Friday Dev Livestream (September 6, 2013)

September 8, 2013 | Etaew | Viewed 3,746 times | Question and Answer,

Friday September 6, 2013 the Defiance Dev team streamed a play and Q&A session on the TrionWorlds Twitch channel.

dahanese was joined by OverloadUT and Trick Dempsey.

The stream archive on Twitch has been having difficulties and there has been a delay in getting this article out.

September 9 Edit: Missed some questions added them, they are marked with a *.

Last stream

Mission line inside the second DLC which allows you to get a transmitter, which allows you to redirect the guidance system of an arkfall. It can pull down, in areas that there are openings, an arkfall to occur that you will be able to fight on the outside but fight inside the enemies that have shown up there.

Questions

Why are there so many Volge emergencies at the moment?

Right now because of the sieges, I think it ends this Monday, the Volge emergencies are going to calm down considerably. We wanted to make sure that people encountered the enemies and the changes to the enemies and get that pursuit. Particularly with people returning to school and getting new computers and being able to join the game.

Does the Volge accuracy at a distance need adjusting?

We could do something about that, they shouldn't have the range that they do. Essentially they need to get the same treatment that we made to Dark Matter Enforcers.

They also had sniper like accuracy with their siddearms and it was silly and made them more difficult than they should be. The troopers could suffer the same reduction and not lose their personality.

*Why isnt there a Volge boss?

During the big event we showed off at Pax, we visited a larger major arkfall that we didn't go inside. If he had, he would have encountered the Volge boss. Essentially a raid boss, something that is designed to fight between 16 and 24 players simultaneously inside a confined space and it does horrible things to people. We've drastically improved the group targeting and he now takes advantage of all of those things.

*How will consumable grenades work?

DLC 2 contains a lot of toolboxes for arkhunters to use, specifically spikes, stims and grenades which are getting a revamp.

One of the problems they had with grenades is that they were high risk with relevatively low reward, easy to miss and imprecisions in the third person perspective. We wanted to reduce the cooldown to them and add a more strategic element to their use, and also add more economic pressue in the choice between salvage and scrip.

With grenades we've reduced their cooldown, currently on alpha the cooldown is 3 seconds, so now you can throw 10 grenades in the time it took for the previous cooldown ends. In addition we have created it so they are limited use, when something goes down to 0 inside your inventory it does remain there, so you can go to a vendor to refil it or you can take advantage of another feature we've put in called Smart loot.

Smart loot is a consumable item that you already own a copy of, enemies that die have a higher chance to drop that rarity or lower of that item type. So if you had orange frag grenades and you run out of your orange ones you will see orange ones drop, but more frequently green and blue. You can switch between those easily and you can go back to the vendor and get a full stack refil of the grenades.

*What will happen to the current grenades?

Current grenades will convert to the new system, but they will remain in your inventory. You will get a full stack of them and you will be able to refil those by going to vendors or picking up the loot.

*How will the Grenadiers mod synergy change?

We are looking at the mod synergies that rely heavily on the old system, either we will do a full refresh with it, so you can immediately throw another grenade or other weapons. We haven't decided entirely with that.

Right now we have a system called 'antiquing', which creates items which you can sell back without the merchant greed being involved in that. For example strange combinations you could sell back for a huge value, and be able to buy a better item with it. Rather than make the item dissapear from your inventory or replace the bonus with another benefit.

*What do you plan to help with the endgame?

We have a plan, I am going to Redwood city next week to discuss that plan. Hopefully sometime next week I will broadcast an honest state of the game address to tell you guys what we are doing. There are a lot of disapointing things in the game, and we want to make those better. If that means we have to change our update schedule we will, you guys have stuck with us and have been a pretty incredible as a fan base and we want to make sure we deliver on the promises of the game.

*Why were Volge emergency drops nerfed?

I need to look in on that, as I've seen reports of people getting orange drops from Volge elites which suprises me as they should never have been dropping orange drops as we had intended to have them put into sieges. That would have been silly as you would have been getting dozens of oranges a day, so I need to find out which changelist that was and how that happened. To my knowledge they shouldn't have been nerfed and I want to find out what their status now.

*What happens to those Volge LMGs that were meant to be dropped in sieges?

If you reach tier 10 to the scoring you are getting a Volge reward lockbox, which can contain some of the extremely high rarity weapons.

*What are you going to do to players that spent a lot of money on the charge blades?

We are working on something that is fair for you guys, after this is done I will post on the forums.

Also you should stop buying the Mod Hoard boxes, as they were a temp item and should not have been put in, we are going to recompense people who have purchased them.

*Will there be a two handed charge blade?

No yet. I really love the dynamic that melee weapons created, so I would really like to have an effect of aiming with a charge blade and create more variety. Every new animation we add to the player that would have to be loaded, and that would make more bland looking people at arkfalls so we are balancing priorities.

*Will the PC UI be fixed?

I have a strike team right now looking at the UI, someone on that team sighed with exasparation finding out that they had to double click some things as its like the 90s. We are doing a major overhaul of the UI making it more functional and friendly and fixing the major chat elements.

It's hard to go into that, but we need to fix the chat since its silly.

*Can you incentivise people to revive others in sieges?

Yes I can, and that is one of the updates that is coming, but I can't say when it will be. It's compared to arkfalls, I prefer the way that sieges handle scoring and contribution as its not as invisible and gamable.

Many people figured out that there is an ideal way to handle a siege which is to fire the healing gun once, healing a guy, firing a single critical and running away.

*How will spikes, stims and grenades work for console players?

Grenades will remain the same, spikes stims and your power will function as a shoulder button and a modifier. For PC users it will be 1,2,3 buttons.

Switch grenades easily?

We're not making a change to the loadout system just yet, because anything in your inventory can be smart loot dropping you will be able to run up to any dropped grenade and hold the pickup button and immediately swap to the grenade.

Is there any way to improve framerate during arkfalls on the 360?

We are going through a major series of optimisations at the moment. It's mostly the consoles trying to render everyone, we are doing some things to improve the framework on that but I don't know the timeframe for those. That is rendering, engineering and network field.

Are there plans to make the game 100% co-op, no more single player missions?

Yes, totally. Probably one of the most fun thing we've done testing is fighting Nim as four players.

Because of the network re-architecting we had to do for instanced arkfalls, we should in the near future make it so you no longer need to be split up during any of the missions, because it's silly.

Clans seem pointless, are there any plans to change it?

I want the second DLC to be out already. I worked on the clan progression system, it makes it much more significant. Clans become a very good way to maximise the output of events.

Clan participation can increase, via a progression path, all of your rewards from various activities.

Pump shotgun reloading (entire mag before you can fire)

We are fixing it, no idea when.

Will there be an EGO Rating increase?

Technically there has been a slight increase from the episode content. The moment we release new perks, which will happen some day, that will increase the ego rating.

The ego rating is the sum of all pursuits, and the sum of all perks, and weapons skill?

Weapons and mod synergies not in the game?

I've got some people looking through the database finding out why we have those discrepencies. The loot system is really complicated. I'm trying to find the root of why it is that they don't match up, whether its rogue equipment that is being dropped or that a loot table out there is horrible. I'm not personally looking at that but I have some people who are.

What will happen after the 5 DLCs are released?

I can't say, that's too forward thinking. There are loots of things we want to improve before DLC 2 is even out.

We are doing a lot of improvements to the game beyond the DLCs, because the DLCs are things that we charge people for, and until we have a value that we are comfortable with, it seems strange to charge people for lots of things.

I'm really looking forward to creating the improvements to the game that we are going to do right now, and that is where I am focusing. That and working with the team up in NBC Universal and Syfy that the crossovers for the second season are amazing.

The rewards for emergencies are rather weak?

If you grind emergencies and the minor arkfalls, you should actually end up with higher scrip value than any other kind of content. Right now I am getting metrics to find out people who play in particular ways their profit margin.

If after we crunch the numbers that emergencies are still under performing we will bump those up, but for right now they should be scrip ones, salvage from arkfalls and xp from everything. You can actually get a suprising number of ark keys from completing the conflict sites (Events), the locations you fight in during the missions.

Arkfall lockups?

Not familiar with the cause of the arkfall thing, I know engineering is looking at it.

Sound issues

There has been a lot of discussion of the sound issues inside of arkfalls, you guys make a lot of noise. From a technical perspective there are only so many channels they can do. They have been definitely working on the priotization of those sounds, but in the face of lag and performance issues the sound is not the highest on our priority.

Will future patch notes list everything that has been changed?

Our patch notes have been silly in the past, we are fixing that. We are making the process between Rift and Defiance identical, our next big patch will reflect that change.

When will coldfire plasma assault rifle become a priority?

The Volge weapons in general got a major revamp while we were working on the second DLC to make them more interesting and consistant and that is when they will be released to the public.

The shape was pretty but it didn't have a mechanical effect to make it special.

Will keyshards come back to the game?

The fragments will not be coming back. The way that those worked was that ark keys used to require 8 fragments, so we just made everything that cost 1 ark key cost 8 and we made it a single unit of currency. It was silly to make you track two things and was confusing.

New Dodge Challenger colours?

I don't think so, those are the real dodge colours. The colours are the real colours from the production line, that is the limiting factor.

When are we getting dirt bikes and be able to make backflips?

Do I pull back the curtain for that? no...

There are a variety of dev commands that we can turn on right now that can let them do backflips and supermans etc they are super broken. The backflips should come out at some point, that is well within the physics engine of Havok and the other stuff we rent.

The other strange abilities not so much, but backflips would require an update to the client so that would require a real patch and so might be some time.

Job crafting?

Crafting and things like crafting, none of us are happy with the way that the salvage matrix works. Job systems aren't so good for shooters. There are a lot of things on the wishlist once we fix a lot of the core gameplay and fun of the game. We are going to be improving the player customization and crafting experience but I can't comment on when or how much yet.

What are you doing with PvP, force them to fight in a constant PvP environment instead of wait for instance pops?

If you flagged yourself for PvP you would find yourself largely alone, because there are so few PvP players. That is something we want to address, but there is a social problem with it as well.

I love shadow wars a great deal but some of our instances are well crafted.

They are looking at it.

Why does decoy not do damaging explosion as stated on the website?

One of the functions that used to exist on it was that you could essentialy get a flashbang to drop wh en you swapped places. It caused wierd issues and it is a function we intend to add again, but we are doing an awful lot of balance right now. So we want to leave the powers stable at the moment so that things can be balanced first.

When will arenas be co-op?

I can't say when, all of the solo stuff we want to be able to be done in a group.

Rampages, Hotshots and Races will remain solo.

How long until we see between season content?

I can't really say, it's one of those when questions.

Is there going to be a way to swap your character from NA to EU server on XBOX?

I don't know the legalities of region swapping. I know a lot of people have been talking about swapping, since you can now change which region you are on. But I don't know where that conversation is going.

Is there going to be a skill level for Charge Blades?

We had them for a bit, I was suprised when they got pulled. We could certainly add it, but a lot of the other weapons have a great deal more variability in the stats they have to alter, we only have 2 possibly 3 variables we can alter on the charge blades. Until we have greater itemization upon them it doesn't really do justice to players who want to have a good melee combat to have a lame skill progression. Once we have a better skill progression on that we can swap it and turn it back on.

Can we deactivate the feature to stop being turned around when shot?

Get knockback resistance, being hit with a knockback based attack you will turn towards the guy who hit you. They are stuns essentially, also I think Blur will help with that a lot.

Is anyone looking at group and instance persistance for Arkfall Interiors in DLC 2?

The reason you cannot return to the same instance that you went to is that we immediately try to fill any vacancy inside of your group the moment that you disconnect. So normally someone else has taken your slot.

In Arkfall Interiorors there is no concept of needing to be in a group or having a slot inside of a public instance so as long as that instance still exists, because they can end, your inside of a very unstable structure. When you re-join you will re-join inside of that instance.

More settings for PC graphics?

We have people working on that. Even if you have an awful lot of memory you can't make it display more players right now. I think the code of it is finished, you can let the game know that you have more RAM and display more players and outfits.

Is there a reason why keydrops inside conflict sites are better when soloed?

If you are alone inside of one, you are getting the gold contribution. If someone shows up it is being reduced. One of the core philosophies going forward is that any arrival of any player should be a positive experience for everybody, so the rewards should only get better or stay the same if someone else shows up. These events don't track with that. That is why we are putting so much effort right now into doing a contribution revamp which makes it visible and drives you to do better.

Retention

We do care, which is why we are making the shift that I am helping to spearhead. The increase in overall quality the better chase, the more reasons to log on.

I think that would mean that we would get a greater retention of people who already are here but it would mean that our acquisitions would stay. It is difficult to discuss that in any specific way without talking a lot of shop that I shouldn't talk about.