What To Look Forward To Fleet Week, Nine Tails Lockdown & 3.13.x
Star Citizen Alpha 3.13’s New Update is pretty light on content BUT there is more going on with the Patch Cycle… so what have we got to look forward to over the next couple of months?
At the end of May we have Fleet Week this is one of the most major yearly events for Cloud Imperium and Star Citizen since last year anyway. Based on last years event you can expect:
The main focus of fleet week is military / combat ships, support ships and recruitment.
This is underlined with an in game expo, this year supposedly focused around microTech and New Babbage, you’ll be able to visit the Expo Hall there by taking the train network there. Once at location every day or two a new ship manufacturer or manufacturers will take over and have their various ships on display and you’ll be able to try as many as you want for free.
There is normally a FreeFly Event giving anyone the ability to try Star Citizen for Free, throughout the expected 10 day event.
It’s also likely that this will come with some form of Referral scheme – recruit some people get some ships type deal.
Last year also had the UEE Navy flying around In Game as part of the Event… kind of as a parade with fireworks going off as they flew past major space stations and docked with them.
Last year’s Fleet Week was infact one of the best experiences I have had in Star Citizen.
As we were able to steal the Navy Ships… and it was the first time we had seen the Javelin and Idris moving around and fighting in game… and people fought them and blew them up… it was glorious… tho lots of it was unintended and some was patched out… I love the things that you can do in game that the devs don’t intend.
Also something I know is that CI had a lot planned for last year that wasn’t ready… they wanted to have flybys of the fleet planetside and more going on.
Star Citizen is a lot more developed and better prepped for Events like this since 3.12 and XenoThreat that brought Dynamic Event Tech… we could very much see a much more developed event this year.
A massive part of the hype for the event and Star Citizen Monetization model are the Ship Sales at Fleet Week, these should parrot the current manufacturer that’s displaying their ships in the expo with purchasable ships on the RSI Website… and as I said this should be combat, military and support ships/vehicles.
Along with that we can expect some New Ships – Potentially Straight to flyable AND/OR Concept ones… 5 second Spoiler… SCLeaks have talked about the possibility of a Crusader StarBomber…
There could be some other new parts to Fleet Week this time and I am extremely excited for it!
There are 3.13.x Patch or Patches planned one of them at least is likely to come at the same time as fleet week but there is various content that was missing from 3.13.0 Initial Live Build but is planned to turn up during the 3.13 before the end of June.
The Nova Tonk – It’s a large main battle tank and the most powerful ground vehicle that’s currently planned for the game currently… that we know about anyway… tho I suppose it’s arguable that the right vehicle for the right job or situation is “better”. We know it will take multiple smaller vehicles to threaten one too. We do have some new ground gameplay in 3.13 BUT I am not sure if it’s enough to make this battle tank more useful than just something cool to spawn and look at… at the moment anyway.
To help carry such large vehicles we have the Hercules Starlifter C2 and it’s more armored military variant the M2. These are large cargo hauling vessels suitable for carrying massive vehicles like the tank planetside. In fact they are carry upto 2 BUT you can also use it for a load of smaller vehicles OR as a cargo ship or a mixture of both.
Expect these to be highly adopted by players that want to do trade that involves landing on a planet or moon as they should be a bit sturdier and more suited for atmosphere than say the Caterpillar.
We have the bigger version of docking – Ship to Station Docking allowing larger ships to be spawned and dock with Space Stations in game and make use of their facilities. Thing like the Hull-C need this before they can be put in game BUT it allows for a lot more gameplay to open up for larger ships…
Things like cargo, local inventory and various wider gameplay needs this!
Another less touted feature that should turn up is Spawn Closets. This allows NPCs to spawn and despawn out of sight in a room or around a corner that isn’t accessible by players. This allows for security forces at LZs and Space Stations, reinforcements to be spawned at outposts and for something more immersive than we currently have.
These Features could also potentially come with some more gameplay and missions associated with them but we haven’t had CI confirm anything yet.
These patches also typically contain bug fixes and balance tweaks.
Nine Tails Lockdown AND Other Events… CI have talked about the Nine Tails Lockdown as a XenoThreat like major event that will be one of their new dynamic events. We know that CI have another 8 – 10 events planned for this year and we can assume things like Fleet Week, CitizenCon and IAE are some of them along with the Nine Tails Lockdown.
We don’t know if there will be another event with 3.13 cycle beyond Fleet Week BUT it’s very possible we could see one.
What we know of the Nine Tails Lockdown is that we are expecting areas of the Stanton System to get taken over by the Nine Tails pirates and require players to get together and defeat a fleet. Expect Space Stations to get affectively taken over by them until players turn up to deal with them things like that… that is just an assumption rather than a confirmation tho.
3.13 could have some extra bits and pieces, new ships, other events, new gameplay and competitions too… the next major patch is 3.14 and that’s currently planned for the end of June… we will see the PTU phase for that typically mid June with the target of a live build at the end of that Month tho as we saw with 3.13 LIVE they will delay the patch if they require more work… in 3.13s case that was around 3 weeks.