Star Citizen What Is So IMPORTANT About PHYSICAL INVENTORY?
huge changes are coming to Star Citizen with Physical & Local Inventories Features that are planned in 2021.
We had a new episode of Calling All Devs – Inventory Futures with core gameplay director Richard Tyrer AND I wanted to summarize what was talked about and put it a bit more in context.
The start of these new Inventory updates are planned for Alpha 3.14 the Q2 2021 patch for Star Citizen and then the next phase for Q4 2021 with Alpha 3.16 that would add some physicalization and lockers and more external containers with interactions.
Physicalized Inventory is a collection of a lot of gameplay features.
Currently the game has limited personal inventory… allowing you to access a move food, drink, harvestables and mineables.
HOWEVER items like weapons or flares can’t be stored in this way…
The next step for Personal Inventory is to have items and gear of all types be able to be stored in inventory and a UI for it.
External Inventory is another piece of the pie. It’s a container or storage that has it’s own inventory that you can place items in or loot and has it’s own UI too.
True Physical inventory is the step beyond this, having lockers or weapons racks and seeing each individual item (or at least some of them) stacked up and grabbable straight from the storage device.
Moving towards this CI are currently working on Local inventory, it’s a temporary solution for FPS Gear, Food, Drink, Armor as well as for habs and hangars. We’ll have have storage for our gear in habs, hangars or ships… this will be not physically represented at this stage BUT it will at least be storable and accessible AND you won’t be able to carry everything on your character, there are restrictions to the amount a storage container can contain.
But you could have storage at microTech/New Babbage Hangars for example for a lot of items… but this wouldn’t be shared with Lorville’s Hangars.
You’ll have to make meaningful choices in what you bring with you and what you store where. It’s a big step towards physical inventory without having to physicalize it yet.
If you are in area that has a local inventory (hangar, hab,ship) when you open up your personal inventory (i). This will bring up both on your screen and you can move items between the 2. They want to add tabs to this so you can access both ship and local or external inventories and move items between all of them… all drag and drop via the UI.
This could be seen as an evolution as the PMA (Personal Manager App) which was more of a short term solution.
You’ll be able to drag a new suit or armor onto your character to put it on.
These systems allow for looting of backpacks and gear more easily.
Asset Management and an Overview of where your items are is going to be heard to keep track of, so they are building the Asset Manager App. This will show you where all your items and ships are… think EvEOnline’s Asset Manager… this is super important to track everything but eventually will probably list fees associated with your storage and have some links to financial apps or information too.
Some Other bits that were mentioned:
All (at least most) ships should have some form of external storage.
Beyond this they want to add physical habs and hangars for even greater storage.
In the future you’ll be able to get NPCs to move things for you, outfit your ships, move cargo from the hangar to your ship etc…
Small items won’t be insurable at the moment at least.
They mentioned PvP Raiding of habs… but it was sort of a maybe thing… in the future we’ll work it out.
Backpacks/Storage will be limited by both weight and volume.
These are all steps towards True Physical Inventory but these pieces will evolve rather than be lost when they move to that, it’s an important step for Star Citizen and will with each iteration make huge changes in the way players… play!
And that’s it… Inventory Updates will be with us this year… and I am very much looking forward to them, we don’t know when we will have true physicalized inventories at this stage tho.