The Need For (Multiple) Speeds | Journey to 4.0 (CitizenCon 2952)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   Hi, my name is Yui Klatt. I'm a game play programmer in the vehicle feature team. I'm here with Rich Towler, David Colson, Jared Talbot, and Johnny Young. And today we're going to talk to you about the upcoming changes to the flight systems and the combat systems, uh which I don't specifically for this 142, but which will eventually find their way to the persistent universe. We want to define uh ship roles for the game because every role in itself and every ship can offer unique game play opportunities for individual players. We want to provide a lot more variety to the game play in Star Citizen, a lot more opportunity for different careers,

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   different responsibilities, and different sort of perspectives and views on game play where people contribute different types of work and different types of jobs. Star Citizen is supposed to be a big expansive game with giving the players lots of chances to have a variety of different experiences. It's not just about combat, it's not just about an economy, it's not just about piracy, it's about all of those things happening at the same time. So we need ships that can act and function in different ways to support all of those different goals. In trying to figure out these roles and define what they are and make the game play for them, we've started very heavily leaning toward combat, mostly because combat is a mechanic that is very widely applicable throughout the game, and the principles behind it apply to various other roles in the game. We've been working um away in the S42 branch um and this is really allowed us

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   to isolate these ships. So we've kind of broken it down into archetypes, and it's really allowed us to kind of break down what these ships do. You know, and also it's to make sure that when we are defining these roles and balancing these roles that we're putting the ships in the right place because we don't want the ships to be like you play this ship it means you dominate this part of the game. There's always got to be plus and minuses so the balance is right. So there's still some crossover between the ships. So just picking one type of ship just isn't you know, isn't just a win. We have already defined several ship roles and they're usually known as light, medium, and heavy fighters. Light fighters were also fighters which are very dominant in the area of one versus one PvP combat. But they come with a downside because obviously they're light which means the materials chosen the ship are probably not the strongest. So it's more about the attack. It's more

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   about trying to out position and get in there and attack and get out of the situation. Heavy fighters are kind of the opposite. They're not supposed to be really good at one versus one versus one, but they excel at n versus n engagement. So when we have group battles. Medium fighters for us internally we call multi-role fighters because they have a lot of hard points. So they have a lot of loadout flexibility. So a player can tune them to the role whatever they want, but they will never reach the performance of dedicated ships. A lot of medium fighters sometimes come with a turret as well. So they've got that additional gameplay of the turret which is aimed to kind of counter the lack of maneuverability that their ships have. And then additionally to that we have racing ships which are basically just really fast at changing the velocity vectors. And interceptors which we basically just want to go very fast in the forward

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   area, but never reaching really the performance envelope of dedicated top fighters. Interceptors are designed to kind of catch up to ships and disable them. And so they come with kind of advanced kind of you know hardware on these ships. Bombers on the other hand are um well, they're just slobbing heavy ordnance at larger targets. So you use them to take out bigger ships. Um but they're not really good at well, killing small fighters. And then from smaller ships coming to larger ships like Constellation and up, we want to change the game play to be less about positional combat, but more going to the naval style of combat where it's important to show the correct shield and fire arcs and timing your shots over long distances. So, the purpose of ship rules is to really help players understand what ship should be used and when they should be used. And it's really

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   about delivering on those kind of game play promises that we've been talking about you know, over the past you know, kind of several years. If every ship is the same, it's not fun. But if we have dedicated ships with dedicated pros and cons, then we can create very exciting combat environments. And the biggest challenge we see in order to get that game play we want is the current speed that we have in combat. It's a subject we've talked about many, many times in the past and it's something we've tried many things with. You know, we've tried limiting things at speed, we've tried adjusting handling at speed. We just we've tried so many things to kind of manage speed, the negative impact of speed on combat. When ships are going fast in combat, they usually just end up very far apart which is not very interesting and it

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   just devolves into jousting very quickly which is also not very interesting. The second you create a longer distance between you and a target, your angular requirements to maneuver to that target are just it just extremely small. And this is a very obvious math reason why high speed combat is kind of the opposite of what we want to achieve. Meaning meaningful and effective positional maneuvering. We want the combat to be closer and to be more turn oriented. So, rotations should matter more than just flat speed. Having very high speeds that are pretty much the same between all ship classes negates a lot of the opportunity for smaller ships to flex different types of game play. Another the with the speeds in combat is it's very hard to keep

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   players engaged in the combat because players can move so far, so quickly in such a short space of time. It's quite hard to keep a track on your opponent. So you might think, "Oh, why don't we just make the ships slower and call it a day?" Well, we can't do that. The main reason we can't just make everything slower is the size of the Star Citizen world. We've got huge planets where we need to go from the planet's surface up into space. We need to transverse between different systems. So essentially we can't have just low speeds all of the time. There's a massive universe out there to explore. There's planets to explore. And the feelings we want to capture with the speed, we still want an element of danger that you can still go too fast in lots of situations. We have tried an awful lot over the past few years with what we what we've called soft speed

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   caps where there is no speed cap on ships, but we encourage gameplay to occur at a lower speed, but it doesn't really work because the advantages of flying fast in terms of defense is just better. So since the last year, the focus of vehicle feature team shifted very heavily towards 142 and nailing down the flight and space combat experience for it. And I'm very proud to say that we finally found a really good working solution that we're going to show today. So the main idea is to simply not have combat and long-range travel at the same time. So we're splitting these gameplay experiences. This will be done by a thing which is called master modes. A

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    master mode is a thing that is globally applied to your ship. Um and we have two of them. We have SCM, which is now relabeled as uh standard control mode, and QCM or QM for quantum mode. The idea is that between these two modes we can constrain the speeds in combat and also get all of the maneuvering, like high speed maneuvering and traversal mechanics that we had before, but in these distinct modes that are integrated with lore and integrated with the the ship functions such that there's costs and payoffs for being in each of the two modes. So, let's start with SCM control mode and what this means. So, this is the mode that we intend to be the functional mode of the ship, whether it's combat or mining or any of these kind of core kind of things the ship does. We want the player to do these things in this mode. And what this does is is it reduces the

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    speed of the ship, but it also enables the shield to be turned on. And obviously the intent behind this is this is where you do your combat. It's where the guns are on, the missiles can be armed and fired and all the kind of operational things the ship does operates within this mode. The speeds that you can reach in SCM are somewhat limited, somewhere between 2 and 300 m per second, tuning tuning pending. but this is basically the hard cap which you cannot not really exceed. You can slightly exceed this by using boost, but you cannot maintain any velocity beyond that SCM limit for a longer period of time. So, we're thinking of this as some kind of energy management system, so you can go a little bit faster with a little bit more accelerations when you need to, but you know that you have it is a limited

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    resource and you should use it carefully. Specifically, the boost space is interesting for for space combat because that boost space space is not is not spherical as it was before. You can boost the fastest if you if you're going forward on a straight line and you have a lot of debuffs when you're trying to boost backwards. That alone gets us a lot of interesting maneuvering space and variation in the day-to-day dog fight maneuvering, so to speak. Importantly, you don't have your quantum drive available in this mode. The idea is that quantum is restrained to the quantum traversal mode. The second mode is quantum control mode or QCM or QM. What this mode does is it unlocks your maximum velocity that your ship can reach. So, when you were limited before to 200 to 300 m/s, now you can go to 1,200 1,400 m/s, whatever your ship

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    allows you. During the development of the M constant mode, we realized we needed something that was a little bit more kind of about traveling large distances but not the distances that you need to you know, screw up your quantum drive and travel across the universe. So, we've created this feature called quantum boost, which is available in the constant mode, and you can access it at any point. So, any point you want to kind of boost towards your location that you you know, you kind of looking at but it's just a too far away, and this boost is available for a limited amount of time, and it's purely on a straight line. Just to give you like a a ballpark, quantum boost will allow you to go to a target fast if it's within, let's say, 50,000 km, whereas you will use quantum travel to do very long-range jumps between with between planets. So, uh quantum mode allows you to go very

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    very fast with up to like 1,200 1,400 m/s when you want to zip really fast over a planet. It also allows you to do quantum boost to quickly go between points of interest, which are rather close to you, and it allows you to go to travel long distances between between planets and and large-scale stellar objects. But, it comes at a cost. Your capacitor systems are non-functional because they interfere with the quantum bubble that is allowing you to go fast. You won't have shields. Your shields will will collapse right away when you when you when you swap into quantum mode. Your weapons will stop working because anything that's firing outwards of your ship will disintegrate the quantum bubble. Your countermeasures won't work, and you will also not be able to use thrust and boost. So,

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    basically, all your capacitor and combat-related systems are turned off instantly. When you switch between modes, there'll be a little period of time where everything has to spool up and change. So, you will lose your shields during this. You won't have your weapons during this, but you also won't be going fast. So, there's a a risk-reward element when you need to switch modes. So, this can be a very kind of conscious choice of what mode you should be in at any particular point. So, if you feel under threat of another someone that's close by, you're not quite sure what their intention is, maybe switch to standard control mode and be safe. Or, you can switch into quantum mode and escape. And this is going to kind of bring in an element of danger and element of risk. Because uh going into the two different modes is like a systemic thing within the ship's items, um we actually have the opportunity now to define ship roles

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    that can block people from escaping either using devices that suppress the quantum bubble or devices that can effectively interfere with your ability to transfer between the modes. For example, specific ships like interceptors can be tuned such that they have a higher standard control mode speed, so they're able to catch up with people. Or, for example, make the swap between the modes faster and more efficiently, so that they could catch up with you, go into standard control mode and attack you more effectively as per the properties of their ship versus another ship, which might not be as good at doing something like that. It's something that's fundamentally changed the gameplay experience for us. And this is working now. Um you know, and we're playing it every day in the studio. We're refining it. We're

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    tweaking bits here and there. Um but, we're at that stage now where we're tweaking and balancing. We've got the core features. It's there in the game, playable. And the difference it's made on the game for us is it's basically night and day. Because the speeds have been limited in standard control mode, suddenly fights are a lot closer. The accelerations of ships, similarly, have been retuned a little bit, and their afterburner strength has been retuned a little bit to make it so that you can orbit around ships and have a lot more interesting maneuvering. Um and because the ranges are closer, maneuvers that would be performed by your ship have a much more significant impact because you're closer. So, if I like thrust up or down, you'll immediately see the difference. So, similarly, things like capital ships uh effectively get a buff to their offensive capabilities with this change because suddenly you can't

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    orbit a capital ship at high range and high speeds. Um you have to get a lot closer, which will make the turrets much more effective at shooting you. Turrets become more important, and working as a group to attack capital ships is more important than it has been before. This is a really exciting change because it allows us to keep the combat speeds relatively low, where we know that the gameplay is better for that, while also keeping the point-to-point travel speeds as high as they should be for PU. Playing with master modes in Squadron 42 has been a lot of fun simply because it's changed the entire combat experience. Before, you'd find that you were fighting at a huge distance. Now, you find that you're in really tight, close combat with the

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    other players. I think the biggest part of this is going to be when we have the larger ships interacting with the smaller ships. Once we can have battles with big capital ships and smaller ships, we'll have brought something to the Star Citizen world that I don't think has been as come out before. Uh and I think it'll make a massive improvement to the game. Having made these changes uh to implement master modes and rebalancing all of the ship speeds, uh we'll finally be able to define ship roles in the way that we've always wanted and to bring a lot more variety to the gameplay that we haven't had before. So, it's been a really long journey here, obviously, cuz you've been a part of this journey. Um you know, and we've tried many, many different things over the time to try and really create the experience we want. But, you know, the reality is from where is it came down to you know where it always is in Star

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    Citizen which is creating choice for the players. It's about giving players the option and their choices have consequences. You know, so with master modes it really helps define the player choice in the game. So, they're choosing to do combat. They're choosing to travel from here to being quantum. They're choosing to QT boost somewhere. Just giving players that freedom within the universe we have is just like it's a really magical thing and we tried many times to control that as you know, as designers to try and get a specific experience at some point. But, we always end up coming back to the fact let's just give the players the choice and let them make the key decisions and we'll design the balance around that. We finally have it. So, we're we're now nailing down the space combat experience for Star Citizen and specifically for Squadron 42. We know from internal play

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    test that the master mode stuff works. We know that it works with our flight re-tuning and it's very exciting. It will yet take a while to ship this to the PU because the amount of ships you fly in Squadron 42 is rather limited whereas in Star Citizen we have about I don't know more than 100 ship records at the moment. But, the whole hard problem of designing this thing in the first place is over. We just need to get the numbers in now. And all the footage you've seen today is from Squadron and it's all currently playable in the game that you know, internally that you know, we're playing this every day. We're still working on some tweaks, but everything is there right now. It's all about the foundational kind of tweaks that we're making. Um, and we can't wait to get it in your hands. So, thanks a lot for listening to us today. We're very, very excited to get the changes to you as soon as possible. And yeah, we'll hope to see you fighting

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    in the verse.