In this episode of Star Citizen Live, Jared Huckaby first receives the chief designer Thorsten Leiman which prepares future gameplays. The latter provides details on the on-board engineer gameplay, following the reactions of players who discovered certain decisions during the “design brief” on this activity.
In the second part of the show, he exchanges with Anna Demetriouan actress who lends her voice to several Star Citizen characters.
This article covers the first part of the video.
Engineer gameplay
The purpose of the on-board engineer activity is to maintain the vessel at its proper level of operation and performance depending on the mission and the hazards encountered.
Engineering in Star Citizen is broken down into three parts:
- configuration and optimization of components upstream: this consists of taking a component, changing its configuration and testing its performance;
- the management of the distribution of resources: from a supervision screen, it is a question of deciding which components can consume, with what priority, and in which network of resources they can draw;
- changing or repairing faulty components: when a component does not work as expected, you have to physically act on it.
These three components can be held by the same playerdistributed over a full teamor ignored by players who aren’t interested or don’t have time to waste on it. Indeed, the player can always go to a station to have his ship configured and maintained. by paying a service.
Since there is no character class system or choice of profession when created, the activity of an engineer can be carried out by anyone at any time. Thus, a pilot who is not interested in this gameplay can decide, following a failure, to go and see if he can restart his ship by acting as a flight engineer.
The developers want to give the full control over all components of the ship. This will provide great depth for players who want to invest in customizing and maintaining their ship.
Even though this gameplay is optional, players will still have to deal with the consequences lack of maintenance or damage. Thus, the larger the ship, the more interesting it will be to take into account the role of engineer. In the video, Thorsten estimates that it will take two people to support engineering actions in a Carrack-sized ship. That doesn’t mean they’ll do it full time.
Time to Kill
To make engineering gameplay meaningful, the developers will increase the time it takes to disable a ship (“time to kill” or TTK in English). Having an engineer on board should further increase the ship’s survival time.
Thorsten gives the example of an engineer who, following a “soft death” of the ship, finds a functional quantum engine, makes a makeshift connection to restart it, and allows the ship to escape from a dangerous situation.
Frequency of repairs
The problems in the ships should arrive at the frequency of the month, even of the week depending on the use made of the machine. Indeed, even if they are still hesitating between a system that depends distance traveled or operating timethe system will take into account the external environment (electromagnetic radiation, temperatures, etc.) and the crew behavior. So, pushing the ship to its limits will result in faster wear, while underperforming employment will reduce breakdowns.
Sabotage
A player who infiltrates a ship will be able to use the engineer gameplay to to cause problems. It will therefore be possible to hack the internal network of the ship, by attacking the components one by one. This will allow, for example, shut down life support systems or artificial gravity in certain sections of the ship.