EVE Frontier - Site Design and Geometry Q&A w/ CCP Brwydr

EVE Frontier: Dynamische Standorte, NPC-Verhalten und Konfliktpotential

CCP
- 21.03.25 - 01:14:23 - 4.046 - EVE Frontier

• Zusammenfassung
• Original

EVE Frontier setzt auf dynamische Standorte mit unvorhersehbaren NPC-Verhalten. Ressourcenverteilung und Okklusion spielen eine zentrale Rolle, was Erkundung und Konflikte fördert. Permanente und generative Standorte bieten Anreize zur Kontrolle und Ressourcennutzung. Belohnungen motivieren zur Verteidigung, während unvollständige Informationen Risiken erhöhen. Zukünftige Entwicklungen umfassen Spielerdesign von Strukturen und Basenbau.

EVE Frontier

00:00:00

00:04:20 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the stream. I am CCB Swift, filling in for CCB Jotun as best as I can. He's over in GDC doing some cool stuff with the Frontier team, but we've got some MVPs right here. I might not have Bathrobe, I might not have the Stunner Shades, but thankfully I've got CCB Brody here. How are you doing, man? I'm doing good, yeah. Looking forward to the stream.

00:04:46 Yeah, me too. It's going to be a really fun time. We're here to chat with you a little bit about, you know, the game design philosophy around sites, things that you interact with in space when you're in stillness. And just the philosophy with how that is designed and how you can interact with those things. I'm like super stoked. We were chatting with this a little bit before the stream started and I was just like...

00:05:12 Feeling myself entranced with everything that was going on. But yeah, so just tell us a little bit about what you want to talk about today and just about how players interact with things in space. Yep. So I guess explain a little bit about me to the viewers to begin with. I've been playing E for 20 years plus now. So a lot of background there.

00:05:39 And something that I've been very focused on over the years is creating conflict, or conflict drivers at least. Got me into a little bit of drama, historically, but if you're not in drama in EVE, then what are you doing? So I've kind of taken that ethos into level design and the kind of vision and philosophy behind sites in the Frontier.

00:06:07 In EVE, there are dungeons. In the Frontier, there are sites. And the idea that I've kind of been pushing quite a bit is that if a player can do it, why can't NPCs also do it? And one of the big things that players can do in the Frontier, they can build bases. So why can't an NPC build a base and see it grow over time?

00:06:36 And that's kind of a big part of the push that we're making now. That's a really fascinating concept. Instead of just having like a very formulaic layout where you know like what's happening, maybe you leave something.

00:06:51 Es ist auch sehr unterschiedlich in der Frontier, weil, you know, Objekte haben physicalität, Occlusion plays a role, so hiding behind things, what you can see, maybe like...

00:07:14 You think a site is going to present one way and it's completely different once you kind of like start exploring it and kind of getting behind some objects and things like that. Yep. So I think some of my peers are fed up from me are talking about line of sight and occlusion. It's my bread and butter. It's the first thing I look at when I look at making a site.

00:07:43 I look at some of the concepts that we've got from some of the epic artists we've got. And then I think, as a player, how can I make best use of this space? Where does it make sense for me to go? And then I try to lean into that as much as possible. With level design, you've got things like steepling and lights. Like Zelda, for example, great example of kind of...

00:08:11 Getting people to go places that they don't realize that they want to go. You go into Zelda, you open up the area as soon as you leave the starting zone, and you start to see points that are rising above everything else. And you know instantly, okay, I need to kind of head this way. So this is something I've tried to bring into quite a few of our newer dungeons. They kind of grab your attention and pull you in a certain direction.

00:08:39 Und wir haben ein bisschen mehr Kontrollen als Zelda, weil wir wissen, wo wir landen werden, wenn wir in diesen Sites sind. Wir haben ein bisschen range, aber wir landen in den Bereich, dass wir kind of wollen Sie. So Sie sehen die Approche, die wir wollen Sie sehen, und dann wir kind of subtly guide Sie in eine Weise. Aber wie alle Dungeons haben, Sie haben absolut Frieden zu gehen, wo Sie wollen. Es kostet Sie Zeit. Und viel.

00:09:08 yeah that's a huge thing in uh in the frontier like there are resources that play here uh you can't necessarily just take and also like as you mentioned for conflict drivers other people are going to want the stuff that's in there

00:09:22 So you kind of have to operate on this concept of imperfect information and maybe rush a little bit. Maybe you're a little bit underprepared, maybe you're a little bit overprepared, but you're not quite sure until you get in. It's super exciting. It really feels like it fits into the Frontier, just overall philosophy of, I think seems to be Jotun put it the best, space is scary as shit. Have you seen it out there?

00:09:46 Direkt quote, I'm almost convinced about that. And it's going to get scarier. It's going to get scarier. That's also terrifying, but in the coolest way. Yeah, yeah.

00:10:02 So the reference about scary, something I've seen quite a lot in the community, and I'm always looking on Discord and looking at people's feedback, and people get scared about things that I haven't designed. It's like we've got silo dungeons at the moment, which are essentially a storage area for resources of factions that are...

00:10:28 Long gone. And the first time I saw someone talking about it on Discord, they were terrified that there was going to be something in there. And I hadn't designed it as an encounter with an NPC. But they didn't go to all the resource nodes in there or the caches to pick everything up because they were absolutely certain that an NPC was going to appear and destroy them. And so...

00:10:57 In the future, that may be the case in a lot of situations. I like that you're keeping it kind of open for what might happen, just to keep everyone on their toes, right? Like, oh, maybe they'll think they can glean something out of site design. Well, I can't say no two sites will be the same, but what happens to you in one site the next time you visit a site that's similar or the same site?

00:11:25 So we're adding quite a bit of variability to what happens to you when you enter a site. We've kind of started that at the moment with the silo sites. Again, when you go in, quite a few people have noticed, but other people have kind of not really seen it. The placement of the resource caches changes every time you go to a new site. There's an extensive...

00:11:53 ...set of areas that these things can spawn in. So when occlusion is fully included into the game, and you can only see within a certain vicinity, you're going to need to do a bit more scavenge gameplay. And... Yeah, there's so many different, like...

00:12:09 The occlusion, the physicality, line of sight, it adds so much new gameplay considerations, but also, as you mentioned, new roles to do in space. Maybe you need someone that needs to be able to analyze what this little space corridor is going to have, or maybe some cartographers out there to be able to map out these dungeons, or rather these sites, so you know what forces to bring and what equipment you need.

00:12:39 It is so cool, especially just to see you and your creativity, along with the rest of the team, just unleashed creating these sites and, you know, putting neat little things in there, and also just how the NPCs will respond. So we're going to get into a little bit in more detail, and also...

00:13:00 Towards the end of the stream, we also have a Q&A from some of the questions that you guys asked in Discord through the last couple of weeks or the last couple of days. And that'll be right at the end. But Brody, why don't you get into it?

00:13:16 Okay, I've prepared a deck. Hoping you can see that. Yes. Happy days. Okay. So I've kind of just done this last minute. It's going through kind of what we want to do in the future with the vision of sites and the philosophy behind it. So...

00:13:46 The vision for the sites are, as I said earlier, if a player can do it, then why can't NPCs do it? Now, the tech behind what a player can do is very different to the tech behind what NPCs can do. So a lot of this has been trial and error. A lot of this has been working with the team and kind of trying to...

00:14:11 Not take shortcuts, but make best use of the tech that we have at the moment to do what it is we want to do. Yeah, do some creative stuff in order to get the NPCs to act in a certain way. I know you guys do get bound by the tools you have. There are some cool new tools that you can use in Frontier, which is the reason these things can exist. But I didn't mean to cut you off. Keep going, talking about kind of...

00:14:38 Just how these things evolve and how they're created. Yeah. So the picture here is the accelerator site that is fairly new now. It's not one of the newest ones, but it's one of the biggest dungeons that we've made. And it's the dungeon with the largest amount of occlusion. And it's something I'm very proud of. And it will be leaning more towards the vision that I'm going to be setting out now.

00:15:07 So the idea is that a site can essentially change. Historically we've had...

00:15:18 Sites and Dungeons, that you go in, you do an action, or you kill NPCs, and then there's a completion event, and then that site disappears. Yeah, people might be familiar with, like, oh, there's a certain NPC that's the trigger for the next wave, and then you walk on to the next phase. Yep. So I was thinking, what if we kind of went away from that and gave permanence to a site? What if it was a static site?

00:15:46 What if there was a site that started off with the seeds and then grew over time into something pretty spectacular? Or maybe it's got a failure state if someone interacts with it in a certain way. And as these things progress, maybe something else happens to them. Maybe they spawn certain NPCs that gives them what they require.

00:16:11 If you're building a big base as a player, you need resources. So obviously NPCs will need resources. So they'll need miners, they'll need haulers, they'll need NPCs to defend. And so that's kind of the avenue we're taking. Sites will grow over time. They'll be destroyable. There will be some that won't be completely destroyable, but you'll be able to disable them. And then...

00:16:40 These sites will also have a kind of...

00:16:44 ebb and flow to them, even if players don't interact with them. So over time they may break down if the NPCs aren't doing what they need to do. And then maybe they recover. Maybe they stay in the broken down state for quite a while until a player interacts and triggers something else. And the idea behind this is that then we give texture to the universe. There are certain neighborhoods that are created through these sites. And we make sure that there's logic behind this.

00:17:13 If a certain region has an abundance of...

00:17:31 Was ist es, was ich als Spieler, als eine Tribe, das will meine Goals in der Game führen? Und du kannst auf die Map und denken, okay, da sind die Statik hier, die mir diese Resourcesen geben. Vielleicht ist es für mich zu setzen, die hier und dann machen die Best Use von diesen Resource Nodes. Aber da ist es auch vielleicht eine Tribe, die die gleiche Idee haben, wie Sie.

00:17:55 Das ist so cool. Und also, ich kann sagen, dass als das Ding progresses, vielleicht gibt es mehr Reward, da ist es, weil diese Entities sind, sozusagen, mehr Ressources für die Welt. Und, you know, one thing that fascinates mich, wenn ich die Frontier-Map sehe, ist, wie viele Systeme da sind in der Game. So, wir sprechen über, you chatted about diese, wie ein bisschen, kind of, Static. Aber wenn es...

00:18:24 thousands of systems where they could be in like having this ecosystem where they're always doing something interacting with the the place that you live interacting with the resources around you maybe they're getting uh crushed maybe they're thriving somewhere it's going to be so cool to just have um like this texture to space yeah um so there'll be static sites um that that

00:18:51 So they're a known quantity, they'll be disableable. So if my tribe kind of claims one of these static sites, another tribe will be able to come and just basically disable it for a considerable amount of time. We're not talking hours here, we're talking days.

00:19:14 It then creates that catalyst between groups. It creates that kind of inflection point where, okay, this group then has basically come and taken my resources and stopped me gaining them. Why did they do that? I don't like that group. Okay, let's go to war. Let's do something to get back at them. And it's, I think in EVE, it's been those situations that have been some of the most epic,

00:19:44 dass wir gesehen haben. Und ich denke, dass es ein sehr guter Weg für uns ist. Und wir haben eine große Canvassung zu tun. Aber die Statik sind nur ein Teil von uns. Wir haben auch die Generative Sites, die sind die Menschen, die sich um, um, um, um, das kann, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,

00:20:12 There may be other groups that want to make sure that they keep going around and spawning elsewhere. So they may destroy the ones that are in your area. That is so cool. So you can actually create just like a little almost garden of your type of sites that you want to keep and keep harvesting through the years and just hope.

00:20:34 No one comes in to try and interfere, kill them and let them move and go somewhere else. You're absolutely right about conflict drivers and how much fun that can create. But also when you're kind of like a lone pilot and you find one of these things and it's, you know, got...

00:20:52 a jackpot of resources that's a really fun like just rush of like i've got to go get this thing now before someone else notices it uh before it changes before like something crazy happens before maybe other areas start interacting with it uh so that that's that's gonna create such weird like tense moments in the game that always feel super rewarding uh once you kind of go after them yep

00:21:21 Es wird sehr cool. Und das ist die lustige Partei. Es werden die Tribes, die die Kontrollen zu kontrollieren, aber es ist nichts, dass sie von ihnen von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen, von den Ressourcen.

00:21:49 So you talked a little bit about rewards. Don't mean to interrupt. I'm just fascinated by it. What type of rewards are we talking about that are going to be in these sites? I'd rather not give that away at the moment. Okay, okay. So they will be things that players use often, and it will be something that is rewarding to the player enough so that you'll want to defend them. And as we've experienced...

00:22:18 Passive incomes are a big driver in people and players being willing to sacrifice vast streams of wealth. And that's also another part of this.

00:22:34 Yeah, we've definitely seen how that shapes player behavior. If you're going after a static objective that's worth a certain amount of resources, that's cool. You know what's really appropriate to risk. But if you're looking at something that can generate resources continually, you don't really know how much that's worth. Maybe you'll be able to hold it for months and months. Maybe you'll only be able to hold it for a week.

00:22:58 Again, we're kind of circling back to that entire concept of imperfect information. You're not really sure what someone else out there is going to do or what type of response you're going to get. Yeah, yeah, completely. And I think that comes into the next slide, actually, which is basically creating neighborhoods of these sites.

00:23:25 We're not moving away from the typical content that we have.

00:23:36 We're not moving away from those completely. These will be added on top of those. So it's basically getting the best of both worlds. We'll still have that kind of, not so much instant gratification, but those sites that give you an immediate thing to do. And you know what to do in there. You need to kill NPCs. You need to reach a certain point by a certain time.

00:24:03 But also you've got these longer time, these sites that require a bit more investment in them, like the statics, like the generatives. And who knows, maybe in the future you'll be able to plant a flag. Maybe you'll be able to do something a bit more interesting with them. It's not a guarantee. It's a possibility for the future. But there's a lot of opportunities with sites like this where...

00:24:32 the npcs operate like a player yeah it sounds like you're really laying some really fascinating groundwork uh just to continue building on as well just see how these sites work uh what what people like like about them what resonates really strongly what's successful about them and just kind of take it further and build off of them um but yeah that that it just seems so neat to be able to go into this little sneaky uh area or just like going through like

00:25:01 A dungeon where you don't really know. It's not formulaic. You don't know how it's going to end every single time. You might not even know what sort of reward you're going after, but you know kind of about the type of resource you're going to get. Yeah, yeah, completely. And I think...

00:25:21 I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want to give too much away to players who will be looking at this system in the future and try to min-max and get the most out of it. But I will say that these sites will...

00:25:39 Let me move on to the next one. And they'll have states to them. So a site that may have operated in one particular way previously may turn into a different state in the future. So one that I will share is that a site will become infested. What does that mean?

00:26:08 It's become feralized. There's something wrong with the NPCs that are building this site and now they've become overtly hostile. But what does that mean then? Do they continue doing what they would do if they were normal? Well, no. They start overproducing everything then. They start taking more and more and more resources and building up and building up. And if you're in that system with your base...

00:26:35 There's nothing to say that those NPCs won't see you as a threat. That's so neat that they're going to be able to identify things like, oh, these players are taking resources that I, the NPC, now need. Maybe I'll take them as my resource. Yep, yep. And we've seen in one of the most recent dungeons that we did that we are kind of leaning into more...

00:27:04 Biological resources as well. There have been corpses found with certain things inside them, so maybe they see your base as something to pilfer from, maybe they see your storage as something to pilfer from, but they also might see you as the player as a resource to take.

00:27:26 That feels very Eve Frontier, just like, oh, here, the NPCs now see you as the resource. Have fun. So we're talking about these sites, you know, some of them you're talking more of, like, maybe a strategic objective, something that maybe a group of players would go after. Are there, like, how would you design sites differently for, like, individuals versus groups, or do you just kind of let the generative site kind of play that role for you?

00:27:55 So, it's a really complex question because of the way that things are set up in Frontier.

00:28:08 I'm going to be mentioning occlusion and line of sight again and again and again. But sights are... So your defensibility in a sight is very much determined by the amount of things that you can hide behind and about how fast you can move. So for smaller ships, that's typically easier. You can hide behind things a lot easier than you would if you were in a battleship, for example.

00:28:37 So, it's not so much... It's a really difficult way of balancing things, but it's also fun in the sense of, as a game designer, of confronting that challenge.

00:28:54 And so when it comes to risk, when you're in a smaller ship, typically, because you can hide behind things and get complete immunity, you're at less risk. Not always, but often. So that presents us with a bit of challenge and a bit of...

00:29:19 A bit of a problem. So there's a couple of ways that we've counted this. One of them being...

00:29:28 Having better AI in NPCs. The behaviors that we've got in NPCs, most of them in the NPCs that we have at the moment, essentially the NPCs are dumb. They will look at occlusion. They will look at if they can fire at you, but more often than not, they won't really do much about that. But we do have smarter AI now that will make sure that they always get into line of sight with you.

00:29:56 So faster, smaller ships can be tackled that way. But also one of the newer things that we've done is that NPCs will try to fire at you through things. They're not smart. But we've adapted that now where NPCs won't fire until they actually have a lock on you, a proper line of sight. There's nothing between you and them.

00:30:25 Ja, es ist nicht easy zu tun, es ist nicht easy zu balance along diese Linien. Und mit kleineren Schiffen zu den größten Schiffen, du denkst, dass die größte Schiff ist mehr survivable. Aber in der Linie der Sight und Occlusion, die Schiffen haben eine einfache Zeit im Hintergrund. So das ist etwas, was wir brauchen. Ja, die Sneaky Boys sind die Sneak.

00:30:49 You know, we've been talking a lot about line of sight and inclusion just because it plays such a huge role in there. But like when we talk about line of sight, I think people just generally go to like, oh, how is this going to change PVP? How is it going to, you know, change how fleets work and tactics? But really, like when it comes to sites.

00:31:13 This really, as you were talking about before, plays into the design, the type of objective that you're going to be able to achieve with a certain type of ship. So can you talk a little bit about how this plays into your design for making these sites? Yep. And the next slide is perfect for this, actually. So line of sight and occlusion is the bread and butter when it comes to

00:31:42 Any type of comeback in the site. The picture on the left is basically the...

00:31:54 The bounding boxes of the assets that we use. So as you can see on the left, that entire asset is completely occluded if you hide behind it. But if you look at the asset, there's loads of points in there that you should be able to A, fire through and B, fly through. Now, we're trying to get on top of making this

00:32:22 Es ist viel einfacher in der Zukunft zu machen. Und wie Sie sehen, zwischen dem leften und dem righten Bildern, die Boxen, oder die Occlusion Boxen, die auf den Assetzen sind, haben sich ziemlich verändert. Die Einsen auf der Seite, Sie werden können, Sie werden können, Sie werden können, Sie werden können, Sie werden können, Sie werden können. Es ist viel einfacher.

00:32:46 You'll be able to do a lot more with the occlusion boxes on the right than you can with the left. And this is something that we are going to try to tackle more and more as it goes along. I'm sure that people who play have seen with asteroids and with certain other assets as well. You get close to them and you rebound off them. That's something that we are looking at and something that we are going to try and

00:33:15 considering that line of sight and occlusion is such a big part of the game. And so when it comes to designing these sites, that needs to be taken into consideration whether the asset is able to be fired through, if there are open spaces in the asset as well, as you can see with these ones.

00:33:38 But also the difference between fast open spaces and space areas that are extremely crowded and dense with cover. Because if there's lots of cover, you're going to survive for longer. So we can then amp up the threat to you. Wow. Everyone will survive in those areas with lots of cover because we have ways to counter that now.

00:34:04 Yeah, that's kind of the balance that we have now. The more cover we have, the more we can do to kind of threaten you. It's really neat to see the granularity that you have for like the occlusion and the site design instead of just like these huge, what I would refer to as a large collidable object, right? It's just this one.

00:34:25 big sphere that even if it looks like there's a hole in the middle you can't fly through it you just bounce off of it um but here it looks like you're able to uh create like little pathways uh of occlusion and and just giant gaps where you know if there's a if there's a hole or if there's a break in a structure you could fly through it and someone might be able to spot you either another player at npc

00:34:50 Or maybe you can kind of use it to scout, right? You just like hide behind it. You get like some bad vibes. Just peek your head out a little bit, see if anything's there. Oh no, we're good. Keep on the site. That's just such a, it adds so much really cool gameplay and just neat opportunities for you to be able to interact with sites like this. Yeah. And that's why we've leaned into the NPC behaviors that work with this. So they won't fire unless they've got...

00:35:18 ...a line of sight on you. And there's nothing occluding between you. But this goes a step further, or will go a step further in the future. I don't want to say too much about this. I don't want to give too much away. But there's things happening that will make this matter more.

00:35:39 Das ist all I can say. All right. I like the little tease. I want to know more. I might just wander over to that area, maybe just eavesdrop a little bit. But we'll definitely have more streams in the future. And obviously, if you guys want to learn a little bit more about this or chat about occlusion and site design with designers.

00:35:59 Head over to our Discord. It's a really great community of players talking about stuff. You'll be able to interact with developers and just kind of see cool insights into their minds. It's always my favorite part about, like, working with a game at this stage is just being able to just have those conversations and see those conversations. It's really neat what you guys get up to and what you plan. Yeah. I've worked with a lot of companies, and I've never...

00:36:27 We worked with a company that is so open to that kind of collaborative process with a player. And the ideas that players present to us give us opportunities to kind of bounce off of what their ideas are and think, oh, this would be very cool if we included it with that. So I would definitely, definitely encourage players to get involved, give feedback.

00:36:54 And present ideas, just throw them at us. We are more than willing to listen. And if it's a cool idea, we will see what we can do. Yeah, right on. Well, let's continue. I know you've got a couple more things that you wanted to chat about, kind of like bringing all these ideas. You know, we talk about occlusion. We talk about the different types of sites, how they rebuild NPCs and their activities and actions, rewards. What does this look like all jumbled together?

00:37:25 Now, that's a very big question. So something that's happening at the moment is that I think we've covered this one. Let me jump to that one. This one's probably more appropriate. Something that's happening at the moment is that we are creating more tools on the back end that give us more control over where these things happen.

00:37:52 Historically, the distribution system that we've had has been quite linear. And the way that we distribute content in the game, it's given us options, but it's been difficult to implement them. We've got a new system that's coming now that is basically going to make that much easier for us to manage. So the current distribution system will change in the future.

00:38:21 It'll become more granular. We'll be able to do things that kind of conform to what we've always wanted. So areas with an abundance of, I've got to be careful about what I say because I don't want to give it away, but areas with abundances of certain things may have certain distributions attached to them. Planets may be a signifier.

00:38:49 Maybe a signifier. There's a lot that we can do with the new distribution system with all the interwoven layers of content that we are creating. And so...

00:39:02 I think players will see a big difference in the future, but I don't want to say when. Yeah, no, that's good. Of course, things are going to develop, they're going to evolve. But just the idea, I guess, that maybe you have the tools to create certain little ecosystems around types of...

00:39:26 Types of properties in space like we talked about the the digital physics of the frontier like the rule set that's there like the like your ability to play with stuff and set dungeon distributions based on what's in space is neat instead of just like kind of a static area where everything is flat there's gonna be some richer areas that might be more populated

00:39:48 Maybe little cold spots that a smaller group or maybe a solo player can strike their riches in or explode horribly. Very likely for me. But that's cool. Everyone needs a job. Shipbuilders, I keep you in business. Yeah. So what makes the world go round? Yeah. But yeah, we've got quite a few things going on at the moment that will tie into that kind of distribution.

00:40:17 um i won't go into too much detail but uh it a lot of it will tie into uh history layers and the the law of e-frontier and the factions that came previously uh interwoven with uh the feral drones that are currently uh here and potentially other factions as well that are involved in the game

00:40:45 Right on. Okay, so we had some really great chats about this. Again, please head over to our Discord to keep the conversation going. If you have, you know, more questions for CCP Broodier and the team, Broodier and the team, I got to get the pronunciation right. It's fine. Nice, but I'm told you have some...

00:41:09 Maybe some recorded footage or recovered footage of one of these sites. Are we ready for that or am I jumping the gun? I've got a couple more slides that I'll just fly through really quickly. No need to speed through. We've got plenty of time chatting here.

00:41:26 So next item is, I think a lot of people will have seen this site. This site is the accelerator site. And it's just want to give an idea of how we kind of design these. So originally we'll block them out in Blender. And then we'll try to think of positioning of the assets and kind of how we can

00:41:53 So with this site, for example, it doesn't really give away the size of it, but a battleship in here is tiny. So a frigate in here is just, it's minuscule. So what you can probably see is these.

00:42:16 Basically, outcroppings. There's quite a lot of them in here that give quite a lot of occlusion for frigates. Now, this isn't a combat site yet. I like the yet. So, when you go in here, it's other players you need to be aware of rather than NPCs. May change in the very near future. Who knows?

00:42:45 This is kind of the first step. We need to make sure that we are catering towards multiple types of players with the sites that we create.

00:43:00 When it comes to that, I look at the archetype of a site. What type of content do we want in the site? Like in this one, there's a small puzzle that you need to basically do in order to gain access behind this shield that's hidden here. In the future, we're going to be baking a lot more archetypes into a single site. So it'll basically give more...

00:43:29 opportunity to players, whether they're individual players, whether you're playing as a group, whether you're in a frigate, a battleship, a battlecruiser, there will be things that are more appropriate to you and the ship that you have. And there will be other content then that will be extremely difficult for you to perform, such as getting from...

00:43:54 EPS race, for example, or a speed test. If you're in a battleship and you need to get from point A to point B in a very short space of time, a battleship's likely not able to do that. But if you're in a frigate, maybe you can. So maybe a shield only goes down for 10 seconds and it's 80 kilometers away. If you're in a battleship, you're not going to be able to do that. If you're in a frigate, you might just be able to edge out.

00:44:21 okay so are you thinking that like in if someone were to encounter a site like this like uh an individual or a group with like a cohesive doctrine might not be able to complete it but there would be like different little elements that would be open to them to what they've brought and then if someone you know maybe smaller will be able to just like kind of wiggle through and find another area uh of the site that's that's for them is that kind of like the the direction you're going yes um

00:44:49 And these approaches are something that we take into consideration as well. So the approach that a battleship takes in a site will be completely different to the approach that a frigate takes. And that's all I'll say on that. I don't want to go into too much detail, but there's some cool stuff coming up that we're working on at the moment that will make best use of those situations. Yeah, it seems like a really cool tool that you

00:45:19 Oh, I didn't mean to rhyme. A really cool toolset do you have to work with in order to kind of balance these things and just make them available to as many people as possible? And, you know, just again, we talk about different types of gameplay that the occlusion and just the site geometry itself offers up for you. Yeah. So with certain games, when you have a certain spec or...

00:45:46 you're in a certain ship, everything's open to you. And so there's nothing really limiting what you can do. Now in certain situations, that's cool. But in Frontier, where we want to give the survival kind of semi-horror, I guess, approach.

00:46:09 It's not great if you're able to do absolutely everything without potentially asking someone else to come give you a hand, which is kind of why having areas that only certain specs or certain ships are able to achieve the goal, it makes sense. Or you can just go in, do the battleship content, and then go and change ship and come back later and do the frigate content. It's completely open to how...

00:46:38 players interpret it, but it'll be much quicker and therefore much safer if you team up with a friend, they come in a frigate, you come in a battleship, you deal with the big MBCs, and the frigate may be able to squeeze into areas that you can't. Yeah, and maybe also some double coverage there, frigate might be able to provide some cover, or not provide some cover, but scout out for any bad guys around the corner, or just in the next phase of the site.

00:47:07 It just seems really neat. My mind gets turning as to how I'd want to approach these things. That kind of comes to a good point as well about scouting. In EVE, you have scouts when you're in a fleet. They're super important. They tell you what is happening with enemy fleets and movements and all the rest of it. In Frontier, with Occlusion and with Line of Sight,

00:47:37 You need scouts that are incredibly capable. So the kind of skill requirement for that then kind of sets a precedent. You need people that you know you can trust who are able to interact with the mechanics in a particular way to tell you what's happening with enemy fleet movements, whether there's someone close to you or not.

00:48:06 There's something I really want to talk about, but I can't. But there's going to be a big addition to that type of gameplay.

00:48:17 Potentially soon. It's neat that you're talking about the role of a scout. And there's going to be so many different roles in the frontier that you'll have to fulfill. And a lot of it, it might not be what your physical ship is capable of. It could just be what skills you as a player have. Are you good at predicting?

00:48:40 what information someone else is going to need, the rapport you have with them. Maybe a really close-knit group of pilots can really do significantly more than just a whole bunch of people who are maybe not as comfortable with one another. And the tick rate kind of comes into this as well because the...

00:49:06 Mit der Tickrote, wie es in Frontier ist, alles ist mehr Reaktion-Based. Du kannst schneller reagieren zu bestimmten Situationen. Und es ist nicht zu sagen, dass wenn du super Reflexes hast und eine Erasing-A-Twitch-Gameplay wirst, dass du wirst. Du wirst. Es ist nur, dass es bestimmte Play-Styles gibt, die bestimmte Spiel-Sätze favorieren.

00:49:34 Such as scouting, for example. Hiding behind things as well. Hiding behind things at the moment is easier in a smaller ship than it is in a larger ship. The faster you go, though, the more difficult it gets because you need to slow down as well. So it's kind of a really interesting interplay of skill requirements when you're in a smaller ship because typically it's easier to hide behind things, but you go faster. So it's kind of not as well.

00:50:02 But yeah, Occlusion and Line of Sight are going to be huge for not only PvE, but the PvP aspect of the game as well. And I'm really looking forward to see what players do. Yeah, you touched on this a little bit, but the quarter-second tick rate and just the physics of the ship itself, it feels so much more...

00:50:25 um responsive and much more snappy like it feels like you're able to make those types of decisions and you know calculated movements um you know whether deliberate or accidental types of movements that you can really take advantage of or completely blunder if you do things a little bit wrong

00:50:45 It just feels so neat. And also, you know, the camera's a little bit different, so you can't necessarily just detach your camera and just look all around the area around you. As we've been talking about, it's what your ship can see. Yep. So the camera situation is very cool. Something that we did previously was have an action cam.

00:51:12 Where you look directly in front of your ship. And you could control your ship as well. We still... Which is quite cool. And there are some ideas about leaning into that too. But with the overall camera that we have at the moment, it's much more... It's much closer to your ship that you can get in E, for example. So it gives you a kind of... Not claustrophobic, but your ability to see...

00:51:41 All the details of everything around you requires you to move your camera around a lot more. And like you said, you can't just right-click and look at or zoom right out to get a full view of the field that you're on. But there may be something to that in the future that gives a broader perspective.

00:52:05 All right. So again, you wanted to talk a little bit about variability of these sites, how they might change. We did chat a little bit about how the MPC behaviors would be, but take us through this. Yeah. So this is one of the newer sites that's gone in. It's a large debris field. Well, I say large, it's a moderate debris field. We've got much larger ones.

00:52:33 But you go into this site and there are certain areas that have resources and caches that you as the player can take from. So these resources or these caches will change whenever these sites spawn and the first person walks into them. Now, this is kind of a baby step into variability.

00:53:01 There's a lot more that we want to and can do here, which kind of jumps on to the next point, which is random encounters. This is another site. You can see the nice little quotes here. So this site is Rex. It's basically a...

00:53:26 Synod Transport, that has been floating through space for a considerable amount of time. Now, as a player, it's quite interesting. There are certain resources that you could potentially take from this site. Those resources aren't guaranteed when you come to this site. So a little bit of salvage gameplay is involved here, but there may or may not be corpses here as well that have...

00:53:55 kind of desiccated over time. And the other thing as well is that there could be random encounters that occur in this site. And this is something that we want to expand across everything that we do in terms of content now. When it comes to sites, planets, moons, suns, there should be a risk associated with that. There should be a chance that something

00:54:24 interesting or unique happens to you just as you're traveling around. And so this is the first step into that with these sites. It may not happen every time. It may not happen anytime you go into them. But that one time that you do go in, an NPC may take interest in what you're doing. I like that you added the corpse for scale just so we can kind of see exactly like the size and magnitude of this thing. Yep.

00:54:54 And then the next slide is the... Is this the teaser? Yes. Okay, we did a little bit of preamble before, but I'm told this is some recovered footage from a site that might have been spotted out in space. Maybe it's in development, who knows? So it's a bit of a first look, right? Yeah.

00:55:23 Ja, es ist ein erstes.

00:56:14 And maybe that's just the beginning.

00:56:17 So neat. So I kind of want to, I just want to adjust my VCR at home and get a clearer picture, smack the side of my monitor just to get it. I want to see it all now. Yep. I want to see it all now. The printing sounds, it's just so soothing to me. But I think there's a certain age that you'll recognize those sounds. And if you do recognize those sounds, you know.

00:56:45 Take your aspirin, drink some water, stretch. Health is important. Yeah, yeah. All right, so thanks so much for talking about that. We do have some, if you've got some time, we've got some questions that the community asks that we'd love to kind of pick your brain on. Yep.

00:57:05 Alright, so I'll jump right into it. This one's submitted by Lakal. Thanks so much, by the way, for everyone who submits questions. We love to know what you want to know. And it really helps us kind of design streams like this around gameplay.

00:57:22 just cool neat stuff that we might take for granted because we work with it all the time but uh you know you're you're interested in it so lacal says right now sites and e frontier seem very similar to those in eve online with very familiar mechanics what unique design elements or gameplay features are planned to differentiate site design in e frontier and make them feel distinct from its predecessor yeah i know you touched on this a little bit um in your chat but

00:57:50 Feel free to just respond. We've got a lot of opportunities to kind of create some interesting gameplay.

00:58:02 So EVE leans into its own strengths with the sights that it has and does that amazingly well. And finding that niche for the Frontier with the physics engine that we have has been something that we really want to nail. So that's kind of why this vision and this philosophy of if a player can do it, why doesn't an NPC do it?

00:58:30 I think that's kind of a core aspect now of creating sites that give a unique approach to the frontier. Creating sites that players can generally have certain types of interactions with. Again, I've got to be careful with what I say. I don't want to give too much away. But you can tend your garden.

00:58:58 and grow what it is you want to grow but also someone else can come and torch your garden i think that's that's a great analogy uh just someone just going in there setting your uh your tomatoes on fire no thanks uh no tomatoes for you those tomatoes yeah yeah yeah i really do love the just you know the concept that you've touched on uh about how the engine uh combined with you know

00:59:27 The physics of Frontier and the new improvements that you have to NPC behavior kind of all play together to make these sites completely different and very tricky to nail down. Oh yeah. It's definitely a challenge getting all the different aspects of a site to kind of mesh together well. But I think

00:59:57 We've taken smaller steps over time just to kind of get that information to build up tooling that we need, to build up the AI behind NPCs, but we're at a point now where we have those things and it's time to take a bigger step. Nice. Let them cook and you've got the tools you need to do that. Next question submitted by Ebola.

01:00:24 Do you plan to add big ships, like capital ships, in E-Frontier? I do want to talk about player ships, but there are big things on the table.

01:00:46 And I'll leave it at that. Okay, I won't, Julie, too much. But big ships out there, we already know there's big spooky things out there. Not even skellingtons, just big spooky feral ships. In relation to what potentially could come, are they big? Or are they small? Is there big or is it small? Who knows?

01:01:13 Ich denke, die Mood-Eater ist eine sehr respectable size. Ja, ja.

01:01:20 Next question submitted by Warcus. Rather than designing repetitive, predictable sites that players can easily map and document on a wiki, are you planning to create dynamic, randomized, or unpredictable sites to heighten the uncertainty and make risks feel real? I know this is something you already touched on, how every site's going to kind of evolve and change and just how it's generated. Even the site itself, you know, you're going to be able to tackle differently based on the ship.

01:01:48 oder group that you're with? Yep. So this is something we're definitely leaning into in the future. Variability, so placements of assets in a site, types of NPCs, encounters, randomizing rewards as well is something that we want to do in the future. And then static, generative, these kinds of sites are...

01:02:18 Das ist die Bred & Butter, die wir auswählen können, in dem Player Interactability geben, auf was es sie wollen, von einem Encounter, und was die Rewarden sie wollen. Ja, ich weiß nicht mehr. Ich weiß nicht mehr. Ich weiß nicht mehr. Ich weiß nicht mehr. Ich weiß nicht mehr.

01:02:46 Okay. Snipingwolf has a question. Do we have any intention of making the approach and object button click have any sense of the object that we're approaching? Really, he just wants to know, like, if he hits approach on something, will he just bound into it or he'll be able to take a bit of a smarter path around it? Yeah. So the bounding boxes that I showed earlier on is something that we are definitely looking at improving in the future.

01:03:14 Bouncing ships is a pet hate of mine. When you ran into something and you just do these really weird movements, it's definitely something that's been discussed. It's definitely something that is on the table to be tackled. And we want it to feel more realistic. Taking it to full realism, however, means that if you ran something, you're going to take damage.

01:03:43 So be careful what you wish for. And yeah, that discussion has been long ongoing. I think this is something that I'm really excited about is just being a nuisance, right? I bounce into my friend and suddenly we both are on fire, but it's okay. I planned for this. Maybe he didn't.

01:04:08 Ja, definitiv. Und wenn es zu larger Engagements als auch, Fleet Fights, das ist definitiv going to be a headache für die Fleet Commanders und Sub-Commanders von der Fleet, wenn du da haben die Spieler, die wir alle kennen, das lief zu einfachen.

01:04:32 So our next question comes from Kobinator. Will there be a time when you can salvage Rex's salvage sites versus just looting them? Yeah. Salvage gameplay is... It's something that I did a bit of investigation into previously. There's a lot of options that we can take in the future, but it's...

01:04:58 It's definitely something that we are looking at. It makes a lot of sense with the survival aesthetic of the game. The lore and the history as well of this bleak universe that was once populated is now very dead apart from ferals and...

01:05:25 Automated factions. So being able to kind of dig into that history layer, being able to scour ruins and find wrecks and having gameplay around that definitely makes a lot of sense. All right. So next question from Rapid Taco. Great name. Are the places of interest going to be tied to the lore for the deep story arcs?

01:05:51 Yes, I don't want to go into too much detail about this. Simply yes is fine. I think you just want to know. There's definitely going to be a lot more solidifying why certain things are where they are in the future. Okay, nice. I like it. Perfectly vague, but also...

01:06:16 Makes me want to know more. Kind of on a similar subject, from a question from Art Urban, are PRYs global warpables or celestial based or like how are people going to interact with them? Yeah. So the new distribution system that we will be getting will give us a lot more options that we have currently. At the moment we can distribute things to celestials.

01:06:45 and pretty much everything you see in the system. But in the future, there will be a lot more granularity to that. We're looking at Lagrange points, which gives us...

01:07:02 A huge array of new distribution points that we can start using. And bringing science into this as well and scientific correctness, I guess, is that these places where things will orbit, it makes sense to build things around them, right? And so...

01:07:27 There will be other parts of the universe where it makes sense that things are moving. So you'll see a wider distribution of content in those areas.

01:07:41 But, yes. Nice. I can tell that you have been talking to an astrophysicist, which the Frontier team has, just by what you're talking about. It feels so cool. The sci-fi geek in me is just eking out over all the cool prospects of where these things can exist, how they exist, how they're going to act next to certain things.

01:08:09 we're just all nerds after all oh yeah oh yeah and our last question is from pand cakes uh not necessarily about uh structures or rather about the sites themselves but he asked will there ever be a system for players to design their own monolithic structures and then he kind of just kind of goes on and asks will you not put this into the game for fear it will generate a universe littered in titanic phallic shapes

01:08:38 That would be a very cool thing to do. Okay, okay. I don't know, but letting people create some cityscapes and some things that are personal to them would be very cool. It's not something that I've looked at, but...

01:09:07 There have been situations of inadvertent... So you've been making your own city of dicks is what you were trying to say here. I knew it. Is my screen still being shut? No, thankfully? Maybe? I don't know. There's been situations where certain shapes have shown up.

01:09:36 Inadvertently, through no fault of our own, they just appeared that shape. If you know, you know. I think this picture has been shared on Discord quite a bit. And after the stream, I will share it again. Yet another reason to join the Frontier Discord. It's so many reasons. Yeah.

01:10:03 you know kind of just this isn't necessarily a question but it did get me thinking you know if when players do design certain objects in space do you think they'll be able to design their own kind of like maybe mini dungeons in a sense or or mini sites where they can create like their own structures in space and you know maybe have uh some smart turrets or something and a cache at the end that would be very cool um

01:10:31 I think defensibility of player bases is something that's going to become more and more and more important as we go along with the game. And my favorite words, line of sights, is a big factor of that. And so with the sights that we're designing at the moment as well, we're also keeping in mind creating environments that players will be able to build a base around.

01:11:00 Wow. ...that could potentially change the overall defensibility of your base and how you interact with that system. That is seriously cool. Oh, I didn't even think about that. Oh, I was still thinking about the cityscapes that you were making.

01:11:22 All right, well, I really appreciate the time. We've just a bit over an hour of chatting. Great questions and really just so nice to be able to pick your brain, CZB Brodier. I really appreciate it. Can't wait for the next one. I know I'm eager to know more already, but any final words? Explore. Have a look for some of the new sites that have only just gone in.

01:11:49 There's been a few situations where I haven't answered fully in this conversation and I can't wait for people to understand why. Okay, so there are surprises out there in the frontier that you need to uncover so Brodier can talk to us more. That's what I'm getting out of this. Go out there and poke at stuff. There are and there will be more in the future.

01:12:19 Heavy breathing intensifies. Well, again, I really appreciate it. Thanks, everyone, for joining us in chat. Thanks for watching. Love chatting with the players. Please do head over to our Discord and just get involved in the conversation. We'd love to hear what you think about this. But for now, I am CCB Swift. CCB Brodier, thanks again. Really appreciate it. We will chat with you next time.