Star Citizen: February Subscriber's Town Hall feat. Lore Team
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
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work Justin hi everybody Welcome to reverse the verse this is Wednesday uh February 24th 2016. I'm your host Community manager Jared Huckabee and this is our special February subscriber edition of reverse the verse uh basically we're taking questions specifically from our subscribers for members from the cig writing team uh Laura team whatever you guys call yourself you guys can talk tell them what you guys call yourself you have a name yet do you have like a team name Laura Laura team lordy all right the lower team uh immediately to my right is uh senior writer Mr will weisbaum hi how's it going a head of linear content Mr Mr John schimel good morning good morning after that is associate writer Mr Adam wieser hello and our archivist is Sherry
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heiberg hi and joining us from is exile in the United Kingdom head writer lead writer Mr Dave Haddock hello hello how you doing Dave good old all right uh before we get started why don't we give everybody a little intro about what you do for Star Citizen so that we they can tailor their questions for you guys uh we'll once you start us off what do you do for Star Citizen a little bit of everything I I work to support Dave in writing all the uh scripts and story for squadron 42 creating all the content that's really excitingly going into the uh pu Alpha currently all of uh the news updates uh that you see on the site every week we we develop as a team and uh just uh as well as helping with
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some of the marketing law as well for when we sell products and chips and stuff that's one of the best things about working here is that there's so much Variety in what we do and so much of it okay what about you John Schumer what do you do for Star Citizen uh my job here is sort of morphed over the time I'm here I started as a story consultant and I worked with Dave before will started on the develop the story for squadron 42 and then I spent some time producing video content for the site most of my time now is spent producing uh the performance capture shoots that we do in Healing The Imaginarium Studios a massive undertaking I had brown hair a month ago
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and Adam what do you do for Star Citizen yes as a as an associate writer I support Dave and will um and basically everything we'll describe you know writing jump Point articles news dispatches uh lore for marketing chip components um Galactic guides a lot of the star map stuff so yeah there's just so much as will said there's so much work to be done I'm just part of the team to help kind of like leia-based foundation for some of it for them to then go on and uh tailor to the exact needs gotcha and Sherry what do you do I manage the game design document Confluence I basically make sure that all the infinite and put it in its place for us I do or banish it yeah yeah I make sure the data is in place and play
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star map and I validate the Astron all our systems are scientifically accurate and match with the lore and that matched with the lore of course yes when you guys work down in the Community Hall with us the often were the times this planet isn't doesn't have the orbit it should and this star is not the right color for its size oh it does the great star color change of 2015. very serious about it good times good times and Dave Haddock from the UK what do you do uh I have a little bit of everything will already said that yeah uh Squadron 42 pu um marketing stuff I mean whatever they need to do that's basically just All Star Citizen all the time yeah Dave's in
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the UK right now doing deep Dives with the design team at Foundry 42 showing up uh Squadron 42 stuff which is coming along nicely yeah but I have a delay so if I speak weird that that's not because of the delay all right so yes these this is the cig writing team the Laura team the story team for lack of a better term so your questions uh would be best suited for that kind that realm we are taking questions exclusively from the subscriber chat on the RSI website so if you do have a question you want to ask the story team here log into the RSI chat hit the subscriber tab if for any reason you or your subscriber and the subscriber tab is not appearing for you in the lower
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right hand corner under more channels you should see your subscriber tab again assuming that you are a subscriber if you're not a subscriber you're welcome to watch and enjoy and become a subscriber yeah I try not to do the Hard Sell but yes ease into it well you also can become a subscriber that process is automated so it's right away and you can ask us questions after you subscribe it's the hard thing about hanging out with writers they rewrite you as you know but don't even get me started subscriber chat to pick some questions over the weekend in the subscribers Den which is a forum dedicated to subscribers uh so we'll start off with one of those questions uh from long cut he asks how is progress on the galactopedia coming
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who wants to take that one um well uh we have some plan we've made some plans with turbulent to get the galactopedia launched uh we've been working on deciding what content we want to debut first yeah and as one of the long-term things I've been going through and uh helping compile a lore cannon that that collects lots of people places events uh and starts to break that down so when it does come time to put it into the galactopedia format we already have a base of a lot of that information ready to go um yeah Adam's been great about calling through kind of all the old news updates and stories that we've released so far in making sure that all the kind of stuff that we threw out when we were writing at the time has been logged and
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tracked so that we can make it as an easy reference guide yeah I think through like May of 2014 there are already 300 plus characters that were mentioned in official lore um so far so uh and that that's only may have 2014 so there's there's still more to to kind of slog through and find the right place for yeah we haven't talked about the galactopedia in a while we've we've added several hundred thousand star citizens since we have uh can you why don't you tell us what the galactopedia is for those who may not be familiar with it it's the in-game Encyclopedia of everything Star Citizen uh think Wikipedia But better maintained shots fired no not shots fired I love Wikipedia
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and more honestly fictional yeah now you said in-game will it also be available outside the game like on my website maybe uh from what we've been talking about with turbulent that the first place that'll go live is most likely the website and then it'll also hopefully be easily available from your Moby glass is one thing we've been talking about so we'll have to see how it shakes out but that would be really great to have it as an in-game and out of game reference gotcha all right uh one of the questions from the chat to follow-up to the galactopedia one in the description for the galactopedia there was a backstory stating that they originally attempted to contact the vandu for participation I want to know if they will send people
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over and how well that went I assume it went very far away foreign [Laughter] asks will future updates to the star map trickle in as they become available or will they be added in batches oh I can answer that one for sure I've been trickling in updates as I get them as we confirm what we want on the star map I've been adding them I've been keeping a change log and we've been talking with turbulent about making that changelog public all right cool uh yes again for those asking questions about weapon sizes and such that was that's not a question for the uh for the lower team so much so keep the questions coming we'll stick to the list for now uh
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good job from s will there be an option to run around naked in your own ship or at least your underwear and this question was picked by Will by Adam wiesers we're gonna make him answer well I picked that one specifically well well we don't quite know exactly how the the clothing system is going to work I know one thing Dave had mentioned a while back is that he would love if players might have the option to be wearing like flip-flops and shorts while flying their ship that said if you get in the firefight and you're you know you get vented out in the space you're you're toast but there's we haven't confirmed whether that's going to be allowable but I know that uh that was a dream Dave once had so hopefully we can make it in game um I guess I guess we'll have to see [ __ ] a question about the star map from Goku
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is the fact that there is no threat information on the star map intentional uh we we kind of have the high level rating systems going on right on the high level where we kind of track the economy and the security level and the population but we're still kind of working with the Pu design team on figuring out more the specifics of what a Threat Level would be how is that going to be spread across the system um it's not like an entire system will be as dangerous throughout it's going to have pockets of more dangerous hot spots and not so we're still talking through how that's going to work
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specifically with the gameplay before we build in too much of that information on the lower side of things uh ferret asks the current environment for Star Citizen holds quite a few parallels to the Golden Age of piracy back in the 1600s there are unexplored areas territorial Governors a powerful Empire Pirates ships Etc how cognizant are individuals or groups of this fact I guess he means you guys are there any lessons that can be learned from history for either the uee or some dissenting factions it would also seem to be that there would be at least a few social or economical lessons to be had does this knowledge shape how you approach certain factions in Star Citizen yes yeah I mean you know the the
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piracy the era of piracy definitely was part of conversations early on in the development it was definitely influencing it um again for a lot of this stuff we use it in sort of a launching place of the universe so I think there's there's elements that we could look at that would be directly influenced in the game but mostly we wanted to once it starts to take a life of its own you know we wanted we wanted to develop how narratively exciting and fun all right let's see do we have any new questions
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are there uh bobsled 624 and the chat asks are there plans to update the lore and or history of a system based on the actions of the persistent universe as populous in real time uh he doesn't say in real time just I I guess we'll we'll players be able to affect the history and lore of a system after the fact history or the were they well will they be able to create new history correction for the for this system oh yeah oh yeah yes I mean yeah really like once it gets to the newsworthy level of actions or something big enough happens uh hopefully we'll be watching that on a game level and being
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able to track and incorporate that into the lore is is really our but also that idea ideally would that affect the look of the area you know or whenever the direction that the system takes because there's now is now a crime-ridden system rather than a you know a neutral one yeah we were talking to the environment artists about the potential of maybe being able to have the economy affect how much litter you find on the ground or how much graffiti is on the wall so the worst of places off economically the more dirty and grungy it's going to look and vice versa so if you help an area
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out if you start shipping more and more stuff to it maybe it starts cleaning up its act a little bit Yeah so but but a player's ability to impact the way the future the history is written depends on the extent of the impact of what they're doing but right we probably won't memorialize or having a beer yeah I mean on the galactopedia side as as it updates as the game unfolds as the game is fully released we would very much like to be able to record impactful player events like taking down a well-known pirate for example that's what we really want to do yeah it's just the the challenge of finding the right threshold on which that you go from like like John said just being another person out there like being a
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part of the solution or part of the problem to actually kind of like doing enough of something to to become well known for it kind of like life yeah hopefully gotcha I guess a follow-up question to that from uh a name I can't pronounce sorry I'm not even gonna try ethi ethnic will our characters in The nope that wasn't the right one this is from PA sorry I'm messing that up messed up we're live yep if the player names are going to be made a part of official history what will happen when they have crazy inappropriate names hmm or or they have names with seven digits after them do people do that yeah we had a question we had a question from yeah
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we have a question from corruptu for fun one what happens to corrupt you for fun one does something amazing in the universe and gets written into the lore it's not so inappropriate no I mean we're gonna say it was corrupt you for fun one uh we've talked I mean yeah with some of them we've sort of created our own fail face for it like but I mean I mean you know if corrupt you've performed for fun one to kill the dread pirate Roberts and also I mean we might have it so that your RSI website account name is not
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we we're not allowed to have your fictional display name as well so that that's your account name is corrupt you for fun one we're saying that a lot um but your character's name is George George and a link to your account yeah so yeah we'll have to figure out how all that information is displayed and the diegetic versus non-digitic nature of that info luckily we have some time okay uh Timothy muster asks at some point in the Pu will there be NPCs based off of the cig team one can only hope uh there were a fair amount of team members who had their head scanned when
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we were filming yeah up in the UK I've seen Will's headscan I got my head scanned it was great um keep talking so yeah we actually spent a part of yesterday assigning team members to NPC characters oh really that's great oh my gosh are you are you letting the team members have a vote and who they play or you're just kind of it's just not a democracy no oh I would have to shave yeah that's true huh we scanned a few people with beards we did and no apparently from yesterday yeah but you have to you would have to do a facial thing you have to have a
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beard if you have a beard yeah you would always huh huh uh bobsled 624 asks how involved in the writing how involved in the writing okay this subtitles how involved is the writing team and the design of systems and alien species or are you consulted and contribute after the species has already been created uh Dave we have a car alarm going off that's what you hear in the background it's usually kind of an open company I mean very early on you know we had talked about this alien species and very broad strokes but as the team grew like and people started
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concepting stuff like more people from the conversation there are needs and animation needs and stuff like that like that so I mean we still stay contributed to the conversation but you know they're more more people involved in it uh logical chimp asks what type of techniques tricks tools do you use to come up with characters names backgrounds Etc in order to avoid having everyone in the verse being a middle-aged white male diversity without inducing the feeling artificially in the distribution well we I mean it's part of our Cat part of casting for sure you know it's part of when we talked to the casting
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director we very specifically ask you know for diversity it's definitely a case when we're naming characters because one of the ideas that uh International boundaries have kind of dissolved uh in the Empire now it's more about planets so before where you would have these names that were kind of segregated by what country you were from that those boundaries have definitely kind of eroded away so as we develop names it's kind of fun sometimes a good method is to take a first name for one country and a surname from another country and combine them in interesting ways so that can kind of give it a a more kind of different vibe than what we're not used to so yeah I I personally keep
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a stack of magazines at my desk and sometimes I'll just open it up to one page and choose a first name open it up to another and choose a second name and just try to try to put something together that way because it making every name a reference or or named after someone it takes too much thought sometimes when you're writing you just you just need a name and you just you know sometimes it's best just to make it slightly more random um they're all named Goofus headlights was a good publication and I was a loyal subscriber for several years don't be offended all right do you guys work with the alien languages at all yes yep uh somebody's asking how the Banu and language is coming along and any chance we can get a sample soon
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they are was first we have another one on top it'll be a little while okay the linking name generators in chat now but it's really fun to watch them develop the land yeah yeah uh speaking of names destined to uh to join star citizens storied history space Herbie asks does game development drive the story or does the story Drive the game develop it's really kind of both and and it's great that way is that we'll come up with a fun idea and go pitch it to design and vice versa design will come
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up with a really fun scenario and come to us to help spice it up or or smooth out the the corners of it to make it make sense in the universe so it's it's a lot of conversation back and forth and I kind of think that's the way game development should be so I mean it's worth noting that you know Chris is very intent on the game feeling cinematic and and hanging on to a really cinematic sense of story and character so it it sort of the two things dovetail a lot you know this I think the writing team drives the story and the dramatic parts of of the of the game and then it when it turns into gameplay a design has some ascendancy in in that but it's it's definitely an ongoing collaboration
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chip uh farewell red asks do we see families in the game either in capital ships or starliners families um so far I I mean having children included in video games is always a bit of a risky proposition because uh to be frank violence against children falls into a different category uh and so by including them you suddenly open up all these possibilities of kind of situations that you may not want players getting into um so whether we're gonna have them in like lockdown areas or not they're also a whole different set of animations and models and stuff so right now I think they're pretty low down the list
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be a question more for Chris I guess uh I think we'll we'll definitely have couples that you'll see around we'll have to talk to Bender about getting an animation where two people are walking with their hands in each other's back pockets that'll be important that's oddly specific that's how you tell when people are dating all right Sherry would you mind changing seats with will please I no longer feel comfortable here I'm staying right here um when uh mask writes when does information become lore can you guys rewrite anything you have written up until now or is it all considered official and unchangeable can we I try not to wreck on personally
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don't like retconning unless absolutely necessary but um technically it's all malleable it's just it's we're developing in public face so it's a little weird we have to you know kind of choose what we can to to work on usually if it's if it's something really firmly established I think we try to do whatever we can to not wreck on it but if it's little details it's okay to it's okay to kind of amend it to to save us some trouble down the line or make something else work yeah I would say in under normal circumstances you'd be free to wreck on whatever up until release right but because we're so public facing it does give you an additional challenge
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yeah yeah well you have to be really careful that you're not you don't retcon yourself into a story that's gibberish yeah yeah there's a lot of ripples from when you change one small detail and we see it all the time of we'll we'll try to adjust something and then it really spider webs quickly into a whole bunch of smaller other changes so yeah because the game is so story driven there's a kind of there's a like a film there's a film version of an ecology to it and it it's shocking how much impact when Small Change can make so it requires a lot of care um do you guys ever write Easter eggs into the story for squadron 42 or Star Citizen oh yeah oh yeah is there any is there an Easter egg that
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you wanted to put in but weren't able to so that's not a spoiler because it's not in the game I don't think I don't think so I can't think of anything because I can do whatever I want nobody tells me what not to put in here not not yet I mean we try to make them more on the subtle sides so we haven't yeah kind of I mean part of it I don't know part of it's also the idea that um it has to exist in its own right within the the the reality of the game so it can't stand out too much but if you dig just under the surface you can catch the reference um yeah I mean there's nothing like you know you're not going to find you know The Big Lebowski as you know Jeff Lebowski in the game you know because that wouldn't make sense but like you
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know there's a guy who's known as a dude who wear sunglasses maybe that you know then it becomes a little bit more palatable because they you know they can exist within that reality and make sense rugs for spaceships you do always complain about no carpets in spaceships we need more carpets in our space he's a firm carpet spaceship guy is let that know ties the room together uh Space Cowboy asks what is the Star Citizen novella it was an old book thanks Dave can you tell us anything more about the star system developed I'm trying Space Cowboy I'm working on it actually I've been
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developing it actually over the holiday the Christmas break that was a about two weeks of actually working intensely on the The novella um uh yeah no I think it'll be cool I'm not gonna spoil anything yet but it should be really it's gonna be really fun you're gonna spoil something later it's the story of the dude a lot of rug let's see okay gray dog asks do you have a storyline in mind when the procedural generation team creates a planet or do they come up with a planet and then hand it off the concept team and then you guys write for it um all all planets I'll go started kind
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of the the star map was very lore-based and and talk about stuff with design but a lot of that of what would make this system interesting and unique what were these planets kind of like um procedural generation we haven't worked too closely yet but there will be hopefully building the planets off kind of the specs that we've outlined especially now that we're starting to pull in real scientific data from our Consultants to help the procedural generation team set parameters for the planets they're building and at this point they're working on the tech you know once they get the attack into a into a place where where it's ready to actually start building planets then yeah I know all the planets in uh Crusader or around Crusader have drastically changed size in 2.2 so it's
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been fun to look at that yeah oh Crusader in 2.0 and 2.1 was the size of Jupiter just to see how big they can make a planet it wasn't the intended size really yeah [Music] we need to measure it yeah but that was their goal anyway the goal was they wanted to see how big they could make a planet and now they're attempting to size the planet too yeah everything's been spread out a lot more it's it's really exciting stuff 2.2 is pretty fun yeah it's one of the reasons we call it the baby pu or the Pu light instead of the Pu it's a test bed there because they're experimenting uh La Mac La Mac the Big Mac has a question specifically for sharing so nobody else answered this
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it's just for sure have you gotten all the backlog archived or is there a substantial amount to do yet and how does that affect the other things you want to do to work for the game I'll take this one I don't know what do you mean for the buy the backlog lamac he's not saying maybe all the stuff that you had to organize when you first came on board no I'm still organizing that the thing is that there's always new content being produced and so there's it's like fighting a mountain basically you just fight a little bit of it every day and make sure that you you keep the pile of the mountain that you fought in one corner and eventually you'll have a mountain of your own and then the mountain will be a hill but it'll always be producing pieces of content I've been slowly copying Wikipedia over
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into our conference no it is it is what I do about 60 of the time and I spend about 40 of the time on the star map uh zeros asks how is it trying to write the political intricacies between all the races and planets in Star Citizen in comparison to other games you may have worked on fun it's I've worked on it again I I mean something we've been fleshing out as we keep talking about in these interviews we do about how we're fleshing out more of the lore and backstory for the alien species and and it's really getting that balance of what is each species unique perspective on these different topics and trying to
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balance them out and make them have their own unique Flair so kind of going through of how they treat crime and how to be view slavery and juxtaposing that with how the uee feels about stuff so that's that's been pretty great and we're starting uh very recently we've been putting out a little bit more content uh more recent news updates and in the uh this month's subscriber supported jump Point magazine become a subscriber uh comment subscriber so we've been releasing more kind of alien-based content as we firm up kind of our background work so that's been a lot of fun yeah it's uh so it's a fun thing to do just because by knowing some of those very basic concepts of the different
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species it not only informs the species but it can also greatly inform like the systems or the planets uh On the Border in the region or kind of their development history so that's that is one of the fun things is to think about how life in a certain system or how culture developed in a certain area based on its mixture of Xi'an influences or Bantu influences on top of um whatever kind of like astronomical features made that system special too so it's fun how small things like that strands can infect the the game in different areas and the um you know we spent so much time with the uee like trying to make them feel like a really textured and morally Gray you know political system and and society that you know we want to make
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sure that all the other ones have that same type of complexity and richness to them and and feel compelling and interesting and you know have lots of opportunities for really cool stories basically uh Merv degriff asks is anyone writing things like the uee Navy or UE advocacy field manuals uh not not directly it's really hard to write that stuff just as a straight up like I'm gonna I'm gonna write this book we we tend to kind of seed it into other documents that we write like news updates and you know portfolios and stuff like that um just to try and figure out like you know how specific aspects of it work and then but maybe you know it might be
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fun to put together uh you know straight up field manual for advocacy I don't know why the advocacy is snag my imagination of I I go into confidence and I try to read as much about the advocacy as I could as I can I don't know why because they're awesome because they're awesome uh question from Doc he wants to talk generally about Xi'an there we go that should be actually we should just ask that how do you pronounce Xi'an uh there's multiple pregnancies so I just want to ask any tidbits or any crumbs about Xi'an life social structure kinship structure Rites of Passage taboos power structure and the makeup of the elites Etc it seems like the Xi'an are coming into Focus now in your minds
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okay and so I just and so just hearing you talk about how the Xi'an miter might not behave and operate would help share that Vision with the majority of us in the community who really do care and appreciate the imagineering effort and value and value it as much as the engineering effort sorry there was a lot to read there basically USC just wants to know give it give him a tidbit about the Xi'an that he doesn't know give him a crumb a more something of defeatist Xi'an imagination uh can I can I give it can I give it tidbit Dave go for it uh so something really fun that will probably not have much game impact which is why I'm choosing this as my tidbit uh is that uh we've kind of been talking about the possibility that they evolved as carrion eaters that they eat kind of rotting plants and animals is the preferred food
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choice and part of that is that their spicing is very heavy to make up for the fact that their taste buds are less sensitive than ours and as well as that they're spicing tends more to be textured based so a lot of like prickling or numbing Sensations in their spices spices so if you go eat at a Xi'an restaurant you might get like a well-fermented kind of wilted plant seasoned with kind of a prickly numbing heat so there you go Xi'an tidbit that's bizarre this last jump point with the focus on aopa and uh um and kaifa was was a lot of fun to kind of like dip into the the Xi'an and start to talk about him internally and
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there are a few kind of like unapproved docs that that we have floating around that have kind of like started to sketch out ideas and Visions for for their for their culture and uh and so forth and it was a lot of fun to just to spend some time talking about that and starting to develop that so it's they're definitely coming into focus and it'll be it'll be fun to to reveal more of those uh attributes um as we go along they're pretty into flowers aopa is that how we're pronouncing that aopa as in flower arrangements I think they're I think they're awesome I think letting everybody pronounce these things in their own way is actually kind of cool it's more diegetic it's more like the real world yeah that's how everybody's you know depending on what region you're from
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everybody pronounces certain words differently so I like that we don't go out of our way to correct people too much although it is Xi'an okay another question from bobsled 624 with Chris and Star Citizen being committed to a fully fleshed Universe how do you imagine the lore of companies I.E ship manufacturers featuring into our daily lives in the Pu for example in Energy Efficiency Energy Efficiency scandal from RSI faking the efficiency rating of their power plant somebody owns a Volkswagen so how do you expect to lower the companies to it to affect their daily lives in the Pu
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sorry so I I mean the other week I was talking with uh one of the designers about how fun it's going to be when we have uh the possibility of a first ship coming out once the Pu is live so kind of like a company actually launching a new ship in the verse and experiencing that fiction through your character would be kind of an exciting way to use the lore of a company that way uh scandals would be really interesting we have the kind of Goldfinch scandal with the origin which was which was fun so stuff like that popping up in game maybe recalls recalls would be really interesting too and we've done that before in the back end of lore but as a
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way to you know when we're doing a bug fix or something we can skin it as that so yeah so hopefully a lot of different and a lot of advertising everywhere for the companies you know when you visit cry Astro filling station or or showrooms and stuff having those companies advertised as well we're still a big Benny's machine which we do not recommend steel big Benny's I skipped around so now I gotta remember which ones I've already read and which ones I have okay ask them again we'll just answer differently everything's in flux we're in well some of these questions are are the
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same too so and sometimes the answer one question answered this question so all right a question from Chris Chris X RIS or what sorry you guys spell your things weird I don't know what to do I have enjoyed the lore regarding the war on vanduel some dates are now set in lore I guess to support the upcoming Squadron 42. this being a development project where road maps are constantly changing how do you con do you constantly adjust the dates in the lower or do you manage them by other means I guess that falls into the previous question about the retcons I mean we've been pretty good about them so far uh I mean I think with a lot of the stuff I mean at least with the
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current developments of Vega 2 and and bishop's campaign like these things don't happen on a dime so we have a little bit of latitude we try to you know try to build that in I guess to make it a a bit easier but you know the at least particularly with the Vandal War I think we have a little we have some latitude as to you know when events happen around uh the ones we've established so we can we have room to play and we don't paint ourselves too badly in a corner yeah uh yeah in 900 years of history is a lot of time so Dave did a really good job with the start laying in these foundations of through the this day in history and kind of a really broad time sorry thing in the table broad timeline um and so there's these big gaps though
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and with that much time it's pretty easy just to toss somewhere something in between two different dates and kind of have it work out for the most part dates I think has been so far one of the least things we've had at retcon they've been pretty sticky so there's a lot of wrestling with them right yeah yeah because it was the systems actually once we started building the system Maps we started because originally at the initial phase the Pu was only I think supposed to be 20 or 30 star systems and then it expanded uh so the the ones that we had already created kind of expanded out and suddenly there was now you know 100 or 110 or whatever the numbers uh so no the Time Capsule had established
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dates that now had to be uh transposed to this new arrangement of systems so some of them got a little funky because you had to like the the system specifically the system where first contact with the Bandu was was much closer to Earth but when the map expanded suddenly they were far away from the bad air so it didn't really make sense so we had to kind of figure out how to how to place it so it made sense in the narrative again without retconning too badly yeah I forgot about that the all the hard work you did on kind of that Discovery timeline of making sure when the star map was Final that we were discovering things in the right order because I think there was a couple instances where a system that was really far away had originally been discovered much sooner than was humanly possible so yeah
- 00:43:30
cool uh Freebase asks regarding language how updated will the human language be will there be slang that we'll have to get to grips with to follow a conversation with NPCs human language has changed quite a bit in the last 40 minutes 40 minutes I mean even Old English here on Earth is much different a thousand years ago than it is now so 900 years in the future does human language change which I mean we have the cath card slang uh the sort of pirate can't uh type thing I mean I you know I mean I've sort of kept it somewhat similar just for me just because it's easier to write and it's you know it can get a little obtuse if you need a dictionary to understand what a person's saying to you uh and also I mean it just it gets
- 00:44:19
trickier once I mean once localization comes into the picture I don't even know how we kind of handle that type of stuff yeah it's the same way like how movies will often have characters that should be speaking of foreign language just speak with an accent instead just because of having to deal with an audience understanding the material so I mean I think a recent example is the witch which was trying to be historically accurate as much as possible but even their Old English isn't really old English because no one would be able to understand it so for that sake we've kind of been going lighter on it and just sprinkling in new terms when needed booty call has probably been one of the like the heaviest slang between that and star watch which is using all the pop culture
- 00:45:07
slang we've kind of been introducing new words you know everyone loves blading Olympics cargo Olympics yeah okay here's a question for Sherry does the star map at present represent the physical locations of everything is it an accurate representation of everything's physical location and diverse no it's not unaccurate like representation of the physical locations uh we we are still working with the designers uh to make sure that the stuff on the star map will eventually be in the place that they want the planets in the Pu and so the star map is a continuously evolving thing um but uh the jump points that we have in place are accurate as far as our work
- 00:45:56
with the designers attention let's go back to our question list here uh Aragorn BHS will there be any underground cities or bases designed to protect people from an uninhabited Planet environment perhaps this might be a planet that has not yet been terraformed yet but might be in the future yes yes that's all we're going to say about it I mean the upcoming Knicks uh Landing zone is an example of that levsky is underground it's an old Mining facility that's been taken over so that's completely sealed up there's one in Banshee yeah Banshee Lorna and Banshee two um a Banshee has a has a pulse uh I think a pulsar yeah so I think that uh would make that that planet uninhabitable but um there's
- 00:46:45
lots of mining there so the um everyone lives underground there yeah probably be hard to live on the surface of Hades and that like their power plants on this kind of neat I think I think okay uh zalen wheel asks how does the Ark compared to the glycopedia other libraries say okay sorry how does the art compare to the blacktopia and other libraries in the universe of retor in our Moby glass apps like how will how will the different apps differentiate themselves between the glycopedia the star map the Moby glass Etc well they all just access the same information can you recall if we actually established that the galactopedia was a
- 00:47:34
publication of the Ark um I mean it makes sense the nice thing about the ark is that they try to be independent so we can have you don't we don't have to worry about like through whose lens is this history being told type thing so they can be a bit more impartial and a bit more objective but I don't recall actually I it's a yeah the galactic TV is going to be kind of that that pure information whereas we've already kind of established uh more flavor text based information like the galactic guides for instance definitely have their own tone to them when they're describing these planets and systems versus what you would expect from the galactopedia which would be more just pure unfiltered information I figure the same would probably be going to a library at a university or something you
- 00:48:21
would be getting more kind of scholarly papers which would be different than the information you would expect in a galactopedia but we definitely won't be putting it we won't be writing the galactopedia like a scholarly paper no the scholarly paper stuff would just be like you would find a short little excerpt like you've seen other games where we just do a couple paragraphs for for fun and flavor of research being done at a university or something like that yeah okay uh Dark Star wants to know if we can if we can say how many planets make up the United Empire of Earth offhand oh well it's on our spreadsheet yeah we 've got is
- 00:49:11
the Empire Earth is it a federation like it was in Star Trek with member worlds and non-member worlds it's a system okay member systems and so how many systems does the uee control but I need to actually check this the spreadsheets to be absolutely sure can someone open up the star map at home and count for us the show's got eight minutes left if somebody can open up the star map and start counting systems controlled by the uee let us know before the end of the show I can have a solid answer for you if I can check my data Pappy Boyington we don't usually read out the names but I've just been enjoying it so much today are there any old Earth myths taken into
- 00:50:01
account for the Star Citizen lore and possible future missions for explorers they're 34. that's a Bob Dylan answer so there's 34 um systems old Earth I can't think of any off the top of my head we haven't been playing kind of into that more Fantastical aspect as much we've definitely been drawing from history a bunch for as Dave described earlier from taking things as seeds as starting nuggets before we spin off in
- 00:50:50
our Wild Star Citizen directions but as we start doing more of those creepy kind of pu missions maybe we'll start looking at weirder and Wilder stuff I consult myth sometimes in the names of the planets like they are the systems Haiti system that's true convention at least the system definitely like the all the Perry liner Gods of War why is that because it was a war let's call him on the nose well
- 00:51:39
let's see time Behavior no they won't know that stuff guys all right back to the paper Corin avatan batan avatan it's not fun when I don't know how to say it how can we expect all of the Lord to be revealed in the game will most of the lore like the Tara Mills lore be only accessible through the galactopedia will there be random data pads scattered throughout the Galaxy that will need to find and collect to get the lore essentially what I'm asking I like when he explains himself is how well or is how and what is being done to allow the law to be accessed in game rather than needing to alt tab to different external sources um that's so that's a good question and something we're starting to explore as we develop out missions I I'm hoping
- 00:52:28
that it's going to be a wide variety of sources uh technical Cross of what will you be able to uh Garner from the galactic pedias that we were talking about the galactopedia being kind of a go-to for very light summaries of everything so maybe on Tara Mills you'd get like a a short description of the company but if you wanted the full history of them for example you would have to go visit their Mill in Bremen and then when you're on that planet you would be able to learn more about that company or maybe when you pick up a box of their tasty snack uh you look on the back and they have a little write-up about their company that you can read so kind of blending in that immersion versus just throwing huge
- 00:53:17
amounts of data at you I think things you make a more uh of a connection with information when you've kind of earned it yourself so I like that approach yeah I mean yeah I mean it's a lot of these things too are used as launching points for because we get asked a lot to to come up with backgrounds for these companies for um artists to start designing component parts for example uh stuff like that so yeah as exactly as well said like you you can kind of infer that the personality of Tara Mills for some of these companies just based off their advertising the quality of their products uh stuff like that so you can kind of get us get your own sense of it and that's sort of the kind of the fun thing about what kind of Chris is building here is that we can do that type of um really kind of involved
- 00:54:06
deep dive into these companies that normally would you would just sort of slap together a product with some stats and kick it out the door but you know as we're doing ad we can do ad campaigns and stuff like that we can really make it pretty rich and and really fun so you get to kind of determine the lore on your own based on how they're presenting themselves to you rather than as well said like you know just finding a paragraph or two that sums them up completely and in a very kind of almost meta way little bit mind-blowing actually already what we have available for these kind of background write-ups on these companies I mean I can't think of a few other games that would have a couple Pages written up on a vending machine manufacturer so I mean that is just really exciting on its own so kudos to us I guess good job
- 00:54:56
all right last question is from me actually how many alien races have been discovered at this point in the in in Star Citizen history in 20 by 2946 how many alien races has Humanity encountered do have we shared all of the races with people yet or are there some that we haven't shared yet do you mean like sentient space Fair young people tavaran Banu vanduel active ones we we've come across a couple we've mentioned in the lore a couple civilizations that have collapsed or we found the ruins of them there's a planet with a cephalopod race well yeah we have the developing systems
- 00:55:44
that are protected planets that we have uh alien life that may become a civilization we're watching that grow as far as like not announced alien uh species we haven't announced anything if that's on the cards what will the will the be will the ability to discover an alien race be something on the cards somewhere down the line uh I think the kurthack is going to be uh a big moment when that does happen and that's going to happen once the game launches so that's farther down the road and for those uh developing alien races uh what happens if a player lands on those planets to do that do they can
- 00:56:33
they affect the development of that culture great question they're arrested that's a really good question okay I didn't promise an answer guys hopefully you can eat them capture all right but if you don't cook them right well that brings you to a rap or the verse hope you enjoyed it uh we'll be back with a regular reverse the verse on Friday around the verse comes out tomorrow at noon Pacific uh will John Adam Sherry thank you for joining us here in the studio I specifically let Dave off for a reason it's pretty light there now isn't it
- 00:57:29
uh it's eight yeah all right guys thanks for watching Everybody wave come on Hennessey turn the camera off
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.

