Inside Star Citizen: Initiative Indicative

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] those of you playing Star Citizen for the last month have been experiencing a new kind of mission chain for a new kind of global event called the overdrive initiative the five-part Prelude to the return of a newly improved Xeno threat arriving in the upcoming Alpha 323 and so this week we went to the folks who created it to discover their original intentions to hear their reactions to how it's been going and to get a look at what lies ahead for this and additional initiatives leading up to 4.0 and Beyond overdrive initiative Cod named hex

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   penetrator was an attempt for us to uh dip our toes into new events and Quest chains for uh players to progress immediately or over a set amount of time we're a live service uh we need to do things that um increase engagement and get players playing together so the overdrive was our way of experimenting with some stuff that's most common in other MMOs and trying to see if it's a good fit for us it's a five-phase mission that prepares the players for the center thread event and it's one of the first times that we've actually kind of done a longer story line across multiple contracts rather than just here's just one so in this case we try to release the New Missions weekly but depending on feedback and and and information data we either shorten it a bit or take a bit longer and the idea is

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   that we run it for a phase it's somewhat grindable content that gets harder uh with each new one that you do and it's all towards some sort of Greater narrative it's more uh giving the players a deeper understand of the lore of the game and prepare them in advance to the sin of thread at the end of a longtime Mission Quest chain so let's start with phase one the phase one was a data heist where the player had to go down and recover some data off of servers we gave it a bit of a narrative spin where the CDF has detected a lot of their security bunkers going offline or being taken over by senior threat soldiers and they're recruiting any willing and able

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   body and you have to go and infiltrate and get capture the data to figure out what they're doing and keep the server room protected until the hacking is done we balance this for all of the AI to be the tough part of it along with the server so the further up through the mission chain you got you got less time to recover each server and turn the cooling off warning security breach respon and

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   you had more AI coming to attack you one of the main key differences that uh I had the joy of implementing is we took some of the tech from Squadron over where it's not just Xeno threat attacking you but they're also putting a lot of pressure going into the server room you might spot some of the xen ofare people actually rushing down into the server room to try and check all the covers to see where you're at lot of good feedback so far I think phase one went well we did a lot of work on like improving the AI some people getting the intended experience that we have designed where the AI are reactive where everything's working perfectly some people have spotted some of the AI rushing to the server room and they were like I didn't even know that AI can Sprint at me like is that new and other people who are you know reporting the chip didn't insert or the AI aren't as

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   reactive as we'd have liked these are all things that we we take down internally and we look to improve constantly to better the experience in life people seem quite pleased with the new kind of flow of things and and the eye being way more accurate and and scary more John Wick less Couch Potato depend on the number of players it gets really tricky because there is a difficulty cve between the first time you try the mission till the last one the first time is quite easy to get with two four people but since you get to the end it gets really hard to achieve it I've seen people take coming with like 20 to 30 people just to raate that one bunker which is my opinion a bit of Overkill but it's really cool to

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   see so phase two is then a uh Bounty recovery mission you have to go and find so many Xeno thre people the cile force detect that there is a Zeno thread uh Target that has a decryption key that will allow us to discover uh information about the C thread movement but it's encrypted and the CDF has then located some high value targets from Xeno threat which are holding a decryption key so you have to go out there take them out steal their encryption key Target destroyed and then bring it to one of the drop off points kill them steal it and uh deliver it we can get more Intel on uh what's in a threat is planning next Target these missions used to exist way

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   back when in the Pu but they were taken out because they were broken so we made an effort to fix these up and then reuse them in this phase my main mission was to grab the Bounty mission that we already have there and merch it with the delivery one be sure like the decryption key was A pounder and do that merch between both missions into one main mission uh style try the cargo terminal the idea was again was these scale up and get more difficult as you go but uh on release there was a bug which actually made some of them a little bit easier as I have seen people and also had messages saying stuff like hey the Xeno threet overdried initiative Phase 2 is Ace and then day minutes later might have spoken a little bit prematurely and then a massive wall about something that might be bugged so

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   thanks for that Army Esports guy one of the most ridiculous things that I saw on Phase 2 is the uh hover bikes people using three um dragonflies to take down the Hammerhead which is just absolutely ridiculous I I don't know what to say to that well done um we'll look to make the AI respond to dragonflies and actually like kill you because there's no way you should be able to kill a hammerhead in that vehicle congratulations Target is destroyed I have uh contradictory feelings because it's like I put so much effort on this Mission and because of balance issue uh you see this people taking the mission in a different way

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    but in the other side it's fun to see the pro players that we have challenge themselves uh with our missions phase three is Xeno thread being a bit more Brazen they realize that their setup has not been working so well so they're just doing allout incursions they're popping uh up randomly around Stanton uh with a massive combat Fleet the idea in normal MMOs is you turn up you get entered into some sort of quest and it's like this thing's happening engage with it and if you leave the area you sort of the quest is removed the incursion is our first step into trying to do that uh with the current system we have it's a challenging thing that you will need to get collaboration between the different players to be able to tackle down those ships so the idea is you go to a

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    location and there's lots of ships and everyone it's it's it's a server wide event so even if you've not done phase one or phase two of overdrive you can still do phase three it won't skip your progress you'll still have to complete the previous phases but the idea of it's kind of a this is happening right now in world for everybody everybody needs to get here and help us destroy all of these ships what's interesting to me there is that when we played it it was quite difficult and we needed to cooperate and stay coordinated to take down like the big amount of of ships that needs to be killed so as of recording this this isn't happened uh what I expect to happen is that um some lovely players will turn up in a bunch of dragonflies

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    and just make it all look like so thanks in advance how does this make you feel I love dragonflies I got one in phase four we kind of split it into two subsections so phase four will have a section that is a Comm and then there's like a 4.a which is uh karea first phase is three comares back to back are being taken down by Xeno thread operatives and then you have to go in

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    and stop them and in the meantime as you're doing so be ready to face some ships they're guarding it and you're tached to reactivate the com when you do they're throwing everything they got at you and try to re connect to the comay obviously these are crucial to the functioning of the law and Communications around the planet they get taken down from so you need to repair them we've added some fun little surprises and changes to them so it's not going to be your generic comay run that people are used to and once the comar is reactivated the turrets come back online and help you in the fight apart from uh the comai being guarded it's also more focusing on the combat we're throwing a lot of ships on

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    you you as well as the Vanguard ships are hacking into the comay while you're reestablishing the connection so you need to focus your fire on those ships before targeting all of the escort ships Target destroyed so the idea is that some players would be dealing with the outside defenses and other players would be trying to actually get in there and sort of make sure the comay is handled after you've done enough of these it turns out that it was all a red herring and actually they're doing an all out of sold on Korea to wipe the entire criminal database and sew some chaos so they can plan something more Sinister which you're being tasked to all fly to Korea and take out the incursion of soldiers there so phase five is our events

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    refractory period just kind of cool off and the reason we do this is actually a sort of tried and true game design thing where if we keep giving you constant action uh your dop mean levels are Skyhigh and then stuff starts to get really boring as such people turning up in dragonflies to kill a hammerhead clearly not enjoying this normal game so phase five is a delivery mission where you have to go bring supplies to the jump point from Pirate of Stanton cuz you're aware the Xeno fr's about to raid you and you want to make sure you're prepared for that big battle so what we do is we we have little rest bites where the action Peaks down and then we'll peek it back up because phase six is the whole Xena threat event which

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    is a huge battle and it's going to be hopefully very difficult we have a little bit of a rest bike not too much when you do phase five and you have to do these sort of delivery missions there will be AI there to try and stop you but it won't be as big as a battle as the previous phases that you would have seen your parents know you go around shooting people the jump Point itself isn't a whole lot different from any other station aside from that it looks way cooler because you know we're building up welcome to pyro soon people will get to pyro soon Landing complete but it's also just a very very very far way for you to go because you're always supplying to pyro you don't know where you're picking your supplies from so it can either be a very quick jump or it can be very short

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    jump and now for Bas six Xeno fret which you've all played but we've made changes to it we have updated the size of some of the boxes so they're a bit more difficult to handle you have to be more aware some of them will require a dedicated tractor beam there's a new commodity that will help you out within inside phase two of Xeno threat which is the protect and resupply of the javelin and then The Showdown has had a whole rework based on some feedback and some cool thoughts we had from the capture the Idris event that we did I'm not going to spoil any more of that

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    but stay tuned try to board it so the overdrive is our first sort of fora into Quest missions in MMO uh things that are meant to be repeatable grindable meant to encourage the community spirit and people to play together this is the kind of direction we were starting to head in when it comes to these Quest chain missions this won't be the last one you see so what we're hoping to achieve with overdrive initiative is more Quest change and Mission linking more in line with other MMOs that are on the market which for a more enjoyable play experience instead of more disconnected modules and give a bit of a narrative flow to it as well to become more a game one thing I'd like people to appreciate is that when Chris himself

19. 00:14:32

    and Rich asked us during some of the reviews as we were making the missions they asked how the balancing went and if it was difficult and both Elliot and I response were well for us it's really really difficult but we are kind of terrible Pilots anyway I saw players in the forums saying that they have now motivation to every Friday go back to the game and tackle the new mission for the development side what we're trying to achieve with this is just uh new ways of making missions make gameplay for players uh more fun we're constantly evolving in making the game better uh seeing feedback we have our own internal thoughts of how we think it well we've done our postmortem and we know how we're going to improve it for the next one so from here on out it's only going to get better and better and we're going to see more and more Quest chains come

20. 00:15:24

    in so what did we learned this week well we learned that the overdrive initiative has been a fun new addition to the persistent universe that touches an entire host of gameplay features for Star Citizen that if there's one thing you can always count on it's that the star citizens themselves are going to find emergent solutions to the challenges at hand and that while this may be just the first gated Mission chain for the persistent Universe it definitely won't be the last as it sets the stage for a proper welcome to pyro during our journey to 4.0 this summer and if you haven't played the overdrive initiative yet there's still time to play all five phases is starting tomorrow and running until the release of alpha 323 for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next [Laughter]

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    week you have to explain X penetrat um so hex penetrator is an anagram for pre Xeno threat but we know that people Daya mine are source code so I just came up with a random anagram that was very inappropriate um I didn't think it was going to last and then unfortunately once it was there people all started referring in documentations like oh so the hex penetrator missions This and like this like this and that and I was like well I can't change it now it's going to confuse everybody so my lasting Legacy in this company is a mission called hex penetrator how does Fitz Roberts feel about this he laughed then told us to change it and we forgot oops sorry Chris