of that status will dictate the level of care and level of healing that you need to go and basically get that healed. So you can go to a med bay and get them repaired. But it also allows other people to act as support roles and come and help you. Let's say you've got a really bad broken leg, which means that you can't walk anymore, because you haven't just fallen over and taken a little scratch. You've repeatedly taken damage in your leg and you've not gone to heal it, because MediPens, for example, will no longer just be like, "Oh, I'm a MediPen, I'm full health." You will have these permanent statuses like hypothermia and hyperthermia. And those will only be able to be removed when you go to these locations, either a medical bay in a ship or a medical bay at these hospital locations. So when essentially you go into that downed state, that's where body dragging will come in, so that people can come in and drag your body back to the medical facility. We're going to have obviously the medical gun in terms of the multi-tool attachment; we'll be able to inject essentially the material that's inside the MediPens, but a stronger version of that. So the MediPens will basically turn into something that is stabilizing you in the moment. You'll still be able to replenish your health, but if you've got a bleed or something like that, it'd be like a clotting agent that stops that bleed. And that allows you to get back to safety. And at that moment in time, you can then go, "Okay, do I want to go on and push on? But I've got this status effect." If I go back to the fractured arm, my weapon's now swaying more, similar to how we have the eyeball effects with the other things. And that progression of the actor status T1, in terms of the different limb statuses that you're going to have, in terms of whether you've got a traumatic brain injury, whether you've got leg injuries, whether you've got arm injuries, whether you've got internal bleeding in terms of your organs, the level of those statuses will basically go up and up and up to the point where you're like, "I can no longer function now and I need somebody to come out." And you'll have plenty of opportunity to back out. So it's not going to be something that's going to be like, "Oh, hello, you've broken your legs and that's it." It's going to be something like the other actor statuses, where you're going to have junction points where you can make a decision: should I go on? And it's that moment like in the Arctic: I'm close to the edge, but I might lose my toes. So essentially what we're working on right now is that healing circle and that healing gameplay. And it also allows that cooperative gameplay, that when you do go into this downed state, which covers the first of the three death states, that's the state where you really don't want to go to the next stage. Because as soon as you go to the next stage, that is what Chris touched on in terms of, it's almost like the DNA integrity, because you're going to go to the hospitals. When we release this, hospitals will be live in the locations. You'll be able to go to these hospitals and almost download your DNA matrix into the hospital database and say, "OK, if my body is unrecoverable or my friends can't get to me, then I'm going to die and have to be recloned into this body. My DNA is going to have to be re-imprinted into this shell." And during that process, that's the process where your DNA can kind of fracture or lose some of its integrity. And that is what Chris touched on in terms of you're losing a life in gameplay terms. That is what's happening as it's being imprinted into you. And depending on the manner of your death, and depending on, "Oh, if you've just been ignoring all of these statuses and all of your arms don't work and your legs don't work and you've got a brain bleed," some of that DNA integrity, as it's being injected back into your body, can be re-inherited from those systemic statuses that you've had. And that means that you might come back in your body with a prosthetic arm, or you might come back and your eye color has changed, or you're not as tall as you used to be, because there's something that's gone wrong with that DNA imprinting. That's kind of what we're working towards now in terms of that hospital healing gameplay loop, actor status, the extension of the actor status system that we went live with before, and obviously body dragging and all of that, setting your spawn point in game terms and the lives. That's the stuff that we're working on right now. And to be honest, that's going to be a significant change in how people play the game, because when you go to the third stage, where you're shedding your tear... I'm not shedding my tear at the character I've lost, I'm shedding my tear at the inheritance tax that I've just been levied. And it's at that stage, that permanent death where you're having to pass on to a next of kin, where it is the sins of the father. You're still going to have some of your reputational statuses, but they may not be as high as they were, because it's like, "Oh, your dad was part of X, Y, Z, but you're going to have to prove yourself." And that kind of loop is a really unique aspect in terms of an MMO. And that really ties into death having a real meaningful consequence. Like in Demon's Souls, the amount of times you get to the boss and you get to that 1%, and your palms are sweaty and you're moving the mouse and you're like, "No." That all of a sudden changes when you get to the edge of that cave and you're like, "Yeah, I'm just going to go in there, and if I find something in there that's not friendly to me, then I'll just respawn." Now it's going to be like, "Well, if I respawn, what happens to my ship? Am I going to lose my gear? I'm going to have to come back to it," because obviously physical inventory ties into it. "And then, oh, will I lose some of my DNA integrity?" And all of a sudden, it changes the choices you make along the journey that you're going on. And that is critical.

Yeah, one of the other things we're doing is that we're not going to be despawning player bodies anymore. So when you die, the body that's there and all the equipment will stay there. So if you end up having to be recloned, you could essentially go back to where you died and recover some of your stuff and see the skeleton of your previous incarnation. But the other thing I would say is that the cost of the new life, basically, and you're only going to have so many of these to degrade, is much more than getting rescued or having someone come and grab you and fix you up. So there will also be an economic incentive to live, to essentially not just go, "Oh yeah, I'm just going to respawn," because A, you're only going to get a very limited number of those, and B, they're going to be very expensive. So you would prefer to have other players or your friends or a service come and get you and fix you up. And I think that'd be really useful and important, because even in gameplay like that, okay, if I'm now exploring in a corner of the universe that doesn't really have a lot of people, my level of risk there is much higher than if I'm in the middle of a really well-traveled area of space. I think in terms of gameplay, things like finally getting around to the full health, Death of a Spaceman setup and the physical inventory, the gameplay potential and just what's going to happen and the interplay with players... there's not other games that I can think of that quite have all this stuff all together to do this at this level of detail. And personally, I'm super excited to have these come together. We've talked about them for a long time. Obviously it's taking a while, but that's because we're building something incredibly high fidelity with all this detail, but with all the scope. But it really will change a lot of the gameplay mechanics. A lot of how people are playing the game right now, you just wouldn't want to do. It just wouldn't make sense. And I think that's super exciting.

And hopefully you can see some of the method to the madness of the development. Because it's not like, "Hey, overnight we go, let's just add this cool thing." It's like, okay, it's underpinning these things. So when we add actor status, when we add eating and drinking, when we add physical inventory, when we add the ability to hold things in the hand from grenade throw T1, all of that is tying into the bigger picture of what we want to achieve. And that core gameplay loop of: I'm not just stepping into my ship and flying into space and I could just open my PMA and have access to everything I want. There's no consequence, there's no feeling that you're in the world, because you have access to this infinite bag of holding. This consequence of: I'm going on a real adventure. The things that I take with me are the things that I have access to. The ships that I have dictate how much storage I have and what I have access to inside those ships. Do I have a kitchen that provides me food and drink? Do I have a medical bay? Have I got room to take a buddy with me? Is he going to wear support armor that allows more replenishment of the medical gun that can revive me when I'm down in the cave and we can get out together? All of a sudden that becomes not just a single player "Oh, I've just got access"; all of a sudden those shared experiences are the things that make it a true experience. All of these individual systems in isolation, they're really cool, and we put a lot of effort and a lot of heart into them. And they're complex because we want scalability on the size of Star Citizen. But when you pull them all together and they start talking to each other, and they start, "Okay, have you got space for the amount of food and drink you need? Have you got space for ammo? What guns are you taking? Am I going to take the grenade launcher? Well, I can only fit so many magazines of that. Well, maybe I should take an energy rifle because that recharges." All of those different decisions tie into making it... That's when all of a sudden you go, "Hold on a minute, the game was already there. We just needed these systems to start talking to each other."

I feel like at some point we need to rebrand this to the Life and Death (and Taxes) of a Spaceman. It would be more appropriate.

Ultimately, we do joke a little bit about it, but the goal with Star Citizen is, essentially, it's a virtual life. We are trying to simulate, obviously in a more primitive state than the real world, all the things that would happen. Naturally you would think, okay, if I'm going to go to the Antarctic, I've got to bring my supplies with me. I've got to worry about if I get hurt, and all these things that I think create great gameplay opportunities and also great cooperative gameplay opportunities, right? So there's a lot of things that we talked about where clearly, if you're going to be adventuring in a dangerous place, having equipment and having people with you is probably a good thing, because otherwise something goes wrong and you're by yourself. And there's been a lot of engineering just on the very low level and some scalable stuff that we have to do to enable a lot of these systems, but over the next year or two years, we've got a lot of this stuff coming online. And I feel like when they all start interoperating together, then it will be an experience like no other. I don't know another game that does it to the level. There's some games that do some really nice... Red Dead Redemption 2 is great. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that does elements of this, but I think not to the scope and the level and the detail that we're doing. And that's one of the reasons why it's taken so long. It's definitely taking longer than I'd like it to. And it's part of my frustration when people are like, "Wow, where's my gameplay loops?" And I'm like, "But it's going to be so awesome. You've got all these elements." I know the big picture and how they're all going to pull together. And it's just one of the things that, when you're making a game live, developing in front of people, people experience what you wouldn't normally. Normally, most game developers will tell you, in the old way, certainly when I was making the Wing Commanders and all the rest of stuff, and Richard probably can opine on all the ones that he was making, that the game really only comes together near the end, right? So you work on all these disparate parts, and you do it for years, especially in today's world; people work on it for years and years and years, and then it really only comes together sort of... We're kind of in that alpha to beta stage. I know we say we're alpha, but we still got a lot of features to come, and normally a traditional alpha would be you've got your features there but you don't have all your content polished, and then beta is all content and features are in there and you're working on the bugs. So a lot of it doesn't... Like Wing Commander, you weren't playing through until a couple of months before we released the game, and it was all in different pieces. In the way we do Star Citizen, people see us develop all these pieces in different parts, and they go, "Well, why have you got that? That just seems silly that you're focusing on this aspect over here, where I don't even have this other thing over here." Well, we have a plan. We're working on all those pieces, and when they all come together, it's going to be a great experience. Already there's elements of it now, so you can go around and run around the verse, and yes, there's going to be a lot more, but there's already fun stuff to do, and there's the social aspect of it. I see amazing videos every single day. It's one of the funnest things for me, to see cool videos by whoever; there was one that Tarada just did on 3.11 that was shared around here. The point is, this is really cool stuff that people are doing with the sandbox we're building, even though the sandbox isn't finished. But whether it's me or Richard or Todd Papy or Tony Zurovec, we're all operating at the level of: we see the matrix, we just haven't built all the elements of the matrix yet, but we know it's coming together, and when it's done, it will be this amazing simulation. Our only frustration is... it's not like me and Richard are like, "Oh yeah, guys, take longer." It's like Richard and Todd and everyone else are like, "Is it really going to take you that long to do that feature? Are you sure you can't do that in half the time?" We're always on that case. I know everyone out there is on our cases, but some of this stuff just takes time to build, to test, and also to do it when you're doing it in a live game, right? Because we are building in a live game, so you can't just break everything by introducing a new feature. You've got to make sure the old features work as well. But to be honest with you, it's actually a fun way to do it, because a lot of how we're doing it also informs our development as we go along. Because yes, we've got our big plans, but some of the feedback we get helps tweak how things are coming in or what areas we'll address, or what things worked well or what things didn't work well that we need to adjust. And if you were doing it the old way, you wouldn't get that feedback. You'd just basically put it all out there. It'd be your best shot at it. And then you'd be like, "Oh shit, well, we've got to fix this thing or improve this thing." So I like it. And also just people experiencing what we're building so far is awesome for the team as well, because the team get all inspired when they see cool stuff that the community is doing. So there's upsides and downsides to what we're doing, but I wouldn't change it for the world, because I think it's one of the funnest things I've ever done in games, and it's awesome.