Star Citizen Alpha 3.13 Roadmap Updates!
there are some Changes and updates to the Star Citizen Alpha 3.13 Patch that’s planned for LIVE release at the end of March let’s take a look at what’s been delayed and pushed out and what’s new and been added.
Firstly we have some entirely new features for Alpha 3.13.
Mining sub-components, these will allow players to customize their lasers to suit specific jobs and encounters. For example, some will make mining easier, some will make it faster, and some will have great stat boosts at the cost of serious trade-offs elsewhere.
Shield Effects v2, improvements including the use of particles with signed distance fields to allow shields to more closely conform to the shape of the vehicle, allowing better visibility at distance, creating clearer visual cues that the shield is being damaged, and its overall health.
Reputation UI gives players insight into their reputation with the important NPCs and organizations they have interacted with. This will also include a total list of reputation ranks, including those that have been completed and the ones they’re actively working on.
We do have some bits that are not ready for 3.13 though and have such have been pushed to 3.14 – Due to priority being placed on the XenoThreat event in January, Missile Operator Mode, the Guidance & Control Rework AND Surrendering Features did not reach feature-complete status by the cutoff time. There is quite a bit of momentum on the development of these features, however, and this will allow them to be in a more polished state for their release. Fortunately it appears that it was nothing too major that got cut, although I was really looking forward to some improved missiles and dogfighting / combat balance there.
3.13 did have various features that have been now committed for the Patch:
- Object Push & Pull
- Mounted Guns
- Force Reactions
- New Asteroids – Stanton System
- Cave Entrances – Drive-In & Sinkhole
- Refinery Stations – Non-Commercial Overlays
- Vehicle Visual Degradation
- Vehicle Names and Serial Numbers
Beyond that there are some changes to later patches and the Progress tracker too:
Sliding – A higher priority was placed on actor performance in 2021, so a few of the actor features have shifted down the line to accommodate this. Sliding was originally due to start work in Q4 this year, but since it has now slid to early 2022.
For the Progress Tracker we now have a couple of other features they are working on this year:
Actor Status Tier 2 which looks at a variety of new elements such as hygiene, NPC status tracking, multiple bites, DNA integrity, medical insurance, cybernetic limbs and cloning.
Rundown Small Home Outpost Assets, basically a rundown version of a small home for AI to live and shelter in. They consist of a central hub and a few optional internal and external modules. They provide the basic necessities to support a small group of people for an indefinite amount of time.
Boom! That’s it 3.13 is around 4 weeks away and I am reasonably hype for it and any events that CI have planned. It’s possible we could get some more features or ships added or they might be secrets until release and some more features could slip if they became blockers for a release but I think the 3.13 patch is pretty lockdowned now… huh… Lockdown might be in the name for the patch… but we will talk about that SOON!