[2023] Features and improvements that do not need a lot of money

Hey there,

Ok so first, I super appreciate the enthusiasm in the thread. We always love to hear where folks' heads are at for suggestions or ideas on places to improve the game.

Now, with that said, as much as I wish your suggestions were “quite inexpensive” or required “a little more time” that is unfortunately not true. I am hoping though that I can shed some light on exactly why that is the case since very often in software (game) development very few things are fast or inexpensive.

Let me give you an example in each of your categories to be a bit more illustrative.
 

On 9/18/2023 at 11:27 AM, Whykara said:

Quite inexpensive:

• Update old textures - armours, weapons and planets.

 

Perfect, we've actually done this in numerous releases since 7.0 and it's going to continue in a number of releases I can already see on our roadmap. It's happened for armor sets/weapons (like the reforged set) and has also been a part of environment polish, the most recent example of course being Voss.

I want to give more than one example so I am going to try to not go crazy here but just how "inexpensive" is this? Let's assume we are talking about updating environmental textures for an existing planet.

• Once we know what planet we are going to be on we need a full audit of the textures present.
• Typically this is done by our Environment artists. They are looking for wallsets, floors, etc. Textures they can update they will get the most bang for the buck.
• Also as the design of the new location (this is multiple teams work) starts to take shape, are there any existing props that we want to update to bring up as well. Less broad appeal but can be centerpieces in rooms etc.
• Ok all of that is highlighted, now what?
• Well, if we are doing some fancy new (what’s old is new) things we need to concept what it is going to look like, so over to the Concept Team to get started!
• Alright we are out of concept, time to start the updating machine, multiple teams get to work depending on the specific assets but it typically includes some combination of Environment, Character, and our Outsource partners. 
• So I am on the 7th bullet, but I am honestly at almost the beginning of the process for when we are talking about “expensive” so let me speed it up. What’s left? Everything….
• We get the assets back. We need to go through art review, licensor review, changes, integration into the game.
• It’s integrated, now what? Does it work? Maybe. Funny side (and totally true) story. Imagine that we did a sweet update to the texture of leaves to make our trees look better on one planet. Nailed it, it looks great, high fives all round. 3 weeks later our QV (commonly known as QA) team finds a lone tree on a completely different planet that looks bad (QV is incredibly valuable to everything we do, and these types of change are no exception). The leaves are entirely the wrong size and the fidelity is wrong, weird? You guessed it… it’s those sweet new leaves from the other planet. Game development is complex and weird.
  • Now this is the part where I tell you about our Engineering and Tech Art teams. The tools and support they provide are invaluable. But you may not have realized that something like our Gameplay Engineering team would also be involved in updating textures on trees, but here we are as we had to bring them in to help us track down where some “textures got away from us” in other parts of the game.
  • I also want to highlight that once we have the art in hand, taking art and making it the thing you see and experience in game is something different altogether. I am skipping a lot of steps and words but this part is big.

And again, that is something we are stoked to do, taking an opportunity to polish up some of our older planets as we revisit them. So keep an eye out for more of that on the horizon. Now onto “a little more time”.

On 9/18/2023 at 11:27 AM, Whykara said:

Would require a little more time:

• Add new races.

 

Let’s talk about a new species. This is one we certainly talk about a lot internally, we always follow the “next new species” wishlists and whatnot. Not to understate it, new species is a monumental sized task. This is the kind of thing that touches nearly every aspect of the game and almost every discipline on the team.

To give you a similar idea as I did above. The teams and places it touches and needs to be hooked up:

• Once we know what the species will be it goes to our Concept team. This will include the initial species along with color variations and conversations of what customizations would look like (hair, jewelry, patterns, etc)
• I will say this as a single bullet, but imagine this bullet is gigantic. All of that ^ now needs to get made. This will largely be on our character and outsource teams but depending on what the customizations are will likely touch other teams as well across our art disciplines.
• Ok, “new species” is done. Well, the game has no concept that this species exists in a number of very important places. Let’s talk about them one at a time as they each have unique challenges.
• The game - Yup, the whole video game. You want someone, one time, to say “Hey aren’t you a ”? During your story. We can’t build that into the game if the game doesn’t know. Gameplay Engineers have entered the chat.
  • Also, worth noting that *any* instance in the game retroactively where we wanted to acknowledge your < new species> would now need to involve at a minimum writing, loc, narrative, and world teams.
• Cinematics - I imagine you want to show up in cinematics. Do cool spins, take down bad guys, smooch people in space. This is going to touch a number of teams. First, we need our animators and VFX team to make sure the plays nicely with any and all existing animations (all of them) or clean up every instance where they don’t. Across the whole game. That’s more than a decade of content.
  • Once those teams have done their checks, now our Cinematics team needs to do their passes on actual implementation to make sure things are firing in the way they would expect.
• CM / UI / Systems - This is another one of those bullets you should assume is gigantic. But you need a way to actually make yourself the new species. Purchase it, unlock it, create it with all of the sliders and options, change to it (if you are something else). All of that requires setup, adding it into existing systems or in some cases overhaul of existing windows/systems if they don’t currently fit.
• Etc. - This is just a catchall bucket for every other team. QV, engineers, tech art, tools, etc. who are all also going to contribute to this. Behind the scenes, the species you play touches an enormous amount of things, and so that means an equal amount of humans on the team are going to touch it.

Ok, I have typed a lot of words. So a couple of notes. I am not saying any of this to say we wouldn’t do these things. In fact, the first example is something we have done already in the last year or so and have plans to do again very soon. Me saying everything above is to pull the curtain back a little and provide some insight, so when you look at an idea you have and think “how hard can that be?”, when it comes to game development the answer is often more involved than it might seem on the surface.

All that said, keep the suggestions coming! Sometimes there are suggestions that we spot and someone goes “hey we can do that pretty quick” and they are the exceptions we can turn around quickly!

Thanks all.

-eric