Star Citizen 3.15 State Of The Game
Hello & Welcome to the State of Star Citizen Alpha 3.15.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.15 has had a Patch 3.15.0n it’s still on the 1st Wave of PTU and we are keenly awaiting wider PTU / Open PTU hopefully very soon. I wanted to talk about the updates in this patch as some are actually pretty major and the patch is in a pretty good state.
The Law System has seen Updates – most crimestat 1 crimes are now misdemeanors which will still grant the same crimestat but can now be paid off at a fine terminal to remove (stations sill shoot at you with any crimestat tho). Not paying off a crime at a terminal will escalate the fine and CS impact after a week. They Reduced the cooldown between crimes for assaults so they will impact your crimestat more if they happen in succession. Greatly increased the crime stat contribution for all misdemeanors so that fines are much more important to pay off.
There was a Healing, Griefing and Medical Polish Pass – Disabling tractor beaming, healing, and drugging of other players in greenzones.
So now you don’t have to worry about being mobbed at Landing Zones by players trying to OD you.
Theres a Drug efficacy balance pass, and adjusted effects of Resurgera to be equally more aggressive towards BDL decay and other drugs’ durations.
They made some tweaks to body dragging to make it behave more consistent and less jittery and made a load of other tweaks and fixes for moving them over ramps / elevators.
Downed State has had a Polish Pass the downed UI is now clearly visible while downed. Increased revival service beacon reward to 15k, up from 10k credits.
They Made intro and pretty much all UnderGround Bunker FPS missions shareable.
They Added a small reputation penalty for failing or abandoning a delivery intro or re-hire mission.
There are issues with friendly forces at these Underground missions, after the mission has ended they can become hostile to you. The Base defenses sometimes attack you when you are coming to help. So these need to be fixed ASAP to make those missions viable.
They Made several AI sync improvements to help reduce them teleporting short distances.
The 400i had a further Polish Pass with its landing gear reverted back to it’s previous, lower state. Door panel updates: new UI, removing light buttons where not needed & labeling locations.
On All ships the Velocity Indicator can be turned off/on/fade
There were Optimizations for planet terrain and ocean tessellation based on screen size.
There has been an Inventory Polish Pass – Further style and performance tweaks have been made for all aspects of the inventory system. Updated filter system to display tabs showing quick item type sorting along with the original option for more granular filtering. Implemented new interaction dots and numbered ports for consumables (magazines, grenades, medpens). Added capacity display for consumables on the item and as dots around the item port the item is attached to. Added double click to equip items from inventory. This should swap currently equipped gear and consumables should fill empty armor slots instead. Added Swap option to item contextual menu to remove the currently equipped item and replace with another. Updated the inventory to not display if the inventory they have open moves far enough away. Added capacity value the description tooltip of items that have storage space such as backpacks and chest/leg armors. Updated inventory page arrow buttons to be a bit clearer. Added interaction option to close world loot containers.
This is actually a much better implementation of Inventory than previously. It’s also less fiddly and more responsive.
There were a load of Major Bug Fixes, server and client crashes, memory leaks and freezes.
I’ll highlight briefly some of the most important fixes beyond that;
You can place downed players on medical beds properly.
Ship spawning and claiming should be working better.
Hospital Props should spawn in the right places and not collide with things.
The Inventory UI has had loads of fixes as has general medical gameplay.
The Medical Tool should be functioning correctly and player bodies should no longer instantly disappear.
Ships had tweaks to their elevators and HUDs that were broken.
There appears to have been fixes for some bits causing lower framerates at some landing zones.
Alpha 3.15.0n in the PTU has a really really good frame rate. I’ve only briefly played it and didn’t have any 30ks or instability issues HOWEVER some people are saying it’s the best patch ever, super high frames and stability… others are saying they constantly 30k… hopefully that will be everyone in the former camp before it goes live.
It’s great that medical ODing at GreenZones has been fixed… we didn’t want that in game… it was silly, especially when you lose the gear on you when you die… it was just griefy.
The is ok 400i but it’s not a ship I will be buying… my MSR handles my multi-role and I have a Carrack for exploration and larger multi-role… the 400i just isn’t really a fit for me.
The Hercules A2 is fun… it’s Bombs have some issues, they can do some wierd things atm and there isn’t a huge amount of use for them yet. I mean you can help blow up an outpost I suppose… but we need more use for them than that. I feel that there is a lot of gun on the ship but it’s not worth it’s huge REAL MONEY PRICE TAG of $700, which will probably go up further when 3.15 is released.
I haven’t seen server crash recovery in action yet, in fact I don’t think it’s part of the current patch and I am keenly awaiting for it to drop and examples of it working BUT it seems that it will snap shot your ship and cargo and if the server crashes it will allow you to spawn it at a nearby station cargo intact… that combined with hopefully less 30ks as well will be great.
Is icache and Gen12 renderer updates helping in this patch… maybe… it’s hard to quantify however the patch is really starting to shape up and the medical rescue elements and potential cargo becoming more viable again have me reasonably hyped.
I hope we will see the LIVE build of 3.15 at the end of October or very early November. It has seen a long patch cycle and that’s partly due to all of the new stuff both gameplay and server related. Could it cause some knock on delays with 3.16… possibly BUT there are separate teams working on that patch that should be largely unaffected.