This post is to talk a little bit about the direction we're currently heading with tech 22 gear.

The overall theme of tech 22 items is organic / organic-hybrid. The player obtainable items will all be some sort of hybrid and not actually be organic type.

Weapons will almost all have self-damage and higher than normal DPS. Many weapons will have parasites or splash.

The shields and energies will generally be high regen and low-med bank. Most items will have a small amount of +shield or +elec, like 5% for tier 1 and 10% for tier 2. I am looking at energies that take parasites as fuel, and then other pieces of equipment that generates the parasites to create sort of symbiotic relationships between certain energies and other equipment.

In general, items will be on the smaller side.

There will be a set of purchasable tier 1 tech 22 ships at AI bases that won't be too great, but beyond those, all tech player-obtainable ships will be gained through ship upgrades. The basic 4 ships can be upgraded several levels down different paths, ending up with multiple tier 2/3 player ships of each hull type with different characteristics. In addition, the plan is for there will be build-able ship upgrades to hybridize lower level ships into tech tech, augmenting their power and changing their look slightly.

Overall, the main goal of tech 22 gear is to be different than tech 21 and tech 20 gear much more so than it is to be more powerful. The base power will be slightly higher, but this will be at least partially offset by making items that are more interesting, and not just straight up what a player looking for pure power would pick to maximize his DPS.

Any screenshots available for maybe 1 of the player ship models?

We don't have the actual player ships yet, but what we do have is some fancy animating / organic texture technology that Marius made that we're going to use to modify existing tech 20/21 ships to look like semi-organic and creepy tech 22 ships.

For a second i thought you meant we were going to be able to upgrade our current ships with organic stuff. How awesome would a organic wattage look

All of this sounds very promising, thanks for clearing things up a bit. I hope the fuel will be ridiculously easy to obtain...

So it is what i thought! This sounds awesome, please tell me one of the upgrades is inertial dampning for wattage.

Are you actually looking for any answers when posting this, or just letting us know? You haven't actually asked any questions in your post.

Anyway, in general I like the idea you've got going. Just be careful with how far you go with this sort of gear:

It sounds good, but at the same time, one of the reasons so many people like SS is because of the infinite variables you're allowed to have with gear. Having certain gear needed to work together is good, but don't too it too often or you'll cut out the fun of trying new setups.

Also in before people post the regular warnings of 'test everything before you release' and 'make sure there is gear suited for all classes'.

I really just love the idea of having 4 base hulls that can be upgraded on different paths, that idea is amazing.

I don't like the fact Jeff_L said "The overall theme of tech 22 items". It makes it sound like there is no room for improvement, no room for later content, and no room for any other style of content. This for any kind of MMO is so bad you might as well quit now, because a modern MMO would never admit that they cannot or will not add new content later.

This first T22 zone should be the main focus, or a large focus. But it should never be the "only focus" for T22.

bro, quit your babbling.. when he said "theme" he didnt mean zone, he meant exactly what he said. As in he wants all t22 gear to be based off parasites, semi-organic hull's, using symbiosis and gear that works together.

YOU are the one that is close minded. Obviously Jeff wants to break away from the t20-t21 stride and introduce entirely new content that is not only different, but a stepping stone for his ultimate goal: which is to make an entirely new late game (t22-t30).

I'm not close-minded. You (paxx) and Jeff_L are. You said it here.



No MMO in their right mind would say "all". It's an ultimatum that tells people they can't do anything else.



As for the theme, you want to keep a relatively stable theme across from newb to endgame, regardless of the game, regardless of your theme, regardless of the gear and content in the game. Going from Sparkly Vampires in the low game to Beating up Aliens with a Spartan Laser in the endgame is not how you make any kind of video game, that intends to be successful and make money.

It's just too different to make each tech a totally different concept.



Alien Tech should be the first focus of T22. But other T22 content areas will be added, and most will not (or should not) be Alien Tech. Is it that much of science fiction to say that we won't find advanced humans, or warp cores, or kilometer long star destroyers?

Oh wait, that's not impossible. We have Halo, Star Trek, and Star Wars. So it's not physically impossible to think of.

As I said, he doesn't just want to make t22, he wants to keep making different techs of gear every 6 monthes. So whatever ultimatum your talking about, it is non existent in his intentions..


Quick question... how much experience do you have designing and developing games compared to jeff?

Well really this one looks like it's about to die, because he is not giving due attention to the content and tech levels he has already implemented. People are already talking about how unrealistic coming back to SS is because it means completely regearing all their characters, and Jeff is talking about releasing a new tech every 6 months. So he wants to make a dead sprint for making characters that would come back completely unlikely to try by throwing in a huge gap between them and ingame, and he intends to do so via means that are beyond the current Dev team to deliver. C2 is still ridden with bugs that they haven't touched and you think that every 6 months having a major content release isn't going to have huge negative consequences?

Unless the Dev team doubles, or(more likely) triples in size they are going to have no way to keep up, won't be able to address the bugs in a timely manner, won't be able to deliver complete solid content, and they are going to make the game so that it takes literally years to to become endgame. People are already intolerant of the SP system locking them at the low end for a few weeks, if you think people are going to play a game with one third of its content unplayable to the point that admins had to literally force people into it(low level) and another third is rushed sub par content(looking like everything above t21 is going to be), then how long do you expect people to stay for the 2 decent tech levels?

Content > Equipment

Currently every tech level except t20 does not have enough content or equipment, you'd be better off spending your time widening your base, building tons of real low level content(not locking people into it with a shitty SP system), and working your way up.

Currently SS's whole goal it seems is to indiscriminately pump out shit(exactly the noun I needed) for us to use, without much regard for pre-existing content. Which is exactly what SS needs. 1-19 needs a lot of content, and t21 needs a lot more as well. T21 right now is what I would expect at a launch, with more being added in, but instead it is the most expensive barren tech level in the game.