Inside Star Citizen: Design Brief: Cargo Career, Part II

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   so basically napu is what we like to call it uh it was like uspu before we had Intel pu we had the Austin guys I'm not sure if they add an acronym so I guess North America pu is made sense do you like Yahoo yeah it's it's all right it sounds like an Abu almost [Music] why should we care about cargo or why should you care about cargo and to me the answer is because I never thought of Star Citizen as just uh FPS in fact I would say the thing that makes me the most excited about Star Citizen is that it's a whole world of people who have their own Ambitions and goals and they're interested in different things

2. 00:00:48

   and to me cargo represents a way to get into the world to play with your friends in order to engage with other players even in this Dynamic way you have all of this player interaction that comes around hauling the cargo dealing with pirates hiring people to defend yourself from Pirates and it generates this whole kind of economy and simulation of player interactivity and I think this kind of thing is at the root of what makes star citizens special today in the game we've had all of this what I call instantaneous cargo when you're in a real physical world things don't just up here and disappear in your car right a person going to Costco they don't just click on a few things in the kiosks and it magically appear at the back trunk of

3. 00:01:36

   the car that kind of magic way of of opening inventory is gonna disappear and it's gonna become that warehouse inventory with these new changes with the freight platform and the cargo grid and inventory container boxes and needing to move things manually with the tractor beam it is going to add a certain amount of friction into that whole experience the benefit of manual loading is really that you get to choose how you organize your cargo and how you get to load it on your ship you know you've got one guy that's loading the bigger boxes with the vehicles you have your other friend that's loading in you know your ship weapons another maybe is loading up commodities for a long haul and you can organize that snap everything to the cargo grid tractor beam it onto your ship and head out with

4. 00:02:24

   your friends for an adventure across the verse foreign the cargo career is at the heart of what Star Citizen aims to achieve not just a universe of exploration and conflict but one of Commerce and opportunity as well and last week we shared the first part of its next iteration with a discussion of freight elevators instanced and persistent hangers varied cargo boxes and a new cargo grid that will expand the possibilities of your ships in new and exciting ways so here in part two we're gonna dive a little deeper into the systems underpinning it all starting with how we intend inventory to evolve next thank you and speaking of inventory changes this

5. 00:03:15

   leads us to what I think is one of the other very big Transformations that's happening with these new sets of features so instead of having something like a magical bag of holding you actually have a place where you can go to put your items to store them and you know that it's safe while you go out and do future travels one thing that we want to do is really kind of physicalize inventory in terms of you need to be at a specific location to use that inventory and management so this gives us a lot of benefit across the game where you know exactly where your stuff is and where to get it and where to go to organize it now you'll be accessing that inventory via the freight platform and the hangers you'll be using the

6. 00:04:03

   freight platform to put it down if you want to take something out you use the freight platform to take it out and you can use these inventory container boxes that that I mentioned previously in order to optimize that kind of Holly let's say you realize you have a lot of guns that you want to take with you well in the kiosk Inventory management screen you can move those items into a single box to aggregate them together so that you just use one pass with the tractor beam in order to move it all onto your ship it also means that you'll have the ability to haul larger things in the game more efficiently by taking them and putting them into these larger boxes such as ship items that maybe you purchased or stole if you want to do some kind of underground assaulting Mission you just bring your big guns and everything and you also load that into

7. 00:04:51

   your ship so everything is going to be really physicalized and no more kind of magic stuff popping here and there in addition to the freight platform access we want to give players the ability to access smaller items without having to go to a hangar and for this we're going to add some kind of what I call an item bank and this is just like a secure box kind of access point in the landing zone so that you don't have to go to a hangar and it'll look very similar to the other personal inventory interactions and you can move smaller items around there such as handguns or meta pins but again tying it to a physical location in the game and getting rid of this kind of magic we're taking that and also applying it to the inventory in the vehicles right now in the game you can hit I while

8. 00:05:40

   you're inside of a vehicle and you'll see a similar kind of invisible magical inventory for the vehicle we're going to be getting rid of that and instead replacing it with a combination of access points like glove compartments in the ship as well as those inventory container boxes so that you'll still be able to haul personal items and larger vehicle parts between locations in the game but you'll have to do it in a way that's physically tied to actual entities that are attached to the cargo grid as well as exposing it in a way for people to be able to reclaim them from a wreckage or maybe even pirate oh so lots of changes coming with everything being physicalized everything stored in boxes and no more Magic Bag of

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   holding but how will you inventory your inventory well that's where the new Hangar kiosk comes into play freight elevators are going to be implemented as an access point inside of player hangers and you'll use a kiosk to interact with the freight platform in order to call things up from your inventory or to put things into your inventory the player controls the freight elevator through the freight elevator kiosk because we have to coordinate between three different doors the kiosk is what determines when the door should open when the door should close when the cargo get loaded and all that stuff so that is the physical thing that's basically going to bring up cargo for you and then also like take cargo from you when you sell it the kiosk is going to be the center point of anger

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    this is really where you will you'll manage everything so it's not just the cargo stuff that you manage through the kiosk you will be able to manage your inventory basically bringing up the stuff sending it back it's also going to be those small items you also gonna have to have some sort of inventory box that you will be able to to interact with to put stuff in it basically everything is going to go through that kiosk so everything is Central to the kiosk all of this will redefine the open sandbox experience at the core of star citizens persistent universe but what if a cargo career isn't for you what if you just like to run the occasional Mission don't want to spend your time loading boxes or prefer speculating on the market economy around it all well the purview of nappu is to construe for you

11. 00:08:07

    two we are going to have missions in the game that latch on to this so for example you'll be able to take a mission where a corporation like Crusader will ask you to haul their cargo for them and this is an opportunity for players to engage with this kind of gameplay of hauling and manual loading without having such a large investment in the game right now cargo has largely been required to have a large investment speculation and risk on the part of the players and where we're going is we're going to be reducing that risk for certain sets of players who don't want to engage with that kind of speculation while still allowing them to have this kind of fun manual loading kind of packing experience on the other hand if

12. 00:08:56

    the thing that you are more interested in is that kind of speculation and that kind of rating and wheeling and dealing and trying to just cut the best profit we are still going to have a certain amount of automated loading in the game it just won't be instantaneous you'll have to use a service it'll cost a little bit more it'll take time you won't have access to your ship while it's being loaded but you know depending on the kinds of gameplay that you're looking for if you enjoy that more physical kind of gameplay we'll have that there for you if you're more interested in just kind of profit trading we'll also have a path for you there too so I think in this kind of new world of of cargo and and all these new features that we're coming out with we're trying to make sure that for all the people that are looking to play with this that there's something there for them and of course all of this comes with a large amount of economy tuning

13. 00:09:44

    that's going to need to rebalance things now that we have physicalized movement guaranteed friction on the transactions so all of these things we can use to rebalance it and hopefully make it to where if you're interested in taking high risks there's a path for you to maybe get a better profit vice versa if you don't want to there's still a way for you to be able to play the game and not be overly punished that's going to be an ongoing endeavor and we'll talk more about that as we get closer to release so lots of changes coming to Star Citizen with the work being done by the North America persistent Universe team so let's go ahead and let them bring it all home and see if we can't maybe just sneak in one more tiny big Edition people have been waiting for too another big thing that we're working on

14. 00:10:34

    is unique item recovery this is something that the fans have been asking for for a long time and we're hoping that it's really going to finally resolve this problem of losing items or losing items Mid Mission it looks like a simple subject but there's a lot of little things to think about like people buying some some gear giving to their friend and coming back what happens to Diversion that was given to their friends or even like if your body get looted by somebody how do we want to kind of cope with that so one of the ideas that we have running right now is that you would have a lost and found within your hat so if you're playing your mission crashes you lose your progress but you can go back to your ab restart that mission grab that item and continue on where you left off and we're

15. 00:11:25

    really hoping to apply this to subscriber items and other unique items as well I think in the long run we have a lot of plans just really trying to build out a feature set that can incorporate a lot of different ships that can incorporate your teams that allows you to be more in control it allows you to try to find the best ways that work for you and your group then right now that's the main thing we're working on our universe is Big we're going to keep building more systems more planets and we really want to find a way to make that exciting we want to have you take goods from one planet to the other explore places that you haven't seen loading up organizing all of your gear all of your equipment having it snap to a grid keeping everything safe and it's

16. 00:12:15

    a huge part of Star Citizen and where we want to go with the game that is a summary of that we're working towards for physicalized cargo now this is going to be an ongoing process starting with the first set of changes coming out with 320 automated loading in the whole with the whole C and the new packing system that's coming out there but we'll continue this work of adding these things like freight elevators Hangar instancing persistent hangers inventory containers all of that and continuing into subsequent releases so I hope you enjoyed hearing about it and I think I'll be back a few more times to get into more details about those things I look forward to seeing what they're developing in the future and and then also showing it off to the community and team

17. 00:13:03

    so what did we learn the last two weeks well we learned that freight elevators will allow us to fulfill the dream of fully physicalized cargo the instance hangers will give us the time to load and unload our ships without creating too many traffic jams that persistent hangers will be the first real estate players can decorate and call their very own the cargo boxes are expanding to hold all kinds of stuff from personal inventory to ship weapons to even some small Vehicles themselves that this all means a new way of storing and moving your inventory all around the Galaxy utilizing the new Hangar kiosk will certainly help that everything from missions to economy will expand and rebalance to accommodate for this that there's still going to be some automated options for those willing to spend the time or the money and that there's finally a light at the end of the tunnel for lost items in the works but he could say it's a pretty good Hall overall not usually the pun guy now don't forget

18. 00:13:53

    that Alpha 320 is out there for everyone to play and that citizencon is just four weeks away 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 and breathe you need to thank you goodbye peace out that's it