Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Theaters of War Update

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:08

   Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Calling All Devs, our Q&A series where we take questions from you, the Star Citizen backer, and pose them directly to our developers over over teleconferencing. On this week's show, we are talking all things Theaters of War with two of our esteemed pillar directors, Mr. Shawn Tracy and Richard Tyrer. Shawn, Rich. How you doing, guys? Great. Pretty good. All right. Uh we are talking, like I said, Theaters of War. We're going to we're going to do we're going to do a little primer on what Theaters of War is for all the citizens that have joined us uh since the last time we really dive dove in dived into it dove into it back at CitizenCon 2949 uh then talk a little bit about where we currently are and where we're going. So, let's just start things off. Uh what is Theaters of War? Theaters of War came up because uh we've got we've

2. 00:00:57

   already got two, you know, extended modules from Star Citizen. One is Arena Commander and one is Star Marine. And each of them are specific. Arena Commander was meant for ships and then Star Marine was meant for infantry. So, what we wanted to do was combine the two and basically extend Star Citizen's combat into a round-based analytical format that one we can profile, we can get performance better, we can balance all our weapons, balance all the all the vehicles, give them a real uh reason to exist within these certain worlds um and within a very controlled kind of scenario that has some structure to it so that we can uh work on that but also deliver a super fun game mode that has very very little barrier to entry whereas um again within the PU it takes a little bit to get to to get to the combat. Um and in some cases people want a 30-minute, you know, quick boom uh let's

3. 00:01:45

   go have some fun kind of experience and that's what we're that's what we're bringing to it now. Um it is you know, an extension of Star Citizen so there's things and and Rich has a great term which is 360-degree gameplay. That is one of the things that makes Star Citizen what it is. So, we want to bring that in there. And again, Theaters is all about finding the best 30 minutes, 40 minutes of combat within Star Citizen. What does that look like? How can we structure that, put it into a round-based mode, and integrate it into one of those given modules whether it was Arena Commander or Star Marine or its own. Um and right now it is an extension of what the Star Citizen experience is and again, it's very centered on the uh combat and and action-oriented active elements of Star Citizen versus um some of the some of the less active or let's say even more passive or or less combat kind of gameplay. So, that is the reason

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   and that is what uh Theaters War is. It's a round-based mixed arms um uh a combat mode um within uh the Star Citizen universe. Okay. I do want to add that through the through the scenarios though, it's also a great look at Star Citizen's history. Right on. Yeah, usually we talk about that. Uh definitely. Tells the stories. Yeah. So, a chance to look back in Star Citizen's history and and explore some of the key uh events that have shaped the universe uh before the present day persistent universe. Exactly. Look, I contributed. All right. That's what is Theaters of War. Second question, who is working on Theaters of War? We've had some announcements recently. So, within uh uh uh CIG we've partnered up with Firesprite um and we've uh basically allocated 10

5. 00:03:22

   staff uh within Firesprite as resources that we can use on this mode specifically. Now, there's all kinds of challenges when it comes to, you know, directing a game internally, having external resources working with you on on given given product. Um and that's why, you know, again, we've got we've got some internal staff to um CIG that are working directly with Firesprite. Some of those include myself, Rich, uh even some people out of the active feature team. Jens helps out. Uh Rob Johnson from the the PU team reviews some of that stuff coming in as well. So, there is some internal support that happens with with Firesprite. Uh but again, it's it's just 10 people. Um it is definitely not the entirety of the Firesprite studio. They've got lots of projects that they're working on internally. Um it's really you know, access to to 10 resources that would have been hard for us to to pick up

6. 00:04:10

   otherwise. Um and and it was already a team that was all uh put together. So, that's what we're using right now. It's a it's a 10-man team all in all. The one thing to to understand as well is that why we've just made this announcement now in terms of that relationship with Firesprite um but it's actually they're the guys that we've always been working with. So, ever since we did this war at CitizenCon 2019, those are the guys that helped us put that build together. We've been working them all the way through this time. So, you know, it's in terms of the grand development of Star Citizen, you know, it's a drop in the ocean in terms of resource um and and that's why, you know, that team also as well not only focus on Theaters of War, they also focus on just keeping Star Marine and Arena Commander in in a playable state. So, like all the CitizenCon stuff,

7. 00:04:58

   everything that we'd worked on This is the same team. Now, it's gone up and down in terms of resources cuz there you know, turnover at at anywhere including Firesprite. So, it's gone up or down but it's never been bigger than 10. Um and quite honestly, you know, at at at at at a 10-person team within CIG we're talking 1.6, I think, 1. Yeah, 1.6% of the overall dev development budget anyways in terms of staff goes towards this. And again, what Rich said is super important. This is the Arena Commander, Star Marine, Theaters, all of those round-based modes. That is this team. All right. So, now the big one. Where are we at in Theaters of War development? I think where we're at right now is that we had some really good feedback and

8. 00:05:49

   positive vibes from the recent test. We've taken that and and utilized what we you know, that feedback to kind of solidify the direction that we want to go with it. The war specifically scenario one which is Crossroads of Crime. So, Crossroads of Crime is the first the first scenario within side this war. And then we're going to be basically pushing on to what we've really wanted, scenario two, which is kind of a more ship-centric mode. So, if you think of scenario one, which is for people who haven't played it, you start off on the on the planet. You start off not in ships because there's AA turrets that basically shoot the ships down and you see those AA turrets shooting the the ships as as the Valkyries are coming in. And then you obviously you progress to a more open area with a huge radar dish and ships then start to come in and then

9. 00:06:37

   you progress up into the upper atmosphere. So, it's kind of a progression from on foot up into the space but it's still quite a lot of on foot combat there. We want to really push towards and we're starting to gear up now now that we've kind of understood what we're going to get from scenario one. Now, we want to explore what we're going to get with scenario two where it's where the needle is more shifted towards what is basically unique about Star Citizen in terms of the ships and the multifaceted ship gameplay in terms of it's not just dog fighter versus dog fighter. It is a multi-crew ship versus, you know, a large multi-crew ship versus a single-seater versus a a dual-seater versus people on foot shooting those ships. So, we're we're pushing towards more of the ship-centric ideas alongside uh the ships themselves but also for the on foot people to be more involved in space

10. 00:07:26

    in EVA and EVA combat and around that area. So, what we want to do as well is we want to start integrating into the features that we've been pushing live to Star Citizen. So, tractor beaming for example, you know, we've got um we we've got mounted guns that we're pushing live and trolleys and you know, manipulation of entities from one place to another. So, that's where we we're starting to come we're start or we're working on healing right now in terms of being able to revive people who've gone into a down state so you don't immediately just die and respawn die and respawn. Actually, you could be die you could die or go into a down state. Somebody could then revive you and bring you back and that would change the whole dynamic of this premise of just, you know, death is a consequence in the PU. The combat is, you know, still fast-paced but it's not supposed to be not strategical. You're still supposed

11. 00:08:13

    to be able to like play as a team, coordinate around a singular objective. And so, where we're at right now in this state is that we're kind of closing out scenario one and then we're moving on to more of the cinematic elements around scenario one. So, the they saw in the recent play test we had an intro video that kind of uh kind of shared the lore and the reasoning behind like the Hathor group and the UEA advocacy coming in to take out the Supreme and the the story of that game mode. We're actually working with you know, the VFX teams and the cinematic teams to try and um help us bring some of that cinematic feel to the game so that you know, we've got kind of the core gameplay loop itself. Obviously, we we're still as a whole company across all three games in terms of Star Citizen, Arena Commander, and uh and Squadron 42. Uh so, you know, on

12. 00:09:05

    all three of those areas we we need to improve the performance. They're all coming from the same code base. They're all coming from the same build. So, we need to improve improve performance in the next thing. So, that's where we're at. We're working on that as an initiative. We're working on the cinematic feel for scenario one in terms of adding in that the the the outro videos that we haven't got yet, the additional like the the the radar dish that we have in there that that will blow up and destroy and you know, you'll you'll get that positive vibe from when you're going from phase two to phase three. It's kind of layering all that on and then the art is obviously also doing a final pass on all the art cuz obviously it was it not placeholder. I think that would be disingenuous. I think it's fairly advanced. So, you know, you look at it it's it's it's still the MicroTech planet. It's still all the same MicroTech um foliage and so on and so forth but you know, taking it to that next level so that we we we're really happy with it.

13. 00:09:52

    And on the other side, we're starting off that scenario two which is like, okay guys, we kind of know what we're going to get when you're going from the planet up to up towards space. Now, what do we get when you start in space and the manipulation of, you know, landing on asteroids or working within space stations or having predominantly fleet battle around it while you're working on gas clouds and So, that's kind of where we're working. And all of these things, all of these questions, all these developments that we're working towards, they have real-life consequences on what we want to do in Star Citizen. Now, I want to be very clear with what that means. That doesn't mean that Arena Commander drives how the Star Citizen plays. That's not the case. You know, Shawn and I work on Star Citizen as much more so than Theater of War, but what it does mean is it it allows us to kind of

14. 00:10:42

    fast-forward that development to be able to push it in into the developer's hands, get it right there that we play it and we go, "Oh, okay. This is how the impacts it. This is what a ship happens when it flies into a gas cloud or This is what happens when we start having combat around this scenario. This is what happens when we've got EV lots of EVA players playing it. And you know, so that's kind of where we're at now is disseminating that information that we got back from the playtest, it validating where we want to go in terms of we made some bold choices in terms of removing all the boundaries, pushing pushing a bit more breathability or breathing space in Star Citizen that it's not just open the door, I shoot my gun, I die, I respond back in the room, I open the door, I shoot It's like, "Oh, no. I open the door or I'm actually only spawning in vehicles from now on cuz

15. 00:11:29

    that was a conscious decision we made. You spawn in a dropship or you're spawning in a mobile spawn point from an Ursa that's been moved into a tactical position behind the objective now because you can move it into that objective space. And that changes how you approach that map. That changes how your team plays. So, you might find you might want to be a sniper in the hills. You can be now. And so, what we're do we've we've opened up that flexibility of how you potentially could operate and achieve an objective success with a team-based mission in the PU. Now, and it's about the Theater of War element there is is about seeing that future picture of what we want Star Citizen and and how we want that combat to feel and and play and then, you know, bringing them both up so that they're at parity so that we do have as Shawn says, this distillation of that 30-40 minute

16. 00:12:18

    experience of Star Citizen. And and to to extend on that, if I if I if I even can a little bit, um the what Richard mentioned being very how I term it is being very tip of the spear with a lot of the the stuff that we're trying to that we're trying to do. It's meant to highlight issues early, long before we ever really want to run into this within the PU. And a great example was our very first Evocati test that we had done with theaters, right? The performance was really brutal. Like we were working hard trying to get that performance up to where it needed to be. But in terms of, you know, any game running at 20 frames, 25 frames even, that's that's tough to play. That's tough to play combat. That's tough to play anything that isn't fairly passive or whatnot. So, you tend not to

17. 00:13:05

    I'm not saying you don't deal with it, but it becomes less of an issue. If if if your game doesn't necessarily require it, and I would argue that every game requires at least, you know, 30 to 60 frames. And you know, I don't think anybody in Star Citizen disagrees with that. But, what we're able to do was just between the two tests. And and something happened between the two tests, too. But between the two tests, we almost doubled the frame rate um because that's mainly what we're working on. But, very little of it was a theaters thing. It was all to do with, you know, a ship component update, an actor one of the one of the characters updating. A lot of it doesn't come down to GPU or even the assets that are in there. It's just the systems that we've got. And putting them under load, putting them under, you know, stress is base you know, making them all happen because quite arguably your game's not running at 30 frames a second if the

18. 00:13:53

    guy's just standing there. You know, and there's there's not a whole lot going on. The game is happening when you're playing it. When you're when you're shooting, when you're getting shot at, when you're running around, when you're spawning, when that's when stuff is happening. So, we try to be very tip of the spear. So, what happened between those two was Xenothreat. And actually, you know, Xenothreat would have suffered worse performance had we not been in there um trying to make some adjustments and and really just calling out all the all the different systems that are that are spiking and that we've got to do something about. So, being able to replay and have this analytical environment for us to do this is is super important. But it also comes down to the gameplay stuff itself as Rich was talking about. Healing. We are able to do that right away. Mounted guns, that's very useful right away. If the tank comes along, right? There's going to be a place for that to exist. Versus, you

19. 00:14:41

    know, again, what what would be there. So, we try to be very very again, very tip of the spear trying to get to where Star Citizen will end up because again, you've only got, you know, 50 people in this full full solar system. But, when server meshing is done, we what have a hundreds of people. So, you can expect that a lot more is going to start happening. In terms of players, right? Or or PvP or whatnot. So, and and as I said this is going a while ago, it's got to be fun when we get there. It can't be, you know, we just get there and we're like, "Oh, holy crap. Performance is really rough." Or, "Oh, holy crap. That ship's too good." Or or or whatever. It's a very symbiotic relationship between between Star Citizen and Squadron and Arena Commander and Theater of War and it's

20. 00:15:29

    one of the ways that we can do this cross-development between the between the different platforms. Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do with the structure and the way we're approaching this. Again, we've got Firesprite working with us, working with Rich, you know, day-to-day. But Rich is also running an entire pillar. And then we're also working with John, who is also running an entire pillar on the ship side. But the beauty of it is because we're we're working on this mode. We've got basically a game team that works on the mode. Then we've got the two main pillars that that contribute to that mode. So, that's vehicles and that's actors. You know, the characters, let's say. Um And both of those go into this mode. So, because we're working on that and they're working on that for us, it's kind of it's perfect. It just it all aligns. Um So, really we're able to make some pretty decent progress on a lot of these features because of the way that's that it's set up. But it's a lot of

21. 00:16:16

    work. It's a lot of work because not only are you again running three teams, but third-party external team that that really is is taking direction from us on the design, on the on the art or whatever. And and delivering on it. And they've been doing great. All right. So, so we've got what, we've got who, we've got where. Let's talk about why. Why after all this time is the testing group so small? Why is it just internal playtest and Evocati? Why don't we just open this up to everybody? First off, we would we get feedback continually from the people who, you know, make Star Citizen because A, they don't on a day-to-day basis play it. So, it means that we've got we can utilize people to come and play the game and, you know, gives them a bit of fun. They can come and enjoy playing,

22. 00:17:02

    shooting each other. That's fun, you know, it's good to have a bit of a blow off bit of steam off in the day. So, and you know, everybody who is is a game developer, I hope, I pray that they like games. And if they don't, they they should they should give up the position. It should be mandated that you give up your position somebody who does like games. But anyway, so on that front, um you know, it's good that they're the first bastion. They're the first gateway for us to be able to get feedback from. And the people are super passionate about Star Citizen and they they're super passionate about what we're doing. So, it's incredible amount of feedback that we can get back. So, they're the first gateway that we have to get back. So, we go, "Okay. Let's see what, you know, the 700 odd Star Citizen developers say about it."

23. 00:17:50

    Uh Then when we go to Evocati, obviously Evocati are our uh you know, they're the they're the top gun, should we say they're the 1% that are able to come and help test the game mode. And they understand that, you know, the performance might not be the best. That they might run into crash bugs. That there might be these issues that they're going to run into. Or they might have to jump through hoops or copy their account over or do XYZ to be able to play the game. And it is a specific window on a Saturday or a Sunday or to go and do that. And you know, that's an incredibly valuable asset to use to be able to get that information. Now, as Shawn already touched on and I touched on previously, the game that we're or the game mode that we're making um in terms of the environment that it's in, to understand the fun, to understand the gameplay, I

24. 00:18:39

    think the performance has to be a level that you can at least see past it. You can at least go, "Okay, I see what they're trying to do here, but I'm walking over a bit of hot coals to get there." So, you know, "Oh, maybe the audio is not that great." Or the balance of the weapons is not that great. But, they the balance is intrinsically not that great in this area in Star Citizen. Or you know, they know that we've disabled missiles or whatever. So, and I think when you have to caveat a lot of what you're trying to achieve healing's not in there or mounted gun's not in there or the tank's not in there. I think when you have to caveat a lot of the gameplay, going to a wider audience always is always a risk. A risk because what you what you know, the reason is not why we're going wider. The reason is why do we do these tests in the first place?

25. 00:19:27

    Well, we do these tests in the first place to gather information, to gather like, is the map balanced? Advocacy versus Supreme, you know, do we get equal roughly amounts of wins? Yes, we do. How do people feel about the balance between the air versus air versus ground versus ground versus ground? You know, how do we see the progression? Are people actually playing through the map? Do they understand how to play the game mode? Is it is it getting doing what we want? Are people utilizing all of the the area that we're giving them to play? And I think when we have that information and when we can and we can distill that information or a perfect one, what is the average mean or the the mean um FPS of all the users that are playing it? Now, as long as we've got a big enough sample size to be able to ascertain that information, then that's all we need because that

26. 00:20:16

    validates what we want. There's no reason for us to do a test just because we should just do a test. We do a test because we want to gather information back to make sure that A, we're going down the right road. B, have we made improvements with the performance? C, is the map in the in the creative areas of the in the map are they hitting the right boxes? Are they doing what we're trying to achieve? And that's why when we go to Evocati, I think we get that information. Now, we could go to wider PTU, but I know personally I would rather have slightly better performance before opening up to a wider audience. And we saw that with Evocati. We saw we saw the litmus test where when we went to Evocati the first time round, performance was poor. And it prevented us getting back information that we needed to progress

27. 00:21:03

    the mode because the only information that we got back was performance is poor. We did address that. We pushed another patch out like 4 weeks later. I think this was way back when. And then what lo and behold, we did get a load of feedback back like, "Okay, I'm not sure about the spawn screen or how does this work?" Or what? And we got some really good feedback to understand what we needed to do next. And I think I will always We will always advocate going wider to the PTU. I think there's no reason for us to go live live because if we go live live, it's just dropping it there. We're using it as a tool to learn and iterate and understand what what happens when we make these changes. And Evocati is giving us that information and internally it's giving us this information. We've done quite a few tests where we've gone, "Actually, you know what? We've had quite a lot of

28. 00:21:51

    information from internal. Let's not go to Evocati. Like we've already canceled one Evocati playtest because we had enough feedback internally where we're like, "Okay, we feel like we should address this before we go live." And that's not just like performance related. So then then we can iterate on it. And so, you know, in terms of going wider, that that would be the honest answer is that we've got the information we need before we go to the next step and and before we feel like we can go to that next gate. Um we still want to take care of of a of a bunch of stuff and it has everything to do with feedback. And those stages, each one of those stages just opens up wider, right? So like the internal company test like he was mentioning, we usually get about 200, 300. It really depends on the time and what else is going on also and what

29. 00:22:38

    our QA is doing, but we get you know, again, 200. When we went to Evocati the last one anyways, we ended up with 706 unique users, 161 some odd rounds and and yeah, mean frame time was actually reasonable at this point. So it was sitting in the in the 30s, which is great. But the last thing we want to do is just dump out a game mode and and do what every and I've seen the messages. I know people are worried that we're just going to dump out the game mode and go, "Good luck. Have fun with it." This is not what we want to do. One, we want to use it as a tool as we have been using it, but we don't want to just put it out and let it die or or or just leave it to not be updated or or to not do anything with. So we want to make sure we've got our plan well put together long before that that that actually goes out, but what's really important is that we're hitting our stages. And the point

30. 00:23:27

    is is you know, my expectation even from 18 months ago was that we were going to be past these stages long ago, but you got to be honest and and again, we're not in a huge huge rush on this. It wasn't ready. It just wasn't there. Performance and and some net thing stuff. Rich nailed the nailed it though too is that a lot of the feedback that that that we go over now at this point it's actually properly about the game which is great. Now we're seeing real feedback rather than, "Oh my god, performance is so brutal." Or, "Oh my inputs are super delayed." And there was lots of feedback that would that that seemed to be about the game, but so often it was actually just that the guy was the poor guy is running at 15 or 20 frames a second. So so clearly having that running at a reasonable frame rate gives real feedback. So And to be honest, when you go wider, the barrier to entry becomes higher.

31. 00:24:16

    Mhm. So for example, like any any product where you have early adopters, early adopters are willing to walk over more coals. I mean, for example, if we just release Star Citizen right now as a as a fully fledged game finished 1.0, we'd get so much critique because the expectations of players going in are not what they expect of a finished retail product. Whereas because we're we're pre-alpha, people can go, "Okay, this has gone out. It's got bugs. I understand that it's got bugs." Those bugs are frustrating. It doesn't make it any less annoying, but it's the appreciation that, "Okay, yeah, I I understand. I I can move on." And I think when you get something where this is like hyper-focused and it's so it's very comparable to other games,

32. 00:25:04

    it's very easy to just look at the the barrier of, "Oh, it feels controls feel sluggish. It doesn't feel great." And it's like, "Well, we know that Evocati understand where we're at with what's coming from the technical side of things for Star Citizen and that it isn't just this bespoke game mode. It is it is a real planet. You can just fly in one direction and circumnavigate the planet for the whole half an hour of the game mode and you'll probably never circumnavigate it cuz it's that big. You know, we don't we don't cheat it. It it's the real deal. So any any benefits that we're making in Star Citizen benefit Theaters and any benefits we're making in Theaters benefit Star Citizen. So we want to make sure that it's playable, that people can understand what we want before we start, you know, ripping the plaster off, shall we say? I wouldn't be comfortable

33. 00:25:52

    releasing Theaters to a wider audience until the performance is respectable that you could put it a boot it up on mid-spec machine and not worry about frame rate. Because frame rate affects so many things. It's not just about, "Oh, you know, slideshow." Cuz it very rarely is, right? Even if it's above 20. It's it's about like the feel. It's about your turning. It's it's you know, the the if the feeling of like going to ADS, going to the reload or you know, you feel you feel unfair when you die because you think performance has impacted how you've played and and in fact it does. So I think performance has such a huge layer on everything that it it it that that is the ultimate. And to be honest, so

34. 00:26:40

    there is no when until we've we basically fix the performance and the net thing can and get that. And there's also Yeah, we've also got a minimum set of of things that we want to ship with. Like a good example is that, you know, there's a with Cross over the Line, if you've played it within Evocati or you've seen videos of it, right? It's on a planet. It's very very infantry focused like Richard said earlier 70/30. I want to have at least two scenarios when this thing rolls out. And and it's more to go to the tastes of the people that are involved, right? We have basically both sides of it. We could do a 50/50 one and then we wouldn't really know, but I think having one that's that's based in space that has a lot of ship combat going on on top of then the Cross over the Line, which is all ground based and mostly ground based anyways

35. 00:27:28

    and and FPS heavy is is an important component of it too. So we've definitely got that minimum set as well as the features because most of the feedback comes down to, you know, squad game play, healing, you know, some of the stuff that they've got used to in other games. As those features come on, that just makes all the sense in the world to be putting that in. How you guys feeling about Theaters of War right now? From where we were with we we did the I remember when we did CitizenCon. I remember when we did that we had the feedback forms and we had a question on there was, "Was the overall game mode fun?" And overwhelmingly we had it agreed and strongly agreed that it that it was. And and that for me shows that, you know, we're still on the right track that we are moving it to pushing it forwards. There's just so many different

36. 00:28:15

    things that allow us to focus and improve on it. So I think To answer your questions succinctly, I feel great. At this exact moment, I feel awesome about what we've been able to do not only for Star Citizen, but for the game mode by itself as well. There's a lot of work ahead of us, of course, to help Star Citizen on the performance, try to pull some priority for that given performance to be the you know, a big priority alongside server meshing and those things, but all in all, yeah, I feel I feel pretty darn good about it. All right. That's it. Thank you guys. I'll let you get back to This has been our Calling All Devs on Theaters of War. Hope you know what it is, how it is, who's working on it and a pretty good idea of where we are in its overall development progress. Shawn and Rich, as

37. 00:29:03

    always, a pleasure. I just get to stand here and watch you guys talk and it's that's it's nice for me. It's I like it. I'll let you guys go. Thank you everybody and until next time. Take care.