Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Player vs. Player
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
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hello everybody and welcome to another episode of calling all debs our q a series where we take questions from you the star citizen community imposed them directly to our developers now this month we are talking pvp player versus player uh there are folks who want it there are folks who want to desperately avoid it we're going to talk about the opportunities for both of them and how they're going to coexist in a unified persistent universe and so of course we are starting with our very own mr todd pappy todd how you doing hi buddy good you ready to talk about pvp i am all right let's start at the we all know how it works now you know the star citizens they've played it we don't need to talk about how it works now let's let's talk about the future of pvp where is where is star citizen pvp going okay so i think from that standpoint we you have to think about how different
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solar systems are connected to each other so and obviously um stanton is a somewhat lawful system it's got uee versus pyro was supposed to be a very unlawful system um or lawless system and then so where players want to be able to find the pvp versus um where players don't want to find it you know they want to focus more on pve um i would start there so so they started you know what system should i be in what system you know do i want to go to and if i'm in tara i probably should feel pretty safe if i'm in pyro i should be looking over my shoulder exactly exactly so and you know with that it's it it basically comes down to we'll never be able to 100 you know
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guarantee you know hey you're 100 safe and and frankly we don't want to do that and i i i would put it more on the scale of let's say 90 to 10 or you know and maybe in the lawless area it's it's you know the the complete opposite it's 10 to 10 to 90 kind of thing so um we never want it to be a zero we never want it to be 100 um so but even then in stanton you know we still want there to be areas for people look for pvp we still want um there to be areas that are you know mostly geared towards pve so it will really just depend on kind of how the player goes about looking for them and and then you know are you turning off the monitored zones
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or you you know uh basically out in the middle of nowhere so and if so then yeah then i i think it should happen there um then we also obviously have like abandoned space stations and jump town and these correa the hot spots exactly exactly so that we have certain hot spots you know within the system that will i still i still think they're 100 valid and that people should be able to go there and try that out um it serves a double purpose it attracts the people looking for it to those places and it lets the people who want to avoid it avoid those places yeah exactly and you know and ideally in the star map in the future where you kind of see where like hot spots of you know of activity and and then that
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kind of can gear your or at that point in time you can choose your route you know with that information um so the in the past i know that we've talked about like a pvp slider and i we're not going to have anything that's player facing but you know obviously for us as developers we still want them we still want to be able to tune you know how much if the players are gearing more towards pvp you know based off their actions then that's more of the content that we would be pushing towards them you know whether those be bounties or or assassination missions or those types of things but if the players are not geared towards that then you know that's me is basically their their choices matter you know in in kind of the content that we're providing
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towards towards them and pushing you know towards them so um and then as far as you know even it's just how the pl how the fights play out so let's say you and i are funny pvp and um let's say i have a warrant you know for my rest because i've been a bad boy and you killed me you know so therefore the reward that you're getting you know for taking me out is should be higher because it's you're going up against another player um then you'll be able to when physical inventory comes in then anything that i'm carrying with me you'll be able to take you know and it might be in damage or it might be in disrepair or other things to happen you know during the fight but it will be
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up to you to choose if you want to take it or not um and so that gives a gives the players you know different ways to collect rewards or basically loot you know the bodies or the ships you know based off of that action imagine physicalize inventory is probably going to play a bigger role in choosing your loadouts and such too uh at least for the f not maybe not for the ship version but for the for the fps version when when you can only only what you take with you you know as joda would say i imagine that's going to become pretty important yeah and i i think that will be somewhat of a game changer as far as um you know uh this is a new new way of playing you know because basically taking that global inventory
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out of play you know when you're out in the middle of nowhere and you don't have any food or you don't have any ammo or you don't have any of this stuff like you you need to basically prepare for the worst and always be thinking about okay what's the situation i'm going to be going into do i have the right equipment for it and if the answers know that you might die you know or you have a higher likelihood of dying okay so if if i'm understanding correctly i'm just going to wrap up wrap you up here make sure i got it uh for folks who are looking for pvp opportunities there will be uh holistic solutions places like pyro places like jump point places like korea places that encourage and draw that activity to it for people who want to avoid it there will be lawful systems like
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terra and and stanton it's like that where there were where they won't be a 100 protected from it but it will be highly discouraged and they should be able to play most of their play experience you know free from potential molestation from other players physicalized inventory is going to be a a have a big effect by providing rewards for people who come after who will come after you for pvp and then uh limiting forcing you to choose what you take with you uh exactly uh from a strategic standpoint um and then the green and basically the green zone so like we will be adjusting the way that the green zones work and making them more law based so you know if you do act up in the city then there's turrets
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that are there or security comes after you so you know there's other aspects like that that will come into play so there will always be the potential for pvp in these safe places it's just the folks who want it will have to really work for it in in in those lawful places like in the heart of the empire correct and stuff correct yeah and and i i think with that it's again you know i i like there being tension within the game you know it could be very low you know tension but i still want there to be that tension you know there so something could pop off and then um then you have to deal with you know the circumstances at that time so you know that's and then the pvp slider is an internal tool instead of a
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a forward-facing tool for the players uh you just used to determine what type of missions and everything that are available to it it's almost like seems like like a reputation meter sort of like if you if you if you get higher pvp reputation we provide you more pvp opportunities and if you have a lower pvp reputation then we provide you more pve opportunities cool all right uh i think we're going to call it rich tyra talk about the inventory stuff because i think there's more to learn there todd thank you so much for taking the time to be here and calling all devs uh thanks bye take care all right thank you so much todd uh now we're moving on to our combat pillar director mr richard ty we're going to talk to him about inventory hey richard how you doing man hey how's it going good uh we're talking pvp today so time pvp and it's and and this may
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seem like a weird slot in there but physicalized inventory external inventory being able to only only have that which you take with you talk to us about where we're at with that current development so physical inventory well first thing i want to say about physical inventory is how it ties into the core combat gameplay loop and why it exists and why we're doing it and you know because obviously some people like think well what inventory like how does that tie into combat right that doesn't kind of make logical sense so first off from a high level point of view you've got to think about what is the core gameplay loop for star citizen in terms of the fps combat loop and the fps combat loop is it starts way before you even get into combat and that is what equipment do i have you know what guns do i have what
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uh resistances am i going to come up against you know what environment am i going to be in and you know this also ties into things like actor status and other things and you know and food and drink so at the moment when you're in star citizen essentially you can open your mobi glass and you can change your equipment at the drop of a hat you know you can have a thousand med pens in there and you can heal indefinitely uh you know and you and you know but you can see with the food and drink system that we've added and the actual status in terms of the environmental active status in terms of hypothermia effects and hyperthermia effects you know you can start to see kind of the direction that we're heading in and the reason that is is that before you get into that combat scenario you know you need to be thinking ahead and going okay what kind of environment what kind of
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situations do i think that i'm going to encounter so you know am i going to need a long-range weapon am i going to need a short-range weapon well i'm going to need ammunition for those weapons should i pick ballistics versus energy because eventually energy will replenish as it does in the ships um and you know in terms of armor am i gonna go to a harsh environment am i gonna need to worry about extreme temperature am i going to need to worry about um you know heavy armor versus light armor because eventually you know with medium and heavy armor you're not going to be able to fly a ship you'll have to stow those away so and then it's like well am i going to need to be in combat as soon as i get out of the ship so there's all these different things and then you've got to think of things like you know i'm going to be hungry am i going to be thirsty and what type of foods am i going to take and what type of drinks am i going to take in terms of
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you know am i go do i want stamina regeneration buffer do i want certain types of buffs to play into that combat and all of that and you know that doesn't even include things like gadgets and throwables and and when you take all of those things that you actually think okay i actually use a lot of those things in combat in terms of how my actor's status is playing you know i don't want to put weakened i want to be a repeat condition you know in terms of the environment's going to affect me and so on and so forth you know when you don't have that at the drop of the hat that is a game changer yeah that fundamentally changes how you approach leaving the beautiful metropolises of the landing zones and all of the nice and you know happy furry areas that you can stay in and these harsh environments
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exactly and at that point you have to go well okay i've got a limited space i can't just take a thousand med pens anymore i can only take like okay five or six maybe i have to store some of my backpack and you know i have to take some food and gotta take ammo and i'm gonna need oxygen and you know and all of a sudden you you're starting to think of well i can't take and it's like you're going on holiday right you might be going for two weeks and you can't be like well it's gonna be is it going to be hot is it going to be cold you know you have to limit what you can take and so you have to really think about those situations that you're going to be in so once you get into combat all of the previous decisions that you've made are going to influence how that combat plays out and that's why when you take the whole of the core gameplay loop
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you know there is a beginning in terms of the preparation in terms of how you set up and you know there's that preparation also bleeds up into you know you might be scouting a particular area that you've seen and this enemy ai and you know you're using a gadget to um map out where they are you know you're looking with binoculars or your scope you're tagging enemies and tagging them onto the fps radar and scanning you know you're scanning particular things maybe there's a bounty down there that you want to get and you know and all of that ties into your preparation phase then obviously the combat phase in terms of you know you engaging your plan reacting to what happens you know how that how that pans out and then there is also a post combat phase which completes the loop and that post combat phase is you know the looting mechanics in terms of okay what can i what can i take and you know if you're like full to the brim
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with like hey i just filled my backpack well you know you're not gonna be able to just carry everything out and you might be like oh actually i'm gonna drag this guy back to my ship or you know maybe i want to take someone alive and so when you talk about the full combat loop you can see that whole premise of how how just physical inventory by itself becomes a huge game changer so physical inventory by a feature in itself we've kind of slowly started to add it every patch so we started with the commodity inventory with fps mining in terms of having a backpack and storing commodities in there and that was always going to be a temporary solution because it was it's to support mining you can see now with the person and the thought that you know we have the wheel and you can see where you're mining and that is actually going to be changed to what we're calling now as the external imagery and it was never the intention that it
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was always going to be a wheel it was actually going to go to a grid system now but it won't be just a grid system like uh you know you're having to manage everything in the grid and or you're playing tetris or anything like that it's actually a really innovative system where it's almost like a list but it also almost think of it like uh when you're moving an app on an iphone right how it melds around that yeah and so what that gives is it gives us an overview of your character and overview of all of the items that you're going to have and you're going to be able to directly interface with your character and the items that you have and vice versa you'll be able to directly interface with external inventory so for example other players backpacks on the ground or crates or cargo or whatever anything that doesn't have a necessarily a physical representation in the world it might have a physical volume represented in the in the game but those things aren't necessarily
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inside of it so that's that what i just described there is kind of like the end goal and that's when we have item persistence and icash comes online but the first kind of next step is to interact that external inventory that ui interface which will be an extension of the person in the thought as it is now you can still just press i and open the and you will have uh the grid-based system and it will still be just commodities at the beginning so that means that food and drink or minerals the things that you can currently put in your backpack you'll be able to still put in your backpack but it means that when we have like say be able to interact with the cargo hold and be like hey i can put things directly in there or take fps manuals out of there and that'll be kind of like the next iteration and you can see that we're slowly but you know surely
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moving towards that and eventually that then will become full items can be able to go in there and then you'll have your character in the middle that you'll be able to switch around take items directly off your character into the interface and back and forth and so that kind of gives you kind of what physical inventory is on the character level and external imagery on the ui but that is such a wide-ranging thing because as soon as you say you can't carry everything you need the physicalized storage on ships you need it in habs your hangar so uh yeah i mean when we get to there and we will get to there um it will be an incredible moment because you know the tech and the eye cache and the item persistency will be online and we will have a very different game than we'd have today uh absolutely who
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would have thought you could talk for seven minutes about inventory and its importance to pvp and that was the i'm willing to bet that was the short version that was the short video but to be honest jared what i'm actually gonna say is you can't talk to me about pvp without talking to me about this war fair fair enough for enough uh uh you want you want to call sean on the you want to add sean to the call and and and just absolutely chat all right let's do it sean how you doing welcome to calling all devs thanks all right we are talking theaters of war we're talking po uh pop pvp pvp pvp in theaters of war uh give it give us the top level how how we doing how's it doing well technically it's not just pvp by the way it's kind of pvp ve a little bit uh just because we've
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got some ai ships going on in there um but yeah mostly pvp between it uh it's been going really well um super excited to have gotten it um uh out for two uh large weekend tests with the evocati um and uh it was really important for us to be able to do this and uh i wish we could have done it even sooner uh uh than we did uh but we had a lot of work to do right after citizencon and uh this might be rehashing some of the stuff but uh we had to update to planet before uh we had to consume some of the physics refactors um and we had to co-exist within uh uh within a certain stream so um just took a little bit of time to to keep everything running and how is it going now we've got we've had two tests
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uh you just did an ama on spectrum uh what's what's next for theaters of war what what's what's the path forward look like well yeah sort of first i guess how it all went which is what you were asking in the first place there but uh uh it it did it did go quite well um the first test was a little bit rough uh in terms of performance and we all recognized that right out of the gate um we didn't recognize quite how bad that would get um and that really comes down to um we've only got a certain set of of of team and then the development group which is you know all of cig and then evocati so it's like this this this slow scaling uh that we've been doing and i've i've been treating this very uh specifically so that every time we do scale
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um we could actually take action on the things that come up during that scaling because always you know uh things come up and it's it's a lot broader than just the game as well uh you know some of the big things that we had to work on anyways were um to do with matchmaking to do with party join to do with squads um those kind of things so the first evoquadi test yeah uh definitely had some performance problems we spent a whole sprint focused on it was like i think eighty percent of the changes was something like you know 170 180 uh changes that came in from not just the theaters of war group or the arena commander group but uh the rest of the company as well um and all of these things ended up benefiting the pu so um when everybody's gonna be getting together within the pu uh whether that's these 20 on 20 battles or
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or full 50 players you actually see that the the performance is dramatically improved because of all the things that we've actually done um and in some cases we might have gone a little too far trying to optimize you know the art against uh some of the game code all of these things really is are the bits that we learned while we were doing so one of the big things that we saw was you know server performance was great that was running at a solid uh frame rate uh really had no hitches uh as far as the server was concerned uh but when we scaled up our concurrency to about five times what we had tried uh previously um we had some things going on with matchmaker so we had to take care of that a lot of that came down to uh party joins and some of the logic that would go on within there because you know as everyone might be aware uh
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we utilize all the arena commanders star marine uh infrastructure and and matchmaker um so a lot of it is is either updating that fixing things that have rotted uh or or making it more fit for purpose um as we're going through one of the other things that we spent a lot of time was putting analytics in so that when we did do these tests it wasn't just a matter of getting sort of anecdotal feedback um there's there's very hard data for us to make some decisions on and you know something you know some of the things that come out of it are pretty interesting and i kind of jokingly sent an update through um i think to uh uh to uh bayour and any and he put it online which was that the fire extinguisher got a kill and we're going okay where is that fire extinguisher
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i didn't even know there was a fire seriously in the level well there is in star marine levels and they explode but this isn't how somebody got a kill uh this was this was a physical impact thing uh uh that happened with that um so happens a chair just to add to the mystery a chair got two kills this was a valkyrie chair got two kills so if you didn't get two kills during the evocati test you were worse than a chair that's good i think one of the also the the fundamental difference as well to to cover where we want to go next is you know if you look at theaters as a breakdown of you know the gameplay systems from the pu in terms of the fps action the combat action and and all of those things like put into one big part um we got some incredible feedback from um
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the community in terms of you know how the handling you know the character and feeling uh you know is the objective right in terms of the balance the layout of the map and we we sat down and we read through all of that feedback we broke it down and you know we got some really we got some gold dust from that feedback and we've we've created a plan for the test of uh theatre war and i think you'll find that when we get to come to it next it's gonna play dramatically different i think the it will feel more star citizen uh in in the best of way and i think that's something that i think with theaters when we started out it's kind of you can kind of say like with arena commander and star
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marine when they started out they're kind of very distilled experiences themselves and when you think of theater war you know what we took to citizencon we're still kind of kind of putting those together and we were kind of learning uh you know how how they best fit together and these last two tests have really given us some more information both from a quantitative point of view in terms of the analytics that we got back and we had a lot of analytics in there and from a qualitative point of view in terms of that you know speaking to the guys uh reading the discord having a look in the on reddit on having a looking at our own forums uh we got a lot of internal feedback because i mean we were playing literally the whole company was playing that this wall literally like every day for a good like two months before we went live and to try and get like you know how did it play and and to make sure that we were playing it and getting
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feedback so we got a lot of that done um and i think the the next version is gonna feel uh more responsive uh it will have a lot of the things that make star citizen unique and great and it will definitely feel like more of a star citizen uh game mode and that is something that we're really really endeavoring to push for so i think it's uh it's an it's an incredible opportunity for us to to push on that and that's why really that we haven't just gone hey eva carty thanks for that let's improve performance push it to btu push it live because we want to get it right and that's why we're utilizing these testing slots to give us that information it sounds like a great example of how the process is supposed to work it's if you develop small you do internal testing then you push it out to
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the wider group you get the feedback you bring it back into it go further until you know such a time that uh uh such a time that you're actually prepared for that and uh and that that comes down to everything again performance i become a member of gamepl it's the issue council submit your bugs submit your reports validate the reports of other people participation in the evocati uh means citizenship i was trying to do the starship troopers thing and i missed it anyway sean uh richard uh thank you so much uh of course though this won't be the last time we're talking theater's a war before all said and done so i'm gonna let you go um thank you so much guys take care well that's it for this month's pvp focused episode of calling all devs i
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want to thank todd pappy richard tyrer and sean tracy for taking the time to be here on the show with us this week i remember that you can submit your questions for consideration for every episode of calling all devs up in the thread up on spectrum there should be a new thread going up shortly if it's not up already when you see this so for calling all devs i'm jared huckabee we'll see you next month
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
