Star Citizen Mission Report – 2016.09.06
Tonight I decided to try out some Arena Commander as I had heard it received some development love with the 2.5 PTU release. I was not misled. There wasn’t much about Arena Commander patches/fixes/updates in the 2.5.0 patch notes so we’ll have to fly by the seat of our pants on this one.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t keep up 100% on Star Citizen development nor do I claim to. If there was a patch note that covers something I noticed tonight from pre-2.5.0 PTU, then I’m sorry and please let me know when/where it was actually patched and I’ll update accordingly. Thanks.
First off, it runs much better. This change is most likely due to some of the optimization work the development team has been working on for the overall project. Being that the same engine is used for Arena Commander as Crusader, I’m sure that this is the case. I was able to up my graphics settings a bit without sacrificing smooth gameplay.
A few annoying bugs have been removed. The worst of which was the glitch that caused defeated enemy ships to fly off on their last vector at high speeds still in an undestroyed state. Previously, once a target reached a “destroyed” state, it would fly off into oblivion at a high rate of speed. It was technically destroyed and would become destroyed eventually but a lot of players would chase after said targets, which would become frustrating. Sometimes the ships speeding off would crash into an asteroid or out of bounds and the player that technically did the damage to get the kill would get no credit because the environment made the kill instead. I’m glad that one is gone.
I still saw a few bugs with some ships and such, mostly issues related to the ship itself and not Arena Commander.
I also noticed in an earlier match tonight that the effect of the Rattler II cluster missile appears to have been changed. I can’t be for certain yet, but it appears that the actual cluster missiles are no longer target seeking and just dumb-fire missiles. This may be good against larger and slower ships, but they are no longer ideal for targeting more agile ships, such as the Vanduul fighters in Vanduul Swarm. I’ll have to update my Gladius’s loadout with a different missile solution.
I want to say that weapon overheating dynamics were adjusted a bit. I noticed much better performance and cooling rate on my weapon systems, specially on my Hornet.
Overall, not a bad experience. As usually I use Arena Commander to get myself some actual combat flight hours in. I use that time to test my loadouts (see the video attached to this post above and you’ll see my awesome Hornet loadout that is absolutely devastating). I’ll have to do some more honing in the coming weeks. Feel free to join me anytime!