Star Citizen 3.14 State Of The PTU

Star Citizen Alpha 3.14 is in Open PTU and looks to be going out to Live Shortly… my guess, for this weekend. Tho it will depend on a few things… let’s take a look at the latest patch and what’s happening on those test servers.

The new power and combat balance is quite different than previous SC patches… it won’t take you too long to learn it and get reasonably affective with the new systems tho.

But I very much like the extra control of being able to put more power to shields, boost or lasers and it actually have a tangible important difference.

I am really enjoying combat. Small ships and especially light fighters can die pretty quickly and larger ships take a pounding.

Manned Turrets & Multicrew ships are extremely effective compared to what they used to be.

Ballistics are still a little too limited for me in ammo capacity but it’s hard to argue with their damage.

Balance still needs work but it’s certainly getting there… CI have also said that they will be balancing well past 3.14 LIVE.

Some of the Desync problems that I have had with Star Citizen are fixed… others still persist. CI are very much trying to track down these issues and resolve them as well as possible for the live build… however some of that desync isn’t going to be fixable until we have things like Server Meshing / a Network overhaul BUT hopefully they will get something in place for LIVE to make the game fun a playable in PvP Dogfights… and when I am doing FPS combat with buddies… stuff heavily desyncing there is lame!

Frame rates seem to have improved in certain areas and the servers are pretty stable in the latest build for the few hours I played HOWEVER I have seen people talking about stability issues and not being able to get out of their habs OR go 15 mins without a crash SO… mileage may vary… that’s kind of expected in a PTU Patch tho.

Mission accessibility seems pretty solid and all of the gameplay loops worked fine… mining, cargo to some extent, bounty hunting, a good amount of combat missions… they all seem functional… which is good.

There have been various play tests for the Dynamic Events, XenoThreat and NineTails… to be honest all they really needed to sort out were some more minor bugs as well as a problem with the Cargo timers for XenoThreat and getting criminal ratings for fighting the criminals… thats… pretty annoying that one… should be fixed now tho!

I am unsure whether CI need more testing of that before 3.14 goes LIVE… tho they a couple of days left if it does need more love.

So the latest Patch is 3.14.0o so let’s take a look at it’s additions and other issues that still remain.

It had more of a Ship & Combat Polish Pass – Reduced overheating across all thrusters. Adjusted shield absorption scaling for all damage types. Fixed heat issues with some energy weapons. Tweaked Hurricane Health Points. Updated shield regen on MSR and some drop ships, it also appears that they updated it’s capacitor too so it has larger capacity for laser pew pew. Corrected MPUV Speeds. Missile Operator Mode Polish Pass, Polish pass on assisted gimbal and missile cone UI. Added warning messages for missile mode when missile is too close or too far to lock.

And they Adjusted friendly fire thresholds.

And important fix was made that was causing Crusader atmosphere to extend much further than intended which blocked QT – This means you can travel to and from Orison easily again… no ridiculously long travelling to get out of the atmosphere anymore… it’s 150km you need to be out before QTing now NOT 750km.
Fixed an issue that was causing players to receive a 16008 error constantly on loading in
Fixed an issue causing shields to get hit multiple times on a single distortion explosion
Players should no longer sometimes see black squares instead of smoke, clouds and fog
Synced Assassination mission objectives should no longer spawn extremely close to each other
Fixed an issue causing players to not be able to stand up from New Babbage tram seats

Fixed 2 Client crashes
Main Thread Deadlock Fix

Known Issues

Some players have reported that they are Unable to select a system (may require an account recopy as well as logging fully out of the launcher and logging back in and possibly deleting user folder)
Editing PMA After Changing mobiGlas case prevents mobiglas functionality
Distortion weapons are bugged against large ships
Missiles do not follow flares as a countermeasure
Missiles can hit the players ship when they are fired whilst the ship is moving forward
Various UI markers are faded and hard to read
Security Ships do not recognise illegal goods onboard a ship when being carried by a player
Ships are not fully repaired after repairing / refueling them in VMS

There are still issues with large ship landing gear… meaning you can’t land properly with ships like the 890 jump and Carrack and a load of minor bugs besides that I’ve also seen mentioned that CI will hopefully deal with.

Object Container Streaming / Elevators are causing some issues, not loading their interior means you can run in them and fall to your death… which… I mean is really really annoying… fix this please CIG.

Other than that it’s just desync I’d like to see get some love AND maybe some interesting cargo alerts and opportunities… that would be awesome too.

But yeah, the current build is looking good, while not yet a release candidate in my opinion it’s still in a pretty good state.