Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

This is actually Rich, but Rich, go and say your part and then I'll chime in.

Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay Director

I think in 3.13 itself, it probably won't change the core experience. Those are features that have come from my teams, and generally, in an ideal world, we'd release features with all the other teams that have coordinated on them and we'd get them live in a situation where they're fully integrated into all of the gameplay loops in the game. Star Citizen though is a vast game and has lots of different systems. So in this implementation, it's going to be very similar to when we released body dragging. The trolleys are there, the mounted guns are there in the locations where you can go and use them. And it means that we can get feedback from people for the feel. And it's already highlighted several issues on the Evocati and on PTU. The trolleys, for example, have been put in a location that's not really fully suitable for those kinds of gameplay mechanics right now. For example, the stairs and elevators don't really talk well or nicely with the trolleys. But what we can get an idea of is, do the trolleys feel nice? Do they work? Obviously, we've got an issue right now where they keep disconnecting a bit, which we're looking into right now to improve. And then the mounted guns, for example: how do they feel? How do they play? So we're absolutely trying to push them live to get them into people's hands so people can play with them and we can get really good feedback on it. And then basically this will segue into what Todd's about to say in terms of the next iteration.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, so basically the way that our teams work, a lot of times Rich is developing these new features and then the content teams that I work with are about exploiting those features and using them in different ways. Because you can see obviously they're still working on it, meaning they're still fixing bugs, they're still working through some of these issues, where we're at in the quarter. So I can't say, OK, this is exactly how we're going to use these things until I actually get the feature and we can play around with it in missions or even just in sandbox experiences. With these things that Rich's teams are developing, most of the time we want them used in sandbox experiences. So you're coming around and you get to a location and you're like, oh, I want to use this or I want to use that. But with missions, we need time to actually implement them into missions and be able to build missions around these features. So that's kind of how we work. We work in a staggered development. Rich and his team develop these things and put them out, and then my teams take some time and basically implement them into sandbox experiences as well as missions.

Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay Director

And to be honest, a perfect example of that was the tractor beam. We developed the tractor beam, which went live in the main patch, and then when Xenothreat came along, you could see it being used as part of the core feature of that mission. Now, if Xenothreat didn't exist, we'd have had the tractor beam in the PU and you'd have been able to use it, and obviously it would have had a core use case of going in space. But that was a really good use case of that mechanic that really highlighted it. So when it works really well, that's the goal. And obviously, because we're in a live production, you get this kind of staggered development. And just on what the goal of mounted guns and trolley push-pull is in terms of how they're supposed to change the gameplay experience: in terms of trolleys themselves, we want that to be tying into moving cargo boxes and being able to have your cargo delivered to your hangar rather than just automatically spawning in your ship, and then you'll have to manipulate it up onto your ship. Similar to if you drove to, I'm going to say Home Depot, although Home Depot doesn't exist in the UK, B&Q, but you'd go to one of these warehouse stores and they would say, you've got to put it on the pallets there, and then you would say, okay, cool, I'm now going to load it into my vehicle. That's the kind of premise that we want for trolleys. But we also want trolleys to be used in missions where it's a simple Last of Us puzzle: okay, I need to be able to get up there, so I can now move this trolley. It's got a box on it. I can mantle up the box. Now I can get to a higher location. So allowing it to unlock gateways. And on the mounted gun side, this is something we've been really pushing on for mixed arms combat. Because you probably noticed that the mounted gun is a ship weapon. It takes down ships. It absolutely erases people, but it takes down ships. The hope is that you can have a fortified location and fight back from that fortified location, or AI can use it in the future to fight you back and you've got to either go in on the ground and disable them so you can bring the ships in, or for later when we do player-owned locations and things like that. It's all about offering different opportunities for attack and defense with mounted guns.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The first time I tried to push a trolley into an elevator, it shot it back at me and killed me.

Richard Tyrer · Core Gameplay Director

Yeah, I mean, we've got quite a lot of bugs around the doors, because what should happen is that the door shouldn't close. It's like if I go into an elevator now at work, if I'm stood in the elevator, the elevator tries to shut and then it detects me there, or it tries to crush me for a little bit and then pops open, and that's what should happen. But clearly game physics creates some fun things. But yeah, that just needs to be fixed on the game code side. And when we build them in, it gives us this additional quarter to fix those issues.