Road To CitizenCon 2021
What is CitizenCon?
It’s the run up to CitizenCon 2021… It’s the yearly flagship event that Star Citizen has each year and is a mixture of various presentations, near future gameplay demo and fanfest all rolled into one that takes place over a whole day.
This year it’s a digital only LIVE event watchable for free by anyone that wants to on the 9th of October.
In fact cloud imperium have said:
you can expect a full day of events, panels, and entertainment (and yes, the cosplay contest is coming back!). It promises to be out of this world, or perhaps out of this system…
We know that CIG are actively holding back and hiding content that they plan to show at CitizenCon BUT we do have some indications from the Monthly Reports, Roadmap and what seems sensible.
What We Know
Typically CitizenCon has 3 big ticket focuses:
Presentations on Specific Features, Topics and Development – Which makes up most of the day.
A Gameplay Demo – Showcasing plans and near future tech for Star Citizen
And a Roadmap / Keynote Update of where we are for the project and what the plans are for the coming months in more broad strokes and major tech milestones.
Last Year No CitizenCon Event in 2020 due to the Pandemic.
2019 or CitizenCon 2949 was the last event and it was a physical one that I was able to attend.
The Gameplay Demo was extremely impressive showing off the Carrack, a Mission on New Babbage where you had to infiltrate a facility and steal data and then they escaped to the Pyro System using a Jump Point… this showed off a huge amount of new things that were being worked on… a lot of them however still incomplete to this day.
We had various Presentations on The Dynamic Universe Sim, Planetary Tech, microTech, Lore, Theatres of War… which was also previewed and playable on the LAN there, there was a ship panel, one of Prisons, UI, Alien Languages and more.
Just highlighting the Ship panel there, they talked about 4 ships…:
Talon
ROC
Railen
And the 4th they talked about was a Mobile Refinery Ship… which should be revealed more fully at somepoint.
There was general entertainment, interviews and talking in between each of the presentations or segments too.
What about this year?
We are going to see various player made videos and adverts in between the presentations.
There is currently a competition requesting these.
We will see a more virtual version of the cosplay competition.
So I’d expect a lot of that but obviously updated and new. You can probably expect Around 8 hours of presentations, demos and interviews on the day.
From the Keynote I’d expect CI to talk about their expanding studios AND new focus on milestones. I’d expect it to be Server Meshing, Gameplay Loops, Bases & Org Features to be the important areas.
Expectations Presentations
And it’s possible they will do it over 2 stages like they did in 2019 where you could choose what to watch HOWEVER as it’s online early, it makes sense that they would just have a single focused stage and stream this time around. You will be able to watch the presentations and everything else after the show too… so don’t worry if you do miss the live broadcast on Twitch.
Some Gameplay loops talked about – Salvage, Refueling, Mining, Science.
Dynamic Universe Sim
Spaceship Ideas
Environments and Planet Tech
AI & NPC Tech
Server Meshing
Org Improvements
Something looking at Turbulent Build Gameplay Area
Theatres of War – Where are we now
Gameplay Demo Expectations
They’ve said it:
“It promises to be out of this world, or perhaps out of this system…”
And it makes sense to me that we will start in a New Star System like – Pyro OR Nyx and possibly jump between them with a Jump Point in a much more fluid completed way than in the 2949 demo.
But what ship will we flying around in… well maybe a Redeemer. That makes a lot of sense. Tho things like the Polaris have been rumored… more by the community than anyone else tho… we know it was removed from the Roadmap and was supposed to return BUT hasn’t yet… and CI are very much working on various unannounced ships / vehicles. I think we may very well see something entirely new.
However the other ships that are planned for the patch around 3.15 make sense so we will probably see the Ares and A2 as well.
There has been talk of the 400i, mobile refinery, argo raft, an Anvil Capital Ship, Titan Suits (I added that there because I WANT TO SEE THEM)… we could very well see some of these in the demo… OR go on sale in concept at CitizenCon.
There is a lot of New Gameplay potential that we could see typically they show a mission and some new gameplay or locations along with that. So we could get hints at Salvage, Refueling, Physical Components, ship customization, even deeper medical things like that make the most sense as well as showing off the updated hacking. I like the think they’d show off a new landing zone or more player-centric habs.
They will have a lot of the Q3 content they will want to show off if the 3.15 patch is coming out at CitizenCon and it’s highly likely it will OR be in Open PTU… so Medical Gameplay… BUT I don’t think they normally like to go a little further out and do something a bit more special.
I’d also expect to see something new NPC and AI Tech wise… someone suggested the potential for animals… and that’s very possible even if it’s more faked… we do know they have been working on the Spacewhales for Crusader, the Yeti for microTech and Crabs for Pyro.
Something I think is possible is that CI will start a more traditional advertising campaign for Squadron 42. I thought this last year BUT the doom virus happened… and then everything slowed down.