Richard Tyrer · Gameplay Pillar Director

So player healing is kind of the next iteration of what we classified as Actor Status. So Actor Status T0 we released around CitizenCon, probably about a year ago now, I think it was like 3.9, around about that. But that kind of covered the first iterations of the statuses that the player covers, such as eating, drinking, hypothermia, all of those kinds. So this is the next iteration of that, which covers essentially injuries.

So we already have in the game right now, the player has global health. So when you look on your HUD, you have the little first aid symbol and it says it's your global health from 0 to 100. What some old backers probably will remember is that we also have the little man, and the little man comprises the different body parts on you. So you've got your arms, you've got your legs, you've got your core and your head, and they are actually individual pools of health. But that's what I say about some of the old backers: that used to be the only thing that you could see. You didn't have the global health. We introduced the global health widget when we released Actor Status T0. But the way it works under the hood is that your limbs take damage. So say I get shot in the arm, and let's say I lose five health points in the arm. What happens under the hood is it goes, OK, let's remove five health points from the arm, and then it removes five health points from the global health. And it was always doing this. You just never saw it. So you would only ever die when your global health got to zero. It didn't matter that your limbs could get to zero, it was waiting for your global health. So if I just kept shooting you in the arm, even though your arm might only have 20 health points, your global health might be 100 health points. So I keep shooting you and your arm is now ruined, essentially, and then I could keep shooting you and eventually you'd die.

There was always the intention that your limbs would basically have these statuses based on their own individual health, and then that would tie into the greater healing gameplay that we're talking about. So basically now what we've taken is that system, and now we're starting to introduce the injuries that will apply to you when you take severe damage in your limbs. So you can have a traumatic head injury, you can have a traumatic body injury, you can have leg injuries and arm injuries. And the way it kind of works is that we're still using the health system, but we're kind of tracking this invisible number behind the number in the back end, which is kind of like body limb wear. So essentially, imagine I keep shooting you in the arm, because we're talking about the arm. And you might lose all your health and that's fine. If you then MedPen it up and heal your arm back up as we do now, if you haven't given it a lot of time, so you're not taking care of yourself, and you keep getting shot in the arm and you keep getting shot in the arm, basically that wear is going to keep building and building and building until you get essentially a broken arm.

And we have three tiers or severities of injury. Tier one or severity one is the highest, that's the worst. Then we've got tier two and then tier three. So essentially, when you get a tier three injury, it's basically going, hey, now you're going to start suffering consequences of that injury. And you can't just get a MedPen and go, cool, I'm just going to use my MedPen. Your MedPen will heal your limb health back up to full health, but the injuries on your arm will give you different effects and different statuses. And that's why I'm saying it's the next iteration of Actor Status. As you start to suffer from dehydration, as you start to suffer from hunger or hypothermia, you start to undergo these different states. So your stamina: you can't run as far, you can't sprint as long. We have lowered max health, and we have all the different eyeball effects that start to come on, whether there's the blood vision or the double vision and things like that. Or whether you're cold, you start to shiver, or you're under severe pressure. So what we have is all these different statuses that trigger these internal body reactions to you suffering these injuries.

So with the upcoming healing status, what we're doing is that you can then suffer this injury. So let's say you've suffered an injury and let's say it's a severity three or tier three. So that's the lowest severity injury. So let's say your broken arm, it's like a fracture. Say you've got a hairline fracture in your arm. So you can still use your arm, but maybe now you can't hold your gun as firm, so you've got a bit more weapon sway and so on and so forth. So you start to notice, thinking, OK, I've got this injury. Now my little man is showing my arm is red, and it's showing I've got a tier three. And it's like, OK, I need to go back to a medical facility to remove this injury. There's no way for you to remove the injuries out in the field. You have that injury, you have to then go and get it sorted.

So you can then go back to a medical facility. And with medical facilities, there are different classifications. We have Tier 1, 2 and 3. So a hospital or a physical location is going to be what's classified as a Tier 1 facility. That's the best facility you can get, so they will always be able to heal everything out. And you can see where I'm going here: Tier 2 is the second and Tier 3 is the worst. And the way that we're tiering it is that Tier 3 can heal any injuries that are Tier 3, Tier 2 can heal any Tier 2s, and Tier 1 can heal Tier 1 and below. By the way, I always wanted it the other way around, but we'd already committed to the tiering, so I was like, okay, fine, that's fine.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I could do a whole segment someday on the way that we tier things in all aspects of our development.

Richard Tyrer · Gameplay Pillar Director

Exactly. So essentially what we have is this injury. So you've got this injury and it's affecting how your character plays the game. It's affecting the effectiveness of your character, whether that's in combat or in mining or how much you can carry or how much you can sprint, how well you can see, all of these different things. So if you've got a traumatic head injury, for example, you might start to suffer double vision. Your stun resistance won't be as high, so if you get hit by force reactions, you'll fall over easier, things like that. So what we're introducing is this severity, and then when you get to the Tier 1 severities, that's where you've taken significant amounts of damage. You've gone down, you've been revived, all of that kind of thing, and you're in a situation where with Tier 1 you might have a multiple fractured arm where you can't use your arms anymore. You might be able to use your arms for that one moment, like if it's life or death dependent: look, I need to get over that wall and I'm just going to do it. Great. But you're not going to be able to climb a 20 meter ladder. So if your ship's got a ladder, then you're in big problems.

So this is where we started to introduce the healing and medical gameplay. So what we're doing for the healing and medical gameplay is that we have the multi-tool healing attachment for the multi-tool. And then we have the dedicated healing gun. So the multi-tool itself will be an improved version of the MedPen. So with the MedPen, essentially, what you'll be able to do is use it to heal up your health, it won't heal injuries, and you'll be able to use it on other people as well. So you'll be able to go and jab it into other people and help heal up some of their injuries. What the multi-tool does is it allows you to heal up, not injuries, it allows you to heal up the health, so you can heal up the limb health and your global health. And it also allows you to scan that person and understand what is wrong with them.

Because the other thing that we're introducing as part of this pass of healing, or Actor Status T1, is the downed state. So any time where you would have probably died in Star Citizen, or should I say 99% of the time, because there is going to be a 1% and I'll explain that in a minute. Most of the times where you would have died, now you would go into the downed state. And the downed state is where you are unconscious. You are not dead, you are just unconscious, but you are slowly dying. And that slowly dying might take two hours. Now at any point when you go down, you can choose to release and respawn. But later down the line, when we introduce death of a spaceman and dying is a real problem, you can wait for somebody to come and rescue you. So you might have a buddy. Let's say we're playing together, I fall down a cliff or I get shot, I go down; you can then come and revive me, either using a MedPen or using the multi-tool healing attachment. So I'm now no longer below zero health, I'm healthy, I can now stand up. I might have injuries, I might not, depending on what took me down, but I'm back in the game. So death now has a way for you to be brought back.

And this is the 1%: if you receive more damage than your entire health bar, so let's say you go from 100 to minus 100, aka you get shot with an Idris railgun and you're on EVA, you will go straight to death. That's like, go to jail, don't collect your 200. That's it. Actually, I should not say go to jail, because I think you have to go to jail. So that was a Monopoly reference, for the purposes of being very clear. It means that you just die and respawn in a hospital or in a location.

So if we go back down that road, we have this downed state, so now people can revive you. But let's say I revive you and you're back, but now you've got the worst case severity. You've got a tier one injury in your legs. So you can't even stand up. You're locked in prone because your legs are shattered. So how do you get around? And I say shattered as in they're really bad. Okay, so I don't want to get into the details of the medical issues of what you're actually undergoing, but let's say they're the worst severity injuries and it prevents you from standing.

Richard Tyrer · Gameplay Pillar Director

So what happens is, obviously, if you then go into a tier three, we're introducing these different levels of drugs. And this is where you will have medical pen versions that you can stab in. So if you've just got the multi-tool and you found somebody, it might say, oh, this person can't stand on his legs anymore because the pain is just too great. It's crippling him. Okay, I'm going to stab him with my anesthetic pen. We'll have specific lore names for them. Or I can use the dedicated healing gun, and with the dedicated healing gun I can scan them and I'll be able to choose which drugs I can then administer to the person who's injured to get them back on their feet. Now it doesn't heal their injuries, it just removes the symptoms. And it removes the symptoms so that that person can then get back to a location, a medical facility.

So for a Tier 3, maybe the Cutlass Red would be Tier 3. The 890 Jump or the Carrack medical facilities, that might be like a Tier 2 facility. And then the Tier 1 facilities are the dedicated hospitals, the physical locations. So you can get back to a medical facility and then go into a medical bed and heal yourself from these injuries, and then you can continue. So essentially, these things aren't going to jump up on you. They're going to be things that happen over time. Like I said, it's like a wear in the background. It's almost like your vehicle's wear.

And then what we also have is this thing called the drug level, and that's what is monitored on your HUD as part of all of your Actor Status widgets. So this is your suit monitoring the amount of basically external drugs inside your system. And that could be alcohol, it could be MedPens, it could be all these other drugs that we're adding. I know that we're adding four bespoke drugs to the system. And then you'll have to balance how much you can apply with the dosage, because you don't want to overdose somebody, because if you overdose them, they'll pass out. And then you'll have to decide which ones you want to use, and that will give you a timer. So you'll be able to understand, OK, this is going to give them an hour here, an hour here. That's enough for us to get back to the ship and get back to a hospital location, or a medical facility if you have a ship with medical facilities.

So essentially what we're introducing is the healing profession. This is you, you're the first responder. This could be with or without your friend. So they've died or whatever, or later down the line, the whole profession around where death is going to be really important. And obviously with this death comes inventory. So you'll lose your items on death if you choose to respawn. So people will be able to bring you back, give you drugs to alleviate the symptoms that are specific to your injuries so that you can function to get back to a location. And if you don't have those drugs, you'll then be able to body drag somebody back to your ship. And then you'll be able to take them to a location that has medical facilities and actually drop them off at an emergency elevator. And you'll have a synchronized animation of putting them into the medical bed, and then basically send them directly to hospital, or heal them in a ship if you're putting them in there.

So that covers the healing gameplay, the healing profession that revolves around healing your limbs, the statuses you're going to be receiving, the different hospital tierings and medical facilities. And then on top of that, the one thing that we're adding is the respawn, which is where you're going to be respawned. So now when you die, you won't just respawn in a hab, you'll respawn in a hospital facility. If you've respawned in that hospital facility, you'll be in a medical gown and then you'll be able to access your own inventory. Obviously, if you've died somewhere outside of a landing zone, your gear will be left with your body. If you've died in a landing zone, for whatever reason, what we're saying is that security have come and collected you and they've taken you to hospital, so your gear will be in the room. So you'll be able to then take it with you.

You'll also be able to choose which hospital you want to respawn at. So if you want to go and choose, I want to always respawn at microTech, you can go and say, this is my respawn point where I want to respawn. Only Tier 2 and above facilities or ships will have the ability to respawn. So that means Tier 3 medical beds won't allow you to respawn. And Tier 3 medical beds are what's in the Cutlass Red right now. So that's going to be a loss of functionality versus what it currently has. But this was always the intention; that was always a placeholder solution when we added it to the PU at the start of 2020, if I remember correctly. And clearly we want to be able to have major hospital facilities at all of the major landing zones. We want to have clinics at truck stops and things like that. So essentially you're going around and choosing where you want to respawn. And then obviously that ties in later down the road in terms of death of a spaceman, DNA integrity, which we've talked about previously, but I won't go into too much detail on that. But the detail that I've talked about here is what's coming in the first iteration of healing and the healing gameplay.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

In just the T1 that comes in Alpha 3.15.

Richard Tyrer · Gameplay Pillar Director

Correct.