V5 Features — Open-World Narrative Universe (Unreal Engine 5)

Status: V5 feature inventory
Source: derived from V5/V5_TODOS.md (implementation backlog) and inspired by the design footprint of Grand Theft Auto, Sleeping Dogs, Mafia, LA Noire, Mass Effect, The Expanse, The Witcher, Red Dead Redemption, and Sherlock Holmes.
Audience: design, engineering, AI, audio, art, narrative, online services, publishing, and live-service leads scoping V5.
Date: 2026-05-15

This feature map has been decomposed into focused pages under features/. This file remains the canonical hub — it preserves every section heading (so existing features§"…" and V5_features.md#… anchors keep resolving); the in-depth, code-grounded companion pages live under features/. Start at the features page index. The runtime/package architecture is in V5_ARCHITECTURE.md / architecture/.

Purpose#

This document is the feature map for V5. It translates the V5 backlog into a product-shaped scope document and describes what V5 ships across the five launch ruleset cells (Urban Crime, Period Drama, Frontier, Monster Hunter, Sci-Fi), plus a cross-cell Mind Palace deduction system that threads all five together, shared cross-cell systems, single-player and multiplayer surfaces, online services, content authoring, accessibility, localization, telemetry, and live-service DLC cells such as Brave New World Steampunk Detective. It does not replace the backlog checklist — V5_TODOS.md remains the source of truth for completion state and agent execution order — but every feature listed here is grounded in tasks explicitly laid out in V5_TODOS.md plus the product behavior those tasks imply.

V5 is one coherent open-world narrative-action game, not nine sibling products. The product covers the design footprint of:

• Grand Theft Auto for the modern open-world urban-crime sandbox, multi-protagonist switching, vehicle freedom (cars, bikes, planes, helos, boats), wanted-star police-response curve, heist-planner doctrine, in-world radio and TV culture, talk-show satire, and parody-of-real-life atmosphere.
• Sleeping Dogs for undercover-cop narrative, dense Hong Kong-style street open world, martial-arts melee with environmental finishers, free-running traversal, vehicle-to-vehicle hijacks (jump-and-take), face/triad reputation split, lockpicking and surveillance mini-systems, and karaoke as a social-context minigame.
• Mafia for period-piece organized-crime narrative drama (three eras — 1930s, 1947, 1968), made-man hierarchy progression, period-correct vehicles and driving model, period radio, family-loyalty story arcs, and a slow-burn cinematic mission cadence.
• LA Noire for the 1947 detective procedural cell, MotionScan-equivalent facial-capture truth/doubt/lie interrogation tells, crime-scene investigation (collect / examine / record clues), case-desk progression (Patrol → Traffic → Homicide → Vice → Arson), partner-driven case banter, and accusation gates that require evidence chains.
• Mass Effect for the sci-fi squad-RPG cell, dialogue wheel with Paragon/Renegade morality, squad of companions with biotic/tech/combat power classes, loyalty missions, galaxy-map travel, branching trilogy-scale choice that carries across save chapters, companion romance gates, and on-ship hub-of-operations between missions.
• The Expanse for the hard-sci-fi spaceship cell — Newtonian flight with burn / coast / flip-and-burn cadence, RCS thrusters, gravity zones (thrust-G, spin-G, zero-G), PDC + railgun + torpedo combat, faction politics (Earth, Mars, Belt-equivalent), coffee-cup-on-the-table conservation-of-momentum maneuver, and grounded crew drama on small ships.
• The Witcher for the monster-hunter action-RPG cell — alchemy (potions/oils/bombs/decoctions), five-sign elemental casting (rename — see IP Posture), monster-contract boards in towns, witcher-sense investigation (track scent and blood trails), bestiary as a gating mechanism, gwent-style card minigame (rename), branching dialogue with long-tail consequence, and steel-vs-silver bifurcated swordplay.
• Red Dead Redemption for the western-frontier cell — 1899 open-world frontier, horseback bonding (hand-feed, brush, talk-to mechanics), Dead-Eye slow-mo target-painting, honor / bounty system, hunting with perfect-pelt economy, gang-camp upkeep, weight-gain/loss simulation, cinematic random encounters, and saddlebag inventory tied to the horse.
• Sherlock Holmes (Crimes & Punishments / Devil's Daughter / Chapter One) for the deduction-and-evidence cell — pure-deduction Mind Palace graph, evidence chains where two facts combine into a third, certainty-threshold accusation system that lets the wrong answer ship, chemistry / forensics minigames, period-disguise dialogue trees, and observation-mode for fine detail spotting on bodies and rooms.

V5's promise is not "blend everything every match." V5's promise is per-genre feel — when a mission is in the GTA-style ruleset it must feel like GTA; when it's in the Witcher ruleset it must feel like Witcher; when it's in the Expanse ruleset it must feel like Expanse — held together by one shared "Cross-Continuum Bureau" cast, one shared creator suite, one shared online backbone, one unified Mind Palace deduction system that lets evidence collected in any cell unlock leads in any other, and a unifying narrative ("The Vanishing Continuum").

IP Posture#

V5 is original IP. The 9 named franchises above are design inspirations only — V5 reuses their published gameplay-system vocabulary (e.g., "Dead Eye", "Witcher Sense", "Mind Palace", "Dialogue Wheel", "Wanted Stars", "Paragon/Renegade") as terminology shorthand for established mechanic patterns, the same way V4 references "Mark and Execute" from Splinter Cell or "Showdown Mode" from Desperados, and V2 references "Drive Impact" or "Heat / Rage Arts" from Street Fighter and Tekken. V5 does not reuse any inspirational franchise's:

• Character names (canonical protagonist / antagonist names).
• Faction names, gang names, or unit names beyond historical / public-domain terms.
• City names, district names, or named locations.
• Voice-line scripts, marketing copy, or distinctive trademarks.
• Music, sound design, or visual identity.
• Vehicle model names (real or fictional from the source franchises).
• Card-game rules verbatim from the Witcher's gwent (rules are re-derived).

Cast, faction, city, district, location, vehicle, music, NIL, historical-NPC, period-media, and card-game-rule clearance is tracked in V5/legal/ip-clearance-manifest.json. Where this planning document still uses inspiration shorthand for readability (for example "Dead Eye", "Witcher Sense", or "Mind Palace"), shipping strings use the approved final-name substitutions in V5/legal/final-name-substitutions.json.

V5 specifically declines to license any of the nine source franchises and is committed to an original-cast / original-locale / original-mythology product. The IP-clearance manifest gates any pre-launch marketing beat that would risk an implied affiliation.

Subsystem Glossary#

Cell-count note: V5 ships 5 launch ruleset cells (Urban, Period, Frontier, Hunter, Sci-Fi), but the code's EV5Cell enum (V5/ue/Source/V5Core/Public/V5Types.h) carries 7 values — the 5 launch cells plus the Brave New World Steampunk Detective DLC cell (Steampunk, [P3] V5_TODOS.md §139) and the cross-cell MindPalace meta-layer; per-cell datasets and tests must therefore size against GetAllV5Cells() (7), not a literal 5 or 6.

Game-Feature Plugins (modular, hot-swap)#

Each cell's mode set is a GameFeatures plugin so it can be enabled per build target and DLC-gated post-launch without rebuilding the shipping executable. Plugins listed here are introduced by their first-referencing backlog task and own their content roots, asset linter rules, and per-mode test coverage.

Cross-Reference Convention#

Throughout this document and its companions, bare §N and §N.M references resolve to V5_TODOS.md (the only V5 doc with section numbering used as hyperlinks). Explicit prefixes are used where ambiguity matters:

• §40 → V5_TODOS.md §40.
• deps§14 → V5_DEPENDENCIES.md §14.
• arch§"<anchor>" → V5_ARCHITECTURE.md by section anchor.
• features§"<anchor>" → this document, by section anchor.

This features doc and V5_ARCHITECTURE.md use named anchors rather than numbered sections; only V5_TODOS.md and V5_DEPENDENCIES.md carry numbered section ids.

Repository Surfaces#

Target paths are created by the TODOs that first reference them.

Table of Contents#

• V5 Product Promise
• Product Surfaces
• Ruleset Cells Overview
  • Cell Feel Tests
• Urban Crime Cell
  • Heist City (GTA)
  • Street Triad (Sleeping Dogs)
  • Multi-Protagonist Switching
  • Wanted-Star Police Response
  • Heist Planner
  • Martial-Arts Melee + Environmental Finishers
  • Parkour Traversal
  • Vehicle-to-Vehicle Hijack
  • Face vs Triad Reputation
  • In-World Radio, TV, Phone
• Period Drama Cell
  • Made Man (Mafia)
  • Vice Squad (LA Noire)
  • Crime-Scene Investigation
  • MotionScan Interrogation
  • Case-Desk Progression
  • Period-Authenticity Bundles
• Frontier Cell
  • Outlaw Trail (RDR)
  • Dead Eye Slow-Mo
  • Honor & Bounty
  • Horse Bonding
  • Hunting & Perfect-Pelt Economy
  • Camp Upkeep
  • Cinematic Random Encounters
  • Saddle-Inventory Doctrine
• Monster Hunter Cell
  • Witcher's Path (Witcher 3)
  • Witcher-Sense Investigation
  • Alchemy: Potions, Oils, Bombs, Decoctions
  • Five-Sign Casting
  • Monster-Contract Boards
  • Steel-vs-Silver Swordplay
  • Bestiary as Gate
  • Collectible Card Minigame
• Sci-Fi Cell
  • Galactic Squad (Mass Effect)
  • Dialogue Wheel + Paragon/Renegade
  • Squad of Companions + Loyalty Missions
  • AI-Persona Companion
  • Galaxy-Map Travel
  • Biotic / Tech / Combat Power Tree
  • Companion Romance Gates
  • Hard Vacuum (Expanse)
  • Newtonian Flight & Flip-and-Burn
  • PDC + Railgun + Torpedo Combat
  • Gravity Zones
  • Faction Politics
  • Ship-Hub Interactions
• Cross-Cell Mind Palace (Sherlock)
  • Evidence Pickup & Examination
  • Deduction Graph Authoring
  • Cross-Era Linking
  • Accusation Gate
  • False-Lead Tolerance
• Shared Cross-Cell Systems
  • Cross-Continuum Bureau Roster
  • Unified Dialogue Wheel
  • Universal NPC Perception
  • NPC Crowd & Schedules
  • Honor / Karma / Paragon Bridge
  • Vehicle Library Across Eras
  • Cover, ADS, Recoil, Stance
  • Photo Mode
• Modes & Multiplayer
  • Mission Architectures
  • Campaign Modes
  • Skirmish & Quick-Play
  • Co-op Modes
  • PvP Modes
  • Horde Defense Per Cell
  • Training, Trials, and Tutorials
  • Replay Theater, Spectator, and Coach Mode
  • Per-Cell Signature Modes
  • Per-Character Side Stories
  • Split-Screen and Local Multiplayer
• Content & Creator Tools
  • Roster & Content Inventory
  • Creator Suite
  • Workshop & Mods
  • Custom Tournaments and Match History
• Online Services & Multiplayer Infrastructure
  • Online Services
  • Network Quality, LAN, and Server Browser
  • Cross-Platform Social, Reporting, and Bans
  • Anti-Cheat
  • Crossplay & Cross-Progression
  • Esports & Tournament Surfaces
  • Ranked Season Architecture
• Live Service & Community
  • Live Service & DLC
  • Battle Pass, Weekly Contracts, and Faction Reputation
  • Twitch Drops, Creator Partnership, and Community Tools
  • Streamer and Speedrun Modes
  • Live Service Calendar
  • Community Features
  • Brand Partnerships and Celebrity Guests
  • AI Commentary and Highlight Reels
  • Director Commentary and Bonus Content
• Platform, Performance & Tech
  • Display Tech, Performance, and Cert
  • Asset Budget & Streaming
  • Patch, Hotfix, Quick-Resume, and Crash Recovery
  • AI Director & Adaptive Difficulty
  • Engineering Polish
  • VR and AR Support
  • Hardware Peripherals
  • Store Features and Region-Aware Pricing
  • Account Vault and Replay Archive
  • Companion App, API, Wiki, and Roadmap
  • Persistent World Economy
• Compliance, Accessibility & Production
  • Parental Controls, Age Gating, and Time-Played
  • Accessibility
  • Localization, Voice-Over, and Region Rating Variants
  • Telemetry, Analytics, and Balance
  • Privacy Compliance
  • Production: Studio Ops, Mocap, VO, and Composer
  • Loading, Splash, Tips, and Notifications
  • Customer Support and Community Ambassadors
  • Balance Operations
  • Character and Account Progression
  • Map Lore, Signature Maps, and Weather
  • Rivals, Relationship Matrix, and Timeline
  • Launch Readiness
  • V5 Exit Criteria

V5 Product Promise#

V5 must ship as one product, not nine. The product should:

• Deliver per-genre feel that matches each inspirational source on its own terms — no compromise blends. GTA ruleset feels like GTA; Witcher ruleset feels like Witcher; Expanse ruleset feels like Expanse; Sherlock deduction feels like Sherlock; RDR ruleset feels like RDR.
• Hold those rulesets together with one shared roster, one shared Mind Palace deduction layer, one shared creator suite, one shared online backbone, and a unifying narrative (The Vanishing Continuum).
• Make dedicated-server client-server netcode the default for open-world PvP and co-op, with rollback-emulated prediction for tight spaceship-PvP and squad combat (1v1 — 5v5), and offline-deterministic single-player for the five primary campaigns.
• Ship complete launch content across every advertised mode — no "coming soon" panels, no skeleton cells, no "early access" rulesets, no half-built era.
• Provide first-class single-player content for every cell (Urban Heist Campaign, Period Made-Man + Vice-Squad Campaign, Frontier Outlaw Trail Campaign, Hunter Witcher's Path Campaign, Sci-Fi Galactic Squad Campaign + Hard Vacuum Crew Campaign), with mocap principals, voice-overs in launch languages, and pre-rendered cinematics that hit a 4K master.
• Degrade safely under offline, partial-net, low-bandwidth, controller-loss, mid-mission-disconnect, and provider-outage conditions (e.g., open-world modes hold session for sub-2-second host-migration; single-player saves locally and reconciles on reconnect; spaceship-PvP rolls back the last 8 frames of input on packet loss; Mind Palace state survives crash).
• Run on 9 platforms day-one: Windows (Steam + Microsoft Store + Epic), PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Switch 2 (scaled — sci-fi cell shaves Lumen GI to SDF), macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux (Steam Deck + Proton-verified), and iPad Pro (M-series — touch-friendly Mind Palace), plus a cloud-streaming variant via PixelStreaming for thin-client browsers and TV apps where contract permits.
• Maintain AAA SOTA quality on all surfaces — Lumen GI, Nanite geometry, MetaHumans for principals, MetaHumans-derived face capture for the MotionScan-equivalent interrogation rig, Niagara VFX, MetaSounds, Chaos cloth / hair, Chaos Destruction for vehicle and building damage, Chaos Vehicles for the era-spanning vehicle library, virtual-shadow maps, World Partition for sandbox maps, Sequencer-driven cinematics, motion-matching locomotion for traversal modes, and reference-grade reactive period radio + dynamic music.
• Operate as a live service from day one with seasonal contracts (per-cell), themed events, balance hot-fixes that ship out-of-band of binary updates, and a public balance ledger so the community can audit changes to dialogue-wheel outcomes, monster-contract economy, dead-eye reload curves, and faction-rep gates.

Product Surfaces#

Ruleset Cells Overview#

The five ruleset cells are V5's core organizing principle. Each cell is a self-contained gameplay framework with its own pacing, control scheme, camera discipline, AI personality, HUD vocabulary, and audio identity. A cell is implemented as a cluster of GameFeatures plugins (one per ruleset variant) on top of shared engine subsystems.

The cross-cell Mind Palace (Sherlock) is not a sixth cell — it's a meta-layer that every cell feeds. Evidence collected in any cell can pair with evidence from any other cell, unlocking cross-era leads.

Cell Feel Tests#

Each cell ships with a feel test suite — a curated set of in-game scenarios reviewers can run to confirm the cell hits its inspiration's hallmark. Examples:

• Urban Crime / GTA feel test: A two-protagonist swap during a moving vehicle chase — Protagonist A drives, Protagonist B leans out to shoot. Swap control mid-chase. Wanted level escalates as star count climbs (1★ visual, 2★ pursuit, 3★ NOOSE-equivalent SWAT, 4★ helo, 5★ military). Pass if the swap feels seamless (no perceptible loading hitch on PS5 Pro) and the 5★ response includes Apache-equivalent attack helo + APC.
• Urban Crime / Sleeping Dogs feel test: Hand-to-hand brawl in a fish-market corridor with 8 thugs and 3 environmental finishers (chum tank, ice-block stack, hanging-meat hook). Pass if all 3 environmental finishers trigger contextually with single-button prompt at appropriate range and the scene resolves in under 90 seconds at standard pacing.
• Period Drama / Mafia feel test: Linear escort mission, 1947 setting, player drives a period car (top-speed 65 mph, drum-brake fade, three-on-the-tree manual) from city outskirts to downtown safehouse. Period radio fills the drive. Pass if the player can complete the drive at speed-limit without triggering wanted-stars, period car physics feel authentic, and radio cuts to news bulletin at scripted plot beat.
• Period Drama / LA Noire feel test: Single 1947 crime scene (one body, six examinable clues, three takeaway objects), then interrogate one witness. The witness lies on two of five answers; player must call "Doubt" / "Truth" / "Lie" backed by collected evidence. Pass if facial-capture tells (eye dart, lip purse, swallow) are readable at controller default rumble and the lie-tag fires only when evidence is in inventory.
• Frontier / RDR feel test: Ride from camp to nearest town (~3.5 in-game km), encounter one random event (broken-wagon traveler, downed rider, stranger ambush). Pass if horse responds to gait inputs (walk → trot → canter → gallop) with stamina decay, encounter triggers within 1.2 km of player route, and a perfect-pelt deer is huntable on the route.
• Monster Hunter / Witcher feel test: A village monster contract for a grave-creature-equivalent. Player must read posted notice → speak to alderman → investigate site with witcher-sense (4 clue markers) → brew a specific oil → fight the monster. Pass if alchemy ingredients are in-inventory or gatherable in radius, oil application gates damage, and bestiary auto-fills on first sighting.
• Sci-Fi / Mass Effect feel test: A 5-on-5 squad encounter with two companions, dialogue-wheel choice mid-battle (Paragon / Renegade interrupt), and at least one biotic + tech power combo (singularity + warp). Pass if interrupt prompt fires at the scripted beat and the Paragon / Renegade choice unlocks the corresponding XP and downstream dialogue option.
• Sci-Fi / Expanse feel test: Two-ship duel in zero-G — player flips the ship under thrust (1G burn → flip → 1G decel → coast) to deliver a torpedo broadside. Pass if RCS jets fire at the correct angles, gravity swaps appropriately during the maneuver, and PDC tracking intercepts at least 60% of incoming torpedoes at base difficulty.
• Mind Palace / Sherlock feel test: A multi-cell case file with 6 evidence nodes (2 from urban, 2 from period, 2 from frontier). Player must combine three evidence pairs into deductions and reach a final accusation. Pass if every wrong accusation is allowed to ship (and saved to an "Outcomes Archive" alongside the right one), and the deduction graph visually highlights which pairs the player has unlocked.

Feel tests live in V5/ue/Source/V5Tests/FeelTests/ and are wired into the nightly Gauntlet automation run; a failing feel test blocks the affected cell's release.

Urban Crime Cell#

The urban-crime cell carries the largest open-world authoring footprint of any cell. It spans two distinct sub-rulesets (Heist City and Street Triad), each implemented as its own GameFeatures plugin. Shared engine surfaces (V5Open, V5Vehicles, V5Combat, V5Melee, V5Wanted, V5Heist, V5Parkour, V5Crowd) feed both sub-rulesets so a character authored in one is reusable in the other.

Heist City (GTA)#

A modern urban open world the size of two full big-city open-world maps combined (~140 km² playable surface area), with three switchable protagonists, ambient world events, and a heist-driven main campaign.

Features:

• Three switchable protagonists with cross-character schedule simulation — when the player is controlling A, B and C continue their day-of-week routines (gym, bar, family, side-hustle). The switch cinematic is a vertical-blade-wipe (~1.5 s) with no perceptible loading on PS5 / PS5 Pro due to predictive streaming.
• A 140 km² open world at street-level density — full-size buildings, pedestrian crowds (V5Crowd ~250 NPCs streaming radius), period-correct traffic models (modern: ~95 vehicle classes streaming at a time), district-flavored music + radio, weather + time-of-day on a 48-minute day cycle.
• Vehicle freedom: ~120 driveable vehicles spanning sedans, sports, super-sports, SUVs, sports-bikes, dirtbikes, fixie bicycles, sea-skis, speedboats, yachts, single-engine light aircraft, twin-engine prop planes, jet-fighters, transport helos, attack helos, semis (with detachable-trailer), garbage trucks, tow trucks, food trucks. All vehicles customizable at the in-world body-shop (paint, wheels, suspension, engine, decals, license-plate). All vehicles handle distinctly under the V5Vehicles Chaos-Vehicles tuning.
• Wanted-star police response (see features§"Wanted-Star Police Response" below) — 1★ visual, 2★ patrol pursuit, 3★ NOOSE-equivalent SWAT, 4★ helo, 5★ military.
• Heists — main-campaign anchor missions, each pre-planned at the Heist Planner (see features§"Heist Planner") with 4-6 setup missions feeding into a finale.
• Side activities: Tennis, golf, darts, bowling, triathlons, street racing (4 race types — circuit, point-to-point, time trial, drag), parachuting (random encounter), yoga (one-shot side mission), mini-golf, an in-fiction casino resort.
• In-world media: 18 radio stations across 8 genres (Classic Rock, Hip-Hop, R&B, Country, Mexican Cumbia, Talk, Soul, Jazz), ~140 in-world TV channels (cable, news, infomercial, kids' cartoons, reality-cooking), in-game internet browser (~250 fictional sites including the in-fiction crypto-exchange-equivalent), in-game phone (text, call, take-photo, social-feed). All in-world media is original IP — no licensed music except where specifically cleared per §82.
• Ambient encounters: Random NPC events (mugging, traffic accident, drug deal in progress, mariachi band, marathon, paparazzi swarm) drawn from a 240-event pool with district-flavored eligibility.
• First-person & third-person modes — toggle live; FOV, head-bob, weapon sway, motion-blur all separately tunable per-mode.

Street Triad (Sleeping Dogs)#

A dense Hong Kong-equivalent open world (~22 km² playable) layered into the urban-crime cell as a second campaign with a deeply different feel — narrow street density, vertical traversal, hand-to-hand combat as the primary tool (guns are scarce by design and police response is harsher), undercover-cop narrative.

Features:

• Undercover-cop narrative — the protagonist is an embedded officer inside the triad-equivalent gang. Two parallel reputation tracks (Cop Reputation, Triad Reputation) progress independently, gating dialogue options, costume drops, and mission availability.
• Hand-to-hand martial-arts melee — the primary combat tool. ~85 combat moves with rock-paper-scissors timing (strike / grapple / counter), combo-chaining, environmental finishers (fish-market chum tank, ice block, hanging meat, AC unit, dumpster, electrical box). Guns are available but scarce; civilian witness reporting causes them to be treated as escalations.
• Free-running parkour traversal — wall-vaults, ledge-grabs, building-side wall-runs, fire-escape slides, awning bounces. Traversal is button-hold contextual (no dedicated parkour button — V5Parkour resolves intent from camera + run direction).
• Vehicle-to-vehicle hijack — at speed, leap from your moving vehicle to a target vehicle's hood, smash window, throw out driver, take wheel. Triggers a short QTE plus a free-aim grab; failure flings the protagonist into traffic.
• Lockpicking, surveillance, hack — period-appropriate (modern Hong Kong, so: digital camera planting, signal-tracing, lock-pick UI, safe-cracking). Surveillance side missions feed back into the case-board in the Bureau HQ hub.
• Karaoke — rhythm minigame at lounge venues, four genres (Canto-pop, Mandarin ballad, English pop, K-pop guest tracks where contract permits), six difficulties (Casual → Master). Successful sets buff face / triad reputation depending on song choice and venue.
• Cooking + ingredient minigames — small-scale; eating at street stalls buffs combat stats for ~12 minutes of game time.
• Cinematic story arcs — 32 main story missions, 18 cop case files, 12 triad favor missions, 26 ambient encounters.

Multi-Protagonist Switching#

The signature GTA-V feature; in V5 it is generalized across the urban-crime cell to support 1-4 protagonists per campaign (the GTA-style campaign uses 3; the SD-style campaign uses 1 + a partner; the heist editor can author up to 4-protagonist campaigns).

Features:

• Switch UI: Right-D-pad opens the switch-wheel; left-stick selects a character; release switches.
• Simulated downtime: When inactive, each protagonist continues their routine (sleep, gym, work, family). State (position, costume, ammo, vehicle, mood, last-action, hunger) is persisted.
• Switch transition: A vertical-blade wipe with 1.5 s predictive-streaming hand-off. The destination world segment streams in before the wipe completes; the source segment unloads after.
• Cross-character dialogue: Characters can phone-call, text, social-post with each other in their downtime, generating headlines for the player to read on the in-game phone next time they switch.
• Cross-character heists: Heists require coordinated role assignment (driver, hacker, gunner, lookout). The player can switch live mid-heist to control any role.

Wanted-Star Police Response#

A five-star escalation curve, era-scaled per cell. The urban-crime cell uses the modern police-response curve; the period cell uses 1930s/47/68 LAPD-equivalent; the frontier cell uses marshal-with-posse; the hunter cell uses village-watch / lord's-guard; the sci-fi cell uses ship-AI / patrol-cruiser / faction-fleet.

Modern urban response (GTA-style):

• 1★ Visual — A nearby unit takes notice. Sirens audible. Light pursuit if the player is on foot.
• 2★ Patrol Pursuit — Multi-car pursuit, roadblocks, spike-strips. Period-correct chase music ducks the player's radio.
• 3★ Tactical (NOOSE-equivalent) — SWAT vans, rifle-equipped officers, helo spotter.
• 4★ Helo — Attack helo with mini-gun support, perimeter cordons, news-helo on scene reporting live.
• 5★ Military — APC, Apache-equivalent attack helo, tanks (in specific zones), military VTOL with troop drop.

Wanted-clear:

• Off-the-radar: stay out of police visual + audible for 90 seconds while moving away from last-known location.
• Pay-off (bribe): in-fiction lawyer-equivalent NPC in the urban hub can clear wanted for cash, with a cooldown.
• Safehouse hide: dive into a safehouse garage; wanted timer ticks faster while inside.

Heist Planner#

A pre-mission planning step that lets the player layout up to 4 protagonists, choose roles, vehicles, weapons, escape route, and rehearse the plan in a 4× slowed-speed preview.

Features:

• Target board — A pinboard with target intel: blueprints, security schedules, guard count, escape window. New intel is acquired through setup missions.
• Crew selection — Choose 1-4 protagonists; the campaign assigns the primary anchor character but additional members are drawn from an "outside crew" roster (driver, hacker, gunner, lookout, demo expert) each with their own cut rate and skill rating.
• Vehicle assignment — Pick getaway vehicle, decoy vehicle, support vehicle; each crew member has a preferred vehicle that affects their performance.
• Weapon loadout — Per-crew-member primary + secondary + special (silencer / drill / breaching charge).
• Route authoring — Place waypoints on the map for approach, entry, inside-target, escape, dump-vehicle, safehouse.
• Rehearsal preview — 4× slowed-speed walkthrough; if a chosen route intersects a known high-patrol zone, the preview flags the conflict in red.
• Live override — During execution, the player can press Tab to re-route waypoints; AI crew resume from the new plan.
• Replay export — The planning step + the execution save as a single contract record for community study.

Heists ship with 3 endings per heist (smooth, hard, catastrophic) based on player performance during execution; ending choice gates downstream cut rates and follow-up heists.

Martial-Arts Melee + Environmental Finishers#

A 3-stance brawler system: Strike (fast jab + roundhouse + kick), Grapple (throws + locks + slams), Counter (parry + reversal). RPS dominance: Strike < Grapple < Counter < Strike.

Features:

• Move library: 85 base moves; 24 environmental finishers; 12 weapon pickups (lead pipe, broken bottle, butcher knife, chair, fire extinguisher). Weapons degrade and break after 4-8 hits.
• Combo chaining: chain successful strikes into a flow; the combo meter unlocks finishing-strike at 5-hit and a guaranteed environmental finisher at 10-hit.
• Environmental finishers: Contextual prompts when in range of one of 24 hazard objects (chum tank, ice block, hanging meat, AC unit, electrical box, jukebox, gas pump, walk-in freezer, glass display, dumpster compactor, oven, deep-fryer, neon sign, bicep machine, treadmill, fish scaler, lawnmower, ice-cream truck, payphone, fire-hydrant lid, manhole cover, sushi conveyor, mahjong table, blender). Each finisher is a 2-3 s scripted move + free-roam recovery.
• Hit-stop and screen-shake: Strikes have 4-frame hit-stop (60fps) for "weight"; counters add an extra 3 frames. Camera-shake intensity scales with finisher tier.
• Reaction library: 12 NPC hit-react classes (light stagger, knockdown, spin-fall, wall-slam, knockout, KO-bleed, KO-vom, dive-back, scramble-up, beg-for-mercy, fight-on, flee).

Parkour Traversal#

Contextual free-running. No dedicated parkour button — V5Parkour resolves intent from camera + run direction + stick magnitude.

Features:

• Vault (low obstacles ≤ 0.8 m): single hand vault.
• Climb (medium obstacles ≤ 1.6 m): mantle.
• Wall-run (vertical surfaces): two-step horizontal traverse at run speed.
• Ledge-grab + shimmy: auto-attach at edge, shimmy in either direction.
• Fire-escape slide: rail slide on stair railings, scaffolding.
• Awning bounce: drop from height onto a soft surface, redirect.
• Roof-to-roof drop / jump: jump or roll based on gap.

Failure modes (out-of-stamina jump, slip-on-wet-surface) trigger a brief recovery animation with vulnerability frames; this matters in chase scenes.

Vehicle-to-Vehicle Hijack#

A signature Sleeping Dogs feature; in V5 it generalizes to any era's vehicles (cars, bikes, period autos, wagons, horses — the frontier cell lets you leap from horse to horse).

Trigger logic:

• Both vehicles moving (> 10 m/s for modern; > 5 m/s for period; > 4 m/s for horses).
• Source vehicle is convertible / open-top or player is leaning out passenger side.
• Target vehicle is within 4 m and same lane direction.
• Hold Y / Triangle to leap.

Outcome:

• Success: 1.8 s scripted animation, breaks window or rips open door, shoves driver into traffic (or saddle), takes wheel / reins.
• Failure (mis-timing): protagonist tumbles into the road with a 0.6 s recovery animation and possible vehicle hit.

The frontier cell variant (leap from horse to horse) replaces "smash window" with "shove rider"; the sci-fi cell variant (leap from ship to ship at boarding range) replaces it with "magnetic-clamp boarding tube".

Face vs Triad Reputation#

A bifurcated reputation system specific to Street Triad mode but reusable across the urban cell.

Features:

• Face rises on civilian-helpful actions: foiling a mugging, calling in evidence, completing a cop side case, escorting an NPC.
• Triad rises on gang-loyal actions: completing a triad favor, beating rival-gang muscle, intimidating a witness, attending a triad ceremony.
• Costume drops gate behind reputation thresholds (Face unlocks detective-suit + shoulder holster; Triad unlocks gang-tattoo + brass-knuckles).
• Mission gates: some main-story missions need both reputations above a threshold; conflicting reputations route to alternative mission variants.
• End-state branching: the campaign's three endings depend on final face/triad balance.

In-World Radio, TV, Phone#

A persistent media layer always active in the urban cell (parallel implementations in the period cell with era-correct AM radio, in the frontier cell with sheet-music / phonograph, in the sci-fi cell with ship-band, in the hunter cell with bard-songs / town-criers).

Features:

• 18 radio stations in the modern urban cell across 8 genres. Each station has a 90-minute loop with DJ commentary, news bulletins, commercials (all original IP).
• 140+ TV channels with cable, news, infomercial, sports, kids, reality, period-archive (for the 1947 / 1968 channels).
• In-game phone with: contacts, text, voice, photo, social-feed, in-fiction internet browser (250 fictional sites), heist briefings.
• Talk-radio satire — 8 talk-show formats with rotating topics drawn from a 1200-line writers room.
• Dynamic news bulletins — live narrative beats (player completes a heist → news ticker reports it within 4 in-game minutes).

Period Drama Cell#

The period-drama cell is V5's narrative-anchor cell. It spans two sub-rulesets — Made Man (Mafia-style period crime drama) and Vice Squad (LA Noire-style 1947 detective procedural) — both grounded in the same authored 1947 city. Each sub-ruleset can be played standalone; together they form a ~55-hour parallel narrative (Made Man ~36 hours + Vice Squad ~19 hours) where the same city is seen from both sides of the law in the same week.

Made Man (Mafia)#

A linear, narrative-driven period crime drama spanning three eras (1930s, 1947, 1968) with three protagonists. Each era is a discrete chapter (~12 hours of single-player content); chapters connect through a generational crime-family arc.

Features:

• Three eras, three protagonists — the 1930s protagonist is the family-immigrant founder; the 1947 protagonist is the made-man son; the 1968 protagonist is the disillusioned grandson.
• Made-man hierarchy progression — soldier → caporegime → underboss → boss. Each promotion gates new mission types, safehouses, vehicles, weapons.
• Period-correct vehicles — 28 vehicles per era, with era-correct handling (1930s: ~55 mph top speed, drum brakes, manual choke, no-radio; 1947: ~80 mph, hydraulic brakes, AM radio; 1968: ~110 mph, power steering, FM radio).
• Period-correct radio — AM-only in the 1930s/47, FM in 1968. Each era has its own genre mix (Big-band swing 1930s; bebop / blues 1947; soul / Motown / psychedelic 1968).
• Period-correct slang, signage, fashion, architecture — reference-grade authenticity authored by a period-research team on a dedicated period-authenticity production track.
• Linear mission cadence — 26 missions per chapter, cinematic pacing, mid-mission cinematic interludes shot in Sequencer with period-correct lens (deep DOF in the 1930s chapter; longer-lens prime in 1947; zoom-rack in 1968).
• Family-loyalty arcs — each chapter has a family-character matrix (4-6 family members per chapter); player choices shift the matrix and gate two endings per chapter.
• Revenge / honor arcs — multi-mission revenge tracks where the player's targets are persisted across chapter cliffhangers.

Vice Squad (LA Noire)#

A 1947 Los-Angeles-equivalent detective procedural, with case-desk progression, crime-scene investigation, interrogation, and partner-driven narrative. Same authored city as Made Man's 1947 chapter; the two sub-rulesets share World Partition tiles and NPC schedules.

Features:

• Case-desk progression — Patrol → Traffic → Homicide → Vice → Arson (5 desks, ~5 cases per desk = 25 cases total).
• Crime-scene investigation — see features§"Crime-Scene Investigation".
• Interrogation — see features§"MotionScan Interrogation".
• Partner-driven banter — each desk pairs the protagonist with a different partner; partner banter fills the drive-between-scenes downtime, dropping case clues and character-arc beats.
• Period-correct driving — same Mafia 1947 vehicle library, with the detective protagonist's unmarked sedan as the default vehicle.
• In-world period authentic LAPD culture — radio dispatch ("Code 3 near Mt. Wilson Ave"), squad-room culture, period-correct precinct geography.
• Branch-on-fail — Bungled cases don't game-over; they downgrade the player's case rating and shift partner / captain reactions.
• Newspaper headlines — every closed case generates an in-fiction newspaper headline the player can pick up at street boxes the next in-game day.

Crime-Scene Investigation#

A diegetic investigation flow shared by Vice Squad (LA Noire-style) and the Mind Palace cross-cell layer.

Features:

• Scene tag prompt — when the player enters a scene marker, a controller-rumble pulses gently when the camera is near examinable objects.
• Examine objects — a contextual "examine" prompt rotates the object in close-up free-rotation. The player must rotate to find the diegetic detail (powder residue, manufacturer mark, dried blood, hidden compartment).
• Notebook auto-write — each examined clue appends to the protagonist's notebook with a paraphrased note.
• Mind Palace push — every notebook entry pushes to the cross-cell Mind Palace deduction graph; see features§"Cross-Cell Mind Palace (Sherlock)".
• False clue tolerance — scenes ship with 1-2 false clues; the player can spend time on them without being penalized but they cannot be pulled into a deduction chain.
• Quiet mode — when "quiet" is enabled, the rumble prompts are off; this is the canonical LA Noire feel and the harder difficulty.

MotionScan Interrogation#

V5's signature LA-Noire-inheriting feature, modernized to MetaHuman face capture.

Features:

• MotionScan-equivalent face pipeline — see deps§5; V5 uses a custom-tuned MetaHuman face rig captured with a 12-camera face stage, with retake support and per-take blend weights. The result is captured as a .usd blendshape stack played in-engine at runtime.
• Truth / Doubt / Lie call — at each witness statement, the player chooses one of three buttons. The witness face exhibits a tell on lies; the tells are calibrated by the face-capture pass and read at the player's controller rumble feedback.
• Evidence-backed Lie — calling "Lie" requires the player to present a specific piece of inventory evidence; the system disallows the call if the evidence is not present, signalling the player to investigate more.
• Tell library — 12 distinct tells (eye dart, lip purse, swallow, shoulder dip, eyebrow flicker, slight smile, jaw clench, throat scratch, gaze drop, head nod-pause, blink burst, mouth tremor). Witnesses pick one tell per lie statement.
• Confidence-based scoring — after the interrogation, the player gets a rating (Brilliant → Good → Average → Poor) based on call accuracy. Brilliant gates downstream dialogue options.
• Multiple interrogation passes — for difficult cases, the player can request a second pass after collecting more evidence; the witness lies may change in response.

Case-Desk Progression#

The Vice Squad campaign structure.

Features:

• 5 desks in canonical period order (Patrol → Traffic → Homicide → Vice → Arson).
• 5 cases per desk — each case ~45 minutes of play; total ~25 cases, ~19 hours of single-player Vice Squad content.
• Case rating rolls up to desk rating, which unlocks the next desk.
• Carry-over witnesses — across desks, recurring period-NPCs return with their accumulated history with the player.

Period-Authenticity Bundles#

Three era bundles authored at AAA period-drama quality:

• 1930s Bundle — vehicles, fashion, signage, fonts, slang, architecture, music, period-correct lighting (single-bulb tungsten interiors, hand-cranked streetlamps), period-correct food (ration-era), period-correct radio.
• 1947 Bundle — vehicles, fashion, signage, fonts, slang, architecture, music, period-correct lighting (post-war neon), period-correct food (early supermarket), period-correct radio + early TV.
• 1968 Bundle — vehicles, fashion, signage, fonts, slang, architecture, music, period-correct lighting (color saturation shift to fluorescent + late tungsten), period-correct food (fast-food rise), period-correct radio + color TV.

Each bundle is owned by V5/balance/period-auth/<era>.bundle.toml and referenced by V5PeriodAuth at runtime. The bundle is a content-content swap layer — the same 1947 city geometry is shared between Made Man and Vice Squad with bundle-driven asset replacement (period vehicles, period extras, period radio).

Frontier Cell#

The frontier cell is V5's western-open-world cell, anchored to a single sub-ruleset (Outlaw Trail) and an 1899 frontier setting.

Outlaw Trail (RDR)#

A 1899-equivalent western open world (~125 km² playable) with a gang-narrative campaign, persistent honor system, perfect-pelt hunting economy, and cinematic random encounters.

Features:

• A 125 km² authored frontier — five biomes (high plains, redwoods, swamp / bayou, mountains with snow line, desert with mesas), each with unique wildlife, weather patterns, and ambient sounds. Maps grade from 3 km rendering depth on PS5 Pro to 1.5 km on Switch 2.
• One protagonist — the gang's enforcer, with deep companion banter via the camp roster (~22 named gang members).
• Gang camp — see features§"Camp Upkeep". The camp is a persistent home base with chores, donations, banter, downtime activities (fishing-from-pier, gambling at camp table, dance-around-fire one-shot scenes).
• Horseback as the primary travel mode — fast travel exists but is gated behind discovery (waystations); riding is encouraged by Dead-Eye / Honor / random-encounter design.
• Cinematic-encounter design — the encounter system is the frontier cell's signature; see features§"Cinematic Random Encounters".
• Hunting & perfect-pelt economy — see features§"Hunting & Perfect-Pelt Economy".
• Honor & bounty — see features§"Honor & Bounty".
• Saddle-inventory doctrine — see features§"Saddle-Inventory Doctrine".

Dead Eye Slow-Mo#

The signature RDR-style slow-mo target-painting system. In V5, Dead Eye is shared with the urban cell as "Reflex Mode" (different name, same mechanic) and the sci-fi cell as "Tactical Time" (also same mechanic).

Features:

• Slow-mo gauge — the Dead-Eye gauge fills from kills, headshots, and Honor-marked story beats; drains during use.
• Tier 1 (early game): auto-target lights up on enemy; player aims manually in slowed time.
• Tier 2 (mid game): painted-shot — player can manually paint up to 6 targets in slow time, then fire one round each as time resumes.
• Tier 3 (late game): weak-spot targeting — paint specific body parts (head, vital, weapon-hand); shots hit those specific points with damage multipliers.
• Frontier feel: the slow-mo has a vignette + grain + sepia tint, a signature RDR aesthetic.

Honor & Bounty#

A persistent honor / reputation / bounty system specific to the frontier cell but with a generalized "Honor / Karma / Paragon Bridge" that cross-references the dialogue wheel's Paragon/Renegade axis (see features§"Honor / Karma / Paragon Bridge").

Features:

• Honor meter — visible at HUD edge; swings from -100 (low honor) to +100 (high honor). Honor changes from witnessed actions (assault on civilians = -8; help a stranger = +4; kill an animal cleanly = +0; loot a body in town = -3).
• Reactions — NPCs greet the player based on honor band; shopkeepers give discounts at high honor; witnesses report crimes faster at low honor.
• Bounty — committed crimes (in-witness) accumulate a bounty in the state's $ value; bounty hunters spawn proportionally; bounty offices let the player pay it off.
• Encounter-flavor — high-honor players see more help-needed encounters; low-honor players see more ambushes.
• Cross-cell hook — the Mind Palace's "moral compass" axis reads from Honor + Paragon/Renegade + Mafia's family-loyalty score; certain cross-era story beats gate behind the integrated score (see features§"Cross-Era Linking").

Horse Bonding#

A four-tier horse-bonding loop unique to the frontier cell.

Features:

• Bonding mechanics — feed (hay / apple / oats), brush, talk-to, calm-during-spook. Each successful interaction earns bonding XP.
• Four bonding tiers — Wild / Familiar / Trusted / Bonded. Each tier unlocks new behaviors (rear, side-step, drift, calm-under-fire, return-when-whistled).
• Saddle compatibility — saddles improve the horse's stamina, speed, carry-capacity. Saddlebag inventory is the primary inventory store during travel.
• Horse care — feed daily, brush weekly, vet-treat after injury, stable when in town. Neglect causes the horse to spook more, leading to throw-rider events.
• Death & permadeath — horses can die from extreme damage. Death is permanent; the player must capture / buy a new horse and rebuild the bond. Optional toggle in difficulty settings for non-permadeath.

Hunting & Perfect-Pelt Economy#

The frontier-cell economy is anchored to hunting; pelt quality is the primary route to clothing upgrades.

Features:

• Wildlife biome roster: 95 huntable species — deer, elk, moose, bison, pronghorn, bear (4 sub-species), wolves, coyote, fox, lynx, cougar, big-horn sheep, jackrabbit, raccoon, opossum, beaver, otter, alligator, crocodile, snakes (6 species), turkey, duck (4 species), geese, pheasant, quail, rabbit, eagle, hawk, condor, vulture, owl, woodpecker, hummingbird (catch only), wild boar, donkey (wild), mule, horse (wild), plus the Frontier Naturalist Year-1 roster. Each has a 3-tier pelt grading (poor / good / perfect).
• Perfect-pelt mechanics — perfect pelts require: correct weapon caliber for the animal, clean kill (first shot, vitals or head), field-dressed within 15 in-game minutes, transported on horse saddlebag (carcass) or sold as pelt at the trapper.
• Trapper progression — bring perfect pelts to the trapper; unlock full-pelt outfits (each outfit costs 3-7 specific pelts plus dollars).
• Tracking — the witcher-sense-equivalent ("Eagle Eye") shows blood-trails, tracks, and the animal's recent path. (Shared engine with V5MonsterHunt, see hunter cell.)
• Carcass logistics — large carcasses go on the horse's rear; only one carcass + saddlebag inventory at a time. Forces choice.

Camp Upkeep#

The persistent gang-camp hub for the frontier cell.

Features:

• Camp roster: ~22 named gang members; each has dialogue, daily routines, and a relationship slider with the protagonist.
• Donations — the player drops dollars / pelts / meat into the camp donation box; donations buff the camp (food quality, weapon stock, medical kits).
• Chores — chop firewood, feed horses, water the garden, milk the cow (if camp moves to a farmstead).
• Camp moves — between chapters, the camp relocates; each location has different layout, neighboring resources, weather, threats.
• Stories around the fire — at night, gang-member ambient stories trigger when the player approaches the fire — short cinematic vignettes with branching dialogue and relationship slider impact.

Cinematic Random Encounters#

The frontier cell's signature ambient design — fully scripted miniature stories triggered by player travel through specific zones.

Features:

• Encounter library: 320 distinct encounters spanning a wide range of types — Stranger in distress, Bounty target spotted, Crash-and-loot (broken-wagon), Bandit ambush, Animal attack, Lost child, Drunk-in-town, Drug-trader (period-correct), Outlaw shootout in progress, Disabled rider, Wedding party, Funeral procession, Lynching (player intervention), Encounter with the law, Hermit, Wanderer, Photographer (period-correct), Camera-take, Fistfight, Card-cheat caught, Confederate-monument vandal, Robbery in progress, Hostage scenario, Treasure-map seller, Native encounter, Salesman pitch, Outlaw-coffin transport, Mortician-cart, Sheep-herder, Cattle-drive, Pony-express rider in trouble, Tent-revival preacher, Snake-bit man, Lost dog, Horse-thief in act, Drunken brawl, Slave-catcher (period-authentic and morally-loaded), Burning building, Drowning child, and others.
• Honor-flavored eligibility — high-honor players see more "stranger in distress" encounters; low-honor players see more "ambush" encounters.
• Replay rate — each encounter can repeat with a 36-hour-in-game cooldown; the encounter pool is designed for ~80 hours of campaign play with low repetition.
• Pickup-and-drop authoring — every encounter is a self-contained Sequencer + AI behavior pair; encounter authors get a wizard that generates the template (V5/tools/missions/random-encounter.yaml).

Saddle-Inventory Doctrine#

A key RDR-style design constraint: most inventory is on the horse, not on the player. This forces choice and creates dramatic stakes (lose the horse = lose your guns).

Features:

• Saddlebag inventory — 12 weapon slots, 6 outfit slots, 1 carcass slot, ammo, medicines, food, hunting supplies.
• On-person inventory — 2 weapon slots (holstered), 1 sidearm, 2 thrown items, 1 outfit (worn).
• Carry-over rule — when the horse is far away, the player carries only on-person inventory. This forces decisions about which weapons to saddle vs. holster before riding into a fight.
• Horse-call mechanic — whistle for horse; horse comes if within 300 m; longer distances require the player to walk back.

Monster Hunter Cell#

The monster-hunter cell is V5's action-RPG cell, anchored to a single sub-ruleset (Witcher's Path) and a fictional fantasy continent (~155 km² playable surface, segmented across 4 regions).

Witcher's Path (Witcher 3)#

A monster-hunter action RPG with alchemy, signs, contract boards, and a long-tail dialogue / consequence system.

Features:

• Protagonist — a witcher-equivalent (a mutated, trained monster hunter); the IP-clean name is in §82. The protagonist's mutations give resistance to poisons, weak humanity score, enhanced senses.
• A 155 km² continent across 4 regions — Coastal duchy (mix of port-city density + farmland sparseness), Northern wildlands (snow + forest), Eastern marsh / bayou (with drowner / undead enemies), Southern plateau (with golem / wyvern enemies).
• Witcher-Sense investigation — see features§"Witcher-Sense Investigation".
• Alchemy — see features§"Alchemy: Potions, Oils, Bombs, Decoctions".
• Five-Sign casting — see features§"Five-Sign Casting".
• Monster contracts — see features§"Monster-Contract Boards".
• Steel-vs-silver swordplay — see features§"Steel-vs-Silver Swordplay".
• Bestiary — see features§"Bestiary as Gate".
• Collectible card minigame — see features§"Collectible Card Minigame".
• Long-tail branching dialogue — choices ripple 10-20 hours downstream into mission availability, character endings, and region-political states (lord deposed, town's allegiance shifts).

Witcher-Sense Investigation#

A signature Witcher-3 feature: a sense-mode that lights up environmental clues (scent, blood, trail, sound, magical residue). In V5, this generalizes to all five cells (urban cell uses "Reflex Sense", frontier uses "Eagle Eye", sci-fi uses "Scanner Mode", period uses "Detective Mode").

Features:

• Sense mode toggle — held button enters sense; release exits. Camera saturation drops, world dims, clue markers light up.
• Clue types — scent (purple trail in air), blood drops (red on ground), tracks (footprints in ground), broken-foliage (green highlights), sound (yellow radial pulse), magic residue (blue particle aura).
• Trail-following — clues chain to the next clue; the trail-follow AI sets a navigation marker.
• Investigate prompt — at clue markers, an "investigate" prompt rotates the clue in close-up and adds a notebook entry.
• Diegetic only — sense mode does not show enemy positions or hidden loot; it shows environmental clues only.

Alchemy: Potions, Oils, Bombs, Decoctions#

The witcher's combat-prep system. Battle-prep is half of every monster contract.

Features:

• Recipe book — 120 recipes total: 30 potions, 30 oils, 30 bombs, 30 decoctions. Each has a 3-ingredient list and a brewing duration (5 to 60 in-game minutes).
• Ingredient gathering — herbs, mushrooms, monster parts. Ingredients spawn in biomes per a respawn schedule (4 in-game days).
• Potions — drink to buff (poison resistance, sign damage, vitality regen, etc.). 5 active slots; potions have toxicity that limits stacking.
• Oils — apply to sword (steel or silver) for damage vs. specific enemy types (e.g., specter oil on silver vs. wraiths).
• Bombs — thrown explosives with effects (fire, freeze, daze, AoE damage). 2 active slots.
• Decoctions — long-duration buffs brewed from monster parts; high toxicity, powerful effect.
• Toxicity system — each consumable adds toxicity to the player; exceeding 70% toxicity causes self-damage; the player can buff toxicity-resist via specific decoctions.

Five-Sign Casting#

The witcher's magic-system pattern, five elemental signs (renamed for IP by the final-name substitution manifest).

Features:

• Sign 1: Fire-Cone — short-range fire jet, AoE knockback.
• Sign 2: Force-Wave — kinetic shockwave, knockdown.
• Sign 3: Shield — magical bubble shield, blocks one major hit.
• Sign 4: Trap-Glyph — placed trap, lock enemies in stun.
• Sign 5: Mind-Suggest — coerce dialogue (NPCs), or charm an enemy briefly.
• Stamina-gated — signs cost stamina; stamina regens during dodge / parry; full-bar discharges enable signature variants (heavy fire-cone, twin-shield etc.).
• Charge variants — hold to charge for upgraded variant (e.g., charge fire-cone → fire-ring; charge force-wave → omni-burst).
• Sign trees — each sign has a 5-tier upgrade tree investing skill points (5 × 5 = 25 sign-tree nodes).

Monster-Contract Boards#

The monster-hunter cell's quest delivery system.

Features:

• Contract boards in every town (~24 towns / villages across the 155 km² continent).
• Posting cadence — new contracts post every 36 in-game hours; contracts have expiration (~7 in-game days).
• Contract data — monster type, location, alderman fee, bestiary hint, optional intel-purchase from an in-fiction "spotter".
• Contract flow — read board → speak to alderman → investigate signs → identify the monster (bestiary) → prepare alchemy → fight → proof to alderman → reward.
• Bestiary unlock — the first contract on a new monster unlocks that monster's bestiary entry. Pre-existing knowledge (from a bookseller's tome bought earlier) accelerates this.
• Contract economy — fee is the major income source for the cell; spent on alchemy ingredients, gear upgrades, training.

Steel-vs-Silver Swordplay#

Two-sword combat. Steel sword vs. humans; silver sword vs. monsters. Switching mid-combat triggers a 0.4 s flourish animation.

Features:

• Combat moves: 22 base attacks + 14 finishers + 6 parry variants + 4 dodge variants per sword. Steel and silver have distinct movesets.
• Hit-stop and parry windows: 4-frame parry on standard hits, 6-frame parry on heavy hits; mis-time and you eat the strike.
• Oil interactions — applied oils boost damage vs. specific enemy types (e.g., specter oil on silver = +35% damage to wraiths).
• Combo flow — chain light + heavy + sign in flow for combo damage; three flows = 70% multiplier.
• Finisher prompt — at staggered enemies, button-prompt for finisher cinematic (~1.8 s scripted).

Bestiary as Gate#

A diegetic "knowledge gates damage" system: knowing a monster's weakness multiplies the damage you deal.

Features:

• Bestiary entries: 80 monsters total across 12 categories (specter, vampire, drowner, necrophage, hybrid, ogre, dragon, golem, undead, cursed-one, doppler, elemental).
• Tome-purchase — bestiary entries can be partially unlocked by buying scholar tomes in bookshops or cleric libraries (~$80 in-game currency each).
• Encounter unlock — first encounter unlocks the entry to ~40% detail.
• Combat learn — successful parries, dodges, and oils-applied contribute to bestiary completion (40% → 70%).
• Full unlock — defeating one of the monster + post-defeat ritual reaches 100%.
• Damage multiplier — completing the bestiary gives +20% damage vs. that monster type.

Collectible Card Minigame#

A gwent-equivalent card-game minigame (rules re-derived; named in §82).

Features:

• Three-row deck — each player has 3 rows on the table (close-combat / ranged / siege); cards are placed by row.
• 3 rounds, best-of-3 — each round you can pass to save cards for later rounds.
• Card variety — 320 cards across 5 factions.
• In-world distribution — cards drop from defeated enemies, are bought from merchants, and are won from opponents (winnable in-card-list collectibles).
• Replay value — card-game side missions (find rare cards, beat a tournament) give XP, money, and unique rewards.

Sci-Fi Cell#

The sci-fi cell is V5's most ambitious cell, spanning two distinct sub-rulesets (Galactic Squad and Hard Vacuum), unified by a shared galaxy geography and faction system.

Galactic Squad (Mass Effect)#

A squad-based sci-fi action RPG with dialogue-wheel narrative, biotic / tech / combat powers, and companion loyalty arcs.

Features:

• Protagonist creation — choose: gender, face (MetaHuman editor with alien-trait presets), background (3 backgrounds: military / colonist / outlaw — each with starting attribute biases), class (3 classes: Soldier / Biotic / Tech, with 3 hybrid sub-classes).
• Galaxy of named systems — 32 systems with ~120 explorable bodies (planets, moons, stations). Travel via galaxy-map FTL plotting.
• Squad of 8 companions — recruited across the campaign; the player takes 2 into each mission. Each has loyalty mission (~3 hours each), romance gate (per orientation lock by character), and a death-state in the late-game (loyalty-completed companions survive game-ending encounter).
• AI-persona companion — Kade Roe has a sci-fi cell only adaptive persona that learns player choices from dialogue, missions, squad assignments, Paragon/Renegade shifts, loyalty beats, and romance boundaries.
• Dialogue wheel + Paragon/Renegade — see features§"Dialogue Wheel + Paragon/Renegade".
• Biotic / Tech / Combat power tree — see features§"Biotic / Tech / Combat Power Tree".
• Ship-hub — see features§"Ship-Hub Interactions". The player's ship is the primary between-mission hub.
• Multi-chapter arc — 3 acts (~58 hours total), with cross-act save imports so player choices in Act 1 ripple through Act 3.

Dialogue Wheel + Paragon/Renegade#

The signature Mass Effect dialogue system.

Features:

• Wheel UI — 6 spokes (upper-left: Paragon investigate; upper-right: Renegade investigate; left: Paragon dialogue; right: Renegade dialogue; lower-left: Charm / Intimidate (rep-gated); lower-right: Continue). Player chooses via stick + button.
• Paragon score rises on diplomatic / heroic responses; Renegade score rises on aggressive / ruthless responses. Scores accumulate and gate downstream wheel options (Charm at high Paragon; Intimidate at high Renegade).
• Interrupts — Paragon and Renegade interrupts fire mid-cinematic with a button prompt; pressing the prompt cuts the scene to a one-shot action (e.g., shove an attacker out a window vs. negotiate a stand-down). Each interrupt has a single-frame trigger window.
• Branching state machine — every dialogue choice updates a state blackboard; downstream missions read the blackboard. State serialization in V5/Saves/SciFi_Choices.json.
• VO — full voice on protagonist + companions; 4 launch languages get full principal-grade lipsync (EN, FR, DE, ES); 8 additional voiced languages with lipsync-light; subtitles in 16 launch locales.
• Player-character voice — both binary genders fully voiced across all dialogue tree branches (~38000 lines per gender).

Squad of Companions + Loyalty Missions#

The 8-companion ensemble is the sci-fi cell's emotional anchor.

Features:

• 8 companions — varied species (4 human; 4 alien — 4 distinct alien species each with original IP-clean design). Each has a class (Soldier / Biotic / Tech / hybrid), a backstory, a relationship state, a loyalty arc, and a romance gate.
• Loyalty missions — ~3-hour mission per companion, gated behind a relationship-state threshold and a critical-path beat. Completing loyalty maxes the companion's stats and locks in the end-game survival branch.
• Loyalty-conflict scenes — two companions can clash mid-mission; the player chooses sides, costing one loyalty point.
• Romance — 6 of 8 companions are romanceable; per-companion orientation lock (some are gender-locked, some flexible). Romance unfolds over ~5 chapters with dialogue gates.
• Companion death — at the end-game's "all-hands" encounter, the player's choice of who runs the diversion, who pilots the emergency-escape, and who holds the chokepoint determines which companions die. Each companion's loyalty status modifies survival probability.

AI-Persona Companion#

The Full-Vision AI-persona companion is sci-fi cell only. Kade Roe learns player choices inside the Galactic Squad campaign and adapts local trust, Paragon / Renegade affinity, memory tags, and five bounded trait vectors without exporting personalized state to cross-cell training.

Features:

• Choice learning — authored signals cover dialogue choices, mission outcomes, squad assignments, Paragon/Renegade shifts, loyalty beats, and romance boundaries.
• Local memory — retained choice and memory tags stay in V5/Saves/SciFi_Choices.json; the runtime uses local-profile-only storage, privacy redaction, and no cross-cell model training.
• Runtime surface — UV5_GalacticSquad_AIPersonaCompanion builds and validates the persona, initializes state, and applies player-choice signals while enforcing the Sci-Fi cell guard.
• Manifest — release-gate data lives in fullvision_scifi_ai_persona_companion_manifest.json.

Galaxy-Map Travel#

The hub-and-spoke navigation layer of the sci-fi cell.

Features:

• Galaxy view — a 3D system map showing 32 systems with FTL routes authored as a graph.
• System view — within a system, ~3-6 explorable bodies (planets, moons, stations). The player flies the ship to a body to land or dock.
• FTL plotting — choose destination → enter FTL → 15-second cinematic FTL → arrival. FTL cost in fuel (recharges at refueling stations or for credits).
• Resource scanning — orbital scan minigame at unexplored bodies reveals minerals, anomalies, derelict ships.
• Side missions — anomaly investigations, derelict-ship boardings, pirate encounters, mining-asteroid runs (each ~30 minutes).

Biotic / Tech / Combat Power Tree#

The power-tree authoring spine of the sci-fi cell.

Features:

• Three skill trees:
  • Combat tree (firearms, recoil control, armor, killshot abilities, grenades): 7 sub-trees, 35 nodes total.
  • Biotic tree (gravity / kinetic powers — Singularity, Warp, Pull, Throw, Lift, Shockwave, Barrier): 7 sub-trees, 35 nodes.
  • Tech tree (electronics / decoy / hack / overload / cryo-freeze / sabotage): 7 sub-trees, 35 nodes.
• Class restrictions — Soldier max 35 Combat / 10 each of Biotic & Tech; Biotic max 35 Biotic / 10 each of Combat & Tech; Tech max 35 Tech / 10 each of Combat & Biotic. Hybrid classes split 25/25/15.
• Power combos — fire one power on a target, fire a second power to trigger combo damage (e.g., Warp on a biotically-Lifted target = biotic explosion).
• Squad-power coordination — squad members can be commanded to fire their powers in sync; cooldown timers align for combos.

Companion Romance Gates#

Romance is gated behind state machine progression to avoid trivial unlock.

Features:

• Per-companion arc — 5 chapters of relationship dialogue; each chapter unlocks behind a critical-path beat completion.
• Companion-conflict resolution — if two companions both have romance arcs and the player pursues both, a confrontation triggers at chapter 4; player must choose one or both companions exit the romance arc.
• Closure scene — romanced companions get a unique end-game closure scene in the epilogue cinematic.
• No-romance-required-for-content — every companion has a deep friendship track that delivers ~85% of their content without romance unlock.

Hard Vacuum (Expanse)#

A hard-sci-fi spaceship-sim sub-ruleset, fully Newtonian, gravity-aware, crew-operated.

Features:

• 3 player-controlled ship classes — Skiff (1-2 crew), Corvette (3-6 crew), Frigate (5-10 crew). Each player can be in any of 5 stations on a Frigate (pilot, navigator, weapons, comms, engineer).
• Newtonian flight — see features§"Newtonian Flight & Flip-and-Burn".
• PDC + railgun + torpedo combat — see features§"PDC + Railgun + Torpedo Combat".
• Gravity zones — see features§"Gravity Zones". Gravity is thrust-G during burn, spin-G in centrifugal habitats, zero-G when coasting. Combat in zero-G is dramatically different from combat in 1G.
• Faction politics — see features§"Faction Politics".
• Crew duty cycles — non-combat downtime is structured around bunk / mess / wardroom interactions. Companion banter unfolds on the ship.

Newtonian Flight & Flip-and-Burn#

A grounded space-flight model — vectors, not arcades.

Features:

• Vector flight — pure vector physics with thrust direction decoupled from facing. Ships "drift" if RCS not applied.
• RCS thrusters — small thrusters reorient the ship. Reorient is free in zero-G but costs reaction-mass.
• Burn / coast / flip-and-burn — three flight modes:
  • Burn: main engine ignited; thrust-G acceleration; player pinned to "down" (rear of ship).
  • Coast: engines off; zero-G; minor RCS corrections.
  • Flip-and-burn: 180° rotation under RCS, then full deceleration burn. Used to slow down approach to destination.
• Reaction-mass economy — main engine and RCS both consume reaction-mass; the player must dock and refuel.
• Conservation of momentum — the famous "coffee cup on the table" scene: anything not strapped down keeps its velocity when ship decelerates. Loose objects in the ship interior simulate.

PDC + Railgun + Torpedo Combat#

Three-weapon-class ship combat, with strict niches.

Features:

• PDC (Point-Defense Cannon) — high RPM bullet weapons for short range (< 8 km). Used for: incoming missile defense, ship-to-ship close range.
• Railgun — high-velocity slug throw at extreme range (< 50 km). Slug travel time is real-time; the player leads the target.
• Torpedo — guided / unguided missiles, long range, damage scales with stand-off. Torpedoes are physical objects on the radar; the enemy can defend with PDC.
• PDC vs. torpedo interception — the enemy's PDC tracks incoming torpedoes and shoots them down; the player tactic is salvo saturation (8+ torpedoes at once) to overwhelm PDC.
• Armor / shields / damage model — no shields (grounded sci-fi); armor varies by region; internal-damage model (engine, weapons, reactor, comms, bridge).
• Boarding — at zero-relative-velocity (matched drift), a ship can magnetically clamp to another and execute a boarding action — squad marines breach via airlock, fight room-to-room. Boarding sub-mode uses the squad-combat ruleset from Galactic Squad.

Gravity Zones#

The signature feel-distinguisher of the Expanse cell.

Features:

• Thrust-G — when the main engine is burning, "down" is toward the rear; player walks with thrust-direction-aware locomotion.
• Spin-G — large habitat rings spin to create centrifugal gravity (~0.3-1G). Player walks with curve-aware locomotion (the wall is the "floor" at the inner radius).
• Zero-G — when not under burn, no gravity. Player floats; uses mag-boots for slow walking, push-off-from-surface for fast travel.
• Combat in zero-G — combat positioning is 3D; gunfire imparts recoil that flings the player; enemies use mag-boots or thrust-suits.
• Transition smoothness — gravity-zone changes ramp over 1.5 s; loose objects (and crew) re-orient with momentum-conservation.

Faction Politics#

Three primary factions in the sci-fi cell (planning names here; shipping names come from the IP-clearance manifest):

• Inner-System Republic (Earth-equivalent) — high-tech, populous, resource-strained; the political center.
• Red-Planet Confederacy (Mars-equivalent) — militaristic, disciplined, biotech-heavy; the rising power.
• Outer-Belt Collective (Belters-equivalent) — distributed, rough-edged, deeply political; the marginalized but technologically resourceful.

Plus 3 secondary factions (corporate-conglomerate, alien-emergent, research-collective).

Features:

• Faction reputation per-faction; rises and falls with mission choices.
• Faction-restricted content — high-rep with one faction unlocks their tech tree, mission lines, station access; locks you out of high-rep with rivals (asymmetric — Inner/Outer relations are zero-sum at extremes; Mars / Belt are partial-zero-sum).
• End-game faction-state — the player's accumulated rep determines the final-act political landscape (which faction's fleet shows up at the end-game; whose station survives the protomolecule analog threat).

Ship-Hub Interactions#

The player's ship between missions.

Features:

• Ship interior — bridge, mess, wardroom, engineering, bunks, cargo bay, airlock. Fully walkable; companions roam between stations.
• Companion banter — companions interact (cook, exercise, talk to each other) at the player's downtime.
• Ship upgrades — armor, weapons, engine, comms, reactor — each costs credits + resources.
• Crew duties — between missions the player can assign crew to duties (research, repair, training) that yield passive XP / loot.

Cross-Cell Mind Palace (Sherlock)#

The Mind Palace is V5's signature cross-cell layer. Every clue collected in any cell feeds the Mind Palace; deductions chain clues into hypotheses; hypotheses chain into accusations; accusations resolve cases.

Evidence Pickup & Examination#

Shared across all five cells. Every cell's exploration mode supports "examine" (close-up rotation) of pick-up items; "examine" pushes a notebook entry into the cross-cell Mind Palace.

Features:

• Examine UI — close-up rotate (right-stick) of the item; zoom in for fine detail. Detail-spots are diegetic — a serial number, a blood-stain, a missing button, an engraving.
• Auto-write — a paraphrased notebook entry writes into the protagonist's notebook.
• Mind Palace push — every notebook entry creates a node in the Mind Palace graph. Nodes are tagged with cell-of-origin, location, in-fiction date, key terms.
• Tag-merge across cells — nodes that share key tags (e.g., "Cross-Continuum Bureau", "Brass key", "1947 LA", "Belt Confederacy") become candidate-pair edges.

Deduction Graph Authoring#

The Mind Palace is a graph; deductions are edges.

Features:

• Graph view — a 3D spatial mind palace (player's "memory room") where clues hover as orbs around the player; the player rotates the view to see all clues. Filter by cell, by case, by tag.
• Pair-and-deduce — select two clues to attempt a deduction; if the pair is in the authored "valid deductions" set, the deduction node creates a new orb labeled with the inferred hypothesis.
• Authored deduction list — every case ships with N authored deduction pairs; the player must find the right pairs from a larger candidate set.
• Wrong pairs — the player can attempt invalid pairs; the system responds with "no connection found" (no penalty) or "weak connection" (a misleading hypothesis the player can build on but will eventually disprove).
• Visual style — modeled on Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments (the player's mind palace appears as a circular room with floating orbs and connecting threads).

Cross-Era Linking#

The Mind Palace's signature feature is cross-cell deduction.

Features:

• Cross-era pairs — deduction can pair a clue from 1947 with a clue from 2078; or a clue from 1899 with a clue from the monster-hunter cell.
• Narrative gating — the main-arc story is anchored on cross-era deductions: a missing-person from 1947 (LA Noire-style case) links to a faction-leader in the sci-fi cell via a "Cross-Continuum Bureau" badge that appears in both eras.
• Reveal pacing — cross-era deductions unlock gradually; early in the game, the player can pair only within a cell; mid-game, two adjacent cells; late-game, all five.
• Cinematic — making a cross-era deduction triggers a 4-second cinematic "thread connects" with sweeping camera between the two eras' memory rooms.

Accusation Gate#

Sherlock-Holmes-equivalent: the player must reach a single accusation to close a case; multiple-correct accusations are possible (the right fictional truth and one or more red herrings).

Features:

• Accusation list — at case-close, the player picks one of N candidate accuseds. The candidate list is generated from the player's deduction history.
• Confirm prompt — "Are you certain? You can only accuse once."
• Outcome divergence — if the wrong accused is picked, the game proceeds with that wrong outcome; the right accused goes free, the wrong one is convicted. The wrong outcome ripples into downstream cases.
• Outcomes Archive — every case's outcome is logged to a Mind Palace "Outcomes Archive" the player can review post-game. New Game+ lets the player replay with different accusations.

False-Lead Tolerance#

The Mind Palace allows wrong deductions; players are not penalized for hypothesis exploration.

Features:

• Weak vs. Strong connections — wrong pairs surface as "weak" connections; the player can build hypothesis chains on weak connections, but the chain has a confidence score.
• Confidence gauge — every deduction chain has a 0-100 confidence; the accusation gate gives a sub-rating ("Brilliant" if all chains are 90+; "Lucky" if some chains are 60-).
• No deduction-graph game-over — the game never fails for wrong deductions; the case-rating reflects accuracy but the story proceeds.

Shared Cross-Cell Systems#

Cross-Continuum Bureau Roster#

A unified character roster spanning all five cells.

Features:

• Bureau membership — every protagonist of every cell is a Bureau member (modern detective; period detective; frontier sheriff unmasked as Bureau; witcher recruited by the Bureau; sci-fi captain recruited via FTL contact).
• Cross-cell character cameos — late-game, characters from one cell appear briefly in another, with author-controlled time-travel staging.
• Companion-app character cards — every Bureau character has a dossier in the companion app showing their cross-cell connections.
• Linked progression — Bureau XP accumulates across cells; high Bureau XP unlocks the cross-cell loadouts (e.g., dead-eye in urban cell as a "Reflex" upgrade; biotics in frontier cell as "Mystic Pulse" cosmetic).

Unified Dialogue Wheel#

The dialogue wheel from the sci-fi cell is reused across all five cells.

Features:

• Same UI — 6-spoke wheel; same UX patterns.
• Per-cell flavor — each cell substitutes its own honor-axis (Paragon/Renegade in sci-fi; Honor/Bounty in frontier; Cop/Triad in urban; Family/Outsider in period; Witcher humanity in hunter).
• Cross-cell axis merge — the integrated "moral compass" axis is the sum of per-cell axes, used for cross-era gating.

Universal NPC Perception#

One perception model (V5Perception) powers every NPC in every cell — a Hong Kong triad goon, a 1947 witness, a frontier outlaw, a drowner, and a station guard all read stimuli from the same state machine; only the tuning data differs (arch§"AI Perception, NPC Schedules, Crowd").

Features:

• Sight — a per-NPC vision cone (direction vector, half-angle, range) with per-cell range tuning; line-of-sight is occlusion-checked so cover blocks detection.
• Hearing — a per-NPC hearing radius with sound-absorption by walls; 1899 NPCs are tuned for keener hearing (a quieter world), sci-fi station NPCs add radar-ping stimuli.
• Stimulus sources — sight cones, hearing radii, witness reports (an NPC tells another NPC within 12 m), and player-attributed events (gunshot, vehicle horn, alarm trigger).
• Suspicion state machine — Idle → Curious (a stimulus seen/heard) → Alert (stimulus confirmed) → Hostile (visual contact). A stimulus that is not reinforced times out and the NPC steps back down the ladder.
• Investigation — a Curious or Alert NPC moves to the last-known stimulus location and searches before de-escalating.
• Witness reporting — a frightened NPC flees and reports to the nearest authority, raising the cell's authority-response curve (wanted stars, marshal posse, village watch, faction patrol per features§"Wanted-Star Police Response").

The shared model means a stealth approach, a noise distraction, or a witness kill behaves consistently across cells; only detection ranges and reaction flavor are cell-specific.

NPC Crowd & Schedules#

A shared crowd-population and daily-schedule system; cell-specific data drives behavior while the simulation plumbing is shared (V5Crowd + V5Schedules on Mass Entity).

Features:

• Crowd density — population within ~100 m: Urban ~250, Period ~120, Frontier ~40 in towns and ~6 in wilds, Hunter ~60 in towns and ~10 in wilds, Sci-Fi ~80 on stations and ~30 in ship interiors. Console builds throttle density where streaming churn is high.
• Entity promotion — each ambient NPC is a lightweight Mass Entity until the player closes within an interaction radius (18 m for named NPCs, 30 m for generic, 60 m for ambient), at which point it is promoted to a full character pawn; this keeps a dense crowd affordable.
• Body-language libraries — per-era walk-cycle and idle libraries so a 1930s pedestrian, an 1899 townsfolk, and a sci-fi station civilian read as period-correct; panic body-language is also era-specific.
• Daily schedules — each NPC carries a V5_NPC_Schedule row (home, work, shift start/end, lunch, evening venue, sleep); schedules tick every 5 in-game minutes on the 48-minute day clock. NPCs beyond 200 m are simulated as schedule-position-only with no per-frame tick; beyond 600 m they only relocate on a day boundary. Period schedules follow era-correct rhythms (1899 sunrise-to-sundown, 1947 8-hour shifts, modern 24-hour cycles with a night-shift cohort).

Honor / Karma / Paragon Bridge#

A meta-axis system that maps each cell's local morality axis onto a unified "moral compass" used for cross-cell Mind Palace gating and Bureau XP (arch§"Honor / Karma / Paragon Bridge").

Features:

• Per-cell local axis — Cop/Triad and Lawful/Outlaw in Urban (−100..+100), Family/Outsider in Period plus Vice Squad's per-case Brilliant/Average/Poor rating, Honor/Bounty in Frontier, Witcher Humanity in Hunter (0..100), and independent Paragon/Renegade meters in Sci-Fi (0..100 each). Each axis moves on cell-specific actions.
• Meta-axis derivation — a Light score and a Dark score are each a weighted sum of the per-cell axes (default weight 1.0 per cell, with per-mission-arc overrides allowed for narrative-anchor missions); MoralCompass = Light − Dark, ranging roughly −1..+1. The meta-axis is computed at session join and is never persisted as canonical state — it is always re-derived from the per-cell axes, so the per-cell axes remain the single source of truth.
• Use — certain cross-cell Mind Palace deductions gate behind Light > 0.4 or Dark > 0.4; a high-magnitude compass in either direction earns Bureau XP faster than a neutral one; companions react to the compass over time.
• HUD visibility — per-cell axes show on that cell's HUD; the composite meta-axis is hidden during normal play and visible only in the Mind Palace UI.

Vehicle Library Across Eras#

One V5Vehicles interface spanning every cell, with era-specific tuning so each era's vehicles feel distinct under the same control scheme.

Features:

• 120+ modern vehicles (Urban) — sedans, sports, super-sports, SUVs, bikes, boats, fixed-wing aircraft, and helicopters; see the Heist City inventory.
• 84 period vehicles (Period) — 28 per era; era tuning differs sharply (1930s: ~55 mph, drum brakes, manual choke; 1947: ~80 mph, hydraulic brakes; 1968: ~110 mph, power steering).
• 38 frontier vehicles (Frontier) — wagons, stagecoaches, river-boats, and trains; wagons cap near 10 mph with a 4-horse team.
• 24 monster-hunter vehicles (Hunter) — wagons, boats, and mounted horses.
• 18 sci-fi spacecraft (Sci-Fi) — skiffs, corvettes, frigates, and capital ships.
• Handling models — ground and water vehicles use ChaosVehicles with a per-class tuning file (CoG, traction, brake type, top speed); horses use the separate V5HorseAI gait library; spacecraft use the separate V5Spaceship Newtonian model (arch§"Vehicle Library Architecture"). A V5_AttributeSet_ Vehicle tracks fuel, per-tire condition, and engine condition.
• Damage model — ChaosDestruction body deformation at hit zones, per-tire HP with blowout reducing speed and traction, and per-vehicle engine HP whose knock-out triggers smoke and a slow-speed cap.
• Vehicle Customization Tier 2 Year-1 — V5Vehicles ships 200 Tier 2 customization parts across modern and period body-shop domains through year1_vehicle_customization_tier2_manifest.json; every part is data-only and eligible for Workshop vehicle-blueprint share.

Cover, ADS, Recoil, Stance#

The shared third-person gunfighting layer (V5Combat), used by every cell that has gunplay, with era-appropriate weapon feel.

Features:

• Cover — sticky cover with corner-peek, blind-fire, slide-into-cover, and cover-vault; cover attaches contextually from approach direction with no dedicated cover lock-on.
• ADS — aim-down-sight with per-weapon FOV zoom, weapon sway, and a recoil pattern; hip-fire trades accuracy for mobility.
• Recoil patterns — per-weapon recoil curves authored in curve tables; era feel is deliberate — 1899 revolvers kick hard with slow recovery, 1947 semi-autos are moderate, sci-fi rifles are managed and low-rise.
• Stance — stand / crouch / prone, with per-cell additions: Sci-Fi adds a zero-G stance with recoil-induced drift, Frontier adds a horseback firing stance. Stance affects accuracy, recoil, profile, and movement speed.
• Authority — in open-world cells damage and gameplay effects are server-authoritative with client-predicted movement and montages; root-motion finishers are server-authoritative (arch§"Combat Authority & Determinism").

Photo Mode#

A unified photo mode across all five cells.

Features:

• Free camera — orbital camera with FOV, roll, pitch, yaw.
• Lens controls — depth-of-field, focus, aperture, ND filter, vignette, grain, lens-flare, motion-blur.
• Time controls — pause world, advance / reverse frame-by-frame.
• Pose & animation — protagonist & companion pose authoring; facial expression slider.
• Sticker layer — overlay text, in-fiction stickers.
• Export — 4K PNG, GIF, MP4 (5 s replay).
• Photo Mode Tier 2 Year-1 — adds 15s MP4 with audio export, privacy scrubbed AAC submix capture, and a shooting-locations editor for reusable camera anchors in year1_photo_mode_tier2_manifest.json.
• Photo-mode-only assets — period-correct lens packs unlock by era progression.

Modes & Multiplayer#

V5's playable surface area — mission shapes, single-player campaigns, skirmish play, co-op, PvP, horde defense, training, replay, and the signature mode each cell ships with.

Mission Architectures#

V5 missions fall into 7 architectural shapes; each cell uses one or more. Every authored mission row in features§"Roster & Content Inventory" is one of these shapes, and the Mission Editor (features§"Creator Suite") exposes one template per shape.

Shared structure across all seven shapes. Every mission carries a state lifecycle — Available → Offered (marker visible) → Active (accepted, save checkpoint written) → InProgress (objective tracking live) → one of Completed / Failed / Abandoned. Failure is non-terminal except in the Heist shape's catastrophic branch: a failed Linear Cinematic or Squad Tactical mission restores to the last of the per-mission checkpoints (auto-written every 90 s on critical-path missions per features§"Patch, Hotfix, Quick-Resume, and Crash Recovery"); a failed Procedural Random mission simply expires from the board with no penalty beyond lost time.

Each shape declares an objective grammar the editor enforces: Linear Cinematic uses ordered objectives with optional set-piece triggers; Sandbox Investigation uses an unordered clue set plus one gating accusation/identification; Open-World Quest uses a marker chain with optional branch markers; Heist uses the planner plan-graph (features§"Heist Planner"); Procedural Random uses a seeded template slot; Squad Tactical interleaves combat encounters with dialogue-wheel nodes; Spaceship Engagement uses an engagement script (spawn waves, optional boarding trigger). A mission that mixes shapes (e.g., a Squad Tactical mission that opens with a Spaceship Engagement) declares a primary shape and embeds the secondary as a sub-sequence; the editor validates that embedded shapes resolve before the parent's next objective unlocks.

Campaign Modes#

Five primary campaigns, one per cell:

Plus the cross-cell Mind Palace arc (~10 hours) that ties them all together with cross-era deductions, gated to unlock after the player completes any 3 of 5 primary campaign anchors.

Each campaign is offline-deterministic single-player (V5Netcode's offline-deterministic mode; arch§"Combat Authority & Determinism") except where the Co-op column lists a multiplayer surface. Co-op campaigns run on a listen server with sub-2-second host migration. Campaign selection is per-slot: a save slot holds one in-progress state per cell (Made Man and Vice Squad share the Period slot), so a player can carry six concurrent campaign threads in one slot and switch between them from the cell-select shell with no cross-campaign state bleed. Endings are persisted to the Outcomes Archive; New Game+ (Bureau Tier 20, features§"Character and Account Progression") replays a campaign carrying forward cosmetics, Bureau XP, and codex unlocks but resetting cell progression, honor axes, and inventory. A campaign reports a completion percentage (critical-path missions + side stories + collectibles) that feeds the companion-app dossier.

Skirmish & Quick-Play#

A short-session entry point for each cell, reachable from the main menu without loading a campaign save. Quick-Play sessions target a 5-15 minute play window, write to a dedicated rotating skirmish save (never the campaign slot), and grant reduced Bureau XP (40% of campaign rate) so they cannot be farmed as the primary progression path.

• Urban Cell Quick-Play — drop-into freeroam at one of 16 districts; the in-game phone surfaces 3 eligible side missions filtered by district flavor. Wanted level and economy carry from the player's freeroam profile, not the campaign.
• Period Cell Quick-Play — replay any closed Vice Squad case for a better rating; the case loads with all clues reset and the witness lie-set re-rolled from its authored pool so a memorized run is not a guaranteed Brilliant.
• Frontier Cell Quick-Play — random-encounter roll: the player rides for up to 5 in-game minutes and one encounter fires from the 320-entry pool, weighted by the freeroam honor band (features§"Cinematic Random Encounters").
• Hunter Cell Quick-Play — pulls the live procedurally-seeded contract from the board (features§"Monster-Contract Boards") at the player's current gear tier; bestiary and alchemy stock carry from the freeroam profile.
• Sci-Fi Quick-Play — Ship-vs-Ship arena (1v1, 2v2, 4v4) against bots or matchmade opponents, plus a boarding sub-arena and a solo horde-defense lane. Loadout is picked from the Ship Loadout Author presets, not the campaign ship.

If a player has not yet unlocked a cell in any campaign, Quick-Play for that cell offers a pre-built profile (mid-tier gear, neutral honor) so the short-session surface never shows an empty state.

Co-op Modes#

Netcode model. Bounded-roster modes (Heist Co-op, Hard Vacuum Crew, Spec Ops, Horde Defense) run on a listen server, dedicated-server-authoritative for damage/effects/position with client-predicted movement (arch§"Combat Authority & Determinism"); host migration completes inside 2 s with a mid-mission player elected new host. High-density Urban Freeroam (up to 30) and Frontier Posse (up to 7) run on dedicated servers with per-cell AOI streaming (Urban 300 m, Frontier 500 m) so a 30-player freeroam shard never replicates the whole map.

Drop-in / drop-out. Co-op campaigns and Freeroam allow join-in-progress at any mission checkpoint; a joiner inherits the host's mission state and spawns at the nearest safe node. A leaver's slot is backfilled by matchmaking if the lobby is public; if a role-locked seat (heist driver, Frigate pilot) empties mid-mission, an AI crew member assumes it until a human backfills. Co-op progress and loot write to each player's own save; the host's campaign advances canonically, a guest's campaign records the mission as "completed in co-op" and grants rewards but does not advance the guest's critical-path branch state.

Scaling. Horde Defense scales wave size and enemy HP to live player count (1-4), re-tuning on join/leave at the next wave boundary so a 4-player session does not trivialize when one player disconnects. Spec Ops missions scale enemy density but not mission structure. Friendly-fire is off by default in all co-op modes; a private lobby may enable it.

PvP Modes#

Twitch PvP (Urban Deathmatch, Ship Duel) uses the 8-frame rollback prediction model (arch§"Rollback-Emulated Prediction (Spaceship PvP)"): each client predicts 8 frames assuming no new remote input, rolls back and re-simulates from the last confirmed frame on mismatch, and snaps visuals for one frame while leaving cosmetic particles and audio un-replayed. Objective-and-position PvP (Heist vs. Heist, Posse War, Showdown, Capital Raid) is dedicated-server-authoritative with a 200 ms lag-compensation window for hit validation; Capital Raid ticks at 60 Hz, the others at 30 Hz.

Match lifecycle. Lobby (ready-check) → Loading (map + plugin stream) → Warmup (60 s, no scoring) → Live → Scoreboard (15 s) → PostMatch (replay auto-saved to Replay Theater). Mid-match disconnect triggers a 90 s reconnect window during which a bot fills the seat; a player who fails to reconnect takes a leaver penalty (matchmaking cooldown, ranked-points forfeit). Each mode declares a win condition: Deathmatch and Showdown are score-to-cap or time-limit; Heist vs. Heist is first crew to extract the target; Posse War is round-based best-of; Capital Raid is enemy-Frigate destruction or objective control. Quitting before Live carries no penalty.

Per-cell PvP rules. Urban Deathmatch keeps the cell's gun + melee + parkour sandbox; Frontier Showdown enables lasso and horse-chase but disables Dead-Eye in ranked to keep skill expression on raw aim; Ship Duel and Capital Raid run full Newtonian flight with reaction-mass economy. Cross-play opt-out is honored per features§"Crossplay & Cross-Progression" — Ship Duel and Capital Raid default console players into a console-only pool to neutralize the K&M aim advantage.

Horde Defense Per Cell#

A wave-based survival mode (V5Mode_HordeDefense_PerCell), 1-4 players, with cell-flavored enemies and a shared structure: 20 waves grouped into 4 acts of 5, a mini-boss closing each act and a cell-boss closing wave 20. Between acts a 60-second prep phase opens a vendor (spend in-run currency on ammo, gear, fortifications, revives). Each wave escalates enemy count and HP; the run ends on a full-squad wipe or a wave-20 clear. A clear writes a score (waves survived × kill-streak multiplier × civilian-rescue bonus) to the per-cell Horde leaderboard.

• Urban Horde — gang waves with escalating SWAT support; civilians spawn in the arena and rescuing them before a wave ends grants a score bonus.
• Period Horde — period mob waves; period police arrive as a scripted reinforcement at act boundaries.
• Frontier Horde — bandit, hostile-NPC, and predatory-animal waves; animal waves break formation discipline and flank.
• Hunter Horde — monster waves drawn from the bestiary (specter, drowner, necrophage); the wave-20 boss is a category-boss monster requiring oil prep.
• Sci-Fi Horde — boarding-marine waves through airlocks on a ship interior; hull-breach events vent a room to zero-G mid-wave.

Difficulty scales to live player count and re-tunes at the next wave boundary on join/leave. Downed players are revivable for 20 s; a purchased revive token auto-resurrects on wipe once per run.

Training, Trials, and Tutorials#

The onboarding and skill-practice surface, one set per cell.

• Training range — a no-fail sandbox with per-cell drills: Urban gun-handling and parkour course; Period interrogation-tell recognition gallery; Frontier Dead-Eye paint drill and horse-gait course; Hunter sign-casting and oil-prep range; Sci-Fi Newtonian flight box and PDC-tracking trainer. Drills surface a live metric (accuracy, time, hits) and have no leaderboard.
• Tutorial campaign — a ~30-minute first-time-player walkthrough per cell, authored as a Linear Cinematic mission, that teaches the cell's core verbs diegetically. Tutorials are skippable after first completion and re-playable from the cell-select shell. A new player entering a cell with no tutorial history is prompted once.
• Trials — scored skill challenges with global and friends leaderboards: Dead-Eye trick-shot, Witcher boss-fight time-trial, Ship-PDC defense trial, heist no-alarm time-trial, interrogation Brilliant-streak. Each trial has a fixed seed so leaderboard runs are comparable; the top run is downloadable as a ghost/replay. Trial completion grants Bureau XP and cosmetic medals (bronze / silver / gold thresholds).
• Hunter Run Modifiers Year-1 — the roguelike Hunter Run ships 20 run-modifiers, including alchemy-limited and sign-disabled variants, plus a per-run leaderboard in year1_hunter_run_modifiers_manifest.json.

Replay Theater, Spectator, and Coach Mode#

Replay capture, live spectating, and coaching for all PvP and competitive modes.

Features:

• Replay Theater — every PvP match and every Trial run is captured as a V5_Heist_PlanRecord-style input-stream replay (full input + initial RNG seed; arch§"Combat Authority & Determinism"), retained 90 days locally and uploadable to the replays service for sharing. The viewer supports timeline scrub, 0.1×-4× speed, free-camera and per-player follow-camera, a swap between any participant's view, and a deduction/event marker rail. Replays are re-simulated from inputs, not video, so they survive a patch only within the same binary version; a version banner warns on mismatch.
• Spectator — a live spectator slot (V5Mode_Spectator) with up to 8 watchers per match, a 15-second broadcast delay to deny ghosting, picture-in-picture per player, and a director-cam that auto-cuts to the highest-action camera.
• Coach Mode — a coach joins a team's spectator channel with a team-private voice channel and a tactical overlay (ping, draw); the coach cannot affect the match. One coach per team; the coach slot does not count against the spectator cap.

Per-Cell Signature Modes#

Each cell ships one signature mode — the curated showcase loop a reviewer or new player runs to feel the cell's identity in a single sitting. The signature mode is the fixed centerpiece of that cell's feel test (features§"Cell Feel Tests").

Each signature mode is reachable as a standalone ~20-30 minute experience from the cell-select shell with a pre-built profile, independent of campaign progress, so the showcase is always playable. The signature mode is the slice shipped to press in pre-launch demo builds.

Per-Character Side Stories#

Optional narrative content attached to named cast outside the critical path. Each playable protagonist owns 3-6 side stories (~1-3 hours each); each companion owns 1 dedicated companion mission (~2-3 hours each). Across the 11 protagonists and 92 companions that is roughly 45-65 protagonist side stories plus 92 companion missions.

Side stories unlock on a critical-path beat (a chapter or act boundary) and on a relationship/honor threshold where the character is relationship-tracked; they surface as map markers or hub-dialogue prompts and never expire. Completing a side story grants Bureau XP, a character-specific cosmetic or gear reward, and in most cases a small permanent modifier (a companion's loyalty status, a protagonist's reputation shift). Companion loyalty missions specifically gate the end-game survival branch in the Sci-Fi cell (features§"Squad of Companions + Loyalty Missions") and unlock the companion's romance arc where one exists. Side stories are tracked in the codex and contribute to campaign completion percentage.

Split-Screen and Local Multiplayer#

Couch and LAN co-op for the modes that support a bounded local roster. Local players share one console/PC; each gets an independent viewport and HUD.

• Urban Heist — 2-player split-screen co-op of the heist campaign, roles split between the two players.
• Frontier Posse — 2-player split-screen of posse freeroam and posse missions.
• Sci-Fi Crew — 2-player split-screen crewing a Frigate; the two players occupy any 2 of the 5 stations, AI fills the rest.
• Cross-cell hot-seat — pass-the-controller Mind Palace sessions, where each player works the deduction graph on their turn; the touch-friendly Mind Palace UI also supports a shared-screen iPad session.
• Arcade cabinet co-op — a location-based four-panel V5ArcadeCabinet SKU runs Spec Ops Co-op, Horde Defense, Fleet Co-op, Hunter Card Game, and Training Range through local service shims, LAN discovery, attract mode, and an ArcadePanel Enhanced Input preset.

Split-screen renders at a reduced per-viewport budget — dynamic resolution and a lower crowd-density cap (arch§"Performance Budgets") keep two viewports inside the platform frame budget; it is unavailable on Switch 2 handheld mode and on iPad. Online and local players can mix: a split-screen pair can join an online co-op lobby as two distinct participants.

Content & Creator Tools#

Launch content inventory and the authoring suite that lets players extend every cell.

Roster & Content Inventory#

Launch content (per-cell, totalled):

Total: 11 protagonists, 92 companions, 1180 major NPCs, 623 authored mission rows (605 per-cell + 18 cross-cell spec-ops) plus 320 random encounters and the Mind Palace arc.

Of the named cast, 28 are principals — the 11 playable protagonists plus the 17 most story-central companions (those who anchor a critical-path arc and receive full cinematic-grade facial capture). Principals get individually-scanned bespoke MetaHuman builds; the remaining 75 named companions and the 1180 major NPCs use per-character composed MetaHuman pieces. See V5_ARCHITECTURE.md arch§"Animation Pipeline" for the bind detail.

Creator Suite#

V5 ships with a creator suite spanning all five cells. Every tool is built on the UE Editor with custom Slate panels (arch§"Creator Suite Architecture"), provides live in-editor preview, and emits a typed USTRUCT data file the runtime loads — creators author data, not code, so no recompile is required and the output is safe to share. Each tool runs the same asset-linter the shipping content passes, blocking publish on referential errors (a mission referencing a missing NPC, a contract referencing an unauthored monster).

Tool detail. The Mission Editor exposes one template per mission architecture (features§"Mission Architectures") and validates the shape's objective grammar. The Heist Author layers a heist-specific Slate UI on the Mission Editor for crew-role, vehicle, weapon, and route-waypoint authoring plus the 4×-rehearsal preview. The Case Author places clues, marks 1-2 false clues, and builds the interrogation tell-tree against the MotionScan tell library. The Contract Author pairs a monster picked from the Bestiary with a site, fee, and bestiary hint. The Ship Loadout Author configures Hard Vacuum ship slots (PDC, railgun, torpedo, armor regions, reactor). The Bestiary Author writes a stat block plus weak-vs-oil/sign/bomb data, a behavior tree, and Niagara FX. The Cinematic Director Mode is a director-mode video-authoring tool with timeline tracks, cuts, a cut inspector, Replay Theater import, Sequencer round-trip, and Movie Render Queue export presets declared in cinematic-director-mode-manifest.json. It exports read-only to gameplay so a cinematic cannot mutate game state. The Cross-Cell Replay Editor lets players splice clips from any cell into a single merged export through a clip browser, cell filters, a splice timeline, replay hash verification, privacy-scrubbed metadata, and export presets declared in fullvision_cross_cell_replay_editor_manifest.json. The Workshop Publisher handles upload, semantic versioning, moderation submission, and rating.

Workshop & Mods#

A built-in workshop (V5Mode_Editor_Workshop, backed by the workshop service) for distributing creator-suite output across all 9 platforms.

Features:

• Discovery — browse by tag, cell, content type, rating, recency, and subscriber count; in-game and companion-app browsers share the same catalog.
• Publishing lifecycle — a submission moves Draft → Submitted → InModeration → Published (or Rejected with reason). Updates publish as semantic versions; the author can deprecate but not silently delete a version others have pinned.
• Subscription — subscribers auto-update to the latest version by default or pin a specific version; a pinned version that fails the current binary's linter is flagged in the player's subscription list rather than crashing the session.
• Moderation — a three-layer pipeline: an ML pre-screen on upload (flags likely IP-infringing assets, slurs, NSFW), community report queues, and paid human moderators with a DSA-compliant appeal path. Copyright-safe rules forbid uploading source-franchise assets or trademarked names; the linter rejects asset hashes on a known-infringing list.
• Featured slots — a curator team selects featured workshops weekly per cell; featured items surface on the creator hub and in the loading-screen rotation.
• Community Heist Hub — the Workshop surfaces a curator-approved Player Created category for Heist Author uploads, including the Year-1 top-50 community heists.
• Main-menu showcase — the Workshop service feeds a curated-showcase carousel in the main menu plus a community-spotlight per month for opted-in, trust-and-safety-approved creators.
• Vehicle-blueprint share — Year-1 Vehicle Customization Tier 2 lets players publish data-only vehicle blueprints assembled from Tier 2 paint, wheels, suspension, engine, decals, and license-plate choices through /v5/workshop/vehicle-blueprints/share.
• Paid-mod marketplace — the [P3] Full-Vision Stretch paid-mod marketplace (post-Year-1; phased per V5_TODOS.md §138, the phase source of truth) lists six data-only paid mod packs across every V5 browsing cell, grants purchase entitlements through /v5/workshop/marketplace/purchase, and enforces a 70 percent creator revenue share with KYC, tax interview, refund-window, payout, and reserve gates in year1_modder_marketplace_manifest.json (historical filename retained).
• Ratings & creator standing — five-star ratings plus a per-creator standing score; repeated rejections or upheld reports lower standing and throttle publish rate.

Workshop content is sandboxed: it is data-only, cannot ship executable code, and is disabled in ranked PvP and on cert-restricted online surfaces. Mods are opt-in per save slot and never affect another player's session unless explicitly co-op-shared by the host.

Custom Tournaments and Match History#

Player-run tournament tooling for the PvP modes, plus the match-history backbone that feeds profile cards and esports surfaces.

Features:

• Bracket builder — single-elimination, double-elimination, or round-robin brackets sized 4-64 teams; the organizer sets mode, region, map rotation, best-of length, and check-in window. Brackets advance automatically as match results report from the game server; no-show teams forfeit after the check-in timer.
• Roles — organizer, admin, caster, and competitor; admins can re-seed or re-score a disputed match within a dispute window.
• Profile cards — per-player aggregate stats (per-mode win rate, K/D, rank, signature loadout), earned badges, current ranked tier, and the last several matches; cards are viewable in-game and on the public profile.
• Match history — the last 1000 matches per player, 90-day retention, each entry linking to its Replay Theater record where one exists. History is read-only and exposed through the public API for community stats sites.

Tournament results post to a public tournament ledger; cosmetic tournament rewards (banners, titles) are grantable by verified organizers.

Online Services & Multiplayer Infrastructure#

The shared online backbone — services, connection models, moderation, anti-cheat, crossplay, esports, and ranked seasons.

Online Services#

The shared online backbone covers all five cells. Each row is a microservice under apps/v5/ (arch§"Online Services Backend") — TypeScript/NestJS, per-service Docker image, multi-region Kubernetes, database-per-service.

Behavior. Login issues a JWT from a single account ID with per-platform linked credentials and silent refresh. Matchmaking is per-cell and per-mode, balancing on skill rating, region, and ping; it widens the rating band over queue time and caps ping-tolerant matches at 80 ms (the simulated ceiling validated at launch, arch§"Launch Readiness"). Leaderboards run an anti-cheat pass before a score posts, rejecting physically-impossible runs. Voice routes positional in-game chat plus party and team channels; it honors per-platform parental and mute settings.

Cross-Cell Online Persistent World — V5OnlineServices owns the cross-cell shared online world in fullvision_cross_cell_persistent_world_manifest.json, using Bureau HQ as multiplayer hub for 64-player dedicated-server presence, cross-cell loadout meetups, live-event settlement boards, and one shared progression layer. The hub writes account-scoped profile, cosmetics, Bureau XP, Mind Palace, codex, and live-event settlement domains while blocking per-cell campaign branch writes.

Degradation. Online services are non-blocking for single-player: a service outage drops the player to offline-deterministic campaign play with local saves that reconcile on reconnect (features§"V5 Product Promise"). If matchmaking is unavailable the affected mode shows a clear retry state, never a hang; if telemetry ingestion is down events buffer client-side (max 500 events / 2 KB per batch) and flush on recovery. Server providers span all three first-party relays (PSN, XBL, Steam Datagram Relay) plus AWS GameLift for cross-platform sessions, so one provider's outage degrades a platform's matchmaking but not the whole service.

Network Quality, LAN, and Server Browser#

Players choose a connection model per session, and the game reports live network quality so a player can act before a session degrades.

• Dedicated server — default for PvP and high-density open-world MP (Urban Freeroam, Frontier Posse, Capital Raid); authoritative, lowest cheat surface.
• Listen server — acceptable for bounded-roster co-op missions; one player hosts, with sub-2-second host migration on host drop.
• LAN — offline-capable session discovery for couch, arcade-stand, and LAN-party play; no online services dependency beyond initial entitlement check.
• Server browser — player-hosted private rooms, filterable by mode, cell, region, ping, password, and mod set.

Network quality. The HUD shows a connection indicator (latency, jitter, packet loss) and a quality grade; sustained packet loss above 5% surfaces a warning, and the netcode is validated to remain playable at 5% and degrade gracefully at 20% loss (arch§"Observability, Evaluation, Release Gates"). Twitch PvP absorbs loss through the 8-frame rollback window; open-world MP absorbs it through lag-compensated hit validation. A player whose connection fails the minimum bar at matchmaking is routed to bots or warned before queueing into ranked.

Cross-Platform Social, Reporting, and Bans#

Cross-platform social and the moderation surfaces that protect online play.

• Social — a cross-platform friend graph and party system; friends, invites, ready-checks, and recent-players carry across all 9 platforms on one account ID.
• Reporting — an in-client report flow with category (cheating, harassment, offensive content, griefing) that automatically attaches recent match telemetry and, for PvP, a short replay clip as evidence, so moderation reviews context rather than a bare accusation.
• Ban tiers — escalating enforcement: mute → chat-restrict → temp-ban → perma-ban; voice/text and matchmaking penalties are tracked separately so a chat offense need not remove a player from all online play.
• Appeals — submitted through the companion app with a 7-day SLA; an upheld appeal restores standing and any forfeited ranked points.
• Compliance — EU reporting and moderation follow the DSA; under-13 accounts follow the COPPA path with restricted social surfaces (features§"Privacy Compliance").

Anti-Cheat#

Easy Anti-Cheat plus a custom server-side signal layer and an ML classifier (arch§"Anti-Cheat").

Features:

• EAC — kernel-level signed driver on Windows; userland EAC on macOS, Linux, and consoles.
• Server-side signals — aim-plausibility (impossible-angle detection), aimbot pattern detection (sub-tick aim snap), wall-hack detection via line-of-sight history mismatch, speed-hack detection via position-delta against max speed, and auto-fire pattern detection. Signals run server-side so a tampered client cannot suppress them.
• ML classifier (V5_AntiCheat_ML) — runs on the telemetry stream, flags candidate cheaters by behavioral signature, and routes flags to human review rather than auto-banning.
• Three-strike flow — 1st flag: 24-hour shadow-mute (matched only with other flagged players); 2nd flag: 7-day MP ban; 3rd flag: 30-day MP ban plus manual review for permaban.
• Appeals — via the companion app, 7-day SLA.

Anti-cheat governs online and ranked play only; offline single-player is unaffected. Leaderboard and tournament submissions are re-validated against the same signal layer before they post.

Crossplay & Cross-Progression#

All 9 platforms crossplay on launch (PC, console, and the cloud-streaming variant).

Features:

• Single account — one account ID with per-platform linked credentials; profile, cosmetics, Bureau XP, codex, and Mind Palace state follow the account across every platform (arch§"Cross-Play & Cross-Progression").
• Per-cell crossplay opt-out — Sci-Fi spaceship PvP (Ship Duel, Capital Raid) defaults console players into a console-only pool because the K&M aim and APM advantage is decisive in twitch flight combat; a player may opt back into the full cross-platform pool. Open-world and co-op modes crossplay without restriction.
• Save portability — saves cloud-sync via platform cloud-save APIs; the companion app reads Mind Palace state and cosmetics for cross-device viewing and can queue append-only Mind Palace clue drafts and annotations through the Year-1 companion editor without directly mutating a local campaign save.
• Progression integrity — cross-progression carries account-level meta only; per-cell campaign branch state stays in the cell save, so importing a profile onto a new platform never desyncs an in-progress campaign.

Esports & Tournament Surfaces#

Three PvP modes ship with esports tooling, ranked by competitive priority:

• Sci-Fi Capital Raid (5v5) — primary esports mode; 60 Hz dedicated servers, the highest skill ceiling, the focus of the pro circuit.
• Urban Heist vs. Heist (4v4) — secondary; objective-extraction format.
• Frontier Posse War (4v4) — tertiary; round-based elimination format.

Tools:

• Broadcast camera — a director-cam with manual and auto-cut modes, picture-in-picture per player, and replay-burst (instant slow-motion replay of the last kill or objective without leaving the live feed).
• Scoreboard overlay — a broadcast-grade overlay with team scores, economy, objective timers, and player loadouts, themeable per tournament.
• Multi-cam recording — every participant's view plus the director feed recorded simultaneously for post-production.
• Spectator portal — the web tournament viewer (features§"Product Surfaces") with picture-in-picture per camera and a 15-second observer delay to deny ghosting.
• Pro circuit scaffolding — bracket and standings tooling for an official 3-seasons-per-year circuit, integrated with the custom-tournament bracket builder and the public tournament ledger.

Esports matches run a competitive-integrity ruleset: a fixed map/mode rotation, disabled workshop content, the per-cell ranked balance pass (Dead-Eye disabled in Frontier ranked), and the anti-cheat signal layer at full strength. Broadcast and observer slots do not count against player slots.

Ranked Season Architecture#

The competitive ladder for the PvP cells (Urban PvP, Frontier PvP, Sci-Fi PvP), aligned to the 90-day live-service season (features§"Live Service & DLC").

Features:

• Tiers — 7 ranks (Iron → Bronze → Silver → Gold → Platinum → Diamond → Mythic), each rank below Mythic split into divisions; Mythic is a single pinnacle band ordered by a top-500 leaderboard.
• Placement — 5-10 placement matches at season start seed the player near their prior season's rank (adjusted by an MMR floor) rather than from Iron, so veterans are not forced through a full re-climb.
• Progression — a win-grants / loss-removes ranked-points model; a hidden MMR drives matchmaking while the visible rank gives a stable identity. A promotion at a rank boundary; demotion protection holds a player at 0 points for one loss before dropping a division.
• Leaderboard — a top-500 per cell, updated live, exposed through the public API.
• Season rewards — peak-rank-gated cosmetics: animated borders, weapon and ship skins, and a season badge stamped with the achieved tier; rewards are permanent and non-tradeable.
• Decay — Mythic-tier players decay ranked points on inactivity (no ranked match in a rolling window) to keep the leaderboard reflecting current form; ranks below Mythic do not decay.
• Leaver enforcement — abandoning a ranked match forfeits the match's points and applies a matchmaking cooldown that escalates with repeat offenses (features§"PvP Modes").

Ranked play requires anti-cheat active, honors per-cell crossplay opt-out, and is disabled for accounts under temp-ban.

Live Service & Community#

Post-launch operations — seasonal content, battle passes, creator programs, community surfaces, and behind-the-scenes content.

Live Service & DLC#

V5 ships live-service from day one (apps/v5/live-service-calendar), with content delivered out-of-band of binary updates wherever possible.

Features:

• Season cadence — 4 seasons per year, 90 days each; a season opens with a themed event and closes with a wrap-up event.
• Per-season theme — each season carries a per-cell theme that drops new mission packs, contracts, cosmetics, and weapons; the theme also drives the ranked-season reward set.
• DLC expansion cadence — 2 paid expansions per year, ~10 hours of content each, rotating across cells (e.g., a new period chapter, a new Witcher's Path expansion); expansions are cell-specific GameFeatures plugins, DLC-gated so a player who does not own the expansion is unaffected.
• Cold Cases Year-1 — the Detective Cold Cases plugin ships 20 weekly Mind Palace packs through the live-service calendar, with 480 minutes of additional authored VO across the 12 voiced launch SKUs.
• Frontier Bounty Year-1 — the Outlaw Trail plugin ships 30 named bounties, legendary-hunt trail mechanics, and 8 legendary trapper outfits as the Frontier cell's first expansion reward tier.
• Frontier Naturalist Year-1 — the Outlaw Trail plugin ships 30 new wildlife species, 12 new trapper outfits, and naturalist progression that catalogs wildlife in the journal through year1_frontier_naturalist_manifest.json.
• Polynesian Frontier Full-Vision — the Outlaw Trail plugin authors a 15-hour Pacific-Islander frontier sub-cell with five Pacific islands, eight voyage routes, six companion arcs, and consultation-gated mission metadata in fullvision_polynesian_frontier_manifest.json.
• Pirate Frontier Full-Vision — the Outlaw Trail plugin authors a Caribbean-pirate (1720s) sub-cell with a 16-hour campaign, five Caribbean ports, seven sea lanes, six crew leads, ten ship upgrades, and naval boarding mission metadata in fullvision_pirate_frontier_manifest.json.
• Egyptian Detective Full-Vision — the Vice Squad plugin authors a 1920s Egyptology-equivalent detective sub-cell within the Period cell with 14 provenance cases, five Egypt districts, twelve artifacts, seven suspects, period evidence retrieval, and Mind Palace tomb reconstructions in fullvision_egyptian_detective_manifest.json.
• Brave New World Steampunk Detective Full-Vision — V5Mode_Steampunk_Detective and V5SteampunkDetective author a new entire Steampunk Detective cell with an 18-hour campaign, six brass-and-fog districts, twelve clockwork gadgets, nine suspects, Bureau HQ portal routing, a pressure-aware detective HUD, and Mind Palace evidence reconstruction in fullvision_steampunk_detective_cell_manifest.json.
• Cyberpunk 2087 Full-Vision — the Heist City plugin authors an 2087-equivalent cyberpunk sub-cell inside the Urban cell with an 18-hour future-city campaign, six vertical districts, seven fixers, twelve cyberware items, and network-breach mission metadata in fullvision_cyberpunk_2087_manifest.json.
• Cosmic Horror Hunter Full-Vision — the Witchers Path plugin authors a cosmic-horror-equivalent monster-hunter sub-cell with a 15-hour hunt campaign, five cursed regions, ten Witcher Sense investigation sites, twelve eldritch monsters, eight contained relics, dread-pressure gates, and ritual-seal hunt metadata in fullvision_cosmic_horror_hunter_manifest.json.
• Hunter VR Full-Cell — the Witchers Path plugin authors a VR-native full-cell mode for the Hunter cell with all 130 Witcher's Path missions, PSVR2/Quest 3/PCVR headset targets, four comfort profiles, fourteen motion-controller bindings, five sign-casting gestures, and flat-save parity in fullvision_hunter_vr_full_cell_manifest.json.
• Cinematic Director Mode — the Cinematics module authors a director-mode video-authoring tool with timeline tracks, cuts, cut-inspector validation, Replay Theater import, Sequencer round-trip, and Movie Render Queue export presets in cinematic-director-mode-manifest.json.
• Cross-Cell Replay Editor — the Replay Theater plugin and Cinematics module author a replay-editor that lets players splice clips from any cell into a single merged export, preserving source replay hashes, timeline JSON, and privacy-scrubbed metadata in fullvision_cross_cell_replay_editor_manifest.json.
• Sci-Fi AI-Persona Companion — the Galactic Squad plugin ships an AI-persona companion that learns player choices for Kade Roe, scoped to the sci-fi cell only, with local-profile memory and no cross-cell training in fullvision_scifi_ai_persona_companion_manifest.json.
• Real-Time Translation Voice Chat — the Localization module ships real-time voice-chat translation across launch languages with 240 ordered language-pair routes, opt-in speaker/listener privacy gates, no raw-audio retention, and text-only language caption fallback in fullvision_realtime_voice_chat_translation_manifest.json.
• Hunter Trial Year-1 — the Witchers Path plugin ships 4 ritual missions, a new witcher school cell variant, and 15 new monsters as the Hunter cell's mutation-trial expansion tier.
• Witcher School Trials Year-1 — the Witchers Path plugin ships 4 trial monsters at challenge tier and 4 mutation-equivalent power unlocks in year1_hunter_school_trials_manifest.json.
• Hunter Run Modifiers Year-1 — the Roguelike Hunter Run plugin ships 20 run-modifiers and a per-run leaderboard using modifier-normalized score submissions through the shared leaderboards contract in year1_hunter_run_modifiers_manifest.json.
• Sci-Fi Pirate Coast Year-1 — the Galactic Squad plugin ships 12 missions in the Nereid Reach system, a new companion arc, and a privateer corvette variant as the Sci-Fi cell's first post-campaign expansion route.
• Sci-Fi New Galaxy Sector Year-1 — the Galactic Squad plugin ships the Helio Verge sector with 6 new systems, 15 new bodies, and 1 new faction, the Helio Forge Compact, in year1_scifi_new_galaxy_sector_manifest.json.
• Sci-Fi Long Tomorrow Full-Vision — the Galactic Squad plugin ships the Long Tomorrow sector with 4 new systems, 20 new bodies, a Maia Shoal Star Map anchor, six FTL routes, DLC gating, and scan-overlay release gates in fullvision_scifi_long_tomorrow_sector_manifest.json.
• Hard Vacuum Capital Cruiser Year-1 — the Sci-Fi Hard Vacuum plugin ships 1 new capital-class ship, 6 Capital Raid PvP maps, and 5v5 ranked Capital Raid with Sci-Fi matchmaking and leaderboard score submissions through the shared online-services contracts.
• Esports Pro Circuit Season 2 Year-1 — the Spectator Broadcast plugin and V5SciFiPvP ship the official Season 2 Capital Raid pro-circuit surface: a 30-slot double-elimination bracket for 16 seeded teams, eight esports-only Capital Raid maps, clean anti-cheat/leaver gates, and public web bracket/map visibility through year1_esports_pro_circuit_season2_manifest.json.
• Pro Stadium Tour Esports Full-Vision — the Spectator Broadcast plugin ships a real-stadium tour for pro-circuit broadcasts with six physical stadium stops, a venue-license calendar, ticketing geofences, accessibility gates, 15-second observer delay, SRT/NDI/HLS/DASH broadcast routes, and public esports/spectator visibility through fullvision_pro_stadium_tour_manifest.json and /v5/live-service-calendar/pro-stadium-tour.
• Cross-Cell Co-op Stretch Year-1 — the Spec Ops Co-op plugin ships 12 cross-cell co-op missions through year1_cross_cell_coop_stretch_manifest.json, including "Detective in the Hunter Cell" style guest-cell scenarios, Bureau Tier 5 gates, 1-4P drop-in/out support, and shared cross-cell loadout validation.
• Urban Speedrun League Year-1 — the Urban Online plugin ships 60 timed urban-driving routes, leaderboards backed by the shared online-services score contract, and 8 cosmetic event vehicles locked to base handling performance.
• Urban New District Year-1 — the Heist City plugin ships South Bay as a 15 km2 addition with 12 new side missions in district, World Partition map metadata, and a DLC-gated content contract in year1_urban_new_district_manifest.json.
• Heist Author Top 50 Year-1 — the Workshop plugin ships a Community Heist Hub with top-50 community heists curated from Heist Author uploads and a dedicated Player Created content category.
• Workshop Curated Showcase Year-1 — the Workshop plugin ships a curated-showcase carousel in the main menu, six curator-approved Workshop slides, and a community-spotlight per month through the Workshop service contract in year1_workshop_curated_showcase_manifest.json.
• Workshop Moderator Tools Year-1 — the Workshop plugin ships a community-moderator dashboard, ML-powered content pre-screen, moderation queue KPIs, and Workshop moderation endpoints in year1_workshop_moderator_tools_manifest.json.
• Live-Service Calendar Year-1 — the live-service calendar ships four authored 90-day seasonal-theme rotations plus Bureau Founding Day, Shelter Signal charity, and Platform Circuit console tie-in events through year-1-live-service-calendar.json and /v5/live-service-calendar/year1.
• Persistent Online World Events Year-1 — the live-service calendar ships a settlement-backed live-event subsystem plus 12 authored world-event scripts, starting with Gang War Week, through year-1-persistent-world-events.json and /v5/live-service-calendar/world-events/year1.
• Live-Service Year-3 Pipeline — the live-service calendar plans 4 new sub-cells, 8 cross-cell co-op missions, and 1 new console SKU through V5/live-service/year-3-live-service-pipeline.json and /v5/live-service-calendar/year3-pipeline. The plan locks Tokyo Shadow Grid, Venice Mask Files, Andean Silver Line, and Northern Fen Coven as chunked DLC-gated sub-cells, schedules 240 minutes of 1-4P cross-cell co-op, and tracks the V5Switch2Year3 native console SKU with reduced-install memory budgets and no platform-exclusive gameplay.
• Cross-Cell Online Persistent World — V5OnlineServices ships the cross-cell shared online world through fullvision_cross_cell_persistent_world_manifest.json, using Bureau HQ as multiplayer hub with six shared zones, 64-player dedicated-server sessions, /v5/parties/cross-cell-world/session, and one shared progression layer across profile, cosmetics, Bureau XP, Mind Palace, codex, and live-event settlement state.
• Faction Reputation Decay Year-1 — the faction-rep service ships a weekly inactivity decay job, neutral-tier protection, ledger/rival-lock reconciliation, and five per-cell restoration mission arcs through year-1-faction-reputation-decay.json, /v5/faction-rep/decay/year1, and /v5/faction-rep/restoration-arcs/year1.
• AI-Generated Highlight Reel Year-1 — the replays service ships optional AI commentator TTS, replay-ranked top-10 highlight reels, and per-match AI recaps through year-1-ai-highlight-reel.json, /v5/replays/commentary/tts/year1, /v5/replays/highlights/year1/top10, and /v5/replays/recap/year1.
• New Game+ Year-1 — V5Persistence ships a tier-20 NG+ plan across all five launch cells through year1_new_game_plus_manifest.json, with two NG+-specific story branches and three difficulty modifiers per cell.
• Save Slot Archaeology Year-1 — V5Persistence imports supported v1/v2 FV5SaveDocument JSON into an NG+ target slot through year1_save_slot_archaeology_manifest.json, then evaluates ten imported ending-state signals into NG+-only scenario flags.
• Vehicle Customization Tier 2 Year-1 — V5Vehicles ships 200 Tier 2 customization parts for modern and period body-shop domains in year1_vehicle_customization_tier2_manifest.json, and the Workshop service exposes vehicle-blueprint share at /v5/workshop/vehicle-blueprints/share.
• Photo Mode Tier 2 Year-1 — V5Mode_PhotoMode adds 15s MP4 with audio export and a photo-mode shooting-locations editor through year1_photo_mode_tier2_manifest.json.
• Companion-App Mind Palace Editor Year-1 — iOS, Android, and web companion surfaces add add-clue and annotate-clue drafts for the Mind Palace graph through year1_mind_palace_editor_manifest.json and /v5/companion-app-bridge/mindpalace/edit.
• Companion-App AR Mode Full-Vision — iOS, Android, and web companion surfaces add a point phone at TV pairing mode through fullvision_companion_ar_mode_manifest.json and /v5/companion-app-bridge/ar/session; the phone renders a read-only Mind Palace overlay with evidence nodes, deduction threads, and privacy scrim while blocking raw camera upload.
• Real-World Crime-Scene Integration Full-Vision — iOS, Android, and web companion surfaces add foreground geofenced investigation check-ins through fullvision_real_world_crime_scene_manifest.json and /v5/companion-app-bridge/real-world/events/trigger; the bridge accepts only privacy-preserving location-only triggers with HMAC geofence tokens, no raw coordinate upload, no address history, no continuous GPS, and venue safety blocks for private residences, active crime scenes, emergency sites, and restricted sites.
• VTuber Companion Stream Mode Full-Vision — iOS, Android, and web companion surfaces add a streamer overlay mode through fullvision_vtuber_companion_stream_mode_manifest.json and /v5/companion-app-bridge/vtuber/overlay/session; the bridge starts a local browser-source overlay for OBS-style streamers, drives spoiler-safe avatar states, enforces no stream key storage, blocks raw voice upload, player PII, and chat message storage, and exposes moderation controls for chat safety, mature gates, streamer blocklists, and panic hide overlay.
• Mind Palace Daily Year-1 — the Detective Mind Palace plugin ships 365 daily Mind Palace puzzles, UTC daily rotation, and daily leaderboard rankings through the shared online-services score contract.
• Mind Palace Crossover Pack Year-1 — the Detective Mind Palace plugin ships The Black Archive as a 6-hour cross-cell mystery arc with 12 new cross-era deductions and Bureau Tier 5 gating in year1_mind_palace_crossover_pack_manifest.json.
• Posse War Tournament Year-1 — the Frontier Online plugin ships a 4v4 ranked-tournament season, 4 tournament-only maps, a Frontier matchmaking tournament queue, and ranked leaderboard score submissions through the shared online-services contracts.
• Made Man Chapter 4 Year-1 — the Period Made Man plugin ships 22 1980s-equivalent missions, a 1980s period-authenticity bundle for vehicles, fashion, and radio, plus 8 new companions.
• Period Documentary Year-1 — the Period Made Man plugin ships a behind-the-scenes documentary cinematic and in-game documentary viewer with chapter/still navigation, captions, and commentary through year1_period_documentary_manifest.json.
• Vice Squad Cold Case Year-1 — the Period Vice Squad plugin ships 8 unsolved 1947 cold cases with period-correct evidence retrieval through the case archive, coroner, switchboard, newspaper morgue, property, dispatch, citation, and scene-revisit channels.
• Hot-fix pipeline — balance values, UI strings, and live-service data ship as CDN-served data files with no binary patch; a hot-fix is fetched at session start and applied without a client update.
• Content delivery — new modes and missions ship as GameFeatures plugins, enabled per build target without rebuilding the shipping executable; large drops use chunked partial-download installs (arch§"Build, Cook, Patch").
• Balance ledger — every balance change publishes to the public audit log (features§"Balance Operations") so the community can trace what changed and when.

Live-service content is held to the same no-stub quality bar as launch content; a "coming soon" placeholder is never shown in shipped UI.

Battle Pass, Weekly Contracts, and Faction Reputation#

The recurring engagement layer that runs across each 90-day season.

• Battle pass — one pass per cell per season, 100 tiers across the 90 days, with a free track and a paid premium track. Tiers advance on a battle-pass XP currency earned from missions, contracts, and PvP; the free track grants functional and cosmetic rewards at a slower cadence, the premium track adds exclusive cosmetics. Tier pacing targets completion at a moderate ~6-8 hours/week of play; a tier-skip purchase exists but does not gate any gameplay-affecting reward behind money. Unclaimed rewards are claimable until season end; the pass never expires mid-reward.
• Weekly contracts — 7 contracts per week, cycling Mondays (UTC), drawn per-cell from a contract pool with a difficulty spread; contracts grant battle-pass XP and currency. Unfinished contracts expire at cycle rollover; a player who misses a week loses that week's contracts but not pass progress.
• Faction reputation — per-cell faction-rep ladders persisted by the faction-rep service (Sci-Fi's three primary factions plus secondary; analogs in other cells). Rep rises and falls with mission and contract choices; rep tiers unlock faction tech, mission lines, station/territory access, and cosmetics, and high rep with one faction can lock high rep with a rival (features§"Faction Politics").
• Faction Reputation Decay Year-1 — after 14 inactive days, trusted through paragon reputation tiers decay on a weekly job without ever dropping below neutral. Every decay run reconciles the balance ledger and rival locks, then offers a cell-specific three-mission restoration arc; the five arcs restore up to 450 reputation each and cannot be bypassed with paid shortcuts.

Twitch Drops, Creator Partnership, and Community Tools#

The streaming and creator-ecosystem surface.

• Twitch Drops — watch-time-gated cosmetic drops tied to campaign moments and esports broadcasts; drops link to the V5 account and grant in-game cosmetics on next login. Drop campaigns are scheduled through the live-service calendar.
• Creator partnership — a tier for high-engagement streamers and video creators granting early build access under embargo, custom referral codes, a creator cosmetic set, and a private support channel; entry is reviewed against engagement and conduct criteria, and the tier is revocable on conduct violations.
• Community tools — chat moderation for streamed sessions (mute, chat filter, report) plus the Streamer Mode privacy surface (next section); creators can grant viewer-vote outcomes only through sanctioned, non-gameplay-affecting hooks.

Streamer and Speedrun Modes#

Two opt-in modes for broadcasters and competitive runners.

• Streamer mode — hides personally-identifying and stream-sniping-sensitive UI: real gamertags of other players are replaced with neutral handles, party invite codes and the in-game phone's social feed are masked, and licensed audio is muted on the broadcast mix where rights require (an alternate cleared-for-broadcast music bed substitutes). Toggleable mid-session.
• Speedrun mode — a precise on-screen timer (millisecond resolution) with configurable segment splits, a real-time/in-game-time toggle, automatic start/stop on run-defining triggers, and a per-segment best/comparison display. Runs export a split file compatible with common speedrun timers. Speedrun mode disables adaptive difficulty (features§"AI Director & Adaptive Difficulty") so runs are deterministic and comparable, and a run is invalidated if workshop content or non-default difficulty modifiers are active.

Coach mode is covered under features§"Replay Theater, Spectator, and Coach Mode".

Live Service Calendar#

The scheduled-event surface, published by apps/v5/live-service-calendar and fetched by the in-game and companion-app calendar UIs.

• Per-cell seasonal themes — each 90-day season has a per-cell theme (urban summer-beach, period winter-noir, frontier high-summer, hunter dark-autumn, sci-fi solar-storm) that re-skins ambient world dressing, lighting, and the cosmetic drop set.
• Anniversary event — an annual in-fiction "Bureau founding day" event with commemorative cosmetics and a limited mission.
• Charity event — an annual event selling an in-game charity cosmetic with proceeds donated; the charity and proceeds figure are published.
• Console tie-ins — platform-specific seasonal hooks (PS5 trophy clusters, Xbox achievement tiers, a Switch 2 collectible-figure-equivalent).
• Calendar behavior — events have a start/end window and a state (Upcoming / Live / Ended); the UI shows a countdown, and an event that fails to start (service issue) shows a clear retry/notice state rather than a silent gap. Time-limited rewards earned during an event are kept permanently once granted.
• Live-Service Calendar Year-1 — the Year-1 feed authors four 90-day rotations (Fracture Signals, Neon Harvest, Long Night Protocol, Founders Return), plus Bureau Founding Day, Shelter Signal charity, and Platform Circuit console tie-in events. Console tie-ins never gate gameplay, progression, stats, missions, or leaderboard access.
• Persistent Online World Events Year-1 — the Year-1 world-events feed publishes 12 one-week scripts across Urban, Period, Frontier, Hunter, and Sci-Fi. The live-event subsystem opens each calendar window, records objective and faction telemetry, persists settled world-state mutations for 30 days, and ships no exclusive gameplay rewards. Gang War Week is the first authored event and drives Urban turf-pressure settlement through the same feed.
• Cold Cases Year-1 rotation — the cold-cases feed publishes 20 weekly Mind Palace packs, each with six evidence nodes, four deduction pairs, and 24 minutes of VO, for 480 minutes total across the expansion.
• Mind Palace Daily rotation — V5Mode_Detective_MindPalace publishes one UTC-scoped daily puzzle for every day of the Year-1 rotation, each with a clean-run daily leaderboard and archived ranking history.
• Mind Palace Crossover Pack Year-1 — V5Mode_Detective_MindPalace publishes the Black Archive as a 6-hour cross-cell mystery arc with 12 new cross-era deductions behind the Tier 5 cross-era Bureau gate.

The calendar drives season start/end, contract rotation, drop campaigns, and balance-update windows so all live-service timing is single-sourced.

Community Features#

Curated and player-spotlight surfaces operated by the community team.

• Player of the Week — a community-team-curated spotlight of a player or creator, surfaced in-game and on the marketing site.
• Posse Showcase — featured player-made content (custom vehicles, ships, posses, crews) with a submission queue and curation.
• Gallery — curated photo-mode submissions (features§"Photo Mode"); creators can opt their shots into the gallery, and curation filters for quality and content rules.
• Hall of Fame — cumulative recognition for top-rated Mind Palace solves and top-rated workshop contributions (features§"Customer Support and Community Ambassadors").
• Newsletter — a monthly studio newsletter covering patch notes, roadmap movement, and community highlights.

All spotlight surfaces require player opt-in for personal content and preserve synthetic-content indicators where AI-assisted content is featured.

Brand Partnerships and Celebrity Guests#

Limited real-world tie-ins, constrained to preserve V5's original-fiction posture and gated by the IP-clearance manifest.

• Celebrity-guest cameos — 2 celebrity-guest cameo recordings (one period cell, one sci-fi cell), each cast as an in-fiction character, not as themselves; contracts are gated by NIL (name/image/likeness) clearance, and no real-person likeness ships without explicit clearance (features§"Production: Studio Ops, Mocap, VO, and Composer").
• In-fiction venue tie-in — 1 urban-cell venue tie-in where licensed real-world music is cleared per §82; if clearance lapses, the venue ships with original-IP music and the tie-in is dropped rather than shipping uncleared content.

Tie-ins never gate gameplay or progression and never introduce a trademarked name into a competitive surface. The IP-clearance manifest gates any pre-launch marketing beat that would risk an implied affiliation with a source franchise.

AI Commentary and Highlight Reels#

AI-assisted spectator and post-match content for the PvP cells.

• AI commentator — a text-to-speech play-by-play layer for live spectator and broadcast, narrating kills, objectives, and economy swings; it is an optional audio track that a human caster or the player can disable.
• Highlight reel — an AI-curated top-10-plays reel auto-generated from a match's replay, scored on kill multiplicity, objective impact, and clutch context; the reel is exportable as a video clip.
• Per-match analysis — an AI-summarized recap (key turning points, per-player stat lines) attached to the match-history entry.

All AI-generated commentary and recaps carry a synthetic-content indicator, and the underlying replay remains available so a viewer can verify the summary against the source.

• AI-Generated Highlight Reel Year-1 — the Year-1 implementation lives in V5/live-service/year-1-ai-highlight-reel.json and the replays service. It exposes an optional Coqui TTS commentator track, a top-10 reel ranked by kill multiplicity, objective impact, clutch context, and teamplay chains, plus a match-history recap with turning points and per-player stat lines.
• The Year-1 endpoints never affect progression, keep human caster override and player disable controls, and require synthetic-content indicators plus source replay verification on every generated audio track, clip, and recap.

Director Commentary and Bonus Content#

Behind-the-scenes content shipped alongside the campaigns.

• Director commentary — an optional commentary track for each cell's campaign, toggleable during play, in which the development team annotates design intent over scripted moments; commentary nodes are placed at specific beats and do not interrupt gameplay.
• Period Documentary Year-1 — a 42-minute behind-the-scenes documentary cinematic for the Period cell, with an in-game documentary viewer for chapter select, still-gallery browsing, captions, and director-commentary toggles; the content contract is declared in year1_period_documentary_manifest.json.
• Origin Comics — a pre-launch 6-issue digital comic series per cell, expanding the Cross-Continuum Bureau backstory; readable in the companion app and on the marketing site.
• Cinematography library — 100+ in-game camera presets exported as USD for Sequencer, usable in the Cinematic Author and Photo Mode so creators can match the shipping cinematic look.

Bonus content is included with the base game, carries no gameplay effect, and is localized to the launch text languages.

Platform, Performance & Tech#

Platform reach, performance budgets, patching, adaptive difficulty, engineering polish, peripherals, and persistent-world simulation.

Display Tech, Performance, and Cert#

Per-platform frame-rate and resolution targets (Hard Vacuum carries the heaviest load due to dynamic gravity + crew sim). The engineering frame-time budgets that back these targets are in V5_ARCHITECTURE.md arch§"Performance Budgets":

Asset Budget & Streaming#

Per-cell asset budgets (uncompressed authoring footprint; the shipped install is substantially smaller after Oodle compression and platform texture formats):

Streaming. All open-world cells use World Partition with 256 m × 256 m cells and 4 HLOD levels (HLOD3 a silhouette at 2 km); streaming sources are the player, companions, and active mission markers, and the critical 3×3 cell area is pre-warmed at mission start (arch§"Open-World Streaming (World Partition + Crowd)"). PCG augments streamed cells with ambient props deterministically from the world seed. Per-cell content roots are independent, so a reduced-SKU build (e.g., a Switch 2 SKU omitting a cell) ships without that cell's asset budget.

Partial install. Cells download as separate chunks; a player can install and play one cell while others download, and an offline player must pre-download the cells they intend to play. The cloud-streaming variant streams assets on demand and has no local install requirement. Each cell declares a minimum-playable chunk so the first mission is reachable before the full cell finishes downloading.

Patch, Hotfix, Quick-Resume, and Crash Recovery#

The update and recovery surface, mirroring V4's build pipeline (arch§"Build, Cook, Patch").

• Patch policy — a day-one patch ships as a single binary update; ongoing patches use chunked UnrealPak iterative delivery so a player downloads only changed chunks, sized per cell for partial-download installs.
• Hot-fix — balance values, UI strings, and live-service data ship as CDN-served data files fetched at session start with no binary patch, so the team can correct balance between binary releases.
• Quick-Resume — on Xbox Series X|S the title supports mid-mission suspend/resume across the platform's multi-game quick-resume; on resume the game validates session and online state and reconciles if a hot-fix landed while suspended.
• Crash recovery — an auto-save snapshot is written every 90 s on critical-path missions; on a crash or hard power-loss the next launch offers the snapshot. Saves are triple-redundant (current, previous, fallback) and a corrupt save falls back to the previous generation with a user notice (arch§"Save Corruption Recovery"). Mind Palace state is included in the snapshot so a deduction graph survives a crash.
• DRM — no third-party DRM; anti-piracy relies on signed-execution checks only (no Denuvo-equivalent, per §1.2 ADR 0006).

AI Director & Adaptive Difficulty#

A per-cell AI Director that adjusts encounter pressure to keep each cell inside its intended difficulty band, reading a rolling performance signal (deaths, damage taken, objective time, accuracy) rather than a single moment.

Features:

• Urban — pursuit intensity scales to driving skill: a player who shakes pursuit cleanly sees faster roadblocks and earlier helo support; a struggling player sees gaps to break line-of-sight.
• Period — investigation clue density and prompt strength adjust to investigation pace; a player missing clues gets stronger proximity cues, a fast solver gets fewer.
• Frontier — the random-encounter mix shifts with honor band and combat skill (features§"Cinematic Random Encounters").
• Hunter — monster aggression and opening frequency scale to the player's gear tier and bestiary completion so an under-prepared hunter is pressured but not overwhelmed.
• Sci-Fi — enemy-fleet composition and torpedo-salvo size scale to squad power and ship upgrades.

The Director adjusts within bounds set by the player's chosen per-cell difficulty (Easy / Normal / Hard / Brutal); it never crosses a difficulty boundary and never alters narrative or loot outcomes. It is disabled in ranked PvP, in Trials, and in Speedrun mode so those surfaces stay deterministic, and a player may turn adaptive difficulty off entirely in settings.

Engineering Polish#

Launch-quality runtime hygiene that keeps frame pacing smooth on first play.

• PSO pre-cache — pipeline state objects are gathered and pre-compiled on first launch (and after a driver/binary change) to eliminate first-encounter shader-compilation hitches.
• Shader pre-warm — remaining shaders pre-warm during loading screens rather than mid-gameplay.
• Asset pre-load — the next mission's critical assets pre-load during the preceding cinematic or transition so a mission start does not stall on disk.

These measures back the crash-free-session and frame-budget release gates (arch§"Observability, Evaluation, Release Gates"); a build that hitches outside budget on the Gauntlet run fails the gate.

VR and AR Support#

Targeted VR/AR support at launch, scoped to where each headset's strengths fit a cell rather than a full-game VR port.

• PSVR2 — a sit-in-cockpit VR mode for Hard Vacuum: the player flies a ship from a stereoscopic cockpit with HOTAS or motion controllers, full Newtonian flight and gravity transitions intact; the seated frame keeps motion-sickness risk low.
• Quest 3 — a VR spectator mode for replays and live matches, presenting the picture-in-picture spectator feed on a virtual theater screen.
• Vision Pro — a volumetric Mind Palace viewer: the deduction graph renders as a room-scale 3D memory room the player inspects by gaze and gesture (arch§"Mind Palace UI"); it reads cloud-synced Mind Palace state and supports examining nodes but defers accusations to the full game.
• Hunter VR Full-Cell — a VR-native full-cell mode for the Hunter cell that maps all Witcher's Path campaign missions, monster contracts, Witcher Sense, sign-casting gestures, alchemy quickslots, mounted travel, and contract-board interactions to PSVR2, Quest 3, and PCVR in fullvision_hunter_vr_full_cell_manifest.json.

VR/AR surfaces honor the photosensitivity and camera-shake accessibility settings and are not required for any progression.

Hardware Peripherals#

Peripheral support beyond the standard controller and keyboard/mouse.

• HOTAS — full Hands-On-Throttle-and-Stick support in Hard Vacuum (Windows and macOS), mapping throttle to main-engine burn and stick to RCS attitude.
• Racing wheel — full force-feedback support in urban-cell driving and frontier stagecoach driving, with pedal and shifter mapping.
• Adaptive controller — full PS5 Access Controller and Xbox Adaptive Controller support, paired with the one-handed control schemes (features§"Accessibility").
• Trackball — supported as a pointing device with dedicated aim-assist tuning.
• Arcade cabinet — the V5ArcadeCabinet build target packages a four-player local co-op cabinet with ArcadePanel controls, 4K60 output, offline boot, LAN discovery, protected operator diagnostics, and no coin-op economy.
• DualSense haptics — weapon-specific adaptive-trigger resistance and haptic feedback, horse-trot haptics, and a gravity-zone-transition rumble cue; haptics are intensity-adjustable and can be disabled.

Every peripheral routes through Enhanced Input and is fully remappable per control context; a peripheral disconnect mid-session pauses single-player and holds the online session through the standard controller-loss path.

Store Features and Region-Aware Pricing#

The commerce surface across the platform storefronts.

• Storefronts — per-platform listings on Steam, the Microsoft Store, the Epic Games Store, PSN, Xbox Live, the Switch 2 eShop, and the App Store; each carries the base game, editions, expansions, season passes, and cosmetic bundles.
• Region-aware pricing — prices are set per region against a purchasing-power-parity table rather than a flat currency conversion.
• Editions — a standard edition plus a deluxe edition (cosmetic content, early expansion access); no edition gates a campaign, cell, or progression path.
• Monetization posture — paid content is the base game, expansions, the premium battle-pass track, and cosmetics; cosmetics and the tier-skip never confer a gameplay advantage (features§"Battle Pass, Weekly Contracts, and Faction Reputation"). Real-money purchases are subject to the spending caps in the parental-controls surface.
• Entitlements — purchases resolve through the platform entitlement system and unlock cross-platform on the linked account.

Account Vault and Replay Archive#

Per-account cloud storage for the artifacts a player generates.

• Cloud vault — replays, photo-mode shots, custom loadouts, and profile data stored per account and synced across platforms.
• Replay archive — match replays retained on a 90-day rolling window by default, with an opt-in lifetime-keeper flag that marks selected replays for permanent retention (replays are input-stream records per features§"Replay Theater, Spectator, and Coach Mode", so storage cost is small).
• Save-slot archaeology — a player can re-import an older save slot into a New Game+ run, carrying forward eligible account-level meta; cell campaign branch state is re-derived from the imported cell save so an imported run starts coherent.
• New Game+ Year-1 — the tier-20 unlock uses a five-cell plan that carries Bureau XP, cosmetics, photo-mode unlocks, codex, Workshop entitlements, and Mind Palace archives while reseeding campaign state with NG+-specific story branches and difficulty modifiers.
• Save Slot Archaeology Year-1 — old save JSON is migrated through UV5_SaveGame::ImportFromJsonString, then UV5_Persist_SaveSlotArchaeology reads prior ending flags like ending.urban.low-collateral and persists matching NG+ scenario flags on the new target save.

Vault contents are covered by the DSAR data-portability export (features§"Privacy Compliance") and respect per-region data residency.

Companion App, API, Wiki, and Roadmap#

The off-platform surfaces around the game.

• Companion app — iOS, Android, and Web; surfaces the Mind Palace deduction graph (cross-device synced via mindpalace-cloud-sync), contract and case briefings, replays, the balance ledger, news, and the season calendar. Status (2026-06-12): this bullet describes the target vision, not current state — V5/companion/ holds design-token mockups only (one static .swift file and one static .kt file with no Xcode project, Package.swift, build.gradle, or AndroidManifest.xml); no buildable iOS or Android app exists, and the web companion in apps/v5/web is a static Next.js content surface rendering fixtures rather than account-linked state (see V5/docs/audit/v5-verification-2026-05-31.md §7 and V5_TODOS.md §78). The Year-1 Companion-App Mind Palace Editor adds add-clue and annotate-clue draft workflows; drafts are offline-queueable, guardian-blocked for restricted accounts, and reconciled through the graph-diff service rather than direct save mutation. The Full-Vision Companion-App AR Mode lets a paired phone point phone at TV and see a read-only Mind Palace overlay through /v5/companion-app-bridge/ar/session, with four-corner calibration and no raw camera upload. The appeals flow for bans and anti-cheat flags is filed through the companion app. The Full-Vision Real-World Crime-Scene Integration adds foreground geofenced check-ins through /v5/companion-app-bridge/real-world/events/trigger; only location-only HMAC geofence tokens are uploaded, raw coordinates and address history are blocked, and unsafe venues are filtered before any fictional scene unlocks. The Full-Vision VTuber Companion Stream Mode starts local browser-source streamer overlays through /v5/companion-app-bridge/vtuber/overlay/session; avatar states are spoiler-safe, chat events are opt-in, and the service enforces no stream key storage, no raw voice upload, no player PII, and no chat message history.
• Public API — read-only stats endpoints (match history, replay download links, balance ledger, season calendar) requiring OAuth; rate-limited and documented for community stats sites.
• Wiki — an official wiki with per-cell rules, per-character dossiers, the monster bestiary, and recipes; community-edited under curation, with studio-authored stub pages seeded at launch so no topic is empty.
• Roadmap — a public roadmap showing delivered, in-flight, and planned items per cell; updated each season and cross-linked from the marketing site.

Persistent World Economy#

A background simulation that keeps each open-world cell's economy and world state evolving between play sessions rather than static.

• Urban — an in-fiction stock market whose prices drift with in-world events and player actions, district-level crime rates that shift with player and ambient activity, and gang territory control that changes as missions resolve.
• Frontier — a bounty office whose posted bounties refresh on a schedule and scale to the player's accumulated bounty, train and stagecoach schedules that run on the world clock, and weather-driven cattle-drive and resource events.
• Hunter — monster respawn timers on a 4-in-game-day cadence, a contract supply that the board posts every 36 in-game hours, and alchemy-ingredient availability tied to biome respawn schedules (features§"Monster-Contract Boards", features§"Alchemy: Potions, Oils, Bombs, Decoctions").
• Sci-Fi — faction-reputation drift, commodity market prices that move with supply events, and mining yields that deplete and recover per body.

Economy state is part of the cell save and is deterministic given the world seed, so it survives offline play and reconciles cleanly on reconnect; it is simulated coarsely while a cell is inactive and resolved to full detail on return. The economy is read by the AI Director and by encounter eligibility so a depleted or thriving world feeds back into what the player encounters.

Compliance, Accessibility & Production#

Player-protection tooling, accessibility, localization, telemetry, privacy compliance, production scope, and launch gates.

Parental Controls, Age Gating, and Time-Played#

Compliance-grade parental tooling, configured by a guardian account and enforced client- and service-side so a tampered client cannot bypass a control.

• Time-played caps — per-day and per-week play limits; the game shows a warning as a cap approaches and a clear notice at the cap, then ends the session gracefully (saves first). Caps reset on the guardian's configured schedule.
• Spending caps — per-month real-money spend limits enforced at the storefront entitlement layer; a purchase that would exceed the cap is blocked with an explanatory message rather than a silent failure.
• Content gating — cell-by-cell and content-category gating: a guardian can hide a cell's adult content (e.g., Made Man's mature material) or restrict online social surfaces for an under-age account; gated content is removed from menus, not merely hidden behind a warning.
• Age gating — an age check at signup routes under-13 accounts to the COPPA path (features§"Privacy Compliance") with restricted social and data-collection surfaces; region rating variants further constrain content (see features§"Localization, Voice-Over, and Region Rating Variants").
• Reporting — the guardian account can review aggregate play time and spending; controls follow the strictest of the platform-level and in-game settings.

Accessibility#

V5 ships AAA accessibility on launch (§72). All settings are previewable in the accessibility menu, persist per account, and — for gameplay settings stored per-cell — survive a cell switch (arch§"Accessibility"). An accessibility audit pass is a release gate.

• Subtitles — per-speaker color coding, font size, font weight, character border, and background opacity; on by default. A separate caption track renders non-dialogue audio.
• Color-blind modes — protan, deutan, tritan, and monochrome palettes; gameplay color cues (clue-trail colors in sense modes, faction colors, threat markers) are re-mapped, not just the UI.
• High-contrast UI mode — a high-contrast UI palette plus a high-contrast Mind Palace visualization that distinguishes evidence orbs and deduction threads by shape and contrast rather than color alone.
• Audio cues — V5_Accessibility_AudioCue routes combat events (incoming fire direction, hit confirmation, low-health) to distinct spatial audio markers for hearing-impaired players; cue set is customizable.
• Difficulty per-cell — Easy / Normal / Hard / Brutal stored independently per cell, so a player can run an easy Sci-Fi flight model and a hard Hunter combat model in the same profile.
• Aim-assist — adaptive aim-assist with per-axis sensitivity, per-cell tuning, and a target-acquisition priority pyramid (enemy > breakable > civilian); driving aim-assist with stickiness and target acquisition is a separate toggle.
• Camera-shake reduction — a global 0-100% slider with sensible per-cell defaults.
• Photosensitivity mode — clamps flash count to a safe maximum per 5 s, removes strobe, and dims screen-burst overlays (muzzle flares, explosions, sign FX); applies across VR/AR surfaces.
• Text-to-speech for menus — Coqui-TTS-based menu narration, lazy-loaded per language.
• Speech-to-text for voice chat — Whisper-based opt-in transcription of party and team voice; the player controls whether their own speech is transcribed and whether they see others' transcripts.
• Real-time voice-chat translation — opt-in party and team voice translation across launch languages. V5 builds a 16-language route matrix using Whisper STT, V5RealtimeMT, and Coqui TTS for voiced targets; text-only targets use translated caption fallback.
• Input remapping & one-handed schemes — full per-context input remapping via Enhanced Input, plus preset one-handed schemes for the PS5 Access Controller and Xbox Adaptive Controller.

Accessibility settings never gate content or progression, and per-feature audits plus user-tester sessions back the launch accessibility QA pass.

Localization, Voice-Over, and Region Rating Variants#

Launch language packs: 16 (12 voiced + 4 text-only). Of the 12 voiced packs, 4 get full principal-grade lipsync (en-US, fr, de, es-LATAM) and 8 get lipsync-light (en-UK, es-ES, it, pt-br, ja, ko, zh-Hans, zh-Hant); the 4 text-only packs (ru, ar, pl, tr) ship full subtitles and UI translation. All 16 packs cover every UI string, subtitle, caption, codex entry, and the period-radio captions. Localization runs through the UE Localization Dashboard as per-language packs, and a per-language localization-QA pass (proofread plus lipsync check where voiced) is a release gate.

Real-time voice-chat translation runs across launch languages through UV5_Localization_VoiceChatTranslation: 240 ordered language-pair routes, speaker/listener opt-in, no raw-audio retention, no voice-chat model training, synthetic voice indicators, and caption fallback for ru, ar, pl, and tr. The release-gate manifest is fullvision_realtime_voice_chat_translation_manifest.json.

Region rating variants. V5 submits a content variant per board and ships the variant matching the player's store region; the rating-board mapping lives in V5/legal/rating-boards.json.

• US — ESRB M (an AO-rated cut of specific Hard Vacuum cinematics is withheld from the shipping build).
• EU — PEGI 18.
• UK — BBFC 18.
• DE — USK 18 with cuts to extreme gore.
• JP — CERO Z.
• CN — NTAB-localized build with faction-name swaps and content edits; data residency in-region (features§"Privacy Compliance").
• AU — ACB R18+.
• KR — GRAC rating.

A platform-specific cert-ban list (V5/legal/platform-cert-bans.json) gates content that a given platform's certification forbids; a compliance review (legal, privacy, ratings) is a launch gate.

Telemetry, Analytics, and Balance#

Anonymized, consent-gated event ingestion that feeds balance and live-service decisions (arch§"Telemetry & Analytics").

Features:

• Event schema — events are validated against TypeBox/JSON-Schema at the client edge before send; an invalid event is dropped, not ingested. Critical events include session start/end, mission start/complete/fail, combat kill/death/damage, Mind-Palace deduction/accusation/outcome, dialogue paragon/renegade choices, vehicle and ship events, alchemy/sign use, and workshop publish/subscribe.
• Batching — events batch at the client (max 2 KB / 5 s / 500 events per batch) and flush to the telemetry service; a batch that fails to send is retained and retried so an offline session's telemetry is not lost.
• Anonymization — each event carries an opaque per-account ID and region only; no PII is collected without consent.
• Consent — per-region opt-in/opt-out exposed in in-game settings; opting out stops collection rather than anonymizing after the fact. A DSAR data-portability export is available through the companion app.
• Consumption — telemetry lands in ClickHouse with per-cell Grafana dashboards; the balance team reads it, and every balance change it motivates posts to the public balance ledger.

Privacy Compliance#

Privacy-by-design compliance shipping day one (arch§"Security, Privacy, Compliance").

• GDPR — DSAR data-portability and erasure flows filed through the companion app with a 30-day SLA; the export covers profile, saves metadata, vault contents, and telemetry.
• CCPA — a do-not-sell flag honored at the account level.
• DSA — DSA-compliant content-moderation and reporting for EU players, including the workshop and social-report appeal paths.
• COPPA — an age gate at signup routes under-13 accounts to a restricted path with curtailed data collection and social surfaces (features§"Parental Controls, Age Gating, and Time-Played").
• Data residency — per-region data residency: EU player data is stored in EU regions, CN player data in CN; the multi-region service deployment routes storage accordingly.
• Transport & at-rest — all client-server traffic is TLS 1.3; saves are encrypted with a per-account key derived from the platform auth token.

Production: Studio Ops, Mocap, VO, and Composer#

The production capacity behind V5's content (arch§"Audio Pipeline", arch§"MotionScan Interrogation Architecture").

• Mocap — 4 body-mocap stages (LA, London, Vancouver, Tokyo) feeding motion-matching pose databases and AnimBP capture.
• Face capture — a 12-camera MetaHuman face stage at the LA studio drives the MotionScan-equivalent interrogation rig; each principal actor runs a 16-hour FACS calibration session, and capture takes export as .usd blendshape stacks at 60 fps. The 28 principals get bespoke individually-scanned MetaHuman builds; remaining named cast and major NPCs use composed MetaHuman pieces.
• VO — recorded in-house at LA, London, and Tokyo studios plus 4 outsourced country-specific studios; 12 SKUs voiced (4 full principal-grade lipsync — en-US, fr, de, es-LATAM; 8 lipsync-light — en-UK, es-ES, it, pt-br, ja, ko, zh-Hans, zh-Hant), 4 SKUs text-only (ru, ar, pl, tr). The Sci-Fi player character is fully voiced for both genders across every dialogue branch (~38000 lines per gender).
• Composer — 3 composers, one per cell-cluster (urban/period; frontier/ hunter; sci-fi), each delivering original score; frontier alone takes ~90 minutes of period-authentic score per composer slot.
• Clearance — NIL clearance gates any real-person likeness; the IP-clearance manifest gates trademarked names, locations, and licensed music.

Loading, Splash, Tips, and Notifications#

The boot, transition, and notification surfaces.

• Splash — a boot sequence showing the build version, the studio logo, and IP-cleared third-party technology logos; skippable after first boot.
• Loading screens — cell-flavored art with rotating gameplay tips drawn from a per-cell tip pool; tips are localized and avoid spoilers for unreached content. Where streaming hides load time the loading screen still surfaces a progress indicator so a long install-chunk pull never looks like a hang.
• What's New — a "What's New" banner on the first launch after an update, summarizing patch and live-service changes; dismissible.
• Notifications — in-game toasts for friend activity, contract rotation, party invites, and live-service events, plus companion-app push notifications; notification categories are individually mutable, and toasts honor the Streamer Mode privacy mask.

Customer Support and Community Ambassadors#

The player-support and community-stewardship surface.

• Customer support — 24/7 support with a tier-1 live-chat front line and a tier-2 ticket queue for escalations (account, billing, technical, moderation appeals); ban and anti-cheat appeals route here from the companion app with a 7-day SLA.
• Community ambassadors — a volunteer program of moderators and curators who staff community report queues, curate featured workshop and gallery content, and seed help-channel answers; ambassadors operate under a conduct agreement and are not paid staff.
• Hall of Fame — cumulative recognition for the top-rated Mind Palace solves and top-rated workshop contributions, surfaced in-game and on the marketing site.

Balance Operations#

The public-transparency layer over competitive and economy balance, fed by telemetry and published through the balance-ledger service.

• Public weapon tier list — a maintained PvP weapon tier list reflecting current balance.
• Faction matchup chart — a Sci-Fi Capital Raid faction matchup chart for the esports community.
• Per-weapon damage tables — public per-weapon damage, range, and recoil tables so the community can verify balance against the shipping numbers.
• Balance ledger — every balance change (weapon stats, monster-contract economy, Dead-Eye reload curves, dialogue-wheel outcome weights, faction-rep gates) posts to a public audit log with the change, the rationale, and the effective date; hot-fixes that adjust balance appear here before or with the data push.

Balance changes ship out-of-band as data hot-fixes (features§"Patch, Hotfix, Quick-Resume, and Crash Recovery") so a correction does not wait on a binary release.

Character and Account Progression#

V5 progression runs on two tracks — per-character within a cell, and per-account across cells.

• Per-character progression — within a cell a character earns XP and spends it on cell-specific skill trees (Sci-Fi's 105-node Combat/Biotic/Tech trees, Hunter's 25-node sign trees, Dead-Eye tiers, melee and parkour unlocks) and acquires gear; progression is stored in that cell's save.
• Per-account progression — Bureau XP — the Cross-Continuum Bureau XP ledger accumulates across all five cells (weighted per significant action; high-magnitude moral-compass play earns faster) and advances a Bureau tier. Tiers unlock cross-cell rewards: Tier 1 photo mode in every cell, Tier 5 Mind Palace cross-era pairs, Tier 10 full companion-app sync, Tier 20 New Game+, Tier 30 cosmetic Bureau gear in every cell (arch§"Cross-Cell Persistence & Bureau XP"). Bureau XP is stored per account in Profile_<accountId>.json and follows cross-progression.
• Shared online hub progression — the Cross-Cell Online Persistent World keeps Bureau HQ as multiplayer hub on the same account progression layer: profile, cosmetics, Bureau XP, Mind Palace, codex, and live-event settlements are shared, while per-cell campaign branch state remains isolated.
• Codex — a per-cell encyclopedia (monsters, vehicles, factions, lore, characters) that auto-fills as the player encounters content; codex completion contributes to campaign completion percentage.

Map Lore, Signature Maps, and Weather#

Per-cell world structure and the dynamic weather and time-of-day layer.

Signature maps and lore:

• Urban — 16 districts, each with a distinct flavor (skid-row, downtown, beachside, suburb) driving its music, traffic mix, and ambient-encounter eligibility; ~140 km² Heist City plus the ~22 km² Street Triad world.
• Period — one authored 1947 city seen across three eras (1930s/47/68) via the V5PeriodAuth era-bundle swap; Made Man and Vice Squad share the geometry.
• Frontier — 5 biomes (high plains, redwoods, swamp/bayou, snow-line mountains, desert mesas), each with biome-specific wildlife and encounter pools.
• Sci-Fi — 32 authored systems with ~120 explorable bodies; per-system planetary detail (mineral hotspots, anomalies) is PCG-generated.
• Hunter — 4 regions (coastal duchy, northern wildlands, eastern marsh, southern plateau), each with a region-flavored monster set.

Day/night and weather:

• Day cycle — a 48-minute in-game day drives NPC schedules, lighting, and shop hours; period schedules follow era-correct work rhythms (arch§"NPC Schedule Architecture").
• Weather states — dry, light rain, heavy rain, snow, fog, and dust storm, with cell-appropriate variants (frontier dust storms, hunter blood-rain, sci-fi solar-flare). Weather is a World Partition data-layer variant.
• Gameplay effect — weather affects visibility, traction, NPC behavior (crowds thin in heavy rain), and sense-mode clue legibility; it is not purely cosmetic.

Rivals, Relationship Matrix, and Timeline#

The relationship and continuity scaffolding that ties V5's cast together.

• Rivals — each protagonist carries a list of 4-8 named rivals, each with an authored per-protagonist motivation; a rival recurs across that protagonist's arc and a rival arc resolves at a campaign beat. Rivals are tracked in the codex.
• Relationship matrix — a companion-to-companion slider matrix per cell; the matrix shifts on loyalty-conflict scenes and player choices, and drives companion banter, loyalty-conflict triggers, and end-game outcomes (features§"Squad of Companions + Loyalty Missions"). The frontier camp roster and the period family matrices use the same mechanism.
• Cross-cell timeline — an in-game timeline (and companion-app view) showing how each cell's narrative connects across eras through the Cross-Continuum Bureau, populated as the player makes cross-era Mind Palace deductions; it is the player-facing map of "The Vanishing Continuum" through-line.

Launch Readiness#

V5 launch readiness gates — every gate below must pass on the same green build before public launch (§90 holds the full list). A failed gate blocks launch; a gate failing for a single cell blocks that cell, not necessarily the whole title, except where the gate is title-wide.

• Content completeness — all 5 cells ship complete with no "coming soon" panel, no skeleton mode, and no half-built era; all advertised modes ship complete; the single-player offline path is validated for every cell.
• Localization — all 16 launch language packs locked (12 voiced + 4 text-only) and each passing its per-language localization-QA pass.
• Platform cert — all 9 platforms pass first-party certification, including the platform-specific cert-ban content checks.
• Compliance — GDPR DSAR/erasure, COPPA under-13, CCPA do-not-sell, and DSA moderation flows all tested; the legal/privacy/ratings compliance review signed off.
• Quality gates — every cell's feel-test suite passes on a green nightly Gauntlet build; the adversarial stub-scan returns zero hits; crash-free session rate exceeds 99.5% on the PS5 regression cohort; the per-platform memory budget holds on a 10-hour Gauntlet run; netcode passes packet-loss tolerance at 5% and 20%; the accessibility audit passes.
• Online — multiplayer matchmaking validated on every supported region at a simulated ping up to 80 ms.
• Cross-cell arc — the cross-cell Mind Palace deduction graph validated end-to-end with the cross-era main arc playable to all endings.
• Live-service — a 30-day day-of-launch live-service event scheduled and the public balance ledger live.

V5 Exit Criteria#

V5 is product-complete when every condition below holds simultaneously on a single shippable build:

• Every § in V5_TODOS.md is checked, verified one task at a time against the actual source.
• The adversarial stub-scan returns zero actionable hits across all V5 modules.
• The nightly Gauntlet automation run is green for 7 consecutive days.
• All 9 platforms pass first-party cert.
• All 16 language packs pass localization QA.
• The cross-cell Mind Palace deduction graph is validated end-to-end with the cross-era main arc playable to all endings.

Exit criteria are the standing bar for "done"; launch readiness is the point-in-time gate for "ready to ship to the public". A build may meet exit criteria before every launch-readiness operational item (event scheduling, marketing) is complete, but it may not launch before both are satisfied.