Looking Forward To Star Citizen Alpha 3.14 – Gas Giant & Medical Gameplay

Welcome Star Citizien What’s Next After Star Citizen Alpha 3.13’s Release? Roll on Alpha 3.14… well yes and we will look at a quick breakdown of the plans for that patch in a moment BUT we do also know that there will be some.

3.13.x Patches, we are expecting the Hercules C2 & M2 as part of that.

Fleet Week the major sale and in game event, with a freefly and loads of combat ships is coming at the end of May as Part of the 3.13 cycle and we have heard of the Nine Tails Lockdown which will be a XenoThreat type event… well a little more evolved and refined at that might be coming in the patch at somepoint too.

Beyond that tho Star Citizen Alpha 3.14 is the Q2 2021 Patch expected to go live at the end of June ending the 3.13 cycle.

The 3.14 Patch Cycle roughly runs from July – End September / Mid October.

So What’s In Alpha 3.14? Well we have the Roadmap Release View that shows us each of the features planned with around a 70% confidence for each… that means that some of them well get moved or delayed…

Crusader as an actual Location, bringing the first full Gas Giant to the Game. This is supposed to have gameplay and POI around here as well.

 This beautiful-yet-dangerous gas giant is home to the Orison landing zone which is also included in this release, a picturesque city floating on orbital latticework BUT it’s only part of the City, we’ve seen the Commercial Platform and we should have Habs, Social Areas like the Voyager Bar, some shops and various areas of this floating garden city.

However Orison General and some other parts of the Landing Zone are not in yet and are currently planned to be there in Alpha 3.??. This will add the hospital, a proper ship shop and more.

I am expecting the MSR and Hercules C2 and M2 to be available at Orison in 3.14… however it is possible they are waiting for the V2 of the landing zone which is currently planned for 3.16 end of year patch. If that’s the case then I would expect it to be available to rent from the LZ before then.

Quite a big thing for me at least is Vehicle Module Swapping… Modularity, this will start with the Retaliator which currently only has it’s Torp Modules… However this should expand it to have some of it’s other modules that you can swap out in the VMA… The expected modules are a Living Area, Cargo Module and Drop Ship Module.

As part of this they are also able to specify vehicle setup at run time in SQ42… which is important… potentially that’s also useful for loadouts for ships being spawned for the Quantum System when they physicallize NPCs.

You may have thought that SDF Shields were in game already and they are for a couple of ships however 3.14 plans to overhaul all ships and appropriate vehicles with the new tech which has shields looking better, conforming to hulls, removing issues with shield holes and having damage signified with colors going from blue to red.

What… there is another Constellation Variant coming out?! Finally the Taurus the cut down, cargo focused version of the Connies is turning up… maybe… it’s been repeatedly pushed back and deprioritized for years. However we’ve now seen some of it’s new interior… also CI have said they may take a look at the struts on the other connies… so we might have a better cockpit for the ships in the future.

There is a lot of medical gameplay planned for here:

Healing T0 – Includes all back-end tasks related to the initial implementation of the Healing feature.

NPC Healing – Enables players to heal other players and NPCs. This will allow players to use items with healing properties, such as the MedPen, on other player characters and NPCs.

There are new medical tools both a module for the multitool for basic healing and a more advanced dedicated Curelife Medical Tool for deeper healing typically being used by actual medics.

We know that CI are working towards hospitals and clinics in game, they have been building out one at microTech, there is new hope on Lorville… it’s possible we will see these locations or some of them open up here too.

Expect these features all to combine into something that would be considered a solid first iteration Healing and Medical Mechanics. We are most likely going to see changes and updates to the mobiGlas and Player Status System at this stage too at least in terms of UI and additional statuses.

We have some extremely long awaited and important Scanning/Radar Updates

There is an improved signature system that supports much greater distances and the dampening of signatures by environmental interference and larger entities.

Radar is used to passively locate and track contacts, and display their whereabouts to the player. Scanning is used to obtain information about a specific entity. Ping actively finds additional contacts, or highlights volumes of space to investigate weak signatures, both of which are displayed via the radar and its AR HUD elements. This is all seeing improvements.

I suspect this will lead to loads of locational based gameplay, exploration, bounty hunter tracking, stealth scanning down POI… and more in the future BUT also in 3.14 there is the FPS on foot & ground vehicle version of Radar & Scanning that can be used!

Weapon Charge/Drain T0, I think this will require some weapons and items to charge somewhere OR over time.

Actor Feature – Physical Inventory recently renamed Personal Inventory

When implemented, players will physically store weapons, gadgets, consumables, healing items, and more on their person and in vehicles via backpacks, pockets, and containers. This utilizes the new iCache for persistence wherever players travel.

They are working towards local inventories that can be interacted with at Landing Zones, in Habs, and on Ships that will allow you to sort and store items.

Later this year you can expect to see more physicalization of items and deeper storage too.

As part of deeper law and Bounty Hunting Gameplay – Law System v2: Surrender

This allows players to be arrested without losing their life, they will be able to surrender by coming to a halt and powering down their ships when ordered to by security. Security will halt their attack and arrest criminal players (and impound the ship if owned by a criminal).

The long awaited Missile Updates are here after being moved from 3.14 along with the Surrender Feature.

Missiles will now be controlled under a dedicated missile operator mode, which gives players the option to select and fire specific missiles while operating in ships that allow for different types of missiles and torpedoes.

ALSO – Converts missiles to use the IFCS guidance and control systems. This will improve missile performance and tracking ability, enabling greater control over general missile behaviors.

More indepth Hacking – All back-end tech tasks related to creating the first pass of the hacking feature. When implemented in-game this feature will be used to access systems and areas that have been previously closed to the player. The hacking process will be represented via a minigame that is displayed on the player’s HUD visor.

Part of engine, icache and general optimization they are doing things like Updating XML vehicle data to be stored in a new optimized location and format.

We are expecting various other optimizations and bug fixes too.

Expect to see more optimizations, visual improvements and engine updates as they move towards the Gen12 Render, icache, Server Meshing etc…

The economy of the game will keep getting a little tweak too

You might see some new missions that make use of these new mechanics.

Cloud Imperium have various Events (like XenoThreat) Planned through out the year and you are likely going to get 1 or 2 through the 3.14 patch cycle.

We might see some straight to flyable ships or vehicles that will be revealed at the launch of the patch.

We know that CI have 8-10 events planned for the year and that means it’s likely that 1-2 events will fall in the 3.14 patch cycle… but we don’t know what those events will be for 3.14… the Nine Tails Lockdown seems likely IF it wasn’t part of 3.13’s cycle…

There could well be other features that turn up for the patch as well… and every couple of months I update the videos on each of the patch cycles so you can know the latest plans.

Boom… that’s what we know about Alpha 3.14 and what’s next after 3.13!