Star Citizen- On Survival

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I know what you’re probably thinking: Oh great, another star citizen rant! When will this idiot shut up about their silly space game? Well the answer is almost certainly not now!

I saw a neat video the other day, discussing the concept of survival in star citizen, and while I am about as excited as the creator of said video about the prospect of survival in star citizen, I do think a lot of that video got caught up in the excitement of the “what ifs.” It failed to consider any of the factors of actually making a video game that would go into making this eventuality occur, nor did it take any real stance on the design/ implementation of these factors. Instead it settled for a vague starry eyed vision of survival, which while fun to envision, communicates nothing of substance, and is firmly unrealistic.

So here’s my response in an attempt to remedy that. This is not a dig at the creator nor the video; I actually quite enjoyed the thing and it spurred a lot of thought, which i’m very grateful for. The goal of this is rather to maintain a certain amount of suspense of disbelief, but to use it more productively, at least in my perspective. On with it then.

Survival is mandatory

Star citizen is a game that feeds its immersion above all else, likely as a core design intention. I can tell many people in the community dislike this part of the game, as many disliked Arthur’s sluggish movement and lengthy animations in RDR2. In immersive games, this friction is a feature, not a bug. I will concede that there is a “sweet spot” where this friction is substantive enough to fully immerse a player but isn’t too much to cause them to waste vast amounts of time, but that friction can and should exist in games whose goal it is to immerse players, such as in SC.

A core aspect of that kind of immersion is survival. Nobody wants to take time to feed themselves or drink water, but needing to do so creates so much interesting gameplay if used correctly (which I’ll get into later). That’s why I think star citizen is only going to lean more into this survival gameplay; they’ve already implemented the foundation, they just need to play off it. That said there are a few various aspects of survival each with various levels of feasibility:

Aspects of survival

Let’s take a look at what comprises survival, at least in my eyes, and see where it can neatly slot into star citizen.

Food and drink

We already have this! Yay! However, it provides so little depth that my game developer soul weeps when looking at it. Right now, all it does is mandates you grab some food when you leave a station or city and that you need to return to stations and cities regularly enough to restock. All that you’d need to do to make it overwhelmingly better is add edible meat to fauna and add edible flora if you don’t want to deal with the whole “meat needs to be cooked” thing, and allow people to refill water bottles at rivers, or just to directly drink out of rivers.

This is generally not the most complicated thing to add, though I’m not certain how high fidelity these functions need to be to be pushed to live, so I won’t make any strong assumptions regarding the planet tech that governs the utility of the rivers, nor the animal/plant loot systems which could provide that food. From what I can tell from what we’re seeing released at the moment, it looks like the animal loot systems are being used the most, so that would likely be the easiest avenue for this, as depending on their backend it could be as simple as adding a new loot item (which does involve adding assets and modifying fauna models) and toggling on a theoretical boolean “edible” flag. Admittedly it could be a lot more complicated depending on their implementation though so, again, the term “easy” is very easy to fling around when you don’t know the systems.

Regardless, what this addition would provide is an avenue to actually explore and engage with the beautiful planets that CIG have designed, as at the moment, why would you ever land on any non-POI part of a planet? Adding interactable rivers and edible flora/ fauna that feed into the extant survival systems, would draw players running low on hunger/ thirst to the surface, searching for sustenance. Low flying over microtech, looking around for a good river when you’re close to death, then hopping back into a mission as opposed to jumping all the way back to a station would prove much more time friendly, immersive, and enjoyable.

Crafting

We can’t talk about survival without mentioning the elephant in the room: crafting. Pretty much every survival game includes some form of the thing, as the basis of survival is the capacity to take natural resources and use them to create more advanced tools and resources, which then loops ad-nauseum. Star citizen’s current plans for crafting are more industrial and grand scale than many other survival games, but I do think there’s still both demand and capacity for smaller scale crafting, as would feature in an early game survival loop. If we look at how satisfactory navigates the small -> large scale crafting, we see the usage of a crafting bench that allows simple crafting mechanics, which enable further development, then the game directs you to automate this lengthy manual crafting, by pushing you to larger scale crafting.

I think star citizen could definitely benefit from this model of splitting the crafting system by size and scale, the smallest subsection of which could simply be a multitool attachment. That way when your ship has soft death-ed on a planet you have the capacity to gather natural resources and craft them into usable tools, or hacky replacement parts to ideally get your ship to limp back to civilization without having to phone support or off yourself and come back later. Ideally both of these options, (the latter especially), are properly de-incentivised in later, more stable versions of the game, though I don’t think phoning help is ever going to not exist. Like you can cut off in game comms to global chat and any other local systems, but at a base level, you can’t stop people from whipping out their phone and texting a friend or an org to bail them out, as immersion breaking as that might be.

I don’t, however, see the workarounds as a reason to just give up on any of these systems. The natural storytelling that these systems will afford are just too rich to pass up, in my opinion. Having a little multitool crafter, and allowing you to just build your way up to a building, or getting a broken ship back up and running despite nature’s attempts to the contrary are the stuff of stories you tell even after you set the game down. The zero to hero’s with this system in place would also be vastly cooler too lmao.

The loop here is pretty crazy as far as scope goes though. Giving crafting capacity to a multitool is an incredibly tall order though, and integrating all the collectables for this loop in planet gen isn’t gonna be easy. Luckily it looks like they’re already on the FPS scanning feature, which would be really helpful when searching for requisite resources, but overall this is a big endeavor, and I really doubt it’ll be in anytime before 2030 (which is why we suspended some disbelief above). The only reason I bring it up is that CIG seems to already be making a crafting system and thus could build micro-scale crafting into the spec from the beginning, which usually bodes better than tacking things on post-implementation. I do hope they’ve taken survival into account in their plans though.

Hygiene

This one’s a bit wonky as I don’t think a tier 0 implementation of it is a good idea at all. It’s similar to the issue with food right now: if you just add it without full engagement in the mechanic, you get all the downsides, without any of the upsides. No; It needs to enter the game in a fully fleshed out state. I know many people would be critical of hygiene playing any part in SC whatsoever at any point in time though, and I do want to push back on this. Things like having to use the restroom, sleeping, or regularly showering sound tedious and useless, and in a tier 0 implementation, I completely agree. In such a state they’d only really serve the immersion, and provide more friction to gameplay which is something a lot of SC players grumble about quite a bit.

But looking past that, I could see restroom features becoming useful as a part of farming when that’s added, and sleeping/ cleanliness can contribute to a demand for amenities in ships, cities, bases, and stations, requiring your ship or base supports the above or you face penalties for not properly caring for your character. This pushes demand for ships with these functions, such as the intrepid, which is a pretty bad deal at the moment but could become a much better one, allowing players to sustain themselves for much longer stretches of time than other ships of its class. Bases would also need to accommodate these new demands, which creates further demand for resources to construct the proper facilities, which stimulates the economy.

Conclusion

I look forward to seeing how CIG end up implementing these systems, especially with their being referenced in the recent star citizen live, be John Crewe himself. I just hope they’re done sensibly and at the correct time, as CIG is unfortunately not well known for their capacity to release things smoothly.

Thanks for indulging my long overdue Star Citizen rant post. I have a few ideas for future blog posts cooking, and as I have more time this summer I’ll likely be able to get to at least a few, not to mention a project or two (stay tuned Nike’s House fans, I’ll get that full version out sometime this summer even if it kills me!) As always, thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great day.