Realistic Star Citizen Update – February 18th, 2018
End of the week update time.
I’m not going to lie, it took me two days to write this up, I started drinking a few minutes into this to dull the pain of the mind-numbing bullshit on display this week and even that wasn’t enough so I just walked off and only started again because it’s snowing outside and my plans for the day are scrubbed, so I may as well wrap up this up.
Around the Verse: The Vulcan Hello – It’s a nerd joke because that’s the title of one the Star Trek Discovery episodes.
Video here.
Did you know CIG has a new ship for sale, because CIG sure as hell wants you to know they have a ship for sale!
The first half of this show is basically an infomercial about the new ship CIG is selling.
It’s a drone based refuel, repair, and rearm ship. About $200-ish, price depends on if you super-pre-buy, or regular pre-buy, addon skins depending on package.
There’s some useful info in this show however; it appears that CIG is still perusing the damage model where parts of the ship can be broken off at some level, your guess is as good as any as to when that will occur.
There’s also changes to atmospheric hovering that will cause ships thrusters to overheat if they attempt to just sit in hover mode forever (some ships will have extended VTOL capabilities though), CIG just need to actually implement heat though…
Some other info buried in there about drones and other little tidbits but overall the show really is just a giant advert.
Oh there’s also some pretty pictures of some ships that are getting remodelled.
Reverse the Verse – The show that made Crau start drinking and then just give up on this post and walk away.
This show starts oh so well, with the host trying to sell CIG’s latest ship and talking about all the cool addons you’ll get for ordering early.
It only gets better from there as CIG’s Lead Systems Designer and Live Game Director start talking…
I walked from this show mid way through because the interview has the developer repeatedly overhype their plans and then reveal what they’re actually releasing for the foreseeable future.
–Mining–
The systems designer starts out talking about how grand the mining mechanics are, won’t be like other games, has amazing gameplay loops with other professions, is engaging, and blah blah blah.
It goes on for a good few minutes.
And then after all that they decide to detail what is actually getting released in a few months…
You get a “laser beam” and you shoot it at rocks, it mines minerals for you, and you have to keep the “beam power” from going too high or falling too low, minerals in the rock (aka: random noise) will cause the beam to fluctuate outside the optimal zone so you’ll need to be there to tune the beam.
Well that just all sounds so innovative, I totally haven’t seen that anywhere before, I’m glad CIG took that extra year since the originally slated 2017 release of mining to make sure that the public outing of mining would so well represent the repeatedly stated vision they have for it.
The next “tiers” of mining, to enter development Soon™, will focus on hazards during mining and the stuff that CIG was actually promoting just before detailing the reduced version that will see implementation.
Later in the interview it’s said that one of the developers doesn’t want to pursue the voxel tech that would have seen player mining burrowing into objects, not sure if that means it’s officially dead or just that the guy doesn’t want to do it.
–Salvaging–
Same as above, goes over all the future gameplay, turns out all that’s coming for the near future is basically hull mining.
Not that “Hull Mining” doesn’t sound awesome but it appears all you’ll be doing is scrapping the hull for minerals.
But don’t worry guys, totally just the first pass implementation, they’ll build on it later.
I mention that because the CIG guys actually get a bit defensive talking about for some strange reason people keep on getting upset about the weak first pass implementations, y’know the ones that the game still has hanging around years later…
–NPCs/AI–
SC is going to have a sort of RTS-like component where you can queue up commands through the interface, NPCs and players will then receive those commands, AI’s may or may not follow their commands based on their skills and virtual personalities.
NPC’s will care about beds, showers, cyber-pooping on your ships cyber-toilet, food quality and other factors on the ship.
Where is CIG actually at?
They’re just starting work on being able to hire NPCs and currently their main focus in on the skills and roles that a player would be hiring that NPC for.
So basically they’re at preliminary system design… not surprising seeing as how the current 3.0 NPC/AI can only just walk across a room without glitching out.
–Medical Gameplay–
Pass on this question, basically no feedback because it’s “early days”…
–Exploration & Travel–
“Early days” again and only “high level” discussions have occurred about long range scanning.
Has some conceptual plans but not much else.
The big change here is that it sounds near certain there will no longer be free warping with no destination, the developers quite positively state that they don’t intend for players to be able to warp without a destination target.
There’s some talk about conditions in which they would allow it back in but as of now it sounds like free warp around the star system is being removed and the return of it is not likely, this is not a temporary thing, the removal is intended to be permanent as of this time.
Really glad CIG spent all that time doing the 64-bit conversion, putting large scale star systems together, all so we could end up with Eve’s warp/exploration system.
–Ship Module Repair–
This is in reference to the opening of service hatches inside the vehicle to conduct repairs on the ships systems inside.
There’s some technical challenges surrounding this and there are other issues taking a higher priority over this.
They want it Soon™, but not Soon™ enough that it’s seeing current work done on it versus other mechanics.
This is despite the fact that it is seemingly on the features list for 2018, but as is becoming a running theme with this post CIG seems good at talking about features, not actually working on them.
–Module Tuning & Upgrades–
On the drawing board, had some discussions, 5-10% upgrade limit envisioned, not much else.
There’s some other stuff but this is a long enough post, watch the video if you want more banter about hypothetical gameplay.
Production Schedule Update
Some ship and FPS weapons got moved up from later patches but that’s about it for schedule changes.
There was a new beacon type added to signal for repairs but that’s nothing astonishing as it’s in Q2 with all the other beacon types.
I’m going to note it here because this isn’t something I’ve bothered tracking, there’s some commentary from the Reddit community that the Q1 patch has seen its percentage completion on the page rising more from removal of tasks rather than completion of features.
It does look like some features are a ways off for a patch that’s due in a month, but I’m at the limit of time I’m going to put into giving a shit about this so if anyone else cares have at it.
CIG Grows to 475 Employees
Article here.
The Reddit thread contains a number of jokes, mostly about how with that kind of manpower maybe CIG can hit Beta in the early 2020s.