Star Citizen Where Is Theatres of War?
The Star Citizen Imperator Elections are over as far as voting is concerned, we will know the outcome on the 1st of November.
It also appears that the IAE is planned for the 20th November running until the 2nd December 2020.
In the mean time while you keep the hype or annoyance for that event inside we have some dev responses on Cargo Missions/Hauling as well as Theatres of War and where is it?!
There was a Reddit Thread with some Cargo Questions in that that were answered, stemming from Cargo missions being dumbed down and changed recently.
Koaku CIG Live Designer responded on Reddit
I’m one of the Devs who built the new delivery stuff! Hope you are enjoying it and as always feedback is welcome and loved.
We Completely rebuilt our delivery system from the ground up to be a lot more reliable and our plans are to try and ensure a more real world and sensible logistic feeling with our missions.
We felt like taking a singular box from ArcCrop to Microtech didn’t make logistical sense for company providing the mission.
As I can not confirm what we are wanting to do we have some interesting ideas we are trying out to ensure delivery make sense, that people playing the delivery role feel apart of a bigger Process and of course that people have fun doing it!
There was a Follow Up Question to Koaku talking about the frustration of server crashes and bugs causing cargo missions & hauling to be overly erratic and dangerous at least finicially.
I understand your frustration by this issue, but as prior the team have spoken on this the reason we don’t do this is because we don’t build the content around the glitches and crashes we build it as we want it for the when we have all bugs and crashes ironed out. If we added content we didn’t want to work in a specific way purely because of a crash we would have a lot more to keep track of and revert when it came to everything working as should.
There was then the suggestion of having higher payouts for cargo missions and lots of different values / options for cargos.
Taking more boxes for more pay-out would cross territories onto the Hauling aspect/idea, with the prices of the current mission we have to look at this on the global scale and the Economy team have to say if a price change is sensible, with our constantly evolving and developing game we are always re-assessing these.
Over on Spectrum there was a thread – Theaters of War before the new year?
Originally slated for early this year and then it just sort of disappeared I guess, but they must be quietly working on it and there must be progress, right?
Do you guys think there’s any chance we get TOW before the end of the year? This game mode could actually keep me busy for a good while as everything else develops.
Duncan CIG Responded on Spectrum
A lot of progress has been made! And it is awesome! Its not at the point we’re ready to release yet but… soon…tm
– in all seriousness the team have been doing a fantastic job, performance, visuals and mechanics have came a long way since our last Evocati test run. We got a lot of feedback from that and it takes time to make those changes. We still have multiple playtests every week that help us make constant improvements to its gameplay, what I can tell you is the feedback from the other teams coming to our large playtests has been extremely positive! Everyone here’s super excited to get it out but as Sean/Rich mentioned its only a small team working on this mode so you’ll have to be patient!
Even though its not publicly released ToW has been a fantastic tool to not only help balance (or introduce new) vehicles/guns but to help improve performance for the overall game. I’m definitely not the person to drop a release date but rest assured its certainly not ‘Sataballed’
There was a follow up question – Did you add AI npcs to TOW ?
Hmmmm probably not in the way that you’re thinking… PvE currently isn’t planned for ToW. We have other PvE content in-mind (for Arena Commander & Star Marine) but right now the AI team are extremely busy with S42 & improvements to PU AI, which in-turn will help us when we do reach a point we’re ready to experiment with them. Right now the focus is on the PvP experience.
Related to that there was another thread on Spectrum Star marine completely broken:
There’s a small for consistent loyal fanbase all trying to compete to get #1 on the leaderboards. Which have been spotty at best but 100% non functioning in 3.11
Duncan CIG Responded Again:
We’ve been super hard at work on Theaters of War, which has unfortunately meant AC/SM has feel off a little as testing is focused on ToW. My next sprint is dedicated to AC/SM stability so hopefully we can get it back to normal soon. We’re also tracking the match cycling issue which i’ve seen mentioned a bunch, we’re doing a lot of testing to fix this one as its super hard to figure out exactly whats going wrong.
Sorry for all the problems that popped up in the latest patches, we’re trying to adjust and better balance QA between AC/SM and ToW as we continue to develop that so hopefully as of 3.12 you shouldn’t see the modes breaking every 2nd patch
There was a Followup on theatres of war recalling that the Devs had said it wouldn’t require much dev time and we will get it sooner than later…
Duncan Responded:
It definitely does not need much dev time, when you consider the team size the total hours spent is far less than the hundreds of devs that are focused on the PU or Squadron 42. Evocati did get to play it for two separate playtest weekends shortly after Fleet Week which has given us plenty of feedback to work off of. Releasing it before those issues are addressed wouldn’t make any sense and would just lead to us getting the feedback we already know about. Soon we’ll be ready for a new wave of external testing and we’ll move forward based on that feedback, as we did back in June/July.