Star Citizen Devs – The Push For Squadron 42
Welcome to some more Star Citizen, there have been a load of informative posts and dev responses recently a push towards SQ42 completion, Emergent Gameplay vs on rail gameplay, whats happening Alpha 3.15 development & is the way CI pick questions for AMAs and Live shows fair?
Richard Tyrer is now the SQ42 FPS Game Director
I saw this on Reddit – This is another one of the Star Citizen senior big hitters being moved in this case from Star Citizen Core Gameplay Director to Squadron 42.
We know that Chris is coming to the UK towards the end of the year most likely and for the foreseeable future in order to finish out Squadron 42 as well. So expect a big push over the next few quarters for the game and hopefully we will start to see development updates when it’s closer to release.
There were various questions on Spectrum from backers that were then answered by devs:
The question here can be summarized with the OP saying:
There has been work in the development of ‘events’ and other (imo) non immersive repeatable gameplay on rails.
Will star citizen‘s gameplay structure be geared towards enhancing the emergent experience? Or will the structure be geared towards enhancing a packaged on-rails experience? Or both?
Jake Accapella Responded
The intent for dynamic events is eventually to have a library of these that we can trigger anywhere, any time. Additionally, the eventual goal is to have the economic simulation (Quantum) be able to trigger these based on the socio-economic conditions of the ‘verse. Dynamic events will also come in multiple flavors such as mainly PVE (Xenothreat) or PVP (Ninetails) focused. This, in addition to player driven missions and events like how you’re describing, are to fill the ‘verse with life and things to do and see!
A Follow up question on PVE (Xenothreat) & PVP (Ninetails) Event:
Does this mean that PvP is not wanted / not allowed at xenothreat or does it mean that PvP is not the focus of this event, but SC is an open PvP game, so PVP takes place on the same level as anywhere else in the Verse.
As I understand it, every event in SC is a PVP event, even if the focus of some events is more on a PVE interaction than others.
It could be possible that if you label them PVE you don’t want PVP in PVE events … but if you do, you will have to do more than what you are currently doing to prevent it from happening.
Definitely the latter! Though I’d advise caution going up against the War Hammer
From Another Thread – Zyloh, correct me if I’m wrong, but with staggered development, there is a team working in this patch (3.14) and another in the next patch (3.15). So, couldn’t the devs of 3.15 appear in the ISC? Or when a patch is being released, all other work stop and you work only in that one?
Zyloh Replied – It actually goes beyond just 3.15. A quick look at the Progress Tracker will show you that there’s folks also currently working on 3.16 and beyond as well. I have seen the feedback that some would like to see that work, and I’d like to remind that we’re already showing a deal of it in Sprint Reports (examples: Pyro, Nyx, outposts, etc.).
We don’t feel it’s productive to do full-blown segments on content that is multiple quarters out because the team working on those features are, for a variety of reasons, simply not ready to present – so, we opt to give visibility through Sprint Reports in ISC, Monthly Reports, Sneak Peaks, etc.
The Tyranny of Looking for Questions
You could almost pick the questions based on time stamp instead of upvotes, given how good at reading past the first dozen replies this community often is.
c’mon people, go find a comment made after the first half hour of this weeks pin post you agree with and give it an updoot.
Zyloh Replied – While popularity of a question does weigh in, that doesn’t mean we don’t look through the whole thread. Sometimes there’s some gems below, and sometimes we even inject our own questions so that we can cover a topic we think the community will want to know. Regardless, thanks for the feedback – happy to relay to the team @Madrona!
A Follow up – You understand that by injecting your questions you are manipulating the player base. It’s called gaslighting. Proud of that are you?
I see it differently than you. To me, we strive to ask the most popular questions (which we do every week), pull some of the less popular ones that we feel we have meaningful answers for, and inject some of our own to cover areas the community may not have thought of – or things we know we have good info to share. From my perspective, this is a multi-faceted approach that grants a diverse selection of questions.
Now, there is a re-occurring issue where some of the popular questions are repeated across multiple shows – that’s a tough one to solve but we’re brainstorming how we can approach. On one hand, we want to answer what a majority are voting on, but on the other, we don’t want to take up time with repeating ourselves. There’s a lot of variables in there to consider: are the votes coming from new players who haven’t seen the answer before? Is the problem with discoverability with previously released answers? If so, how do you manage thousands of answers over the years? Does the early bird get the upvote? These are all the types of questions we’re asking ourselves as we work out improvements.
Overall, our goal is to make Q&As as productive and entertaining as possible and we appreciate all of the feedback shared here.
Another follow up question Spectrum needs the “downvote” button too so that the community can help curate. Currently questions already answered get huge upvotes because they are posted early. We need the ability to counteract this and balance the early populism with the pragmatism that comes from being more educated on the matters at hand.
Exploring this. It’s a complicated matter, because brigading can happen either way, but we’re actually discussing this currently.