Star Citizen News – Alpha 3.6.2, New Concept & ISC Complaints
Welcome to some more Star Citizen News, a little late this time as I was away for the weekend. We have a new PTU Patch, the 890 Jump, a New Concept Ship & a poorly received Inside Star Citizen all to talk about today.
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Alpha 3.6.2 is out to Wave 1 PTU meaning that Concierge, RSI Subs & Evocati all have access to the newest test patch.
It is almost entirely focused on adding the 890 Jump to the game.
They have reworked XL Pads & added two more XL hangars to Lorville & Area18 to accommodate the 890 and Reclaimer. These locations are the only places you can spawn the 890 or Reclaimer and store it. There will be more in the future though.
There are Various performance optimizations.
As there are a limited number of pads available to spawn a ship of the 890s size and it will be a slightly unusual situation to have everyone on a server attempting to spawn such as large ship at once, they do expect bottenecks. They want players to crew up as much as possible. There are some known issues.
- They expect some issues with getting to the bridge and taking off in time
- The 890j is missing some of its exterior LODs.
- The battlebridge currently lacks pilot remote control.
Currently the Ship Rental Feature isn’t in 3.6.2 yet and is still waiting on 1 task to be completed and is the last thing that we are aware that the 3.6 branch is listed as having… I don’t know if this is still planned in the 3.6.2 patch or if it’s getting pushed to 3.6.3 or event 3.7?
With that in mind let’s take a Look at the Roadmap.
For Alpha 3.7 and the end of September, many new tasks have been added to the Space Station Interiors that will now need to be completed.
Bartender Social AI is now almost completed by task, this will see bartenders and customers have better interactions and the Bartender have more animations, actions and be significantly more immersive being able to get you one of a variety of drinks and actually look to be working at at bar.
The Harbinger & Sentinel Vanguard Variants have seen some work completed. It’s expected that the Vanguards will get additional nose weapon options at this stage too.
There was a little progress on the Kronig FL-33 Laser Cannon and FPS Salvo Frag Pistol.
Alpha 3.8 (end of year patch) just saw a tiny bit of progress on New Babbage, the microTech landing zone last week. Alpha 3.9 didn’t see any visible change.
For the Newsletter Sneak Peek this weeks is at various posters and adverts that are planned for Rest Stop Space Stations Additions.
CitizenCon 2949 Digital Goodies Packs went on sale.
These allow you to support the costs of the CitizenCon Event & Game Developments as well as snagging some in game loot an in-game full armor set, in-game ship plushie (make and model TBA), in-game decorative telescope and CitizenCon trophy.
It’s quite pricey at $15, with last years being $10 but with only 3 items being a knife, duster coat and 2948 trophy.
There was a Concierge Event in Frankfurt where some various backers were there was some Q&As, lots of information and chatting with Devs, including Chris Roberts.
I’ll get a break down of some of the info that was talked about at that event as a separate video BUT also there was a new Concept Ship that’s announced at that event and has since gone on sale the Aegis Nautilus.
I’ll get a full breakdown of that ship and sale too BUT it’s available from $675 so it’s an expensive one and is an Aegis Minelayer & Sweeper Ship that can deploy mines, drones, sentry turrets. It’s a bit bigger than the Hammerhead and is suitable for around 8 crew.
There is a mini game associated with the sale on the RSI website too having you trying to find the enemy “stash” before they find yours while moving around a board laying and avoiding mines. There are 2 forum badges and a mystery reward up for grabs for playing the game.
There was a short Inside Star Citizen focused on as was only about QA, showing some additional insight to their processes and difficulties in testing and helping fix the game and get new features triaged for each build. They try to get each Alpha build to be functional & enjoyable without crashes for at least a couple of hours on a server.
It was unfortunately an episode poorly received by the community with the worst like ratio CIG have had on a video 2k dislike to only 1.5k likes, I believe mainly because it wasn’t showing anything new & was far too short, in what is kind of the CIG premiere weekly news and development updates show. QA has been shown off before and it was reasonably generic stuff. DON’T GET ME WRONG I THINK the QA department DO AMAZING WORK, I totally respect their role that they play in the game’s development. I don’t think there was any criticism of them that I saw JUST that Inside Star Citizen should be longer and more on target which should be showing us new stuff for the next major patch and conveying news and cool features as well as better representing voluntary sub money that helps make it.
It’s possible the show was short and empty because of CitizenCon, GamesCom, getting 3.6.2 to PTU and the Aegis Concierge event & Disco’s Birthday (Disco Landon / Jared is in charge of CIG’s Subscriber Perks and this Video Content) BUT that has not been communicated and really isn’t much of an excuse anyway. I am hoping that CIG will git gud after this with it’s video content… more, not less, please?
Disco did also say “I do think we’re about due for another overall “All About Spaceships” episode. Obviously scheduling and availability will determine when we can do that next, but I’ll work towards it.”
Star Citizen LIVE toured the 890 Jump, I already have a tour of the ship up BUT I shall do a more focused break down of it’s features, systems, Gameplay and FAQs as well.
You can expect a round up of Aegis Concierge Event and more importantly all of the info people gleaned about plans for SSOCS and game features in the short term.
I’ll get a separate video on the Aegis Nautilus up shortly as well!
And checkout a 3.6.2 State of the Game when appropriate too.