Fix - Salvaging Game play Loop in Star Citizen
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- Опубликовано: 4 авг 2024
- After playing the EPTU and watching how it translated to live, I did some brainstorming and found a way to make the game play loop feel a lot better.
Take a look and if you agree please give this video some love so we can get things changed early next year.
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I think salvaging just needs a few minor adjustments:
1. Laser Cutters
Replace the fracturing resonance field with a laser cutter (that is also attached to the salvage heads). Make it take a lot longer to cut through non-scraped hull, hence encouraging scraping first. Before maelstrom you could have ships only be cut table at the current breakage points, after the system is finished you would probably be able to iterate on that process. This would heavily encourage a Reclaimer owner to have a crew, as those laser cutters would be bound to the salvage turrets, and hence be more efficient when operating at higher crew counts. You could also bring in some progression similar to the one found in mining, by having those lasers operate in different size categories. Now to differentiate between the laser cutters in salvage and the mining lasers, which are very specialized to a certain size of rock, and can’t really be used on bigger or smaller ones, they could differ in two factors:
- Bigger lasers can ignore hull resistance better, making them be able to cut through more lightly armored hulls a lot faster while still making stripping a ship of their hull (and armor) more favorable.
- Some materials can’t be cut with a less powerful laser, hence requiring a more creative cut over a simple one; hence keeping a reason to why the Vulture can’t disintegrate some ships that makes logical sense then the artificial limitation we currently have.
This way we’d keep the overall chill vibe of salvage while having slightly more engaging gameplay, and not stepping on mining or becoming too similar, and they’d keep with what they already showed us as the Vulture used a pair of laver cutters in it’s advert.
2. Adjust animations and functionality
Have the disintegrate mode of the Vulture be able to disintegrate parts very quickly between its arms in the ripper, at very high efficiency. This could mostly be done by changing up some animations and always have its values at -5% to +15%, at the cost of not being able to eat bigger pieces that don’t fit between it’s arms. This would of course need some more leeway till Maelstrom is finished, to be able to cut a ship into smaller pieces. Once this is done I’d see the Vulture as pretty much perfect and done in terms of its direct functionality and overall gameplay.
Now the Reclaimer, tho one of my favorite ships in the game, needs a major rework beyond just a gold pass. The idea of the claw is flawed, and the grinding room takes up way too much of the ship’s usable space. I further believe the cockpit needs a major redesign, as it’s easily the worst experience in the ship except for the front elevator. I don’t think there’s enough justification to have the claw operator and pilot be different seats; and I hate nothing in the ship more then the giant console that is dropped over the pilot seat and blocks everything you need to see; while the claw operator has a great view (disregarding a bug that currently plagues the ship) but it’s gameplay is limited to pushing three buttons and communicating with the pilot/tractor beam operators. I think instead they should do the following five things:
- Remake the cockpit to have one seat with great visibility for the pilot/claw operator.
- Make the claw articulate a bit better, some left/right and up/down articulation, as well as in/out and rotation for several purposes noted further down.
- Make the fracturing mode be the job of the remote turrets by ways of laser cutters.
- Make it into a magnetic/tractor gripper, with the primary purpose of big wreck pieces around for easier cutting and hull stripping, and the secondary purpose of pulling whatever is stuck to it closer to the “mouth” the reclaimer has.
- Have the structural resonance field (the disintegration thingy) be only able to crack a piece into very small fragments when it touches it, and have it always be at like -5% to -15%, reducing the loss the closer you pulled the object to the “mouth”.
Like that they would make that gameplay a lot more coherent, logical, and could still avoid the collision problem. To not reduce the crew count, and create a station that is useful to keep occupied, have the former claw operator now instead be in charge of the grinder/refinery, cause on a ship the size of the Reclaimer it would make sense to refine (or rather sort) the materials you pull from a ship, instead of relying on a 3rd party to do that like on the Vulture. Shorten the grinder room by like 50-75%, make it slowly fill up with material parts when doing structural salvage (keeping RMC as already separate and refined resource), and have the grinder operator start and program that process (instead of a static, always-on grinding background that kinda makes me mad for some reason) which would be an opportunity to enter a new relaxed mini game as part of salvage gameplay. With the newly won space we could enter one of two possible things in there:
- Either a small, tier-3 med bay that is only really there to keep someone who had a workplace accident stable, as those are pretty much bound to happen on a heavy industrial ship with grinder and laser cutters. Like one tier 3 med bed without the refilling hunger and thirst functionality; and like a medicine closet. Tho this could also be placed in the room where the current docking port is, with the front elevator being replaced by an actually usable docking port/airlock.
- Or a workshop to patch up broken down components, craft some stuff, and overall repair things, with sone dedicated component storage shelves. To make profit of components you find on ship wrecks, either keeping them yourselves or selling them off as second-hand goods.
I myself would vastly prefer option 2, as it also ties into one of my next points.
3. Components
Instead of just cargo, make components a resource to harvest off of derelicts. This is such an easy option too, since you pretty much had it in the first iteration. Now to make it different and not as broken as it was I’d do the following:
- Make components be priced according to their usability. Broken components are worth next to nothing, while working second-hand components can be sold for half their store price or more. This only makes sense, otherwise I’d like an explanation why I only get one- or two-thousand aUEC for most of my components that I wanna sell. This would make finding and fixing components that you don’t plan on using yourself worth it.
- Make the components in salvage be varying in their state of disrepair. Have them be working the further away from the origin of the system failure they are. To balance out salvage contracts, always assume the people who gave out the contract already took away the most valuable components with them when they discovered the wreck, assuming there are no specialized tools required to remove those components.
4. Readjust Commodity Values
Have RMC be the most valuable commodity you can get from a wreck, as it’s pretty much refined already. But have CMat be a refineable instead, that needs to be refined at a station or on a Reclaimer, which then gets split into its valuable base parts. Those can be the same stuff as you get during mining, just in their already refined forms, such as iron, titanium, and gold. Whatever is used in a space ship of the 30th century, and have it priced accordingly.
5. Make the Filler Stations into proper 3d printers
Have the stations also be able to produce items like Store*All Storage boxes, or armor and fps weapons, depending on if you have a recipe and license to craft those things. With the Vulture being able to produce anything that uses only unrefined CMat and RMC AND fit into 1 SCU of space; like a Store*All box or I presume most armors, pistols, and knives. And the Reclaimer being able to produce things that are made of refined CMat and RMC, and things that fit into bigger spaces; like 8 SCU Store*All boxes, ammunition, rifle-sized weapons; or even small ground vehicles like PTVs and Cyclones.
All of this could be how future iterations of the gameplay could look like.
Bonus points for noticing the hat change :D
Very good video, but I feel like some of the points are a bit backwards, after fiddling around with salvage on Live 3.22 for a while.
Currently, the vulture has no reason to want to disintegrate ships because RMC is more valuable and your small cargo hold means you can't afford to pack lesser materials, but in the current state of things, it's the whole other way around on the reclaimer;
Construction Materials are so plentiful, and so quick to acquire (requiring just a few clicks and a minute of waiting for the disintegration to finish before moving on) that there's no reason to spend the time scraping the ship, when you could go for a quantity over quality approach and fill the ship's very, very large cargo hold (if you aren't limiting yourself to the grid) with large amounts of Construction Materials. It's an extremely profitable loop currently, but it's also a very boring one-since as you said, sitting in the claw seat is hardly interactive at all-and it also mostly negates the need to fully crew your reclaimer, since without scraping all you're left to do is disintegrate ships, which can be done by the pilot, and empty out the buffer, which can either be done after the fact, or with a second crew member sitting in the cargo hold while you go about disintegrating big ships en-masse to fill the Reclaimer's very large buffer.
All in all I strongly agree that disintegrating is currently way too quick and easy, and the value of the materials should be the other way around, with Construction Mats being a high-value payoff for completing a full salvage (Which could even encourage vultures to finish a salvage over multiple trips when tackling bigger ships). This puts value back towards a scrape > disintegrate > sell gameplay loop and encourages going through the whole process, rather than gunning for whichever material you can cram into your cargo hold in larger amounts.
Great points. Thanks for the watch!
I agree with the points from a Vulture standpoint. However, from a Reclaimer standpoint, it absolutely has the power capabilities to rip a ship apart regardless of any limitations attempted to be transposed against it. What needs to happen, is the claw needs to go back to what it was intended to be before this gravitational gameplay was introduced as a means to an end currently. The claw needs to be able to rip off segments of the ship, that is already outlined in game, piece by piece with a larger buffer to fit its capacity since it can very comfortably hold 720SCU of cargo, it the grids accurately reflected that without the "balance" of 420SCU. Since that is not possible, the current gameplay is what we have.
Now for PVP, its so very satisfying to pop the zits that are the murder hobos. As for the rest of your points on the matter, yes I agree, for a Vulture, but once you bring in a Reclaimer, you best hope help arrives quick or you are dead.
As for the point in all of this, it is all primarily a functional capability per ship since their speed of travel vary greatly. The Vulture should be focusing on the hull aspect of the loop since it doesn't have the power to break apart ships while the Reclaimer should be focusing on the structure of all ships since its the power house of the salvaging world.
Scavanging should be in its own category of gameplay since it taints the functionality of salvaging by wasting time exploring ships that just need to be broken down.
CIG wants to encourage players to hull scrape first regardless of what ship they are in. If the only advantage to the reclaimer is it can break down larger ships and hold more cargo then there is never a need to scrape anything. This making 2 seats inside the ship pointless to have crewed. Thats the aim of what im trying to get across about reclaimer gameplay.
As for the claw munching. It was a cool idea but honestly they just need to move on and finish this gameplay loop. The claw leads into a lot of other programming problems with clipping and dmg detection when you ram it into something. They are trying to move fast in 2024 to get things out. Claw munching mechanics will add to much development time ontop of a game thats already taking to long in some peoples eyes. Hopefully with SQ42 coming out those teams can move i to SC and help take this verse into a beta state in 2025.
Perhaps you are right about not needing more exploration gameplay on the bigger ships. Its just something i like to do.
Thanks for the watch and your feedback!