STAR CITIZEN – BIGGER BETTER BOSS FIGHTS ARE COMING
Bosses in Star Citizen… what sort of thing do you expect?
Big Mechs, Veteran Pilots BUT what about just your normal dude on the ground? How do you make him into a boss? Give him tons of health? Is there a way to do it just with equipment? Well we can talk a bit on this today as we have a big chain of dev responses from CIGs Zac Preece – I believe (his current title) is a Senior FPS & Ground Combat System Designer or as his twitter profile say FPS Designer Extraordinaire.
Let’s jump into this thread appropriately named Bosses In SC:
For the LOVE OF GOD, do not make them bullet sponges.
I was sold under the impression that 1 npc = 1 player. That’s what I was sold on.
The LAST thing most of the community wants is for an NPC’s health pool to be artificially inflated. This was sold as a simulator, not Cyberpunk2077. I love Cyberpunk don’t get me wrong but this game wasn’t designed for that from the day it was kickstarted.
Bullet sponges are lazy design and fully unimmerse the player. If you want to make a boss in a Titan suit then yes please fantastic, I would love to fight one and have it be a tough challenge, but do NOT just give people big health number and then label them as a boss. It’s boring, overdone, and frankly about as unimmersive as you can get. That is unless you give the boss NPC some special armor that protects them more than the average player, which then as a player I can then loot and then have a bosses health. That’s the only reason an NPC should EVER have more health than a player.
*For the record I also hate the “bosses” you have at places like Kareah and bunkers that have an artificially inflated health pool. Poor, lazy, boring game design. This needs to be addressed SOON because it’s only becoming more and more common. Some of the devs seem hellbent on making this game play like every other arcade combat game you find, it has got to stop guys.
Designer
Giant bullet sponge FPS enemies wearing heavy armour aren’t our long term goal for FPS bosses, the bosses you see in siege of orison are something the team did with the tools they had at the time.
In general the believability of NPCs bosses is really important so we won’t end up with the division style bullet sponges.
We have in the schedule various things to make systemic FPS missions more interesting with NPCs using ground turrets, using ground vehicles and some stuff that’ll you’ll be surprised about (in a good way) i won’t mention now
Thank you for clarifying, I appreciate this immensely. It just feels so awful to have a guy in standard armor take 5x longer than everyone around him because it’s a “boss”. If they have experimental armor that the player can loot or a titan suit or something along those lines then I’m all for it. But until then the current “bosses” just feel bad.
that’d be the idea, the important thing is skinning it so it is grounded and believable.
The guys you see the in the Citadel armour with the increased HP pool our just our way currently of saying ‘this is the super heavy guy’
I wanted to make it consistent across faction who the super heavy is mainly so they are easy to swap out later with something more grounded
Bosses in ground vehicles would be awesome. Long been looking forward to having more of a reason to take a Cyclone/Ursa/Atlas/Storm/Nova to a settlement/outpost besides being lazy and wanting to shoot NPCs from safety. And more valid targets for the railgun.
yep, the NPCs can use railguns currently and we’re teaching em how to target ships / vehicles currently so we can slot some NPCs with railguns for if you show up.
So we can have that archetype stationed at outposts
Leads to fun bigger missions like sending some ground crew in to put the anti-vehicle guys off then you can roll in
Please add animal types as bosses as well.
The stormwals are pretty big
Zac, would also be nice (no phun intended) if current snipers we have now in missions would hit you once in a while
the snipers NPCs currently don’t have glint so their accuracy is lower then it should be.
They have their own profile that basically has accuracy increase the longer you remain in sight
so it’s more likely you’ve been playing against them correctly and slowly (when the servers behave :D)
Sniper enemies were used sparingly in 3.23 content but you’ll see more of them as areas with designed with them in mind come online.
They also only have lower damaging snipers since we use the same damage profiles for players and NPCs so they don’t take away 70% of your HP when you get hit because the accuracy is a calculated % chance based on factors.
Main reason why I’m cautious about giving them a P6LR / Atzkav
Or you could just allow NPCs and players to use the same weaponry with the same values and actually make good, functioning NPC behavior instead of these workarounds and hacky stuff.
they use the same values expect HP
that’s why i said it’s a risk giving them a P6LR
AI behavior isn’t his dept, but you aren’t wrong
I do FPS weapons, creatures and FPS AI so it is
the AI functions pretty well but server frame rate shenanigans
It’s had massive improvements in 3.23 and we’re hoping to keep up that pace of improvements as we things like server meshing coming in
fun fact. bosses have armor with 75% damage reduction. that what makes them so spongy
that used to be the case but players found a way to loot them, they just have a lot more HP currently
they’re just our super heavys which are sprinkled in with LMGs
Will it continue to be NPCs with an artificial health boost or will this be changing down the road to something else.
Currently shooting a bullet sponge doesn’t feel very good or fun.
what you see with the juggernaut archetype will still exist, enemies in heavy armour with extra HP pools as it helps mix up the combat
but in the future there will be a lot more context for if something is bullet spongey so it won’t just be like shooting a normal guy who’s wearing a set you can just put on
In general the challenge will not just be shooting people but dealing with a variety of factors, like you saw in the ISC, there’s kopions in the contested zones
