Star Citizen Live Q&A: Invictus Vehicle Gameplay

Guests:

• Eliot, Lead Mission Designer
• Yogi Klatt, Principle Vehicle Programmer
• Richard Towler, Lead Designer on Vehicle Experience
• Thorsten Leimann, Lead Systems Designer

TL;DW:

• Yogi is happy they managed to squeeze Master Modes into 3.23 but is aware "there's couple balance issues".
• Rearming:
  • For ballistics we'll be able to buy ammo containers to use them to reload the guns.
  • On bigger ships those containers have to be put in a dedicated slot (might change in the future).
  • Ammo sizes will be unified between all guns.
• Firebird and Retaliator will be adjusted in 3.23.1a patch, check this post on Spectrum for details.
• Mission team wants to create missions for refueling, lots of problems needs to be figured out first.
• First version of mining missions might happen "soon", will focus on resource gathering (can be mined, bought, pirated).
• After mission team finishes enough "mission modules" (bounty, mining or any other tasks) they'll start chaining them into longer missions.
• Power plants will consume hydrogen fuel in the future (as in, you won't be able to keep your ship powered forever as it is now). This won't come online with the initial resource update in 4.0 but sometime later.
• Team knows exactly what they want to do with space-combat, now will try to tweak things based on player data.
• Lots of future additions (engineering, armor) will affect balance and will have to be re-tweaked again.
• "There will always be some intentional imbalance."
• Distortion damage will have a counter to drain it and make the ship work again.
• Teams are currently discussing how to move away from ships exploding on reaching 0HP to mostly soft death scenario. Check engineering experimental mode in Arena Commander if you want a sneek peek at the current progress.
• There will be some additional info on what kind of content is awaiting you for each mission (FPS, space-combat, requires multi tool, etc.) but no 100% clear distinction as some missions can change when playing (flying target might land and hide in a building for example). This won't come until mission app refactor.
• "Call to Arms" was balanced by the Mission Team in the past, now it's handled by the Economy Team.
• "Master Modes is doing better than what we had in 3.21 - 3.22 before."
• "K/D ratio flattened out a lot."
• ESP needs to be improved, 1v1 dog-fighting needs to be improved, more ideas to avoid backstrafing.
• Both Yogi and Rich are pretty happy with the changes so far.
• Dupe exploit is fixed internally, will go out when possible.
• Racing is important and has a future.
• "MM will allow us to give racing variants more freedom."
• With the old system some of the racing ships "with all their guns" could be the best fighters.
• Yogi is thinking about a potential "racing operator mode".
• Mission team is investigating ways to speed up the process of getting back to the track in case of death.
• They also want to add open access to the racing tracks in PU (no rewards but your laps will be timed) and other race types (on-foot, ground vehicle, played around with race to get out of prison - just for fun, don't think it fits).
• Tank handling was impacted by some back-end changes, issue is fixed internally and will release when possible.
• Ground vehicle physics were also fixed (to how they worked until now).
• CIG is aware of the problems with cluttered HUD, no info since this isn't a UI episode.
• Devs are still investigating problems with gravlev vehicles, aren't sure what happened yet.
• Lots of discussions on how to encourage players to use ground vehicles. Currently investigating environment (no place to land), weather and other features.
• Engineering plans for 4.0:
  • Life support (fire system, room atmosphere propagation, atmo maintenance, new life support generators).
  • Power management.
  • Relays (connections between items) and fuses.
  • Rebalance of items (bigger differences between item classes for example, clearer info about those differences).
  • Batteries (most likely won't make it into 4.0).
  • Repair of components.
  • Distortion counter.
  • Malfunctions (initially 3: fire, damage and distortion to the item).