Inside Star Citizen: First-Person Assertion

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   at first glance Star Citizen is a game about spaceships when you look under the surface we're really building a universe of the first person with trading and lading exploration and Devastation and over the next few weeks we'll be exploring such character related features as the new personal persistent hangers new visor lens inventory and shopping apps the character customizer which is so good I'm just going to already tell you we're covering that next week and much more but before we leave our combat era of ISC this week we're sitting down with members of Team nuck we really got to get these new teams new names uh to discuss all the FPS combat related changes coming in Alpha 323 let's find out [Music] more go on

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   then the have the power shot so B is sitting down wow you you're so cool I know my mom thinks I'm W I'm wicked mate this game is 930 years in the future why does reloading matter reloading I think matters because from a player perspective it makes you think ahead of the combat that you're about to go into cuz it's part of a classic FPS

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   experience I think it adds to the Tactical element of gam playay thinking on the Fly and it's also quite satisfying to reload weapons I I find it satisfying anyway you give a little bit of thought that situation you're going to put yourself into it feels a bit more more immersive we obviously have a bit more of a complex system with our magazines so we obviously have magazines on the suit and we also have magazines in your backpack you need to make sure that these magazines are as full as possible so we are making you think ahead about the combat situation that you're going to go into so for Alpha 323 um reloading is kind of two parts uh first you got your

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   backpack reloading and then you've got your ammo repoing so backpack reloading solves a problem where for example you find yourself in a situation on a combat and you need to reload but you don't have any spare mags on your suit but you have in your backpack what you can do now is pull additional magazines from your backpack at the cost of an increased reload time it was just filling up a lot of your inventory so we basically decided with um backpack reloading that we wanted to kind of condense that game play and just do it more on the fly it is a Reload but it takes a little bit longer it's going to play a very simple animation so the combat's flow isn't broken but you still need to think ahead because this long reload duration can be painful in the combat if you're

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   not careful cuz we really want to incentivize players to think about when they're going into combat what they need to think about how much magazines they want to keep on them and how much they want in their back pack the last thing you really want to do is pull out you know open a UI and pull out magazines from here and move them across there this allows you to keep in the combat in the action without having to go through inventory menus you will be able to see how many magazines on your suit and how full they are and a backpack icon if you have magazines on your backpack and if you see no magazines icon but a backpack icon then you'll understand that the next reload you're going to do is going to be a backpack reload so it keeps you in the flow but it forces you to wait a little bit the punishment of not preparing yourself

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   is still there but it's lighter it's more forgiving so with repoing the idea being that if you've got lots of let's say we take a 30 mag uh ballistic magazine let's say you've got 15 15 15 you got three half empty magazines the idea being is you just hit a key binding the animation will play like a rummage and basically the magazines will condense down into full magazines and then automatically discard the empty ones as a result of this process you will save your precious SE item ports and then you will have your ammo condensed into your Fuller magazine so you're ready to unleash their full potential onto your enemies so with our new UI display HUD we've basically got a number of bullets in your magazine and then we've also got

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   a number of your combined bullets on your total player and duration of this operation is going to depend on how much ammo you shifting around and the type of ammo that you're shifting around so reporing pistol magazines is going to take a different amount of time than repoing rockets for example that means that we're spending less time in the inventory screen the more time actually in game playay this all will be in 323 but after that we will be looking into probables and consumables so you will be able to repo your grenes and your met pens and there are still a couple of unclear points about some weap for example multitool and its Salvage canisters we're still exploring what options we have over there so recall is part of the identity

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   of the weapon and it will also allow players to express their skill in a certain way we have different kinds of recall very subtle recalls and very wild recalls and depending on that you can p an image of either this is a very harsh very very aggressive assault rifle or a very gentle pistol maybe even with a silencer on top of it when I've been watching citizen con and we showed the new recoils one of the biggest feedbacks was those are laser weapons they don't have recoil oh God if if I see one more form post about like wider laser guns not well why why don't laser guns have recoil it drives me up the wall

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   laser weapons in the first place like we have them are really unrealistic for themselves right there are no big laser projectiles that come out of weapons so giving them recoil is very sensible for a game I think getting rid of recoil in that sense is just boring game playay it's fun it needs to be in there you know you need a challenge when shooting people you need to challenge when tracking people I think you need recoil in order to balance the game and make it fun for everybody you'll see in 322 we put the new procedural recoil in and it looks mint I think personally uh the weapons now use our entirely new procedural system and the nice thing about the procedural system is it means that we can basically have shotto Shot

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    differences be massive so you'll see when you fire the P4 now it can basically be an entirely different bit of your screen than it was in the previous shot whereas before we had a very linear motion imagine before The Recoil would essentially go like this on your camera but now it can be you know kind of doing this all around the place far more aggressive and the overall feeling of it is like oh my God this is actually a gun so some of this is in 322 and some more is coming in 323 so for example the sniper rifles these are going to have the majority s probs will have the new procedural recoil and the majority of the pistols will have the new procedural recoil so you'll see some of the pistols their their personality will have changed a little bit but their functionality will still be the same and you'll see the

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    snipers basically feeling a lot more powerful and angry as you've seen with the other weapons that have had their passes and with the new recoil system this just feels like a real weapon and it feels like this this thing just has impact right you know you want your weapon to feel angry if the weapon is just stable and still on the screen You' be like oh this feels pant so we have not only just Scopes we have a whole new suite of iron sights for the majority of our weapons so what this has done is we've essentially got stuff that has raised the camera upwards and given a better Target acquisition window this is obviously with a lot of sci-fi guns they're very chunky they're very kind of fat which is just how a lot of sci-fi things are so naturally we've managed to improve upon this by saying hey you've

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    still got that fat chunkiness but we've raised the camera up and we've managed to make this the sight line cleaner for your for example your caror rifle on the scope side of things we've basically overhauled how they work so previously if you were looking at anything that is you know an eight times or above it would basically have a black border around the actual scope bit itself but now that is gone the graphics guys did an amazing job at implementing the shaders for these so the Scopes just look way more realistic than they used to be nice Reflections and a parallx effect this is something different just a gorgeous view I can't wait for you guys to see them it's probably the most exciting thing for me personally 323 if you look through the scope you actually see the scope

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    inside and depending on if it's a holographic scope a telescopic scope or a TV screen scope the Shader will look different as well and then we took it and brought it to basically every scope adjusted the shap Shader so that it looks nice on that particular scope and added a few other functionalities to Scopes as well for example we will have multiple Zoom levels on Scopes currently we just have eight times Zoom but in the future for 323 we will be able to have eight times and 16 times Zoom or two times and four times zoom and because our new recoil is a lot more aggressive and dynamic it means that the verticle is moving as you'd expect on screen relative to where the actual Barrel is so not only does it help with a new

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    procedural recoil it also helps with the believability of the Optics as well so I think the whole scope experience or ads experience with Scopes is just going to get better from here on Dynamic Crosshair is also coming in Alpha 323 Dynamic crossair is it's in the name it's a crossair but the good thing about our crossair is it's a little more futuristic a little bit more sci-fi so in 3 23 when you equipped a combat visor you will have a dynamic Crosshair on your screen this follows the barrel of the gun which is really cool because if you're reloading and you pull the gun up like that the Crosshair will actually go off screen like that so it fits into the aesthetic of Star Citizen because it's grounded in the context of where the barrel actually is

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    which is really cool because if you got a pistol which shoots a bit more up like this it actually follows it as you would expect previously you were always kind of Point shooting and it causes a problem in not knowing how big your Crosshair actually is for your weapon so we have to make the the spread on the weapons a bit smaller than usual because if you're going to point shoot you have the issue of like where is my bullet actually going to go this allows us to say hey this is actually kind of what your you know your cone of spread is and we can increase the spread values of weapons themselves which leads to better gameplay and people actually focusing on ads and down sights even in like 10 m engagement ranges and it also just gives that player a little bit of extra information so when you're hiding behind a wall or um you're close to uh

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    proximity with an object the crossair is actually going to let you know if you're going to hit the object or if you're going to shoot past it I heard people saying this is unrealistic I fairly certain we can do this with our technology today so 900 years in the future shouldn't be a problem to have at least military Tech to have this Crosshair component to them it's a Crosshair that not only fits the aesthetic of Star Citizen but cleanly fits into what you'd expect for Star Citizen as well we are able to deactivate it so if you don't like it there's a menu option for you you can also disable the new hit markers independently of the Crosshair so if you just prefer to keep the hit markers you can keep them if you prefer to keep the Crosshair and not the hit markers you can do that as well so you can fully utilize it to make it your own

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    what you want from the game you can have it completely off oron and then we have things like obviously updated hit markers and we also have a final hit Red X as well to let you know that you've confirm that kill it's a completely optional feature but I think you're going to like it so I think the reason why I'm so excited and the team is so excited about why these new changes to FPS are going to be so Dynamic and and completely change the game is I just think it makes our game so much more modern it makes it so much more lively uh and really expressive now weapon manufacturers are going to have much more of a unique brand to them and the same with the uh with our new amazing Scopes you know if you compare the Scopes that we have now uh to what we have coming in 323 it is going to be completely I think

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    gamechanging uh we obviously going to do things in the future like when we get wear and tear in apply wear and tear to when you shoot those things cuz we still want that to be be a believable experience bullet blocking is an issue it will literally be gone from like grenades and magazines and everything like that so even backpacks so people previously would have to shoot people in the legs if they wanted to consistently land shots which is a problem because realistically that's not a good feeling of like I'm behind you I have to shoot you in the legs so I can focus on shooting you in the chest now we really like the fact that the Crosshair is basically kind of starting the whole archetypes for armors so as we move down into the Pu we want our armor sets to become um more specific to their unique if you look at our game half of this is basically FPS combat and these

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    improvements will bring the FPS combat to AAA standard and make it feel like a yeah more polished experience it's not something that you can put into words but something that will yeah that you will appreciate while playing our game and I hope all of these changes make your time in the verse more fun I think this just is so much more about gameplay it's less about getting bogged down in menus it's more about on the action and it also integrates so amazingly with our Hood a fluid experience which is what we're aiming for which is what we you know really want to deliver see you in a bit oh I have to get the microphone yeah so what did we learn this week we

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    probably can't do this in a helmet we learned that procedural recoil system reaches all FPS weapons in Alpha 323 that the dynamic Crosshair will enable some occasional hipfire goodness that new Scopes means better ways to refund your enemies lives and that reloading changes means more of the pew pew and less of the few few sometimes I hate me too for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week for the character customizer d

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    I