Civilian Content Uplift

Hi everyone, we've recently began work on our Civilian Content Uplift, where we plan to introduce new careers, and rework old ones. This will apply to all legal and illegal civilian activites and will rollout with frequent updates over the next 12 months. First up as you may have seen or heard of, will be a new trucking career.

This article will go into some detail on how we are planning to design the various civilian activities on the server, and what you can expect!

Designing the Jobs

When we're creating new activities, we're basing it on these guiding principles

• Progression: Each activity should have a progression tree, where you start off doing small tasks, and work your way up, unlocking new content and increasing the amount you will be making. Progression can also expand past just and XP or level system, into upgrades you can purchase to improve your efficiency.
• Interactions: We want each of the jobs to still have a level of interaction and RP with other players - avoiding an epedemic like diving. This could be working together on a task, or even interaction of getting pulled over while driving.
• Location Hubs: Each career should have locations where players are commonly visting. This gets people together interacting, sharing knowledge and hopefully meeting new people.
• Hidden Content: We want each job to have ways to optimise gaining cash or XP, which has to be discovered by players. This means over time you can aquire knowledge to improve how you perform in a particular activity.
• Simple Tasks: We want to make sure the fundamental tasks in activities are relatively straightforward, even for new players. Selling drugs is still just press E near peds, and the "complexity" comes from hidden content and progression
• More than just money: Every job should have a purpose out side of just grinding for money. We're tackling this through exclusive items for each job (e.g. components for a widebody or NOS upgrade) and also leaderboards to compete for who is the best.
• Player Choice: As the player, you should have a choice of what you would like to do at any given time. Which mission would you take? Do you risk an illegal activity? Additionally, we don't want to restrict a player to only doing 1 career.
• High Fidelity: Finally - for new content we want to ensure we're not releasing it half-finished or without feeling polished. New territory for FDG!

Example Job: Trucking

We're using trucking as our first example of what these new activities could look like.

Progression is achieved through a leveling system. You start off in a mule, only able to do short local deliveries for mediocre pay. Over time, you gain XP, and can access longer missions with better payouts, until you can work your way up to unlocking a better truck. We've also got an upgrade system for the truck, where you installing upgrades unlocks different missions, increases your XP gain, or just look super cool.

Interactions stem primarily from other drivers on the roads. Police could pull you over for dangerous driving, car accidents could happen and your truck would need repairs. Additionally, XP boosts could be given for things like talking on the trucking radio or tooting your horn near other truckers.

Hubs are pretty straightforward. Many missions will start from common locations where players will run into each other (literally). Additionally, there could be locations where truckers can go for a nice meal, giving them an XP boost for half an hour (hidden content!)

Hidden content can come from many different things (but I won't go into massive detail - or it would not be very hidden). However examples as above, of tooting other drivers, stopping for a meal or wearing a uniform are examples.

Simple tasks is represented through the actual trucking being very simple. Get truck, pick up cargo, drop off cargo at points on the map. There is nothing so complicated that a new player wouldn't be able to understand.

More than just money is achieved through rare chances to collect items when completing a job, and also the fact that all the upgrades you purchase for your truck is something you keep forever.

Player choices comes from the player being able to decide which jobs to take. They are presented with the details about each job, the payout, the distance and origin point, and decide which one to complete.

Finally, high fidelity comes from a custom UI, a simple but polished experience, a full new vehicle modification system and heaps of variation in content for the actual missions

Future Plans

As mentioned previously, we want to roll this framework out through some new, or completely reworked careers. I won't leak too much detail on which ones will be coming, but so long as we stick to our framework they should all be entertaining.

However, we want to really look into applying this across all aspects of civilian life - both legal and illegal. An example could be theft. A brand new player is able to rob houses in "rough" neighborhoods, but would not have the expertise to navigate a modern alarm system. Over time, they would progress to better houses, and then ATMs, stores and finally, banks and heists. Along the way, we would look at reworks to bring these systems up to standard. Within this, we then have the exclusive items which make up part of late game content. Drugs, car parts and more would have a similar thing introduced

This tackles a big problem for FDG - which is everyone flocking to whatever is 5% better than everything else. A new player need only watch a few streams, log in and grind the best way to make money. Progression and rare items means people do need to work for things