Currently, it is very hard to be a bad guy in Star Citizen. You get huge disadvantages from having a CrimeStat, and there's not really any place to go besides Grim Hex. What does the future hold for the bad guys?
TL;DRRichard says Pyro and planned multi-system gameplay should give pirates and criminals lawless areas, guild-style progression and PvP and PvE piracy loops, since Stanton's fully policed setup doesn't suit them.
Well, Pyro is a good one. Ultimately, I want bad guys. I don't think bad guys are always the bad guys. If you're a pirate, you might have moral motivations. But essentially, we want gameplay to be associated with areas that are lawful and unlawful. So obviously in Stanton, there should be a greater risk and greater reward for you being able to pirate, but then you're going to run into the issues that the question alludes to: you get a CrimeStat, you're going to be hunted down. So when we start to have Pyro, and we start to develop those systems, and we start to develop the gameplay between multiple systems as well, we want Pyro to offer lots of opportunity for players to be able to roleplay as a pirate or a gang member, or they will have the opportunity to work more in the shadows, more like organized crime. So for example, you can then go into a lawful zone as an organized criminal and be able to perform more criminal activities, but from the shadows. So the expectation is that we want to create gameplay loops, and we've actually discussed those internally, they're planned out, and have guilds that you can join that offer unlawful activities. And at the start you might just be a thug with a ship, but by the end of it you might be John Wick. So it's about having that progression within the game. And the other side of things is piracy or unlawful gameplay doesn't always have to be against lawful players. And that's something where in Stanton right now, if you want to go and be a pirate, you have to pirate the people who don't necessarily want to be pirated, right? And that always leads to a winner and a loser. And I think when you're looking at a game, and this has come up a lot in Stanton: are we a PvE game or a PvP game? From my perspective, we're both. And I want to create loops that support both. And that means on the PvP or the piracy side, where you want to become a pirate, I want to offer you to be able to pirate PvE and AI players, or should I say AI agents, and obviously players, but I also want to provide activities within Pyro that are beneficial, that force you against other pirates as well, so that you can have really cool, engaging PvP combat against people who want to have really cool, engaging PvP combat. And that means putting systems in place so that, A, you can find where that is, and bringing people to areas where they know it's going to happen. So there are definitely lots of plans for both bad guys and PvP and lawful guys and lawful PvP. So I think the first aspect, though, is that we need more than one system that is just fully policed by the Advocacy or the UEE. We need to have systems where it's more appropriate.