What kinds of things will Mission 2.0 enable you to do that you cannot with the current system?asked by Cara the Betrayer

The core ethos of what we call Mission 2.0 is essentially enabling our designers, or anyone in the company, to be able to create meaningful, scalable and robust content. So what do we mean by that? Let's talk about the intent first, as that pretty much solidifies the direction we want to take it to. So as Rich said in the 1.0 conversation, we're going to be having a main story, right? So the first part of that is our mission system will need to be able to create story scenarios, which influences NPCs or game world objects, animation, Track View events, dynamic events in the game world. So when we're telling story, that mission system can drive a lot of that. And currently, we don't have a lot of that functionality. The second major thing is we want to be able to do quest chains. So once you're progressing along that story, you want to be able to finish Story Mission 1, and then unlock Story Mission 2, etc. Again, functionality that we're missing currently right now.

And those quest chains retain or continue across logins.

We were going to get to that, but Rich, you're absolutely right. So jumping onto a little bit of the functionality outside of the intent, upgrading the capability of what we can do. Our first major one is obviously persistence between logins. Carl, you've picked up a mission. You log off for the night, the next day you still have that mission. You don't really care what had to happen on the back end for that mission to still be there in your contract manager the next day, but you want to log in the next day and see it there, ready to go, right? Also, other types of functionality we need is a deeper ability to specify mission sharing and rewards. So right now, as we've seen on a variety of our missions, participation or rewards being split equally are some issues that we wish we had a few more parameters on. So if you want to share a mission with someone and they want to receive some rewards, they have to do a certain amount of participation.

I think it's also really key to understand there that we want to encourage people to be able to play together. They shouldn't have to play together, but if they want to play together, we don't want to penalize them. So Mission 2.0 will give us the ability to allow players to come together without having to vie for individual rewards. They should be rewarded for playing together.

I mean, you've talked a lot about the player impact on Mission 2.0, but for me, it's all about the way that our content creation teams are working to create those missions, right? Our mission tools suite at the moment is very granular and detailed. Mission designers are essentially programming in our mission description tooling. And so they have to worry about way too many error handling cases, initialization, streaming race conditions and things like that. They have to uniquely and very specifically find all of the elements in the world that they need to work with for their mission. And Mission 2.0 is sending things to be much more building-block oriented and make it more declarative. The mission designer will declare what conditions and what environment and what objects they need to be able to work with, and then the mission system provides them with that. They don't have to go and find them and serialize them and worry about their loading and initialization order and things like that. So yeah, it's a big tech...

For everybody at home, that means those missions will be more robust, have less bugs, easier to find out.

There's a question later on that discusses that, so we'll talk about that in a bit.

Well, it means basically if you're a designer, you can focus on designing the content and not...

The gnarly edge case stuff.

Also, some other improvements outside of the way we're building is the presentation of that information. So as we work towards 1.0 and we're scaling the type of mission content, we need to be cleaner in terms of how we're presenting those contracts to the player. The ability to search or the ability to filter, things like that, will be very valuable. Also, the way you accept those missions. Right now, you open up the contract manager, you pick a contract and you're good to go. On the story missions, they'll call you up, they'll enroll you into that mission.

There's also a couple of things there. We want to be able to tell people what tools they need to take on that mission, whether they need a multi-tool or whether they need a specific ship. Also rewards, outlining what rewards they'll get. So a lot of functionality, both from the back-end side for developers to be able to make more robust missions and more complicated missions, all the way to the front end, from the players experiencing that mission, both from a point of view of as soon as they pick up the contract versus playing through the mission and obviously then the rewards at the end. So yeah, there's a lot coming, I think, with Mission 2.0, which is going to be good.

So in a nutshell, Mission 2.0 is essentially an umbrella term we use that affects everything from where we're heading to the way we're building to almost how the engine works. So it's a big initiative.