We haven’t seen a whole lot of Chris Roberts in video form for quite a while (save for that brief cameo in the latest Inside Star Citizen episode), but with the recent Calling All Devs episode, the Star Citizen boss joined core gameplay director Richard Tyrer to talk about plans for the game’s death mechanics going forward.
There are three planned stages to character death: a downed state, where your character hits zero health but could be revived; a clone state, where your character respawns as a clone of itself, meaning players can return to their old corpse to retrieve their things (if they haven’t been looted already); and an avatar transfer state, representing the complete and final death of a character as a result of being cloned so many times that DNA becomes so unstable and unusable that a next of kin is created, with some items, reputation, and even an inheritance tax carrying over.
In addition to these states, there was discussion of more significant trauma to body parts, such as fractures to bone that impart some form of status effect, and if too many fractures are applied to a bone, then that bone will break. This will be tied to the game’s existing character status system that powers hunger, thirst, and other things now. Furthermore, the existing MediPen healing item will have less of an effect on such trauma and instead stabilize your character, while the upcoming medical pistol item showcased in an earlier episode of ISC will effectively be a stronger version of the MediPen to stop effects like bleed. Players will still need to go to a medbay or a hospital to address more pressing injuries like fractures, or choose not to and push their personal envelope, both in terms of avatar integrity and medical costs.
All of these features, of course, require significantly more persistence to the Persistent Universe of the game than it has now, and these mechanics are going to be added over the course of several iterative layers, with the addition of hospitals and downloading DNA like a save point, performance-enhancing (or inhibiting) drugs, and physical inventory being the first steps That said, this ties into Roberts’ idea to have a consequence to death and to make players more invested in their in-game avatars’ well-being, as well as introduce healing and medical gameplay loops to Star Citizen.
The 2950 Imperator Election results are in…https://t.co/RYxXnY8Myj pic.twitter.com/Bli9OYJTmb
— Star Citizen (@RobertsSpaceInd) November 2, 2020
