Inside Star Citizen: Masters and Blasters

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] while Star Citizen aims to offer a first-person Universe of possibilities at the center of it has always been you and your spaceship and over the years of development testing feedback and iteration there have been many changes to the combat and traversal experience and in the upcoming Alpha 323 the biggest and most anticipated of those makes their presence known with the arrival of Master modes and with that comes additional changes to Precision targeting weapon balance gimbal use and more what are Masters so Master birs is a way for us to really kind of capitalize on what the ships are basically Master modes are uh New Game feature that uh change all the

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   combat experience inside the inside game so you have a mode for fighting in and a mode for flying from place to place then a rework of the flight and combat system to essentially try and solve a lot of the problems that players have had with the fight experience you can decide if you want to be in full combat mode or you're you're just in transit or you want to get out of a situation as quick as possible Che fire Master mode is the thing that makes SHP combat exciting and making sure that the ships that you have in the game perform in the roles that we have envisioned for them since uh citizen con we've been bringing

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   Master modes into Arena Commander progress has been quite good showing off the new modes and letting people get their hands on it collecting the feedback seeing how players respond to that online by monitoring how players react on social channels uh we've been testing internally a lot it's a very limited selection of ships but even so people seem to like it so we've taken that feedback and carried on making progress and adapting it all to their the rest of the ships as well we've been watching how players play the game monitoring analytics putting it all together and sharing it with the devs who needs to see it how the hell do you go about converting 200 chips to unfortunately there's only really one way to do it and uh that's to not get too intimidated by the number team effort were disc cracking for it really the difficult part of course especially

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   as a designer is try to uh understand the new uh dynamics that uh the the game system creates especially in an environment like the puu and then try to being able to deliver the proper game experience for every ship with a you know a different tuning and that's quite difficult but that's also what uh is really interesting about bringing up a new feature so we're moving each individual ship into an archetype and we're going to rebalance that ship to the archetype as a starting point and then basically once that's complete we're going to add the individuality into each ship each ship has been given full refresh and we've we've looked at every ship in the game assigned them a base archetype so that you know what you're getting into from from the get-go All Ships based on how big they

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   are and what kind of purpose they serve we'll get an Archy type assigned to them a typical Arch type is a snap fighter very very small very agile but it cannot dish out a lot of damage and can also not receive a lot of damage before it pops light fighter very maneuverable decent weapon load out and it's basically there for agility engagement medium fighter pretty agile for its size but it has a lot more offensive Firepower Target destroyed heavy fighter they don't maneuver well but when you happen to be at the front of them you can die very very fast now these are basic tuning Arch types that we have for our fighter ships class and All Ships in

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   that size will be assigned to one of these things however based on the ship and what the purpose of the ship is we have variations of that for example we have the Interceptor variant of these tunings this is a tuning variation that can apply to any of these Arch types an Interceptor tuning for a ship means that this ship exchanges the agility um with agility we mean the rotation rate and the lateral strafing erations simply for Speed so they will not be able to turn their velocity Vector much they will not be able to rotate much but they will be very very fast just going forward racing ships are like the base Arch type that almost all Racers ended up with so far are interceptors because Racers prefer speed over everything else

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   but you want to pick the right Razer for the right track the other end of the range are our let's call them fighter bomber tunings that means we trade agility for simply durability on top of the fighters we just keep going with this we have gunboats for ships that are constellation sized we have Corvettes for something like a a hammerhead right so our our Hammerhead is for us is our anti fighter Corvette frigs are basically the biggest STP that players can control in the universe right now so we're talking idas we're talking 890 jumps I know that players can control the eras but we're talking ships like the Carrick those are frigs really really big ones but also they will have variations in their tuning based on the brand and what the purpose of the ship is so these are very

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   big changes that are coming but the main takeaway is that these archetypes are just reference frames for the type of tune you want to give a ship it does not mean that every ship that you have in the RSE will fit a specific archetype there are ships which are in between for example the Zab is it a medium or light fighter it's somewhere in between the cutless has not the durability of a heavy fighter has however the turret of a heavy fighter so it's somewhere in between so there are ships which do not fit exactly into these frames but this is the beauty of it because these ships we can make them fit anywhere where they want we just need to make sure that the balance between them is right not everything fits in a box and it would be very boring if it did position targeting is a new way of

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   aiming at specific parts of a ship you get this Zoom Dame picture of your Target and it allows you to paint over specific components of the ship so if you want to take out the frosters you simply aim towards the frosters and your gimbals will make sure the bullet lands exactly where you're aiming it's a big rework of the entire Target system with the goal to make it not only fit Master modes but also fit the problems we've had with Target in the past which is the control of the weapons and the accuracy since Master mode is bringing everything closer together and master modes is slowing everything down we need to make sure that the weapon speeds are adjusted as well it will reduce your fire rate it will therefore decrease the spread and allow you to be more precise where you hit good examples for that is if you want to fire at a ship from very far

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    away and you want to make sure that your shots hit an even better example is if you have a light fighter and you want to help take down a larger ship you will not be able to take down the ship by yourself but you can help other players by crippling the turrets with Ballistic cannons for example and other subsystems so it allows you to see better what you're currently targeting what we're doing is we're bringing all weapons into free archetypes we have the anti-fighter weapons that have higher fire rate and a higher velocity that allows you to hit targets such as a hord of Gladius and then we have the antimaterial weapons antimaterial weapons is the one you bring out when you and your friends want to hunt a hammerhead it's got the highest damage of all the weapons you want to deal as much damage as possible but the target

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    is big and it moves slow so you don't have to worry as much about actually hitting the target then we have unspecialized weapons which are in between the anti- fighters and the anti materials so this is better because gives you a lot of options how you want to attack the target you can just you know spray and pray that your shots are going to hit or you can go into the Precision targeting mode see all the sub targets that you have available and then pick out which of these sub targets you actually want to attack next to basically seeing what you're actually hitting you also just get the stunning view of that big ship that you're targeting right like it's it's it's a full screen zoomed in view on your target you can see it in all its like Glory you can see all the parts you can shoot off I think it's great we've been really happy with the results so far

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    we've seen a massive difference in the way combat works and what the play players are actually doing within combat and that's been really good to see there's still some small things we're working on right now to kind of solve but we're really happy you know we're kind of most of the way there at the moment the next big thing that the new aiming system has is the removal of the so-called n minus one system that means that when you have a gimbal attached to a ship the weapon attached to the gimbal goes down one size at this point in time after like lots of testing we're pretty confident that we don't want the system anymore so in the future if you have a size three gimbal on your ship it will carry a size three weapon but we're actually going further with this because from 3 two three onwards you will not be able to mount fixed guns on your ship anymore in addition to that all the

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    turrets however will get gimbals so this is a requirement because of precision aiming mode because the Precision aiming mode we also want to be able to use on turrets and we need a way to make the bullets fly where we want them to fly without cheating so this means all turrets they will get symbols on their guns so they can properly lead but to still keep turrets more powerful in terms of their weapon employing capabilities and also because turrets cannot just you know jump on the way out of the way the auto gimble mode will be something that's exclusively available to turrets so Pilots will still be able to manually gimbal their weapons with you know either tying it to their controls or by looking around but only turrets will be able to use the auto gimbal system because there's like turrets are supposed to be very very dangerous and so players just have the choice how to apply the damage the best however because Alo gimblin is also in

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    in assisted mode it will come with a reduction in fire rate just to keep things things fair so the uh feedback it has been going pretty well we've been really happy with working with the community who's been playing this to kind of fine-tune it and make the changes needed and we have made a lot of changes based upon these feedback most of the feedback that we been getting has been pretty positive around Squadron battle where there's some pretty good group combat Dynamics players are reporting positively on there's some really cool gameplay emerging such as how players evade now is quite different you have to drop chaff break your target lock break away like find your opportunity to break away from your your pursuing ship what we can see at the moment is that players are very happy with Squadron battles

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    players are not very happy with the one V1 so this is more an era where we have to improve of course there are some very detailed feedbacks about some tuning choices how we should make some type of archetypes better rather than not but in general it's going to be mostly appreciated the players are really enjoying the different roles that we've got the interceptors are quite successful there's been some pretty good feedback around the buccaneer we've probably still got a little bit of work to do around the light fighter class and 1 V ones but other than that it's been pretty good it means you can you can stay closer you are much more in control of staying in a closer formation with with other people that you're playing with when we do our our regular play tests we can actually fly in our our own version of a formation and we can track targets without being several kilometers off each other your form our version of a formation is generally if we can see

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    each other still and and we're not accidentally shooting each other I I'd consider that a good formation sure that's I'm not sure that's a text definition of formation I can see you and not crash indeed that's not a formation judh it's it's it's a win if at least two of the four of us managed to make it away in one piece without any Friendly Fire incidents so the thing that excites me the most about master modes is if you just watch the footage of players dog fighting at the minute you can really see how close all of those ships are and it just feels so much more cinematic it's really about the foundation of the of the whole flight experience moving forward because I fully understand that

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    this isn't a game just about combat we want to communicate that players who want to do combat they'll go into the master mode for combat but if you want to go from here to be you've now got a MD where you can do that without being harassed as much so that's going to be a big plus for the game it's leveling the playing field a little bit more now as we slowly breathe more life into each one of these ships you're going to know the ship at the back of your hand people seem to like how much more frantic and intimate all the fights are in the arena Commander testing that we've done so far and I'm looking forward to hearing Sports once we've rolled it out across all the ships not everything that is in 323 you can see already in the master mode AC mode it's um there's a lot more stuff coming especially to weapon treatment how we use capacitors Etc but overall based on the feedback that we got so far and also from the increaseing

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    player numbers we're pretty confident that we're on the right track so Master modes and the Gunnery system and the whole combat experience is a huge undertaking for us and we cannot do it without you so we want you to play it we need your your feedback be honest tell us what you don't like please also tell tell us what you like um so we can make all this space combat game great together so what we learned this week well we learned that with Master modes comes a rebalancing of ship performance into dedicated archetypes that these archetypes are simply where tunings start and will be grown from to ensure that each Shi and vehicle provides a unique experience going forward and that Precision Target weapon Gimbal and balance changes all combined with Master modes to provide a more involved

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    visceral combat experience for Pilots when they arrive in the upcoming Alpha 323 for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week nothing nope