Inside Star Citizen: Content Driven

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   if you watched last week's three-hour special edition of Star Citizen live you heard a lot about the evolution of this year's patches how often they're going to come out and how our shows are changing to reflect that and if you didn't um well I'm not really going to recap all that here but this week we sat down with some of the non-feature folk to talk about the content driven side of this new initiative [Music] where did this idea of a content-driven push come from well as we sort of alluded to in the the 1.0 presentation

2. 00:00:49

   at citizen con there there's been a desire to get more emphasis on starting to build the story lines and the characters of Star citiz and universe and getting them actually in game the way the content patches going to break down are we're ultimately trying to provide new content to you each month alongside all of this we're going to be essentially providing New Missions new events kind of a lot of what we've done before but taking it up to the next level tet destroyed this was an opportunity to start figuring out ways to engage the players in an a growing and expanding storyline we're going to be sending you all the way around the verse doing lots of different varied types of gameplay you'll still be doing events that are prevalent to a story that we're going to be working on as well I got you covered as well as New Missions that build up the existing roster that we actually

3. 00:01:38

   have in game already there will be some content that is only there for a limited amount of time but ultimately a lot of this content is still going to persist when we hit to star system 1.0 so we're actually building out the larger content map that exists in the game on top of that there's going to be a huge Focus now on stability and quality of life too because we want a stable environment for our developers to work in but we also want a stable game that's less buggy less crashes and much more pleasant for you guys to play day today what's the word today's being rough as far as the structure for how we're going to tell the story one of the things that we were kind of excited to try for it was actually utilizing a a storytelling structure that's usually

4. 00:02:26

   used in TV shows basically there's a usually an a story and a story that happened within a single episode if you're Seinfeld you have a c story as well cuz they're just that good but there's the a story is sort of your primary story your B story sort of a supplemental ancillary story that sometimes can feed into it but sometimes can be Standalone and it's just a way to kind of keep the scenes Dynamic and kind of make them feel alive so what we're trying to do is actually utilize kind of a similar thing but stretched out over a longer period of time and the idea being that a it makes the universe feel bigger so there's not just one thing happening that's consuming the entire universe uh but also if you're not interested in the a story if whatever for whatever reason it's not engaging you you have something else that you can kind of do so the idea is that hopefully that one of the two stories hopefully both but you know if

5. 00:03:14

   not one of the two stories will be fun and exciting and kind of offer a new insight to the Star Citizen Universe currently the the plan is actually the the a story uh we've already started it and is actually going to be going through uh September and then the be story uh is a little bit smaller but it starts basically in April and goes on so it's a multi-month thing so it goes on till about October once this a story and B story kind of resolve themselves we have a new a story that starts up and a new B story so we sort of bounce back and forth so some months we'll have more B story than a story some other months will have a more a story than b story but it gives us a way to kind of again you know pull in a lot of different facets of the universe and whether it's gaml uh Mission types ships and not have to figure out one overarching narrative that somehow

6. 00:04:02

   encapsulates everything this doesn't replace that big story line that we talked about as is on no no no this doesn't replace that uh the 1.0 story but it it is actually kind of offering an exciting opportunity to kind of lay the groundwork for that type of Storytelling in the game save Stanton is an event that spends over a few months and it is all about a gang that has invaded Stanton and it's not one of the usual ones either it's not one of The Usual Suspects so this started in 324 where we made this narrative Journey that players will go on the big story beat was that there was a new Outlaw pack sort of showed up in Stanton system and was wreaking havoc uh they were known as the

7. 00:04:50

   slicers and were launching basically devastating attacks against the local population targeting cargo ships stealing cargo targ in different locations around St such as ugfs and outposts inhabiting them and also going around stealing sensitive data that the CDF do not want them to have the CDF had got all of the players to come and help after the players sort of stopped them from doing that the slices had showed their power and showed what they was really about and brought in an Idis that players had to try and reclaim off of them the viciousness of the attacks and the sort of UN provoked aspect of it is just sort of highlighting effectively what the problem is with with pyro is that you have this sort of Lawless Haven for outlaws right next door to santon

8. 00:05:38

   and basically they have the freedom to kind of come and attack when they want to so these people just lived in a hole and decided to come to another place and make it some people just love chaos with 401 the player will find themselves in pyro ready to defend it or attack it depending on which one you have chosen you'll be locked into that faction so you can choose the citizens for Prosperity the head hunters or the frontier Fighters if you're working for the citizens of prosperity you're doing more Aid work

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   you're there to help people you're not really doing much much combat work they're there trying to make sure everyone survives this by passing out food water medical supplies they're basically like we believe that there's good in this system there are certainly bad elements but you're just going to exacerbate the problem by trying to solve it with violence and the head hunters are an oldtime gang who've lived there for a long time they know the land they know the rules and they're unhappy that these rules are being crossed Head Hunters would want you in their group because they kick out ass and they're they're fun to hang out with it so they're on the offensive they're here and they're going you're not attacking our home they're basically going to be just trying to kill the frontier Fighters and the frontier Fighters want everybody dead they're going nuclear Earth you will be killing civilians you will be killing Head Hunters you'll be killing Xeno fret they don't care who if

10. 00:07:18

    you are in pyro and you're not them you're dead what's up the frontier Fighters ass a lot of explosives they're perfect for someone like the the dark claw I don't know what that says about him yeah you do yeah I do Frontier Fighters This is basically Justice for stand they just want to live life and stand without being interrupted every 5 Seconds they want to make sure that this doesn't happen again are you being honest about the frontier Fighters right now no the citizens for Prosperity have seemingly found something out but they're not telling you as an operative exactly what they are sending you to defend their data

11. 00:08:05

    Runners and they're trying to get them out of pyro and they're asking you to go on the offensive now and attack the frontier Fighters which isn't usual for the cfp they're they're trying to be more of a peaceful group in this operation but now they're not long a career and the frontier Fighters are aware of this data that the CFB have they have reported that they think it's to do with their attack plan on pyro so they're asking their operatives

12. 00:08:53

    to take out the data Runners that the cfp are trying to get out I'll cover you and also destroy any cfp controlled servers to make sure that the data is gone and lost for good and the head hunters Head Hunters again carrying on the their their violent approach of sustaining their locations reclaiming their locations where Frontier Fighters might have set up they will go back in and explode every material that they had so they can get their Outpost back at the end of all this you'll learn things you might learn a few things about the intentions of

13. 00:09:42

    each of those factions you might learn something more about yourself uh and what moral choices you decided to make and ways that us designers got queer at the end of this chapter this leaves us with the truth of what was really happening and sets the stage for something more to come the story doesn't end here I'll keep him occupied the way that this story ultimately is intending to play out there are actually going to be real ramifications based on the group Community choices that are made so that will actually change the direction of the universe it can either go one way or can go the other way so we're actually going to be playing around a lot with

14. 00:10:29

    with ways that players can decide how they want the universe to change so moving forward there's going to be a bit of a Twist that comes down the road which is going to escalate basically the situation into one of our first big events with this it basically allows us to plan out a bit more and actually again start to build a growing narrative giving players more of a reason to engage and be able to talk to each other and like hey where did you get that item from oh well I was here when this happened and I was here when this happened definable points in our universe's history it adds to the universe it adds to the story of it all and it means that you as a player help build this world world out so I'm really excited about the changes coming in it's going to allow us

15. 00:11:16

    to get more fun content in your hands more often and it's going to provide a much more stable environment for us to work in but also for you to play in as well up until this point we've actually been honing in on gameplay mechanics and more kind of under the hoods stuff we have a lot of data pads in the game to kind of do the heavy lifting for storytelling now this is allowing us to kind of push on those other facets as a way to kind of kind of be higher impact storytelling techniques so with a patch almost every month this year building the narratives of the Stanton and Pyro systems with new content less relying on big Feature work and packed between as many bug fixes and refinements as we can manage we aim to deliver a progressive series of

16. 00:12:04

    improvements in storytelling that will change life in the verse for the better throughout 2025 oh and uh last month we launched a new bimonthly Squadron 42 newsletter with exclusive video content ringtones wallpapers and even merch if you missed it you can go to the Squadron 42 or account setting sections of the RSI website to opt in and not miss out on the next exclusive offerings or don't I don't get any commission or anything I just thought the stickers were neat for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the people and process of game development with you and we'll be back in two weeks with a look at Alpha 402 Supply or die