Star Citizen: CitizenCon 2949 - Shoot 'em Up

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello hello hello oh I'm online alright very good so uh yeah somebody get out of the way real quick I've been taking pictures with a lot of people today and it's it's awesome I had a lot of fun but I do me a solid I've got to say you guys take a picture with me this time okay all right everybody say fun fun okay cool thank you I look forward to reviewing all the very very kind gestures I'm sure

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   that we're in that picture all right okay so let's go ahead and get started so welcome to sit it's gone 29:49 I know it's been going all day already um but to hope you guys had a lot of fun so far and definitely stick around of course for the keynote at the end so super excited to be with you guys today and have some exciting and interesting stuff to talk about so over the years I've been involved in a lot of things at CI G and usually when you've seen me here at citizencon I've come to talk about you know new technology some tools maybe pipelines methods to make all this kind of stuff but today it's gonna be a little bit different so today I want to talk about a new game-mode 4 star marine that we're calling theatres of war so up on stage with me and at the end is a

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   lead FPS designer Richard tyre and he's been instrumental in helping me build this game-mode 4 star marine and he's gonna stick around to answer some questions during the Q&A at the end so let's go over the agenda a little bit so first what we're gonna talk about is sort of the electronic access and lore and what that really is all about how a C and SM fit into it how theaters wore will fit into it then we're gonna talk about what theaters Warp actually is so we're gonna explain what theaters is and kind of what the whole intent of the mode is and pretty much why we made it next we're actually going to talk about the map that we're playing here at citizencon today so it's a it's a scenario it's basically a map but it's called crossroads of crime and I'll explain why it's called that then we'll go into the lower a little bit great

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   lower team within the star citizen community it's it's it's incredible the amount of lawyer that we have to actually pull from then we'll go into the actual game mode itself theatres of war will do an overview really just walk through each of the sort of phases and this will make a lot of sense and a little bit will talk about some of the new mechanics we brought online to make this a lot more fun and we'll talk about the vehicles the character loadouts and basically how you play the game then finally we'll get into some future plans when you guys are going to get your hands on it and some of the features that we're still really wanting to work on before we roll out that game-mode okay so in star citizen we have the concept of electronic access and electronic access is like this this simulator for all these different events that can go on within the universe

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   basically it's it's like an entertainment before for the denizens of star citizen for citizens and it's really an important distinction because arena commander star marine kind of exists under this umbrella and and because it's a simulation we can kind of get away with some stuff that is a little more you know quote-unquote gamey than it is in the persistent universe in the persistent universe things are a little more permanent obviously with persistence so star Marine arena commander where the first two to exist under this umbrella and they made a lot of sense in their own regards arena commander came out test our flight that is our core gameplay so let's get the flight happening then we have the FPS which was star marine and now what we have is Theater's war that kind of groups the

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   two together so I also contend that these simulations are really good spot for us to be able to tell some lore in a really meaningful way and an interactive way so that you guys get to experience that lore in a way that's that's super memorable so you can imagine it it's kind of like like a like a reenactment like the Gettysburg you battles or anything like that that basically these guys go in simulate and play through so now let's talk about the scenario or the theater that we built for citizencon watch each other's back come on all right new plan I think they're

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   controlling it from that radar tower I need all agents to focus on that all teams all teams

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   redirecting you to take out that mining laser use ships or take it on foot whatever it takes it's got to go all right so that gives you a quick

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   preview of what's going on back in the war room here so theaters war this is the new objective based game mode and it's within star Marine where the key focus is combined-arms we're putting everything together and this mode really combines all the work we put into the star Marine arena commander squadron PU into one cohesive battle on foot in vehicles in the air all working together to accomplish some common objective or to stop some common objective from being taken and the idea is that this happens in some sort of historical star citizen setting a story from our lower so ultimately star citizen hasn't just always been an FPS or or just an arena shooter on its own it's really more accurately described as the ultimate in sandbox gameplay you've got all kinds of vehicles all kinds of weapons so let's

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    put them together and let's have some fun so really why did we build this right well at some point in the PU we are gonna get to that level of combat going on now you know that the combat in the PU hop it's a little more sparsely and it has to do a little bit with the player counts but the minute that we put all this stuff together this better be fun we can't make it fun after the fact it's got to be fun before so it really gives us a really really solid analytical environment to really hone the gameplay balance things against each other so again how many shots does it take to of a railgun to take down an Ursa how many earths of shots does it take down to take a Valkyrie all of these things they do happen in the pew put a little more sparsely and and it can take some time so having said that when combat occurs it's really got to be

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    fun so to reiterate the key points you know theatres war is another game mode like elimination or last stand in star marine so and again combined arms everything's in play so what do we want to achieve with this well we want to be able to balance all this we also want to give you a solid 30 minute experience where you can come in have some fun and get out in the times when we're all so busy you can't always play for three hours you can't always play for four we need actually a real quick rkt kind of combat but not different than star citizen it's got to be the same and that's a really key point here we didn't develop really anything drastically new for this this is using the exact same

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    assets from the Pew same balance same everything that if anything we've taken a lot of the stuff that we've found within theaters were that we found on fun and we apply it to the PU from there so it gives us a really good spot to be able to do all that so how does fear does of war fit in right now well that was actually how does crossroads of crime fit into theatres of war okay so what's crossroads of crime that's actually the name of the map that's the name of the scenario so I want to kind of give you a little bit of a brief of that scenario now I'm not nearly as good at telling these stories as the Laura team is but I'm gonna give you a little bit of what they fed me so we went through our lure and we went you know where some really exciting sort of combat happening within the history of Star edges in the last 100 years 200 years 300 years before the present day

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    PU and we found this great story and the story takes place in the nexus Thyssen so in the nexus system there's a notorious outlaw gang and there's a lot of outlaw gangs within a nexus system but this particular one is specifically aggressive so the supreme is the name of the outlaw gang in this particular one and they're facing off against an elite advocacy squad that has come to retake one of the planets so to give you some backstory on the nexus system the nexus system was totally unclaimed the Hathor group which was a mining group came in but all they really cared about was mining so as long as profits were being made they totally looked the other way and what that sort of evolved into was a really perfect sort of petri dish for a ton of crime and in the end

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    Hathor a group stripped mined the entire area pulled out and just left it as it was and that obviously devolved into something pretty criminal so with that pretty much anybody that's doing anything bad in the universe is going to have some time crossing through the Nexus the Nexus system and that's where the the moniker the crossroads of crime came so overtime the advocacy or you EE specifically said you know we can't just leave this alone and the advocacy being more or less the interstellar police force went in to retake the system so rather than give it up the supreme would rather see the whole thing destroyed there of this nature before giving it up to the advocate one of the interesting sort of identifying things about the supreme is that though they're super

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    aggressive they kind of take all comers and they're not super well-educated so what you'll notice is that as the supreme took over the the debase from the Hathor group they actually use like pictograms and signs because not all their guys can read it's kind of an interesting back story to these guys but though they can't read they also use these pictograms to actually throw off the enemy which is super interesting so let's give you a bit an overview of theatres of war so again we're applying a lot of the player feedback that we've heard from star marine from PU and from all the different sort of arena commander matches that we've seen and I'll get into some of the details of those later but it really again has forced us to kind of look at things one of the great ones that has come from theatres of war that you guys are gonna

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    see in 3.8 it sounds simple but it you know it was really obvious that the animations need to be sped up I mean when we were mantling over things the guy is just not much of a sense of urgency it was kind of you know climbing over things he was just taking his time reloads much faster getting into ships when you're under fire getting into a ship can't take 15 seconds you're gonna die on your way into the ship the other stuff was you know aural are all our FPS weapons that were really balanced with you know kind of the the I don't want to call them legacy because they're still around but our star marine maps that are really really tight interiors so you really only have ranges of like 20 50 meters attachments didn't really matter what's really the difference we need a shotgun and an assault rifle at you know 20 or 50 meters putting the environment

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    so that you've in a compound that started to be hon hundred 200 meters is much much better okay so again the idea was that we give a thirty minute experience that was chock-full of combat right in your face straightaway so let's give an overview of this game mode so the mode is put into three distinct phases it's basically in this particular scenario you have three distinct combat environments that are going to happen in total the game modes meant to be 30 minutes and right now we've got 20 on 20 in this one we've got phase 1 is disabled the AAA turrets now it's a ground-based battle you've got some ground vehicles that are actually supporting the attacking team in this scenario but the first things first they've got to take down the AAA turrets to bring in the ships in phase 2 you've

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    got to destroy a radar tower after you've taken phase 1 the supreme actually activate a mining laser because they're not going to give up this planet if they're gonna lose they're gonna try to destroy the entire planet so you've got to destroy that radar tower which is controlling the mining laser and then finally actually sorry I'll talk about some of the vehicles in this one we've got a lot it's a huge area so we go from phase 1 which is sort of the 200 300 meter combat with some interior combat to this almost 4 kilometer traversal where the defenders have a lot more ships and the attackers have a lot more ground vehicles so we get this great interchange of those vehicles and things like say the ballista which is you know not probably the most exciting thing to play in the PU right now because I mean if you get into one you could probably

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    have a seat on a planet and just you know wait but in this mode the ballista is the king that will keep those ships away real quick and then finally we transition from a ground-based and-and-and-and low definitely low atmosphere to upper atmosphere and in space so you get to transition between some atmosphere flight and some space flight where the objective is to destroy the mining laser one of the things I want to mention before I get too deep into that is that it's all seamless right like I mean we've got this technology to be able to do this so why not use it to our massive advantage and not put any loading screens in between or anything that combat is completely seamless as you go through this entire thing so from ground to air to space and can go even further the templates that

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    we built for this you can go between you could you could make a map an entire solar system I mean you could be going to a planet in the distance you can do it between a planet and a moon you can do it between two moons you could even do it between two solar systems it's it's a it's a it's a crazy amount of technology that we have access to here and all it needs is a little bit of a structure so when you load into the game that's what you're seeing this is our new spawning interface for this particular mode now it makes a lot of sense for this mode and what you're seeing up there is you see some control points or stories some spawn points and each Bond point sort of has a different role some of them are infantry spawn points some of them are vehicles but you don't just spawn beside the vehicle you're gonna spawn in the seed and you get to select which seed you're gonna spawn into so if you want to spawn straight into a gunner seat you want to spawn straight into a transport seat in a hoplite you can do that on top of that

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    you'll notice that there's also a selection at the bottom we've got a preset selection now I don't like to call them classes because they're more like presets we don't really have a class-based thing with in star citizen what we have is whole sets of equipment that just do different things and yeah you want to call them classes but in the end I want to be able to update you know change the primary weapon change the secondary weapon and these kind of things but we've got four within this mode so let's talk about that so here's all the characters that we're actually using within the crossroads of crime right now the white and they're meant to have a little gold on them is the advocacy so you guys will see that once it releases and then the red are the supreme so again there's four different presets to choose from and each of them kind of aim to provide this variety of combat and and really rolls just fulfilling certain roles within the mode

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    one of the more interesting things is the teams have asymmetrical loadouts meaning there's not the same weapons so assault on one team is not the same as assault on the other team this makes a lot of sense within the lore because again advocacy is coming from the UE they're gonna have their weapons manufactured by bearing they're gonna use more ballistic type weapons whereas the Supreme are gonna have a little crazier type weapons they're gonna have you know some case our weapons they're gonna have energy level weapons the other thing didn't mention is that you know between the foot soldier and assault you might say what what's really the difference between a foot soldier result in this mode there is a very real difference between somebody that's got a shotgun in close range weapons they're gonna be able to take out the interiors of these buildings really really quickly whereas in a foot soldier is much more all-rounder he's like a rifleman within the infantry then you got snipers which is pretty

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    self-explanatory I hope and then we've got an anti-vehicle and again a little bit of asymmetry between the two teams on the advocacy side these use the Animus rocket launcher and then on the Supreme these ones use the rail gun so what vehicles do we got we're all excited about the vehicles so they range from fighting vehicles to transport vehicles so we've got these are all the vehicles that are actually in the mode right now and we tried a ton of them right we actually even started with the Valkyrie and and we will get the Valkyrie back in but for right now it wasn't making a lot of sense it's it's actually super duper powerful it's got a lot of health on it and again this is why we're balancing this stuff so you got the cyclone you've got the Earth's a rover and just to note and I'll talk about a little bit there is a rover acts as a mobile spawn point within our crossroads of crime or theatres of war

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    then finally like I talked about the ballista the ballista just completely surprised all of us right because it became so important it is the strongest anti-air ground vehicle that we have and it really gives it a reason to exist in this particular mode again it's a great vehicle and in the PU it will be very very meaningful but right now it's not so we've got some great ships as well the Buccaneer this one is really cleaning up right now in that and just to mention we are getting statistics of what's happening in the war room right now and just giving you an idea the thing with the most kills right now are the Buccaneers and the Ursus so then we have some arrows the Hornet and then finally we even have a dropship so we replaced the Valkyrie with the vanguard hoplite so all of these you'd use to

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    take the fight to the enemy so what goes on in phase one so you saw a little bit of that on the video but phase 1 is disabled the AAA turrets so in this fade the adverse keiki come to take over the laptops and you'll recognize the laptops from star marine we didn't just make anything new we didn't have to you take over the laptops to take over the a guns from bass excuse me and as soon as that's achieved the a guns are shut down and you can now bring ships in for what is phase two I want to talk a little bit about the gameplay and I keep kind of mentioning it's sort of the compound like gameplay so in this compound you've got some interiors but a lot of the combat happens in the exterior is once you've got one car once you've got one of the control points you're gonna end up having to transition over hold yard that's got a lot of destroyed ships and

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    things like this to go over it so there's great sniping spots there's a lot of defensive spots for the defenders because the attackers in this particular mode have two Ursa rovers and one cyclone so they can actually motor right in and the defenders have to keep an eye on basically those IRS's because they can be used to spawn a lot of infantry and on the Supreme side so for the defenders they don't have any vehicles on this one so this can be really fun once we transition from that once the AAA guns are taken out the supreme are pushed back to their control tower so they don't want them to take the base they activate the mining laser at that moment so the objective for Phase two is to destroy it destroy the ground-based radar there's two ways to achieve this and this is the one of the new mechanics

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    that we've add first you can just shoot it that's easy you use missiles you can lock onto it you use your guns you can ram into it I mean whatever you can do you can do some damage to that tower but there's a way for infantry to help as well it's on top of a compound and within that compound is a laptop that's actually hooked up to the control tower and in that control if you take over that laptop you can overcharge it which basically does like a 20-25 percent damage to the given objective so infantry can help but it's hard to get in that outpost so the supreme at this moment are given ships and this is a great great traversal that happens as you can see sort of on the image there we've got a huge traversal where this is the end of phase one right to the outpost it's about three kilometers so

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    the defenders they have I think eight Buccaneers it could be that we changed the numbers all the time according to balance but between eight and ten Buccaneers again as a defending force that's pretty powerful but the attacking force has to ballistas three Hornets for Rovers and two cyclones so there's a lot of vehicle combat happening now and don't forget you can spawn in these Ursa Rovers as they transition this this phase and then additionally because of the ballistas the ship's really have to pay attention so finally in Phase three you're actually going to the upper atmosphere and we literally go straight up from the control tower so the objective for Phase three is to destroy the mining laser head and basically it's the same way of achieving well mechanically anyways the

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    objective within Phase two you basically have to destroy this mining laser head and again shoot it shoot missiles at it crash into it but we've also got the laptops now we changed it up a little bit because we put three of these all throughout the station so this lets the advocacy move around a little bit because there's going to be cool down on these giving laptops so as soon as you get to that laptop you can overcharge it do some damage to the station and move on to the next laptop if you can so it keeps the defenders moving around a lot so once destroyed the attackers have won the round or if they haven't they've lost the round the defenders all they have to do is stop them from destroying this illegally appropriated stronghold or not okay so I can hear the livestreams now I

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    can hear them they're going go you gotta finish the game though you got to finish that game at that game oh so I want to explain that we really didn't have to put much into this now in terms of work it was over about six to eight months but we really only added a couple new mechanics and put some light structure around this so some of the new mechanics we added Locke spawn points so I didn't mention it on the phase breakdown but in each phase we have this little locked spawn point and all this is is it's a spawn point for the infantry because of a little bit further up but all you have to do is walk into the volume and you take it so if the defender is really smart they're just good they're gonna try to defend that even more than the objective because as soon as that's lost it's the beginning of the end that phase usually so these also coexist with what I talked about before mobile

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    spawn points so that's the Ursa you can take the earth up you can go hide it you can try to drive it right into the outpost you know it's really up to you how you want to play that but even on the spawn screen you will see that that Ursa is in a good location and you're gonna want to spawn there so all the players really need to do is find the right spawn point and take care of their objective so back in that draw war room anyways it's just out the back we've been playing for the last I think about six hours here we've had a bunch of sessions come through and the feedback has been great there's been having a lot of fun within it people are understanding the game right away there's a lot of readability that's already been built into this so that people yeah people understand what to do and where to go so we took a quick video

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    of sort of the reactions of some of the guys in there alright so it just shows you all the PCs so we got 40 pcs set up within there and everybody's coming in we play for about 40 minutes we change the sides sorry we play for 20 minutes then we switch sides and then we play for another 20 minutes now what's been really fun about this is people are talking mad to each other right they're yelling at the enemy we've got them on comms so they could talk to each other and it's actually been really really fun the energy is fantastic you can see that people are really enjoying being able to get that sort of 30 minute adrenaline-packed high octane kind of experience right in your face there's a great moment where somebody for Skellig out demo 55 you got to get better and

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    that guy was like well raise your landing gear and learn to walk on you know you can really tell the good pilots from the bad pilots by the way so if you want to look really good make sure you raise your landing gear we thought about making an automatic but I'm like no no I like to be able to tell her somebody's really good in the ships or not because as they're flying around they all either lift it up and if it's not I'm like I'm gonna get him he's easy you know so it's been a lot of fun and the feedbacks rate and the whole reason we made this thing at this time was I wanted to bring it to in Cana I wanted to bring it to citizen Koz because I wanted to talk to you guys about it I wanted to talk to you guys about it because I want to find out from you what's fun I wanted that feedback and the feedbacks been fantastic everybody's got something to say about it and it's usually very positive but there was one grumpy guy on the way out one time he was like oh there's I still buy lots and I mean

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    can't please everybody all right so we've sort of gone over all this but now I want to tell you when it's gonna be in your hands because this is you know a lot of talk now you can play it right now at citizencon and it's in a good state right now I'm pretty happy with it now one of the things that I tried really really hard to do here was to take fun first and see IG I mean as you guys know we love our visuals we can make beautiful things um and you've seen planet xv4 you've seen some of the technology we've got we can make stuff beautiful but not first let's make it fun first and then make it beautiful right cuz that's that's fun but we don't want to make it beautiful keep changing and changing it changing it make it

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    beautiful again make it be feel good let's just use some boxes Thanks so just to give you an idea I mean I was talking to the one of our the senior lead environment artist and he was like man I didn't know if you're gonna get it here I saw that map two months ago or three months ago I don't I don't know I don't know so it's not you know the culture definitely a TIG is our visuals but we have to be sure that we're fun too and that map was really just white boxes that was the whole it most of the time he was the same wall piece copied thousands of times all over the map just to get the placement of everything right and we would switch it we would switch

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    it we would move spawn points we so we iterated massively on it with tons of play testing and again you could do this when you're in a sort of 30 minute 40 minute kind of mode where you could iterate on it in that way and then once we got closer to citizen we're like okay now I might get really beautiful let's go right and and we've had maybe about a month and a half two months of real solid solid art time on it now and I'd need a little bit more I need a little bit more just to make that to the to the level that you guys have come to expect of us but we got to keep the performance up because again the gameplay has to come first with this particular mode so enough that anyways having the mo playable for City it's gone I wanted to get a bunch of feedback from you guys and pending the city's con feedback you know there was a lot of different things that people came up

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    with there was some great ideas actually that I think we should be implementing it's gonna be in an upcoming release so it's gonna be early next year I want to go to epic Adi and early next year I want to get it out there's no reason to hold this back right we want to play this really really quick so I want to get you guys into it early next year so what are we gonna do well we got work on the netcode obviously everybody's gonna go oh well we got there's 250 milliseconds delay or whatever it is um luckily part of my pillar part of my job anyways as I've got the technical contents on the wind got the combat pillar side along with rich we run the combat pillar which has the network

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    engineers that sorry not just the network engineer gameplay kind of network engineer that will work on this so he works on the upstream refactor the downstream refactor and the netcode rework for hit registration on the server so this will make everything much much better in terms of the mode itself though because it's so tight in terms of like against the PU it's actually not it's we haven't really had any major problems with it and because it's vehicle oriented in a lot of cases we haven't really seen much issues so the other thing we're gonna do is some lobby system updates lobby system updates really mean matchmaking that's the big thing for me me and the turbulent guys have talked about it as well as Tony's Errol Veck and we've always talking about a contact system the fact that we've got like three different friends

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    databases that are all over the place and then there's one on the front end and you've got a handshake them and it's all really crazy so there's no reason that that it shouldn't be just one seamless kind of friends or group experience from spectrum all the way down to the game why it's separate makes no sense at all not for you guys not for us we don't like it either so we want to fix that so what that's gonna do it's gonna make it much easier play with your friends and join up and get in the game right away because again I thought to myself okay you know my son is four years old and he's starting to play some of these switch games he's playing a lot of these Lego games with me I really want to play star citizen with him and I can I can sit and play star citizen with him but I wanted to put him in front of it and just leave him alone and you know what

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    for me I'm probably not but maybe six I don't know it should be pretty soon so it's really important to me also squads that's something else I want to bring into this is really important component of it like though we're gonna have VoIP within and I'll talk about that in a second I do want people to be able to play together in a really really meaningful way so form up in a squad hell on spectrum and just end up in the game within that same squad bring people in and out whatever it is and so the next thing is kind of some boy boy boy blue type avoid stuff I'm pretty sure you guys notice but in an arena commander and star marine and now theaters war there's no chat there's no chat you can't you can't talk

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    to do it up sorry you can't talk you can't you can't talk badly to the enemy team right you can't say anything to them actually you can you know you can you can kind of use the emotes and everything which is fine but we need some basic chat oh my goodness so we're gonna get that integrated we've been working on that but it's also gonna bring the group and voice support and what's really cool about it is something that always frustrates me in any kind of combined arms game or any game that has a cooperative kind of vehicle is I'll get in the gunner seat and I can't tell the driver how bad he's driving right so with the PU you guys have had this experience already there's there's the concept of you know the ship channels and we have the exact same concept for theatres of war when you jump in an Ursa you're gonna be able to talk to that driver because you're within that channel with him so you can say driver

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    whatever right or you're doing a great job I'm sure the other thing will have global proximity so basically you should be able to hear them talking to each other at distance because this isn't the only scenario will make there'll be scenarios that make a lot more sense so that the global proximity stuff will make a meaningful difference we'll have the team groups and the vehicle groups as I mentioned so I want to make a couple updates to this one of the things you might have noticed even in the video in the poll out especially now that you guys have seen Planet V for tech you look at the v3 stuff and you're like so I looked at anyone who so I want to get planet v4 onto this before it gets out to you guys I think that's a really good thing to do um it allows us to vary the terrain a lot more and if anything that's it my really my only complaint artistically is that the terrain is really really quite flat anyways so

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    we're gonna do that we want to update some of the vehicles on there just pending the analytics sort of reviews and oh the other thing I want to get in there is art that basically we have a briefing video that's running I want to get that all in game and then in the end I'd like a real climactic ending to that station coming down I think we'll do something pretty exciting if you that round or or if you defend it so I'd like to have something pretty exciting happening at the end so we'll make some art updates but this is kind of the fun polished stuff that I like to keep to the end we do this because we know it's fun already yeah on top of trying new vehicles and potentially even shifting locations around just based on the feedback well that's too big my notes all right

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    so lots of people helped now this was really easy and fun thing to actually work on it's a lot easier for the developer to be able to spin up a thing in 30 that's a 30 minute round we've got 40 people playing you can play test every day and a really really meaningful way but it's very analytical like we're doing the same round over and over so we know exactly what's happening but we're having the right conversations now and that's what really excites me about this is hey man the railgun can actually shoot through the glass of the rover into a passenger seat in the back I'm like whoa you can okay let me fix that somebody told me a great story about they couldn't get an angle on the Earth's a driver so that the driver had left the door open he ran in the back and he couldn't get an angle on him with his rifle and he just grenade got him cool you know going so these are the good conversations be having these are

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    actual gameplay conversations there's things like a the Animus is really really too strong somebody can sit right beside an ammo crate and just sit there defend the entire point themselves these are the right conversations to be having rather than it just working so some big special things have to go out to retire who you see in a second here Milan paycheck who I wouldn't have been able to do any of this PowerPoint stuff and he's incredible Tom Forest Johnny yen's Clive Clive I'm sorry the stream is so far behind okay Rob Johnson Thorsten Steven Michael Nick piers Lee would the actor feature team lead programmers around here somewhere Jen's Lind so the character art and tech team they

46. 00:38:24

    got really involved which was great because the characters look fantastic we made them nice and bright so people could see them on the map which is really important the QA team obviously so we've been doing these forty person play tests every Wednesday for for a while now for the last six months at least and then all the other developers involved in all you know I don't know where the cameras but you guys know who you are and thank you guys okay so now we'll proceed to the Q&A with whatever time we got left we got rich attire over there I think I'm just gonna March over there all right very good so thank you guys so much and up to the guys that didn't get to play it I'm

47. 00:39:10

    really sorry that we only had 280 slots today one of the I just want to explain the reason why we did this I've done a lot of III s and games coms and stuff like this and when they do this big lineup you never know if you're gonna have enough time to play there's other things that you want to be doing we had talks throughout the day so I thought it was much better that we had a bit of a schedule or that you signed up for slots rather than kind of trying to get as many people through as absolutely possible so I'm sorry you might not have got to play it we'll try to reveal as much as we can but I'm gonna get into your guys's hands as soon as I can so thank you very much all right Thank You Sean we we've actually got off in the war room right now off what's going on hey hey Jared thank you very much for a great presentation Sean I'm here in the war room wherever you pitched 20 attackers against 20 defenders battling it out and I actually got someone who

48. 00:39:59

    just played the the new game-mode Med Rambo hey man how did you like it emotion really I think it is much needed and it's gonna implement more things for all combat the most important question first did you win yes easily and what was your favorite part about in you mode I think it's more to do with the ships vehicles and on boots on the ground right all together as one okay did you enjoy the ground combat to ground vehicle combat or the air combat the most surprisingly being a pilot and I don't normally go on the ground I was on the ground all the time and I find it really satisfactory okay very good and do you think it is easy to get in a team or in 2d mode because it's a very new game mode yeah you just saw a video

49. 00:40:47

    and then we threw you into it yeah it's literally just straight through the storminess is exactly the same way is normal right very good and what was the was it easier to defend or was it easier to attack think it was probably easy to defend especially phase one right and how was how was the team communication going I think communication is really good part of them we have to keep a couple of paper quiet all right and like every team the defenders any attackers they do you have specific spawn points they do have specific load outs that do have specific vehicles they can use yeah so there is certain vehicles you can use I mean as a ballista in there which using the in this game mode it's going to be really really good specific loadout so I'm sure one might be able to change out some points and yeah it was just everything combined as one was really good right

50. 00:41:39

    and I heard I heard that you had a that you kill the ballista was the SMG yes I did who killed a blister with an SMG took a while it took a few bit of help from everyone else but I got to kill okay very good thank you very much for the feedback so we're gonna throw it over to the live Q&A now so back to the main stage thank you so much off now just like before oh there's already a list of people there all right well so guys we have about we have about 10 minutes to use questions so I don't know who's first I can't see his first start talking Sean you're breathtaking oh wow and I want to worry too much about a twitch chat either of them for a while and they don't know what they're talking about ever so it's fine I had a chance to play the new game out earlier Ian first of all congratulations is

51. 00:42:27

    absolutely brilliant oh I loved it and it was maybe one of the single most impressive gameplay experiences I've had in star citizen since the hangar was released it awesome thank you you know the importance and potential of game modes like this while the the PU sort of just States how much fun can be had true starts as an experience to be had in these this is a great example of it now arena commander and star Marines sort of languished for a while without much love until very recently is there a plan to update and maintain the content for gameplay modes like this in the future going forward yep and actually the exact same team that worked on theater of war within this combat pillar was the one that brought you the good doctor so actually during this time we just built another map on

52. 00:43:15

    the on on planetside and a lot of the stuff we were doing in theaters we were just like alright well let's try this in another map we built that other map up and again like it's so much of this exists already it doesn't take a ton of doing for us to get it in because we're not spending a ton of resources on and it helps the pu it helps squadron it helps that whole gameplay scenario so let me get back to actually the content on arena commander and star marine because we've got you know some resources on it and they've really been trained up and they all fully understand what's going on within each one we want to make all these updates and apply them to this so things like the lobby rework on all of these are gonna benefit star marine and arena commander and I've got some big plans for a Rena commander that I think you guys will really like I'm

53. 00:44:01

    not ready to talk about them today I'm still pitching them to Chris and going come on come on and I think at some point you'll be quite happy but yes we are we are keeping some focus on that but the really really really important part and it's really important to understand I'm not saying the PU isn't fun at all there is different types of gameplay star citizen it's a big game you've got mining you've got exploration we've got a lot of non-combat kind of activities which is fun it's just hard to coexist that balance that work on it really hone it to the state that it needs to be when it's not the primary focus of the given mode if that makes any sense so now that it is the primary focus for this given team anyways this given pillar I think you'll see some big improvements and I I hope you felt those over the last you know six months to

54. 00:44:49

    nine months as long as we've been working on it thank you and well don't get me Richard why is this relevant to the PU well first off it's the you know all the systems that are in the PU in terms of the animations in terms of getting into an out ships weapon swapping interacting player interaction system all of that stuff underpins this game mode so game mode is the wrapper that's it's on top and everything that is goes into it below it all the foundation is cutting comes from the PU so when we get that in there I mean anything we improve on it in terms of the animation speed it's you know getting in and out of ships in combat it's too slow or weapon swapping in terms of you know interacting just opening doors and things so all of that stuff that's stuff we want to improve and that's the

55. 00:45:37

    foundation of everything across all all gameplay or you know squadron PU star Marine a reading commander you know when you're flying ships all of that we want to make better and this gives us you know she's Sean's turn the petri dish right it gives us that focus that we can really hone down and absolutely improve it gives us that quickly repeatable access all these fundamental game systems without having to fly from all this art or micro tech you know around and to be honest and see it with devs coming up it's like oh when's the play test yeah can I get in on that and yeah like we're like yeah sure yeah jump on in you know so it's it's fantastic to see it's it's you know it's revitalizing for us and it's also something that we can really focus and really see quick turnaround and improvements and get that improvement and that's only gonna

56. 00:46:25

    benefit everyone I see this harkening you back to the original mission statement of arena commander and star marine yeah who's next hi just a quick question what's the plan for aim assist along to the long term plan for a misis you've introduced it I'm curious what you guys think of it and what's your plan for it for the future we've got our opinions on it yeah I could share our opinions I can't share the plans I think I think one thing to talk about in terms of aim assist is you know the reasoning behind why we will require it and you know Sean touched on in terms of the networking we've got some guys working on their upstream downstream and actually making that you know because obviously combat over the network you know it's got to go you know I shoot the gun it's ain't got to go up to the

57. 00:47:11

    server from my client and then let's go from the server to somebody else to the client so we want to make sure that the networking is absolutely on point and then you know I think that's when we can start talking and we have Dana you know do we need it how does that impact for the rest of it so I think that's where we're at with it okay thank you Jeff you who's next so will the theatres of war have a day/night cycle or an environment I wanted it in yes I wanted it one of it we have we have a bug so we and it's a pretty big one and it's actually already fixed and it got fixed for the keynote but I didn't get it fixed for theatres but it's my fault that was branched off whatever it's okay but yes basically that son it was meant

58. 00:47:59

    to move so during the phases and we actually did this back in the well maybe I can't mention I don't know another game anyways we would do this that certain parts in it because again it only happens over 30 minutes like how much you're gonna see the Sun move in 30 minutes probably not a lot um but I can actually encourage that a little bit by just animating it you know the Sun is a real thing in star citizen like that's though it still blows my mind that it's actually there in the disk we can move it around we can also rotate the planet in for once so what I wanted was in Phase one it was actually morning and in phase two was afternoon and then in Phase three the planets looking it's so incredible that yeah everybody's seen the screenshots but it's sunset right and then I wanted that sunset during phase three so to answer your question yes absolutely

59. 00:48:47

    um but it won't be it's not like it's not like a I guess a real day/night sight it is as soon as I moved the Sun yeah it looks like night well the one thing to note as well is that we we've not faked anything you know even you look at the good doctor there's a whole planet there with you know you've got that tiny little map that arena that's you have everything but it's all real it's all like the PU it's all there so you know day/night cycle everything that's in the PU it's totally possible in theater walk yeah that's my question go thank you Sean who is the voice of the mission briefer I actually don't know no no I swear to you I don't know who do you think it is twitch chat was pretty convinced it was you I know what

60. 00:49:34

    kind of I was gonna say it sounds like me but it's not I promise you yeah right not I did for a game though you can look that up that's fun hey yeah just a quick question about like where you've added new smaller zones to fight in will we be getting more close combat weapons oh yeah great with all the answers entrenching tools well we've got a lot of weapons that you know when you look at the breakdown of FPS weapons across you know the whole of the PU you know we've got that standard foundation in terms of that you know the classes you say SMG es snipers the different loadouts and then we've got the more exotic weaponry so you know we just released a salvo last patch and but we've got a long road map of weapons that you know we've because we've populated the kind of like base weapons

61. 00:50:22

    you'd expect from him you know modern military shooter now we're starting to get to the fun stuff so we've got some really cool stuff I can't talk about it today but to answer your question yes the 3-8 we've got some really cool we were in terms of three eight we've got the lightning bolt company that's already on the roadmap and that's gonna bring some really interesting gameplay that ties into the melee system and stun and yeah it's it's good yeah not to be too much on it but you really do need that environment to be able to bring those kind of weapon types online again if you have these really exotic kind of ammo types and you don't rigorously play them you're gonna get some wackiness happening so now that we've got these

62. 00:51:11

    these environments to be able to do this I think yeah you'll see some funds yeah I think we got time for one more question really okay talk my question is can you use these concepts to create events in the PU yes yes absolutely so it's interesting you say it's one of the one of the great conversations I've had a couple times with Paul rondelle and when he first heard about daisies goes oh just cool but just put it into pew right here's what he said he's put it in the PU and I'm kind of with him on that here's the key and actually there's a reddit thread that I saw that was perfect and you know I can't remember exactly what it says but it's basically like within

63. 00:51:58

    the PU it's like wake up go to thing spun ship gets its thing get to the place do the thing get the thing third uh then shoot in there in the war room it's click click click oh uh and you're playing it's basically three clicks and you're in and playing and having that having that combat now if if we could integrate this into the into the world with PU like it's happening on the planet and everything I would do absolutely that but right now it's a standalone within matchmaking for leaderboards and everything like that it's a little bit easier of an experience to give to you rather than putting a bunch of basically putting a lot of stuff in front of you and and the game mode itself I think the one thing to note as well is that obviously PU at the 50 player cap and you know we're pulling all those 40 players into that

64. 00:52:47

    kind of one location and when we starts you know push out further you know in terms of the players online we'll be able to actually you'll be able to experience that and a more regular basis so it's absolutely a learning experience for us in terms of pulling everyone in straight out the gate and it's only going to give us more information and more analytic s-- to basically create those in the PU absolutely right so and like I said in the talk right the eventualities that the pu you know gets like that right with server mashing without server object container streaming we're gonna get there absolutely and it has to be fun when we get there all right thank you so much guys well one point question how did the Ursa have more kills than anything else it's a Buccaneer wins now after a couple of rounds but this but Earth's is a

65. 00:53:35

    really stable firing platform that's one thing the weapons that are on top our infantry shredders right they will just cream infantry if you're using the remote turret in the earth so at and you're you keep an eye on your back in front you'll be fine there's a very powerful spawn point put the ships and the Animus and the railgun destroy it so okay well Sean Richard thank you so much I'm sure we'll do another follow-up on star system live or something sometime before the end of the year thank you guys you [Applause]