My
goal with Star Citizen is to build a universe that I want to play in
day after day, one that fully immerses me in the environment and stories
that happen around me.
In Star Citizen’s persistent universe I want events to happen,
governments to fall, wars fought and players becoming legends. I want to
see a Galactapedia that grows from week to week, reflecting not just
the ongoing content Cloud Imperium plans to continually generate, but
also the great deeds achieved by players.
Pilots in the original Privateer had to return to base before they could save their games.
To achieve this sense of a living history, there needs to be a
universe where time progresses, characters die, and new ones come to the
front. Beyond this, I want people to have a sense of accomplishment
when they complete a really difficult trading run or kill an especially
infamous pirate. I hate the current game trend in single player games
where the game auto-saves every 2 seconds and if you die you just start a
few steps earlier. This makes you a lazy and sloppy player. I bullied
my way through games like Mass Effect or Gears of War, running in guns
blazing, knowing if I died I would always just re-spawn a few steps
earlier. In Wing Commander or Privateer, you had to complete the mission
to move on. There were no mid mission saves. This created a sense of
anxiety towards the end of the mission if you were badly damaged and
your shields were low, but if you managed to limp home successfully, you
felt a sense of accomplishment. Without the risk of losing something
you’ve worked hard towards, the sense of achievement is cheap.
The last single player game I played that give me an extreme sense of
accomplishment in beating it was Demon’s Souls. How they handled death
and re-incarnation of your ghost / body was consistent with their world
and fiction and because I couldn’t save mid-level, clearing a level,
especially after a difficult Boss fight was immensely satisfying. It was
also one of the most frustrating games I’ve played! I think Demon’s
Souls was too much on the “punishing” end of the difficulty spectrum,
but it really did remind me of the value of having something to lose
when playing. You can’t have light with dark and you can’t have reward
without risk.
Demon’s Souls offered difficult, deadly boss battles which lead to a uniquely rewarding gameplay experience.
In
Squadron 42, this is pretty easy to achieve. You need to complete the
mission to move forward and you can’t save while in space. You die you
just go back to the previous save point, normally before you launched on
the mission.
The tricky part is really how failure is handled in the persistent
universe of Star Citizen, as you can’t just set back the game to an
earlier point.
The simple solution is that when your ship is destroyed, you manage
to eject and drift in space, where you are picked up and returned to the
last planet / landing location to claim your new ship sans any cargo
and upgrades you had (unless you had bought additional insurance) and
head out into space again.
This is the mechanic EVE Online uses, with the extra wrinkle that if
another player blows up your escape pod, a stored clone of your
character is activated, re-spawning your character and effectively
making him/her immortal. In EVE, death is allowed for in the fiction and
is balanced out by the cloning mechanism, which allows for loss of
property but not your character’s skills (as unlike Star Citizen, your
character in EVE has RPG skills that you learn)
The death mechanic in EVE is clever and well woven into their fiction.
But I’m not interested in making EVE 2.0 with cockpits.
One
of my goals with Star Citizen is to make it feel very visceral and
real. I want to feel the effects of physical damage on my character,
loss of limb or other mishaps that can happen in the danger of space. If
my character has been through several wars, I want to see the scars on
him/her – perhaps a cybernetic arm because one was lost in firefight or
the wrong side of a dogfight. I want to be able to walk up to another
player in a bar and SEE that he or she is a grizzled veteran with the
battle scars to prove it. This is the kind of detail, texture, and
immersion that I want to achieve with Star Citizen.
I also feel that if everyone can be cloned easily, it fundamentally
changes the structure of the universe. You now have a universe of
immortal gods that can’t be killed. Death is just a financial and time
inconvenience that has no further consequences. The life and death cycle
of humanity is what has brought us our history, our need to “make a
mark” in our time, to push forward. If I want a living, breathing
universe that has a lot of the dynamics of a real world and is inspired
by the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, immortality for all is
problematic.
The flip side is that while perma-death is realistic, it is not a lot
of fun if the first time you’re on the wrong side of a dogfight you
lose everything and have to start again.
I want Star Citizen to be immersive AND fun.
The death mechanics that I have in mind keep a feeling of mortality
and history without making it frustrating or killing (pun intended) the
fun.
The life and death of a Spaceman.
The Character creation screen will be done “in-fiction”. You’ll start the game in 1
st person
view looking at two bathroom doors – one with a male sign and one with a
female sign. Which door you walk through will determine what sex you
are when you walk into the washroom. Walking up to the mirror, you’ll
see your reflection. Wiping the condensation off of the mirror with your
hand (or some similar mechanic) will change / reveal your facial
appearance. When you’re happy with how you look, you will exit and
return to the UEE recruitment office and officer. You’ll fill in your
name on the MobiGlas form and also specify your beneficiary in case of
death: this could be a family member, son, daughter, uncle, aunt or
someone entirely new (although not another player character).
Read more
here!
