Star Citizen News – Fleet Week Hype & Alpha 3.13.1
Hello & Welcome to some more Star Citizen news for the week ending the 2nd of May 2021.
We have had quite a few cool things this week and some major announcements so let’s jump right in.
Star Citizen Newsletter – Fleet Week was announced during the week…
The UEE Navy and Tobin Center announced today that the 2951 Invictus Launch Week is coming to microTech in 3 weeks! From May 21 (from 4pm UTC/5pm BST), citizens can join the UEE Navy fleet as it travels through Stanton and even take a tour of an in-service military Javelin (the warhammer). Plus, rumors are this is the biggest Invictus fleet yet, so make your way to New Babbage, on microTech (as that’s where the expo hall is and you’ll be able to tryout a huge range of combat, military and potentially new ships).
The Star Citizen Twitter Tweeted out this…
I love cats! No… that’s not the take away it’s a Bengal Carrier… see… because the cat is a Bengal Cat and this Space Pod Backpack it’s in is a carrier!
Hints for Fleet Week? Well they did say Carriers as part of the Fleet… so maybe…
CI did also say there plan is to have the Hercules & Tonk ready for Fleet week and available to try for free along with all the other ships on show!
The Freefly starts the day after on the 22nd and it all runs until June 1st for the main event but the FreeFly actually ends on the 3rd. You can expect a load of ship sales too!
There is a Star Citizen Alpha 3.13.1 Patch on the OPEN PTU at the moment, with
- 1 vs 1 Duel for AC
- PVE Bounty Updates
- And various major bug fixes
Assumedly the patch is prepping for Fleet Week.
Also with that in mind there is Server, Backend and Database Maintenance planned for Monday 3am UTC… pretty much everything including the website will be down for approximately 4 hours… the hope here is that a mixture of that 3.13.1 patch, hotfixes and this maintenance can get the instability of 3.13 under control and put the game in a good place ready for Fleet Week.
Inside Star Citizen showed off various new armors that CI are working on a heat suit, the greycat utility armor and an unnamed armour that will have extra pieces if you wear it as part of a set.
We saw more of Orison the Crusader landing zone with a workers and maintenance area as well as the main tour centre.
Star Citizen: Calling All Devs this week was of a Theaters of War Update, I haven’t covered a summary else where so I’ll do a quick highlights here now:
ToW is a combined arms merging of all the action parts of Star Citizen into a more Arcade Quick Game as a bridge for AC, SM and the PU.
From a Developer POV that this would allow for rapid iteration and balancing for combat specific gameplay.
From a Player POV you’d be able to quickly jump in and get action, without having the travel time and immersion of the PU… instead BOOM you are in… also you don’t risk your character in ToW, where in Star Citizen’s PU you could eventually die…
The Missions in ToW are based on Historic Events and Battles from the Games Lore.
FireSprite have 10 People dedicated from their studio working with CIG teams on ToW.
This was a time and skill thing, as it would of taken CI a lot longer to hire a dedicated team for ToW internally, outsourcing it BUT working with them seems like a good fit.
Apparently this team’s development on ToW accounts for around 1.6% of the games budget, that said it’s a little hard to quantify beyond that.
The updates from the recent Feedback on ToW are being implemented to complete out the 1st Map and Scenario for Crossroads of Crime. They need some cinematic work to finish this out and then it’s close to being ready. Tho no hard dates are given.
The 2nd Scenario is being worked on too and it’s more ship combat focused.
They want to make sure that combat is blended throughout ToW so you have a bit of infantry, ship, vehicle, defense, assault and support gameplay all at the same time.
The choice to delay ToW as the engine was not developed enough to have the performance they wanted… 20 FPS is not enough for a fast paced shooter BUT they also needed various netcode work done too.
There has been a huge amount of regular in game testing for tow from the studios.
Jump Point! Looks at Merlin Docking, what goes into visuals of corporations, the development history of the Gladiator bomber and a look at a small scale armor manufacturer.
May’s Sub Flair appears to be Insect Helmets which look very much like Turians from Mass Effect to me.
And that’s it for the news this week…
I’ll draw April’s Giveaway winner and update the outro Tuesday… It’s a Bank Holiday Weekend so I am being a bit lazy…
For May we are going to be giving away a Hercules Starlifter
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