I like the idea of tuning up ships. It would be hilarious to have a sleeper aurora or mustang and actually 'punch above your weight' like cig says all ships do.
The GT500 was the favored car for the main character in one of my favorite Anime series, Gunsmith C.A.T.S. Awesome car. What you mentioned makes me think of the impression I got when CIG was talking about engineering "sub-classes" where the engineer can specialize if things like tuning, etc. Makes for people being sought after for their developed skills for what they can do in any of a myriad of professions. I hope that comes in someday.
CIG meeting room discussing the crossbow: "The users *MUST* understand this is a one shot kill weapon!!1!" 1) Boost the visuals with a flying flamelectric ionplasma boltbeam the size of a thigh. 2) Give it auditory feedback that would shame a howitzer. I think we can just be glad option 2 won out... Oh and... Shelby Cobra 289
I expect some orgs to specialize in just one narrow aspect of manufacturing so they can focus on quality or quantity of key parts. They will in effect be their own brand name. A group of orgs can even form an industrial complex
I would love to see some more player modification of owned ships - there's currently such a lack of adding your own touch to anything. Crafting and modularity should have some interplay as well in my opinion. I recently watched the Ford v. Ferrari movie with my significant other and she was like, "huh, maybe racing can be fun" 😂 It can be, especially if you're behind the wheel of a GT 500 or anything else Shelby made. What a legend.
With ships literally named the Mustang in the verse, I can imagine a future in Star Citizen when some pioneering org can make their own GT-500 kit to fit ships out with that have a slight edge over the base models, even with normal components installed.
i did enjoy watching Ford v. Ferrari, the GT40 is a beautiful vehicle. Eleanor is a beautiful example of the GT500 as well. GO BABY GO! thank you danny
So crafting needs to incorporate a robust "upgrade" mechanic in addition to simply making new stuff. But it shouldn't be something simple like "Apply upgrade kit", it should require the crafter to use specific equipment and resources themselves to upgrade existing equipment. Ideally there should be a balance of RNG and some kind of "skill check" minigame involved. There should also be upgrade paths for the equipment and materials themselves, such as higher purity materials and higher tech equipment. Subcomponents would be great as part of this.
I definitely thought you were going to go there in your racing video. The best racing teams are all going to have hand tuned fragile prototype GT500s that are good enough for the Daymar Rally, but ideally not an inch more.
Love the GT500, I can see where you use the endeavor with the particle accelerator module to help tune and upgrade ship modules to make them just a wee bit better
One thing I'd like to see to balance crafting 'legendary' components is for positive 'stats' to have a commensurate negative effects so you're always trading off one aspect of performance for another and trying to find a 'perfect' (for you) combination of crafted components that are not always the same 'meta set' for everyone... just like the aftermarket component market for the GT500 ;)
Although an old story by now - I still think that the crafting that was in the original "Star Wars Galaxies" MMO was really nice balanced. Not only was it lagely connected to mining/resource-gathering since the resource could have different qualities/pureness values that could raise your own result - but once your own skill was grinded to mastery (for those extra, tiny percent of quality) - one had to sit and craft each part for the sub-part to eventually make the thing. One could also set a risk-factor while crafting - with a higher risk that all component (and your efforts) broke and was wasted - or it could yeld an even better performance stat normally possible. And just as explained - stats like damage might not be the main advantage. A crafted item might just be better quality as in real life - withstanding wear and damage a lot better, maybe easier to fix. And if you look at weapons - a quality barrel might not make the projectile do more damage... but it might be more accurate, withstand temperature better and (again) take more wear and damage before disabled. Parhaps energy weapons are easier to "overcharge" and therefor in need of better components (high quality wires, condensors or whatever) to last longer without breaking. I can go on and on... but I think you get the jest of it. In the end - if implemented right - this can create a demand for gameloops that are very specialized - and spread players more across the board. Let´s hope that is what we will see in the stars... Oh, and even though the current GT500s looks SO good - the first shelbys are pieces of art.
I think it would be insane if we could craft to the point of different variations of ships in terms of the interior. You could build a ship and swap a room with another and to balance it with a non modular ship make it a permanent inclusion without an incredibly long time and resources to change it
I like having both, but it is hard to be manufacturer of unique items, so I am all for focus on the overclocking mentioned with the Endeavor...and update your ship to a Shelby Cobra GT500-type.
One thing they might be able to do for that extra one to 2% is also tie in "engineering gameplay" and make it so that you have to stay on top of the maintenance of whatever ship you souped up into being a GT500
I hope it isn't completely random. Those Shelby GT350s didn't appear randomly. Also, printing can be managed pretty simply. Patents. So like copywrite today, you would need a license to own it (retail) and a license to print(build) it, and material costs (wholesale). This would make ship insurance and the salvage game play make sense. Add in your idea that someone with skill can turn white items into blue items, and we have a system.
To get those legendary items does take a great deal of skill as an end game raider, skill in co ordinated action and planning I have yet to see in SC (mining is, trust me on this, BY FAR the nearest calling for timing ansd team work) and indeed until the servers are more reliable, may not be possible.
I'm not much for muscle cars but the Mustang vs Cobra is something I'd been thinking about with the drama around the mk1 vs mk2 Hornets. I'm still hoping out for a F7A mk2 Heartseeker myself.
I kind of hope crafting tuning becomes something like the Borderlands game guns. Just modifiers on a base concept where one thing goes up and another (or several) go down. Pick from something like 5 options each to fill 5 different slots and you have a huge number of combinations (kit guns in Warframe are a much weaker example of this) to let you tune items to exactly the way you want to play. It should work really well as long as no single option is completely OP and really open up build options without too much fuss for the devs. Even better if you have to get the mods through salvaging and swapping them around (e.g. start with a 11222 and 22111 and swap them to get a 11111 and 22222). I'm a big fan of the bog standard 1965 model myself (I really wish Elon would turn it plaid rather than the ugly car he based his Teslas on), but Cobra GT350 doesn't look bad either.
Your thoughts on armour and armour looks are interesting, Makes me think of DC Universe Online where armour function and style are Separate so that a person Can wear the best armour Collected but mix and match the styles infinitely So that every toon looks unique. Imagine if you will, driving a Ford Reliant K mini von but displaying a Mustang Shelby GT 500 body style.
Shelby GT 350. Ok the crafting concept is fine as long as like you said the advantage is minimal. But I think the light, med, and heavy gear should remain locked in its primary uses. I don’t want to see a light armor have the stats of a heavy armor just because someone liked the “look” of it. I don’t think you were alluding to that but I’m just saying’.
Star Citizen already has a few "masters of flight" variants, which for now amount to nothing more than unique paint schemes with some lore behind them. But with crafting, tuning, and customization, they could become the GT500s of the mass-produced civilian models.
Tuning options do sound really smart. You would 100% not use a vehicle tuned as a GT500 as a combat technical, you grab a cheap Toyota. On the other hand, racing that Toyato would be silly.
The game which I'm 95% sure Star Citizen is taking as their model for crafting is Star Wars Galaxies, but they will be extending it with minable material properties and refinery gameplay, both of which will affect the quality of the final product. The synergistic effects of the products produce by the best crafters aided by the best component enhancers and the best refinery operators and the best miners and surveyors and explorers, served and aided by the best material haulers and the best convoy escorts, all serving as part of the best trade alliance featuring the best vendors. And people will happily pay 10,000% premium for their one-of-a-kind best-in-the-universe GT-500 as a result.
GT500. Now, 1%, na. Maybe basic things for that small notch by anyone. But someone going nuts with it, it would be nice to see larger % increases possible, but with negatives in tow. Then getting certain buildings or ship refining equip, those negatives being addressed, with maybe small loses in the gains. There will be people out there okay with having a weapon blasting as if it were 2 sizes larger, or 2X farther RANGE, or greater penetration, or larger surface area affects with the cost of after so many shots, or frying other systems. OR, perhaps repealing a set system like a way to allow shields up 20% during navigation mode for instance at the cost of more time to spin those jumps up. Or even better, slamming a quantum drive in ships without them. I picture wires running all over the ship, adding in extra shields, or coolers, or power systems.
I kept getting distracted by the Ford v Ferrari clips, haha. I had to rewatch part of the video, I was never a huge fan of the Cobra kit cars, but the Mustang Shelby gt500 based off the Mustang Cobra was much cooler in my books. The I'd rather drive a modified Miata over the Cobra kit car.
It would be nice if in game crafting/tuning would allow a wider variety of ships to be successful instead of just a single meta ship so CIG has to be careful of that. Otherwise you end up in a situation where everyone seeks out a single ship, not dissimilar to how in the late 1960's the Ford Mustang Shelby GT 500 Fastback became so sought after as a muscle car.
It's all very well talking about the Shelby GT500 as a model for the 2% increase which makes all the difference, but I'd kind of hope for more of a cost-benefit system where you are not getting that 2% for free, but paying for it somewhere else. Where the expert tuner (the Shelby) shines is in knowing how to combine half a dozen tweaks to get the best outcome for the smallest cost to the chosen gameplay loop. Yes, you can get your racing ship turning a little tighter and accelerating a little faster, but the price is that the outer hull is weaker and the engine runs hotter so you can't boost for as long and your hull integrity sucks. More than that, cars need tuning to their drivers; the important part will be finding the right combination for the racing style of the pilot. One player may have a gift for smooth turns and be able to conserve momentum better, while another may be better at making turns with pinpoint accuracy and will make better use of opportunities; they need a different profile. And that's ignoring the fact that every track brings different needs.
I certainly hope that you cant just print out a full complete GT500 without needing any components and just base engery. And i would expect that the weapons you can "print" at a fabricator with resources you need to collect in the verse to be well box standart stuff like the P8-AR usefull yes but you can find it around any corner anyway so it wont break the wow moment i just found a LMG. So long as you have to invest time and efford to be able to procduce an item (Get Copper, iron, polymers etc) And the only advantage you get is a decent supply of ready made weapons thats fine i think ... if however you can basically print any weapon in the verse ... well that would not be good. Maybe you can make it so that you have to get the patterns for weapons in verse so you can print them or similar but regardless while it should be possible for an org to equip themself if they spawn in their base it should be neither infint not effordless to perpare those prints.
The Cobra GT500 - or any other Shelby creation - has that little edge over the mainstream product that makes it enticing... and players may be getting that little edge to make it worth pursuing.
Knowing CIG, they will make crafting a PVP thing. Not because it's what anyone wants, but because crafting is a PVE thing and we simply can't have that! We need to force interactions between players....because everything needs to be related to pulling a trigger. #Because GT500
As cool looking as the GT500 is and despite the fact that it is faster than the 1969 ford mustang mach 1 I still like the mach 1 better. Which is my way of saying I hope that crafting allows us not just the ability to focus on stats, but also appearance.
Im a bit annoyed with everyone saying that pyro is a system of scaresity. What we see is not a system of scaresity. Because when you have scaresity your not going to invest in something that wastes your limited resources on a weapons with disposable munitions. What we are seeing is an run down area, where people have given up on maintaining equipment, it's just too dangerious to maintain this equipment. Tell me if you could only pick one weapon to use for the rest of your life, and you will likely never get any more. Which would you choose a sowrd of your choosing or a gun with only two 15 round clips of ammo? (You have no idea when or if you will get more ammo.) Keep in mind your in hostile tertory, and will likely be in fights every day to every few days, for years to come. Now pick your weapon. Sure the gun works better in the short term, but as the days turn to weeks and weeks to years, the sword looks much better. That is what limited resources means. Materials are not in short supply in Pyro, what is scarse are people willing to risk their lives to maintain the equipment, likely due to on-going and constant conflict. Thus seeing more improvised weapons in pyro makes sense. As they have tons of resources, but lac easy access to pre-manufactored arms, and modern repair facilities, to maintain said equipment. Sure they get it once in a while through raids, and piarcy. But intelegent cargo ships will quickly learn to avoid this sector. So, all you will get are those who are so down on their luck as to risk it. As to the give away, well im not much of a car buff but ford mustang is fairly famious so I will go with that.
I don't like the idea of players being able to just craft any item in the game. Maybe have a small set of generics "open source" blue prints for items that are rather mid-ranged in terms of price and performance that you can acquire, but I don't see mega corps being ok with someone making a profit off of their IPs. The real gains should come from enhancements. Tweaking existing items to gain that little bit of an edge. There should be some sort of balance system in place to keep things from getting out of hand, like increasing the rate of fire at the cost of additional recoil or something.
Implementing "enhancement" crafting should really not be that hard at all when you want to be able to apply this to existing items. All you need is a number of slots which can be used to insert enhancement modules. All items in game which could benefit from this could have one or more of these slots and they do in fact already exist in mining. Multitool could potentially be made to scan for these enhancements on armor, weapons or ship modules if they are not yours, from there a hacking minigame might give you access to the enhancements to loot them without taking the entire item. And for me, the fact anyone can fly any ship as CIG has pretty much painted themselves in that corner with ships due to RL$$ sales, crafting enhancement should definitely be a skill you wil need to learn in game.
Now that CIG has decided to generate revenue through ship sales, crafting has become less attractive. What are the plans for minerals if you can't build spaceships with them? CIG needs to introduce blueprints for spaceships that last for 1 to 10 uses before they vanish so the ore gets used for something worthwhile. It's incredibly frustrating that CIG is so greedy they don't allow players to craft spaceships. Who wants to farm ore just to make armor sets or weapons that everyone can make? If CIG continues down this path, it'll be like World of Warcraft all over again, just in space. They really need to make crafting significant and valuable, because if they don't, it could undermine the entire point of the system. CIG should allow blueprints for ships, tanks, or cars. They could implement a system similar to EVE Online, with original blueprints and copies. Players could then buy or find these blueprints and produce ships using minerals and components. I'd rather pay a monthly subscription than support a ship store where CIG makes money on every sale. CIG should only sell starter ships; everything else should be built by players. so when players buy a ingame spaceship it can be destroy for good an cant be repaired more then 10 times an so on so you create work for players.,
I am pretty sure that one of my Dad's friends had a GT500, that got traded in on a Cadillac during the 1980's by that friend's idiot wife after his death.
Crafting can be a real hit or miss. I am playing PoE a lot and the current league is a miss. While the crafting mechanic could have been good with a little bit more imagination, it is the UI that made it into a disaster. While the mechanic itself is actually quite powerfull, the process is incredibly clunky. Your storage can hold less materiel then you can actually use in the "crafting bench". The bench is an actual cemetery, spacious and with comparably long walking distances. And there is only one type of crafting material (corpses), that itself has a varied set of modifiers. Imagine having only metals for crafting, but no semiconductors, isolators, and other stuff for doping. ... Well, that reminds me, crafting can be fun, my uncle liked his oldtimers. He always wanted a Mustang GT-350 , but others outbid him whenever he got a chance. So he bought himself a rundown Alpha Romeo Spider (1969) for restoration. He loved that car.
They should blatently rip off the Starwars Galaxies crafting and resource gathering framework. It would tie into base building and create conflict over good resources.
It wont matter, because there are going to be a bunch of losers that start pissing and moaning that its not fair and we are going to get another pay to play POS game or some BS like master modes, or both!
