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Star Citizen Creator Answers 10 More Fan Questions

One of Chris Roberts' goals for Star Citizen is to "build a world that's more emergent, more dynamic..."

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Star Citizen's next "10 for the Chairman" video is up. In this latest installment, creator Chris Roberts answers an array of wildly different questions about a handful of topics, including inspirations for the game PC space game, elements of the "multi-crew experience," netcode goals, and a lot more.

In discussing his inspirations for Star Citizen, Roberts brought up World of Warcraft. Roberts said he was never really able to get into WoW because he said the world didn't feel real or alive enough. He's hoping Star Citizen can feel more persistent and alive. In Roberts' estimation, Blizzard maybe doesn't give people enough to do between expansion packs to keep them interested; this could be why subscriber numbers tend to rise with the release of new expansions and fall not long after, he said.

For Star Citizen, Roberts is hoping to build a universe that continually feels fresh, new, and alive.

"We can never keep up building new scripted content to keep up with the demand of how quickly people can play through the content," Roberts said, as reported by Imperial News Network. "I think that's the lesson you'll see if you look at World of Warcraft. The new expansion comes out everyone re-ups and now they’re back up to ten million people playing it, they blast through all the content, and bam it's back down to seven million or six million people playing it."

"So one of the big goals with Star Citizen was to try, and we're still obviously working pretty hard on this ‘cause we're not there yet, but to build a world that's more emergent, more dynamic, and feels like it's got persistent places, locations, characters and you feel like you could be part of the fabric of it. And your actions potentially could have some impact on how the world, or the story universe unfolds during your playtime."

Roberts said Eve Online is a good example of a game that allows for a great deal of emergent, player-driven behavior. He also cited Demon's Souls. Yes, Demon's Souls.

"In terms of play style, I definitely would like you to earn the rewards you want in the game. So if you think of Demo's Souls, that's a pretty unforgiving game but when you actually achieve something you really feel like you achieved something because it was hard to get there and you risked a lot when you got there," Roberts said.

"I think that's another longer term goal--that I want to make sure is for Star Citizen, you don't feel like everything's just given to you and everything's easy," he added. "You feel like if you're going out to earn some money on a dangerous mission you can earn some really good money but also you're really risking a lot when you do that. I think that combination of that really works well with this reactive sandbox design."

Roberts also mentioned DayZ as a game with a good "risk/reward" system built in.

"To some extent DayZ had a bit of that where you died, you died; you lost everything," he said. "It's the emergent player behavior that came from that was fairly interesting. I'm not sure we'll necessarily we're going to be anywhere close to as harsh as that, but it definitely highlighted the fact that, the advantages you can get from perma-death in terms of people feeling invested in what they worked for."

Additionally, Roberts answered a question about Star Citizen's netcode. He said, "Our plan is to make the netcode in Star Citizen as good as we possibly can and be as good as anyone else's out there."

Also during the Q&A session, Roberts said one of the elements he thinks will help Star Citizen stand out is its "multi-crew experience."

"One of the hallmarks is meant to be the multi-crew experience where you are on a ship; you and your friends flying it; people are running into the turrets; jumping into a snub nose fighter; running around putting out fires; replacing blown fuses, all working together as a team to operate efficiently in combat," he said. "And I think that. again, will be one of the things that will set Star Citizen apart because that will be done and simulated in a fidelity you don't normally see, and it should be really rewarding to work together as a team to beat off these attackers or take another ship out."

Along those lines, Roberts also talked about Star Citizen's ship repair system. He said some of the game's existing ships get damaged and destroyed "a little too quickly for what they really should be able to do." The development team is working on balancing that, but it's not ready just yet.

"We haven't finished out the damage stuff, we haven't implemented the repair stuff fully yet, so that also would have some impact, because as you're taking damage if you're going around, managing to sort of patch up and repair things, then you're sort of putting back your damage and keeping your ship active longer," he said, noting that players who work together as a crew will be able to keep their ship alive longer.

For lots more on this topic and many others, watch the full video (timestamps below) or check out the complete transcript on Imperial News Network.

  • 02:39 - Game Inspiration
  • 09:46 - Docking Ships
  • 11:14 - Repair and Items System Capability
  • 13:11 - The Space Sky
  • 13:57 - Netcode in Star Citizen
  • 18:46 - Manned Turrets
  • 21:53 - Your Fight Song
  • 23:00 - Arena Commander
  • 28:41 - Notifications
  • 33:20 - Character Customization

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