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Star Citizen Insider Alpha 3.7 – No More Hover Mode?!

Welcome to some more Star Citizen Insider looking and some of the Updates we have had this time on the next major PU Patch 3.7 coming at the end of September in some more detail. Looking at Hover Mode, Personal Inventories & Vanguard Variants.

Hover Mode is Gone, Long Live Proximity Assist – Changes & Hopefully improvement to Hover Mode are coming with 3.7 as well.

The helicopter aspects of hover mode have been removed. It wasn’t intuitive enough for what they wanted.

Now the closer you are to the ground the slower you will move.

The System dynamically adjusts your accerations to be more believable when in atmosphere and closer to the ground.

The goal of this change is to have the ship move slower as precisely rather than jerky and erratic when trying to land or flying close to terrain.

You can turn it off and on.

They are experimenting with having thrusters with reduced efficiency in atmosphere as well.

They hope that this will solve the issues that Hover Mode didn’t adequately resolve.

For me, on paper, this sounds like exactly what I wanted from Hover Mode in the first place.

I don’t want it to be overly fiddly or erratic, I want to be able to land and control my ship easily BUT I also don’t want ships to be able to entirely dominate planets and moons, if they want to strafe and fight ground installations then they have to slow down, well I suppose they don’t but they’d be incredibly accurate otherwise… zoom and they are gone. I didn’t want a single fighter to turn up and just be like GG outpost scrubs.

The other thing that Hover Mode made difficult was landing in hangars on planets that were of a similar size of your ship you were trying to land, without a holographic view of where you ship is compared to the ground it was more fiddly than it needed to be.

In atmosphere I want ships to have weight, for VTOL thrusters and mass to be important, I want atmospheric combat to be more dangerous than in space, I don’t want ships to feel like they are in space when in atmosphere.

Star Citizen Cannot have the most basic type of operations of a ship require too much skill, yes have a great skill ceiling for combat and maneuvers and systems management BUT the skill floor for landing and traversing terrain needs to be there so that a new pilot can come along and get involved… that is very much my opinion and you are entitled to disagree… though I hope you won’t xD

The Personal Commodity System coming with Patch Alpha 3.7 is the first stage and light version of a full physicalized inventory system with that you can mine and gather items and put those items onto your armor or backpack and all items you have will have to be stored or carried appropriately.

The Personal Commodity Inventory specifically focuses on FPS mineables, harvestables & commodities.

Players are going to be able to collect, mine or harvest items in FPS from a planet or location then return to their ship and unload their PCI into the ships cargo grid or storage there.

At this stage players will interact with this inventory by going into their personal inner thoughts and clicking the pip that appears (though I suspect there will be a more elegant solution as well as a hotkey). 

From this menu players will be able to drop individual items or store all current items in a cargo box which is then placed at your feet.

This cargo box can be moved and is detected by cargo grids so you can sell those items at trade kiosk.

Later they will expand the system to encompass all items but the PCI is the first step towards that.

CIG are experimenting with different paint schemes for the Vanguard Harbinger and Sentinel. The Exterior of all the ships is the same now, they made them have a modular central room that will be changeable in the future and different loadouts.

The Sentinel has an E-War Module / Hacking as it’s central room addition. Currently they are using temp displays but should change these in the future to be informative diegetic displays.

There is an illuminated glass display, inspired by gear they use on aircraft carriers IRL.

I am incredibly excited for more hacking, e-war and infowar gameplay.

The Harbinger has a torpedo room as it’s variant. Allowing you to monitor and see torpedos launch. They are still working on the mechanism or hatch for firing the torpedos, they want the whole launch process to be as viewable as possible from the interior.

There is 2 beds, washroom & food prep area in both of these.

The Vanguards hold a special place in my heart and they are also adding some more nose weapon customization the ships can elect, though we don’t have confirmation of when we are getting those options.