Star Citizen Live Q&A: Alpha 3.23 and Beyond

3 May 202401:05:211,720 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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we were you were taunting everybody at the cam to try and find you yeah and they went we're going to kill this guy and we went kill him yeah yeah hiding theyd body and then we made a big Arrow there was the two paths we made an arrow out of the corpses that said this way and then his Ghost came to haunt you when you tried to get out at the end but we've never actually been we never finished that mission you well more more or less you did cuz you guys K had a confrontation with the final boss he had his is he the one that disappeared transitional moment he he took the guy right Paladin yeah yeah so when are we going to play again soon we can find you know yeah hi everybody Welcome to what show is this Star Citizen live Alpha 323 and Beyond I'm your host Jared Huckabee
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if you've never seen star seon live before it's where we take about an hour at the end of our week uh to ask Rick our dungeon master when our next game is Rick when's our next game um sometime after 323 okay fair enough fair enough uh joining us on the show this week are three members of the uh quite frankly the Squadron 42 and the Star Citizen uh development leadership team uh so let's take a few moments get to know them before we jump into your questions um rich just because you're sitting closest to me and you want to start with you tell everybody who you are what you do for Star Citizen so I am Richard Tyra and I am the senior game director for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 and that means I Work Direct directly with Chris on the vision for both games and then I work directly with the teams
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on executing that Vision okay that's pretty much it okay Rick um I'm the design director for cig which means I handle all the design departments uh for both SE and s42 which is level design and Mission design and content design and Tech design and system design and economy design and uiux design and so yep so yeah work with my assistant directors to make sure that everything's getting done and it's all on the same page as rich is leading and this is your very first any sort of video appearance for clad Imperium game yeah my debut and how long have you been here like five years so you've been here five years and managed to avoid it that long yeah how how' we get you this time um I said yes fair enough sometimes that's all it
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takes uh and JJ tell everybody who you are and what you do uh so I'm uh the assistant design director here um so I cover some of the teams that Rick mentioned so I more directly focus on things like the mission design uh system design technical design and economy design uh so I kind of work on the creative side with those teams and obviously push and help those guys deliver what they need to deliver for the releases so in the last letter for the chairman that's where where it was revealed that that that you've moved over from from Squadron uh well that's not technically you didn't move over you you you you expanded you you you consumed you basically spread out across two games you know bringing Rick and JJ with you uh you were originally back with the with the old uh uh action actor feature team you went over to Squadron
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LED Squadron came got got it to feature uh complete came you know back here the question I want to ask how the hell do you run two games I don't go home very often so that's one uh I mean ultimately have set up hierarchies on both of those teams um to be able to work independently of me when I'm not there um but I spend a lot of time reviewing both sides uh from Squadron and Star Citizen and it if they were very different games it would be a very different beast but obviously they they share the same features they share the same um aspects that we want to get from the games they're obviously different
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content but you know I have to work with Rick and JJ who you know we've all three of us were on the core gameplay pillar and then we did Squadron and then we've done SE so we've kind of all been all together so it's just you have to build up the teams to understand that they can you know give them the authority to be able to deliver on decisions and make those decisions that and you trust those people to do that and then you know ultimately I'll be reviewing the game and give my feedback but yeah it's it's a lot of meetings and a lot of discussion but yeah it's a lot very enjoyable we we touched this a little bit when in your you know who are you and what do you do but I'm I'm curious about the division of labor between between the three of you I think Rick you obviously feature more on the technical aspects than than but but but
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but but tell me how this trium rant works are you are you just const you constantly move together as a pack of three do you divide and conquer how's this work bit of both yeah like whenever there's a new design we all come together and make sure that we're all on the same page and then we kind of split off and divide it up amongst ourselves to get it done yeah I mean the biggest thing is that it's something I always been very cognizant of the fact that I've always wanted to make sure that we're a trio of Partnerships to make sure that we're all on the same page because we've got such a large team we want to make sure that we're giving consistent messaging to the team that we're working on so any new designs or anything new or any new cont content will'll all always have an initial brief amongst ourselves before it propagates wide but then as Rick says
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and you know we definitely do divide and conquer so you know JJ tends to look at like the events and work with Elliot on Mission feature team and system design Rick is obviously more technical from a technical background is working with Joe is on the tech design team and and then obviously myself is more broad but we definitely divide and conquer to help but we always always it's it's never isolation we always come back and go back and spread out again and come back and spread out again so and we've all got different expertises in different areas so it it works well as a as a team yeah I mean we're all sat right next to each other it's not a day go by we're not talking to each other so cool uh so with that let's jump into some of the alpha 323 questions um obviously we post as we normally do we put it a thread up
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on Spectrum which is our bespoke communication platform on robertsspaceindustries.com uh we allowed our our citizens to submit questions and vote on which ones they wanted to see answered most um as we usually do we've sometimes smashed some of those questions and rewarded them a little bit but there's a bunch in here uh the first question right off the bat I want to ask uh is Alpha 323 coming out today no okay um next question next question uh how did we end up with fauna like the copian and Merck instead of anything we've previously seen before like the space cow or the storm wall I'll take that one uh so we've got space cow and space whale you know aside from the cool names and also got you know space worm you know all these really cool creatures that we're working on in the background but each of those have
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like their own unique challenges that are going to take a little bit longer to to get out so with the copon we picked creature that we knew was going to fit some of the early missions that we wanted to do a ground Predator landbased that we could get in the game within the time frame that we had had um and then the other thing cool thing is the Maro is our first boid and our boid technology is something that allow us to scale the number of creatures that we can have on planets in the future so it's exciting to test that uh feature early and we've been talking about boids and in around the verse episode about Boyds was one of the very first things I ever you know produced here there was they look like the the flood in uh in Halo when we when we first showed that one so this boy technology has been a long time coming yeah and just to summarize like what a void is if
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you're not aware just in very simple terms it's just basically a lightweight AI yeah so you have like a human AI which is a fully fledged combat with what people have been familiar with in 322 and previous a copion is the equivalent of a human AI in terms of its complexity so in terms of its animation sounds a void is kind of just a lighter version of that so obviously a bird it doesn't have all of the same param so a fish for example would be a boid and things so anything that's got like flocking and you want to have as a group and it's fluing together so it's just a simpler implementation so as Rick says they were two um creatures that allowed us to hit the things that we wanted to hit um it doesn't mean that we're not going to push the Quasi Grazer and you know the N the space wh further down the line or you know into the game at some
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point but um yeah these two were good ones that we needed to get out way from a technology standpoint and uh for those wanting to learn more uh next week's ISC is dedicated entirely to the creation of the copon and the and the American stuff so we check that out on ISC next week um next question uh economy updates have been few and far between for the persistent Universe um it's it's I think a lot of the the the easy criticism of of stuff in the Pu has been the the the economy um we know that there are some economy updates coming in 323 but we haven't really fully discussed those so so what can you tell us about what's happening 323 so we wanted to basically review a bunch of our major items in the game so looking
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at like armor weapons ships and basically start to apply more logic to why they are being priced that way so just we started with weapons and armor basically so we started looking at things like applying value to different aspects of them so like looking at pure size and just going you know associating a rough material cost with a a pistol is obviously going to be less material cost than a bigger rifle or a shotgun or something that's a bit chunkier so obviously there is a a weight of value associated with that then also looking at things like manufacturers because manufacturers have a some of them have like a manufacturing quality associated with them or a Prestige looking at the different Tech levels we've got some kind of very basic ballistic weapons and we've got some very Advanced like you know electron or like laser weapons that are going to be you know a manufacturing
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cost associated with them so people can go in and go to the shop and go like look at the different weapons against each other and go oh okay this makes logical sense cuz this is rarer or this looks more expensive and feels more expensive to use and we did the same thing with the armor too then we started looking at some of the bigger ticket items like our ships so again we played applied very very similar logic to those where we kind of go like okay let's look at the size let's look at how they're being used and they used to make money because if you think about a commercial vehicle in the real world typically they cost more because you're going to be able to make money with them and then looking at manufacturers quality is it a luxury ship that then applies more value to as well and then obviously weighing that against the actual prices that you know be paying real money for as well and looking that and making sure there's an association with them there as well and that also kind of allowed us to like look at a lot of the outliers that we
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had previously and kind of go oh okay some of them are sitting way far above everything else for some reason and some of them are sitting way far below everything else so it's kind of just been a way of leveling it out applying logic to a lot of that stuff as well um there was a couple of other things that we looked at too so we also looked at balancing Salvage out because I think that had not had a thorough pass before and we kind of saw people just getting Millions upon millions of UE through salvaging so we felt that that was basically flooding our economy with Alpha UE so that was causing problems with people you know the value of things just go down so much and it becomes meaningless when you can kind of exploit a system like that so we've applied some more logic to that and brought the kind of like gains down on what you can get from Salvage and then we also took a look at um balancing Mission rewards so instead of you everyone having to go to
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make money you have to default Salvage we're now looking at the effort versus reward algorithm that we're applying to our missions and basically going like hey how much effort how much risk how difficult are they you you know what are you putting into these missions are they is it super difficult okay you should earn more money from it is it long you should probably earn for money money from it as well so just overall things should kind of feel a bit more as you would expect and that's this isn't the end of that tuning in 323 that this is the next this is just the first pass well the next pass anyway yeah I mean on that note for economy I think I touched on this in the letter for the chairman I think a lot of these systems have been around for a long time like claim timers Insurance um obviously the economy
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values for Missions and they've kind of were balanced correctly as and when they were done a long time ago you know the game's been out for a long time um but we need to start bringing these systems a bit of more cohesion of how they talk to each other so going forward you know I think the players and the community should expect to see I think some significant changes um to those systems as we move towards trying to create a more cohesive experience in the game because I think right now if you know how to play if you just take 322 as a good example if you really know where to go like JJ said you can just make millions upon millions and once you you've got so much money and everything is linked to progression with money um you can just buy your way and that's it
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right you lose the desire or the motivation to keep playing the game so I think we want to we want to build that motivation in that you know okay I'll go and do this because I enjoy doing Salvage and it gives me this reward so uh and then obviously the other side of the coin it's we don't really have a lot of money sinks in the game right now so in terms of insurance I things you know you just claim back your ship your ship blows up you just claim it back immediately um you die you know we've talked about death of a space man for a long time but U yeah we want to start bringing all these systems in in place and I think going forward we will have some more more changes on that front so and of course uh we we we'll we'll have we have a a story next quarter uh with Ben Wah and Andre and stuff about the future development of quantum and how that'll that'll play into that so we don't need to Touch Too Much on that now
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just for the folks who are in chat asking um all that te's up probably one of the most just G to say one thing though I hate the name Quantum because we've already got Quantum in the game so I'm definitely going to be pushing to change that name hey re Rebrand man Rebrand so all of that tees up uh the question that has frankly has dominated the chat since we first uh uh started talking about this five minutes ago now will there be a wipe in 323 uh yes so we're going to look to wipe Alpha U and rentals I believe and that's purely because if we don't all of the analytics that we get back from people playing the game are going to be basically false reports because people are going to be using all of their banked cash and it'll just be like oh people are just buying all of these now more expensive items for example and that then tells us like oh do we need to make these more expensive no not really
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it's just that people are using giant cash reserves that they've been keeping for a long time so while it might be disappointing for some people to lose the money they' built up it really really helps us in informing us like have we made you know have we pushed the economy in the right direction so we can keep making iterations and informed decisions going forward yeah and that's a good thing to note on as well you know we're a live game you know just because we changed the prices in 323 doesn't mean we'll then change them in 4.0 we want to put them in this is our first rebalance or Rel leveler we'll evaluate and that's why we want to do the why we'll evaluate okay look at the data and then base our next decisions on that data um one of the other things that's been on the the public road map for 323 has been the the the reputation
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hostility system yeah uh changes uh what should players expect in terms of game playay with the reputation hostility feature card committed to the 323 road map thus far in the testing cycle we have not seen any evidence of any changes in features or gameplay with regards to this card yeah rep based itility wasn't really for 323 so much as future um it's setting us up for success in 4.0 and Ciro and the the systems that we want to do there um like the the system itself is cool it allows allows us to set up factions that you can gain rep with and they become your allies and help you out and become come to your Aid when you're being attacked and vice versa you know you can piss somebody off and you know that they they're mad at you and they'll attack you on site um you're not going to see a lot of that
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implemented in Stanton right now but we wanted to get it in so we could start St uh testing it in Stanton ahead of pyro um the first place we want to do it is in uh grimhex we're planning to set that up as a neutral zone in the near future um so you'll see more of it then and we do have some uh settlements I believe with the duster faction in 323 where if you do encounter them um the AI are neutral to you so if you go and you see the and you might have a delivery mission to that settlement um they won't attack you unless you attack them so you would there is there is some small instance where like Rick says we're testing out that feature and then it's really more of laying the groundwork for future we just need more feedback on that feature and as we continue to roll it out okay uh so this
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next question uh comes with a very specific set of instructions let me make sure I get this right this is for JJ questions for JJ um Tom follow me over to JJ sniper glint WTF man um so sniper glint was basically our first kind of proper for into giving you some good feedback against someone who's using a sniper rifle so this was actually a low very low development uh cost uh feature that we wanted to basically try out uh and it's not to say that there are other things we can't do later that you know might be you know better for the game that we're heading towards eventually but this was something we wanted to try out purely because when we start adding more
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and more systems into the game that kind of lead us to this uh death of a Spaceman kind of future which for people who don't know it's basically there's going to be more punishment through death death is going to be you it's going to be a very big deal and if you have a moment where you die and you there was nothing you could have done about it because you had no idea about what happened that's where it becomes a big frustration if I come and kill you with a shotgun you probably could have heard me coming and you could have prepared for it and shot me you see me as part of that process whereas when we start looking at you know shooting people over Mass distances that we have on our giant planets if you you know dial in your scope right you can shoot someone from like over a kilometer away and you're not going to be able to see them so it was our first attempt at looking at what kind of feedback we can start providing people to kind of cut through some of that frustration now there are other things that we can do in
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the future that I think support that as well so like looking at you know bigger muzzle flashes that you can see at longer distances um and like improving our whisby system and hit reaction and feedback and things like that um those are things we can work on but they take a lot more time to kind of get right so ultimately we want to play and with the sniper glint system see what people think see what we think dial it in more if we like it or you know if we' decide it's not you know the ideal solution that we eventually want we can always turn it off it was very low cost like I say so ultimately it's good that people are giving us feedback because it's going to inform us on how we want to move forward I think I think you make a good point there that this is Alpha this this is we test ideas you know not not not not every you know you can sit there we can debate it
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I'm sure internally there were people that said no I hate this and some certain internally some people said no this is going to be great I hate snipers you know I'm going to love this stuff because we don't always have to make that determination internally we can put it in especially if it's a low effort thing like this and find out for certain Y and sniper's a great example of that so keep your feedback coming uh you can uh direct it directly to JJ Johnny cus uh Manchester goodard uh just you have to spell my name right though you have to spell his name right though the front desk will not deliver it to you if you don't spell his name and I'm not going to tell you how to spell it so that's that's the challenge rating for you um all right um Rick this might be a question for you why can we scan other players ships but not our own well ship scanning is meant to detecting what's
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outside of your ship right it's a exploitation of the world around you um so that's just kind of inherit in the nature of it um I if I understand the question correctly it's like I want to be able to detect stuff on my ship which is going to be handled by FBS scanning which is one of the features that we're working on moving over from uh Squadron to se right now okay fair enough that see that seems like that was what they were talking about so um okay um Rich we we've talked about master modes quite a bit we we it's got It's had two citizen con presentations it's had an is it's had at least three's since we first started talking about it two years ago at the last at two citizen G ago rather sure technically three citizen G ago now um we haven't talked about where it came
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from like like what was the what was the what was the problem and and why was this deemed the solution well first off I think the fact that we're working on game the issue is that we should always be looking at even if we've got a system that's out in the wild we should be looking at evaluating it and does it it does it deliver the game play that that we want that the community wants that Chris wants uh so when we looked at the combat um as a whole you know and we're talking a long time ago now um I mean probably I was probably still on Star sitting there was probably pres Squadron when it we started talking about master modes um a lot of the combat that we saw across the broad spectrum of the community not just
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the new players and not just the very well experienced players but the broad spectrum um basically became jousting and you know we felt that we could do better than that now I know that there's a lot of um discussion points around Master modes where we're talking about lowering the ceiling cap and you know that was never the the intention that's not our inspiration our Our intention really is to try and create a system that is fair to use for all players that allows players to come on and still feel like they can engage in the game and compete but still reward the very best best pilots and you know we Master modes is you know the iteration that it is today it's been
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through like probably 20 25 iterations of different tweaks and changes and we want to try this and we want to try this and even the iteration that we're going live with in 323 will just that's not the end that's just the beginning of that process we will put it live we will I mean I already had a meeting literally this morning to discuss with yogi about um spool times between SCM and nav or what are we going to do with snub Fighters that don't have a Quantum Drive like do they have a nav mode and I was like well yeah they should do so there is the expectation is that Master mode mod came from the goal to try and improve the overall flight experience for both combat and non-combat in the game so
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that you can feel like if you want to be a space trucker you know that's cool you can switch in uh or if you want to be uh you know a Trader or a miner or combat so it's about taking something and making it accessible to new players it that it's uh has a lot of depth for existing players to then take you know advantage of and you know really that that was the inspiration it's there's there's never really a moment in time where you start going this is a problem we just need to fix it it's more about you you evaluate these systems over a longer period of time and then start to think of solutions about how to improve it and then those Solutions grow and grow into a new system that you go oh this this could be uh a solution that we could do and you know with Master modes I think we did you know we've you you
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mentioned all the times that we've talked about it but we've also done several tests with the community before we've even got here outside of just the 323 avarti and PTU we did you know we we tested it in Arena Commander we tested it with players a long time ago so this is the long uh you know this is the result of a lot of effort and work by a lot of people to get it where we are now and I think it's I I believe in it um and now it's about getting it to the broader audience and then we evaluate that feedback and we tweak it and tune it and get it to where we think it could be because I think you always have to change the foundation before you change you know you can start you either have to do Revolution or Evolution yeah and I think with the previous system the evolution wasn't going to give us what we wanted from the end result so we had
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to go slightly back a bit to then go forward you touched on something I think we're going to touch on a couple a couple times before we're done today this this idea of going to a wider audience to get a broader test going it I think it's sometimes easy to forget that the live environment is still our Alpha test environment and we get a concurrency there that we don't get in evocati we don't get in PTU even when we open it up wide you know even a fully wide open PTU doesn't get the absolutely amount of stress that the live testing environment is so sometimes it's like you can only there's this idea and again we'll talk about it when we get there that you just let a thing cook just let a thing cook you just let a thing cook you just let a thing cook it's like our biggest stove our biggest oven in this in this uh analogy here is the live
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Alpha environment that's where we can put the most stress on a feature that's where we can find the causes of issues that's where we can best find the solutions of issues are there so it's just it's import so that's our next that's the next step of Master mode development it's been through all these internal phases it's been through evocati it's been through PTU now it's time to go to live yeah and tested there to be honest I've been playing Master modes for a long time in Squadron um you know getting a feel for it does it feel right and you know sometimes you have to sit with a feature and play it and get the everyday so now you can't just take half an hour and go oh yeah it's approved like you have to play the game and and play it for yourself in all the different scenarios and then make a judgment and then you know get that feedback and then we can we can tweak and improve I think the interesting thing is as well because it's been going
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for quite a while and obviously we've been playing it internally a lot we've had a lot of very very passionate pilots stets and Pilots at the company who at first were you know they felt adverse to the change like some people some people in the community are as well but it's been amazing seeing them playing with it spending time with it and coming around on it and going actually this is really really fun like I I was you know I prefer this now so it's been very cool seeing that process happen internally and it's going to be interesting to see how it develops in in SC as well um while we're still talking about 323 here um the epu currently has uh uh issues with input delay desync glag whatever you want to call it performance issues uh what's the deal there what's causing it and what's what are we doing to fix it
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so we're doing well first off we're evaluating all the analytics that we get back because you know there's one thing that we get obviously the issue Council reports that you know are very very useful for us that people go out their way and spend their free time and testing the game and working on on the game for us and and giving us the issue Council reports that we we take in we also obviously have our own internal teams evaluating that and the interaction lag itself seems to be linked to um the network side of things where kind of the network is getting throttled um and it's essentially related to the RL and the server um separation so it's something that obviously we haven't experienced before in 322 um but it's been very tricky to try and find out what is causing that problem and one of the
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biggest things that we've seen that exacerbates that problem is when the server performance dips below a certain value um that's when it starts to back up so we've there wasn't really any Silver Bullet there never really is when it gets to things like performance it's always a death by th000 Cuts uh so when we're looking at the interaction lag we've had pretty much a lot of our top Engineers from both the core Technology Group and the gameplay side looking at performance improvements that we can do um to basically mitigate the interaction lag as much as possible and I think the last EP or the PTU that we went to previously it was very minimal I think we we because obviously we we catch all these reports we have debugging in there that captures all of
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the uh the data and that debug actually perform creates performance problems for us cuz cuz it slows down the performance that we don't get that debug in live um so it's we think we've got it and we think we've done enough to make it so that we're not seeing it or we're not seeing it anymore in the P2 reports um there is obviously still certain bugs and things that might appear as interaction lag and are not interaction lag so and and when you come to Performance it's never as black it's never black and white it's there's always unless you find something that's like oh this this ship is inter colliding with a wall and it's causing massive amounts of stalling but with the interaction lag it was just one of those ones that is was very difficult to track down and you know cross fingers we think we've U we have
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done that but you know Only Time Will um while we're on this topic let's let's let's s another question that follows up on it here uh so at the time this question was sent the PTU was in a very rough state some still some are you look online folks are arguing about this what what state it's in right now uh this question is simply How concerned are you with avoiding another 318 well I don't want another 318 if that's the the short question um the long the long answer I think you have to look it's two you have to look at it from two different points of view or not really two different points of view you have to evaluate two points of view before we decide whether a pat should go live I I think the first point of view is the
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fact that you want to evaluate the gameplay experience have we made the game play better are the new features in there polished and working as intended uh the existing features working you know have we lost anything that from a previous patch cycle that um we want to make sure is fully functioning and you know that is a full whole team wide effort that's not an individual person that is from uh all the reports that we get we then obviously canvas live Q a uh we have the player experience team we have publishing we have the development leadership uh you know we're all playing it ourselves getting a good sense of is the quality of the game what we want it to be in terms of the gameplay experience terms of the features when it works well then the other side of the coin where it becomes trickier is
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because we're an alpha product we are releasing foundational technology into the game into the wide audience so for example this one is the replication layer and the server split which is the precursor to server matching so 318 was another foundational moment where we did persistent entity streaming I don't believe it will be the same as 318 personally but I'll soon find out um but when it comes to that foundational technology similar to what I was discussing in terms of the interaction lag when you put it to artti and then EP and PTU you we're only getting a fraction of concurrency compared to live so when we're looking at some of the issues that are performance related and our stability related we might think
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we're golden and then you go to a live audience and something else pops up that we like oh this is a problem we need to hot fix it we need to to evaluate it so we could spend the next two years just trying to get it to be absolutely bug free and then go live and it still have issues because it's such foundational technology it's not like we've bought something off the shelf and gone slot it in it works as intended great so we're proving something out that's never been done before or at least we've never done it before um so we need to make sure that when we're testing this that we test it as broad as possible and then that is the balance between okay is the game play what we want it to be but we might be introducing something that is potentially incre you know reducing
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stability or reducing performance and when you look at reducing performance that then has an impact on all the other things so interaction lag for example people going up to doors and going the doors are broken well actually no that's just interaction lag your interactions being backed up from or the elevators are not working or I'm stuck in my cockpit seat and I can't get out it's not because your cockpit seat's broken is because the interaction was being absorbed and was being queued in this giant queue trying to get through so ultimately you have to look at all of these different parameters from the performance to stability the new technology that we need to test um and all of the gameplay side of things and you have to make a judgment call about you know whether it's beneficial for us to put it into the live audience so that
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we can get as much feedback as possible to then continue to work on it to continue along the development pipeline towards where we ultimately want to be which is we've released server meshing we can have servers that have got hundreds and thousands of players playing all playing all together so it's never as black and white is just it's good enough let's ship it it's always about well we go okay are we going to accept that we might run into more issues than we'd like to but we need to do this to test this thing and when we say testing a specific thing um it's also not about saying oh well this issue was live on PTU sometimes that issue is live on PTU but we don't know where it's coming from right because it's so complex that's the big one and then it's like well we can keep putting speculative
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fixes in and speculative fix and speculative fix and optimize this error of the code and optimize this and is it the networking is it the player interaction system is it game code and when never sometimes you just you need to go broad to be able to find it and I think that's where it's never as easy as it sounds I'm so happy you said that that's that's that's the big thing that I think gets lost in the you should just let it cook argument it's that we can see this is broken this is broken this is broken that's not the same as seeing the cause exactly and in order to see in order to find a solution you have to find the cause so we can see all these things and and we look at it we looking at the same thing that our players are looking at and see that okay that's broken that's broken that broken but we're not finding the the the the root cause of it because
00:36:25
concurrency is only at this level and so so putting it on our live Alpha environment that's the big thing that environment can do for us it stresses it to the point where now causes reveal themselves and solutions can be built yes exactly and to be to be clear we'd never push something out that was no only just broken across the board right like we would never want to do that because that would just be a poor experience people would stop playing the game and then we wouldn't get the concurrency for us to be able to find the issues so we're always going to want to strike that balance between you know we are not a fully live um polished game we are an alpha game and we have to strike that balance with we want to keep improving the game every patch so that people come to it and they enjoy the
00:37:12
gameplay experience I mean that's my ultimate goal um but we still have these technology Ambitions for us to be able to achieve the overall goal and those are those are steps along the way and it will this will be the same when we do Serv Ser meshing we will have scenarios with server meshing that it's such foundational technology that we will find things and we will fix them and fix them and fix them and fix them but we will definitely I can guarantee it right now when we put server meshing live we will find issues that either have been exacerbated by something or XY Z so that's just the nature of the Beast all right uh two more questions about 323 before we move into the near future and stuff um uh these are all big ticket Direction things so sorry for
00:38:03
backing so many of them up on you rich here uh it seems like there were a lot of things thrown into this patch 323 is arguably the biggest patch uh star citizens ever attempted then even even with uh cargo and Hangers coming in a 323 X it's still the biggest patch I think we've put out three with 3.0 you might be able to argue certain things sure um was it too much or should we have done smaller should this have been the 323 1 2 3 4 with all these things from the get-go was it too much is it just this is how it happens what's your view on this I think from my perspective and ultimately I was responsible for this so this helps go big or go home yeah uh I didn't want the transition of features
00:38:53
from Squadron 42 into Star Citizen to take like 12 months because what it would have done is first off people have seen these features for a long time and if we're spending six 9 12 months getting them over into the game I think it would have detracted away from all of the features that we want to add to Star Citizen so I wanted to make sure and I and I wanted to push the team to deliver the features um into Star Citizen uh in a good manner so that we could then transition onto the features that are really more specific to Star Citizen like cargo like Resource Network like Base building like the the features that
00:39:41
are not going to be in Squadron so I wanted to make sure that we tried our best to have that to be as shortest period of time possible so that you know there's the old adage if you know if you've got four weeks you'll take four weeks and and I wanted to make sure that we tried to to get it in um in a good and manner as possible so that we can start moving Star Citizen forward and I think ultimately you know that was my decision I stand by that by that decision and you that's that's the reason yeah I I think Tyler made a post on Spectrum yesterday about how how what our expectations of of 2024 is what what we want to hit we we we want 2024 to be a watershed year in the development of St Star Citizen with some
00:40:29
pretty big Milestones this year so yeah so a big part of that and and you set that goal and part of P pursuing that goal is you got to get all this Squadron stuff in there now get it out of the way so we can start on the new stuff well absolutely I I needed to get that stuff done so that I can move on to the things that we want to add to the game this year that I think will start to Define Star Citizen as a massively multiplayer on online game um I I often say there's some there at times there's very little difference between the people who make Star Citizen the people who play Star Citizen I think sometimes we're just as anxious to get to the next thing to to put this stuff to get this stuff in get these features in as our players are to play them absolutely I mean when I look at Star Citizen itself it's a
00:41:18
concatenation of a lot of features and a lot of content conation good word I want it to be a cohesive experience that is all tied together and I want to get there as soon as possible I want somebody to be able to play the game and understand all the things that they have available to them and I want that to be a a a good onboarding experience and then to have thousands of hours of gameplay and content for people to be able to play now don't get me wrong we have a lot of gameplay already in the game but it's in isolated pockets it's like if you wanted to be a minor great you can go and do mining you can do that Loop but I want I want the connections I want the interweb I that's the difference between features and content and a game and I want to I want to push towards that as as quickly as possible okay so we got about 20 minutes left we
00:42:09
we've done two-thirds of the show on 323 and stuff let's go into the near future anytime we put these question threads up uh half the questions are about the the patch and half the questions are what's next so let's start talking a little bit about what's next in some bigger Direction stuff um cargo elevators uh persistent personal persistent hangers that stuff Fred elevator stuff uh that's been pushed into a 323 pointx patch we're not going to sit here and say whether it's 0.1 or02 or or whatever we we've learned that lesson um talk to us about the current state how's it how's it going this one's me well how's it going so I played cargo I loaded it up I went through the flow I went to my um storage access I requested all my person gear it was delivered to
00:42:58
me I then went to the asop terminal I requested my ship the ship came up on its um ship elevator I went down and then I went to my freight elevator and then I requested my goods uh and we had some issues and those issues that have been resolved or in the process of being resolved now um you know ultimately I was able to step through those issues to be able to get to the point where I could get my cargo and then manually load my cargo up into the ship and then take off but if you look at cargo nobody can play the game without going through cargo it's a foundational feature like you can't it's like inventory was a foundational feature you can't play the game without just interacting with the system if you want to get a ship you interact with the system you want to get
00:43:47
something from your inventory you interact with this system so we can't be in a position where we're releasing it in a state that is essentially golden from the get-go so we needed more time to be able to do that um akin to what I just said if you've got four weeks you take four weeks I didn't want to push it to the next patch uh I didn't feel it was needed to get to the next patch um we are pushing hard to get it into a DOT patch for the 323 um cycle uh and that is currently the intention but we won't push it live until it is working and is infallable because it's a core feature it's core feature in the flow it's the first thing you do you wake up from your
00:44:35
Hab you go to your hanger and you get your ship so it that it needs to be solid and it needs to be really good so we just need to make sure that it is the best it can be before we we push it live uh JJ we'll give Rich a break here yeah back to back to back uh one once the personal personal persistent instance hangers come out in the 323 X patch um will our Landing Zone remain the same as what what players choose when 323 drops uh they set that home base and then it you can't change it for the time being uh we're going to have an opportunity to change it again when the point x comes out or will they be stuck with whatever choice they make in 323 hopefully Rich isn't next because this is quite a quick answer um if you wanted
00:45:22
a break but yeah um so basically we're not doing a full reset so so your home location is as it was when you last set kind of set your character when we do a full reset in future that will give you an opportunity to choose a new home location but I believe and people will probably correct me if I'm wrong in the chat but you can use the the character reset function on the website but and I'll look into the camera when I say this this will mean that you lose everything that you've earned in game so if that if that function is there and available just be mindful when you actually use it just because you know you will lose your U you'll lose your bought in game and things like that so if you are really really desperate to choose a new home location I believe that is an option that you can pick and choose so what we'll just assume that's off the table though because you don't want to lose all your stuff so correct the answer is actually I would wait or
00:46:10
move your things manually okay to a new location okay um and then the big qu and then followup question uh obviously those start four starter locations in 323 Microtech uh Hurst and air8 crusader no that for Grim hex so not in 323 um this question coming up actually kind of spurred me on to go and investigate this more to find out what was involved we do actually funnily enough internally have grimhex as a developer location so it is set up to be a home location for us but there are potential knock on with that so we can't just switch it on and assume everything's going to be okay because if you think about the landing zones they're huge they've got loads of facilities you know some of them are set up for the new player experience and things like that so obviously grimhex is
00:46:58
a much smaller condensed location you've also got the problem that if you start to leave the station you're more than likely going to be around other people who are going to be ready and willing to shoot you so if a new player then accidentally picks grimhex not understanding the implications that could be very frustrating so there's a few things that I need to look into and Chase but um something we I want to do so I think we can definitely do it in in the future okay and I'll makes sense uh that's our that's our near F future 323 X whatnot um let's talk some general uh some general questions some general direction process questions I don't often get a chance to have uh game leadership like top of the pyramid there's literally a pyramid now top of the pyramid stuff here so I I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to ask you some bigger picture of stuff keeping in mind that there is a little
00:47:46
thing called citizen G coming uh in October this year so we're not going to touch on everything whatever um Rick I think this one's for you Arena Commander ah yeah how do you see Arena Commander sometimes it seems like it's really important sometimes it seems like cig is completely forgotten about it sometimes there's a theaters of War sometimes there's years of complete silence um I mean the three of us been a lot of time working on theaters of War so like it's something that's very passionate for us like we're excited to do things with AC but like the priority right now is Star Citizen and one of the ways that we're leveraging uh Arena Commander is that it's a great test bed for some of the features that aren't quite ready for Content so like something that we may not be ready for an actual patch but
00:48:34
stuff that we want to test out like resource networks um engineering stuff that we like we can test in a a specific game mode and aring Commander and get some insights before we go um full content with it in Star Citizen so well hot of the press I did have a conversation with Yen this morning about potentially potential is the specific word here that we might uh use Arena Commander to uh validate the new spawn closet um for FPS okay that's you had a lot of buildup there and then how's that going to manifest well we've never had PVE uh FPS in Arena command it's uh there we go like a hord mode game mode yeah yeah
00:49:23
yeah okay okay I just want to make sure that the lead was wasn't buried there thank you for clarifying um I thought you were you were J I thought you had that no I had it I was I'm I'm asking the question that's some um okay next seven questions are for Rich no okay uh JJ um again talking bit bigger Pat stuff the go noo process the the the very way these decisions are are are are made to whether this feature should be included and whatnot um this process has changed and evolved over the years it's not like we just set something up in 2014 and kept the same process since then uh talk me through hope not huh what I hope we didn't well I've been here I'm I'm on a decade here I know we did I know here uh talk to me about what the goog go prog processes
00:50:13
like today yeah so for us it's it's a much more gradual process there's not really One Moment In Time where it's like is this thing going to is this thing ready or not it's more of a constant review of how features are progressing and we like to be very hand on with the team and with the features so typically we will be playing the features regularly individually as a group or with the team that's actually making the feature giving feedback trying to harden it and also at the same time evaluating where it's at so there are several moments in time as we're going where there will be a point where we have to decide is it ready or not but there's no kind of like Line in the Sand necessarily where we go this is definitely not going or this is definitely going so there'll be points in the process like we had to do with cargo where it was basically like this is a core feature it's not where we want it to be at this moment in time we want to push it a bit further out to make
00:51:01
sure we've got the time available for it um but ultimately kind of as I say the process has changed for us in that you know there used to kind of be more one date everyone's working towards that date we are constantly trying to be on the ball with all of these individual features and knowing exactly where they're at and if we're happy with them well you know for cargo it was you came to me on the day of ISC and was like is it is it in 323 or is it in ax and I was like I'm still deciding you want to a the laundry you want to the laundry okay so the day that our Cargo episode was supposed to air well did air was the day of the go no go so I had two versions of Hosting we often do you know where it says you know it's going to be in 323 and one is you know it's Target still targeting 323 or one where it's not going to be in 323
00:51:50
it's going to be in 323 X and you might remember we we were so good this season about getting all our episodes out at 8: a.m. Pacific on the dot because we we moved editorial over here we've done a lot of structural uh improvements thanks to David and Tom over there who have made things a lot better uh we we we had a great streak going of every episode right there eight and then it's like well what version do we put out and he's literally in there surrounded by everybody playing it that whole story he tell you playing it going through and I'm just like pacing out behind and then he was like come on which version just to see whether it whether it you know it gets the go or go no and it was the we still don't know yet we're going to we're going to give him another two weeks and then we're going to make the hard call yes uh so it was like all right so we go with what we call the truth in the moment the truth in that
00:52:37
moment is that it was still targeted for 323 so we go out and I wanted to give the team every opportunity to be able to get it into the game but it needed to pass the certain level of Quality Bar um to get in there and ultimately they didn't manag to do that and you know that was the decision I had to make all right we got eight minutes see if we can't rapid fire some these just a few more questions here uh Rick yeah uh is this even a thing we've seen a hot take about bed logging not fitting the vision of what Star Citizen is going to be care to elaborate on what you're thinking about doing with bed logging and how logging in and out will look in the future is there a change to bed logging did I miss something I'm not sure what that hot take is but we're definitely in favor of bed logging in fact in the future we plan to give the the player Buffs for getting a good night sleep in
00:53:24
bed and you know have that part of the game Loop but we don't want to limit the player to that it's like bed log being having a bed shouldn't be a requirement to log out of the game in fact in the future we want no matter where you log out that's where you log back in you have all the same missions you know like we want you we want your place in the universe to be persistent no matter where you log out so that's where we're going so it'll be an option but not a requirement correct okay um Rich we're coming back to you the the these are two big ones what do you want first bad guys are solo players let's do B guys you're about solo let's see So currently uh it is very hard to be a bad guy in Star a citizen basically you get a huge you get huge disadvantages having crime stat and there are not really there's no not really any place to go
00:54:12
besides Grim heex what's the future hold for the bad guys well pyro is a good one so I mean ultimately I want bad guys I don't think bad guys are always the bad guys you know if you're a pirate you might have moral motivations of course is um but essentially we want gaml to be associated in areas that are law law lawful and unlawful so obviously in Stanton there should be a greater risk and greater reward for you being able to Pirate but then you're going to run into the issues that you know the question eludes that you know you've get a crime start you're going to be hunted down what's happening um so when we start to have pyro and we start to develop those systems and we to start to develop the gameplay between multiple systems as
00:55:00
well uh we want pyro to offer lots of opportunity for uh players to be able to role play as a pirate or a you know a gang member or or they will have opportunity to work more in the shadows for like more of a organized crime so for example that you can then go into into a lawful Zone as an organized criminal and be able to perform more criminal activities but from the Shadows so the expectation is that we want to create gameplay loops and we've actually discussed those internally they're planned out for and have to have guilds um that you can join that are offer unlawful activities and at the start you might just be you know a thug with a ship but by the end of it you know you might be John Wick so it's it's about having that progression within the game and the other side of things
00:55:48
is piracy or unlawful gameplay doesn't always have to be against lawful players so and that that's something that in Stanton right now if you want to go and be a pirate you have to Pirate the people who don't necessarily want to be pirated right and that always leads to a winner and a loser and I think when you're looking at a game and this has come up a lot in start say are we a PVE game or we PVP game from my perspective we're both and I want to create Loops that support both and that means on the on the PVP or the piracy side where you want to become a pirate um I want to offer you to be able to at PVE and AI players uh or should I say AI agents and obviously players but I also want to provide activities within pyro that are beneficial that Force you against other
00:56:38
Pirates as well so that you can have really cool engaging PVP combat against people who want to have really cool engaging PVP combat and that means putting systems in place that a you can find where that is and and bringing people to um areas that they know it's going to happen so there is definitely lots of plans for both bad guys and PVP and lawful guys and lawful PVP so I think the first aspect is though that is that we need more than one system that is just fully policed by the advocacy or the uee we need to have systems where it's more appropriate and of course we use the term bad guys colloquially shout out to the my bad girls out there yes guys guys girls and robots
00:57:27
um all right uh two more questions here the other big one for you um what place is there for a solo player in Star Citizen go get a drink and leave Rich yeah yeah I think there should be a lot obviously if you want to be a solo player U just because we're a massively multiplayer online game shouldn't preclude you from playing solo um you know I've played many MMOs where I've just played by myself and got through to end game there will obviously be certain prerequisites As you move towards the larger goals in the game that are going to make it difficult for you to achieve as a solo player for example if you wanted to try and earn an Idis in the game and earning reputation to be able
00:58:16
to you know figure out how to be able to manufacture your own Idis and then you need to go and get and gather all the resources to be able to do that that is a very very large initiative almost to the point where when you each even have that interest you're going to need multiple people to fly it proficiently so I think you know that doesn't mean that there is not going to be a large amount of content that is achievable by solo players that they'll be able to have enjoyment and combat for trading to mining to salvage to all the other aspects of uh gameplay that we want to be if you want to be a you know a farmer you can go and be a farmer right but the expectation is that you know we are a massive multiplayer online game we will have a large amount of content that is available to solo players but that
00:59:04
does mean there will be some content that is easier to achieve with more than one player much like real life it's like there there's lots of things you can do on your own and some things you have to accept a little bit of help on yeah we're not putting hard limits on you can always try and do it yourself absolutely like you can get all the materials for an Idis you can build it yourself like if you you know there will be absolutely absolutely yeah um and in in fact in the future we've talked about the possibility of being able to hire NPCs to help you fly your ship and stuff like that I mean that's probably far down the road but it's something we want to do to enable that kind of gameplay so yeah that's literally probably the oldest thing going all the way back to the wingman's hanger days so happy to hear that it's not completely going it's in the road y all right uh last question um this one also has a specific instruction
00:59:53
for it make sure I get this right okay come on go ahead and follow me to JJ T hey JJ why the F don't we have night vision WTF man well is that another WTF come on night vision yo night vision so night vision so I've got some good news I saw and was playing with night vision on weapon Optics yesterday so we have got it to a point where we can put them on the optic lenses using our new optic Tech that came in with with 323 this is not to say that this is coming out with 323 to be very clear but it doesn't mean that we
01:00:41
can look to a fairly close release whenever we feel like we can get it the content out to people uh so people can actually start using these and it works you know it exposes more light when you're on the dark side of a planet so you can actually see look around and see what you're trying to shoot and it's a little bit more uncomfortable to look around in a well lit environment kind of as you'd expect so that's the good news the slightly less good news is that I know people are probably going to start asking when can we get it on visors and ship cockpits and things like that the answer there is we need to assign some more time to it it's a bit more complex the new optic system gave us a really good opportunity to play with some of those settings but the visors and the cockpits aren't set up in the same way as those so it's something that we're going to start looking into and finding where we can fit it in the road map because we definitely do want to provide that for people but we've got some design questions to answer first
01:01:28
and some engineering to do as well so a bit further down two things to add to that one is that we've broken the back of getting it working so we should that should now it's more of a just a content and scheduling problem rather than a technical problem which which is great because it means and and it is really good by the way it looks great um and the one thing is that it's not I want to make sure that everyone's clear it's not true night vision it's light enhancement so if when you're looking at something and even though it's on the Dark Side of the Moon you should you still get a very good clear picture you can still call things out but it's not what you'd imagine as stereotypical night vision uming the exposure on a camera yeah with a the difference between projecting a
01:02:15
light like an infrared light and seeing the infrared light versus just amplifying the light that's already there like a Starlight yeah so it will give you the for the players perspective it will give them what they want they can see and be able to pick things out in the darkness um but I just want to clarify that's what we're we're working towards because that's a more achievable solution for us still gives us uh what we want and like JJ said we do want to then um propagate that to um the visor so yes you can send your letters of encouragement to JJ John cvus Manchester goodard and don't worry about the spelling on this one just tell them how much you want it all right that's it gentlemen all right 502 you survived Rick you survived your very first video of any kind for cig and it was an hourlong live show how do you feel I
01:03:03
feel great this was fun I'll do it again uh folks watching home don't forget check out uh uh yesterday's uh inside Star Citizen uh detailed all the uh all the different features and content coming in the alpha 323 uh season of of patches 233 0.1 Point whatever um check that out plus I reveal of the New marai Pulse which is the which is a very very small little little uh hover bike that seems like it can go anywhere a person can go and I'm not I'm sure that's not going to cause any manner of trouble uh in 323 so check that out um and then uh come back next week uh it's our Creature Feature 2 uh next week I or might call it pause and Claw I don't know I made the mistake hold on you didn't give us names huh I've been watching your shows you you've been giving people names what
01:03:50
are our names well what but okay well JJ's JJ's been owner of the coolest name in the whole in the whole company for for years gius it's it's a totally totally Sab Punk name he was only he was only slightly derailed when Cairo goodbrand was around here Kyro good Duncan Arena Commander guy or something yeah he he was commander guy Arena Arena man he was Arena man uh Dunc the moist master um the moist Master will okay actually I don't want to name I'm done here can I go now I didn't think I didn't think you knew what you were talking you were asking when you when you started the thing I'm out but yeah all right so and then come on uh and then next week uh star s live uh is off uh I'll be traveling to Belgium for the wonderful annual beon convention
01:04:38
there on Saturday so if you're going to that I'll see you there uh so for Star seon live I'm Jared that was rich that was Rick that was JJ it's David and Tom behind the keys Pete on the head set thank you for watching we'll see you we'll see you next week on I see everybody take care bye e

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.