CitizenCon 2022 – Star Citizen Will Never Be The Same…

CitizenCon 2952 / 2022 has come and gone but left us with a huge amount of development information about Star Citizen and it’s future… some of which was a complete surprise from new planets, to attributes, to master modes let’s jump in:

Chris Turned up at the start of CitizenCon 2022, thanking the community for how far they’ve come in the last 10 years.

The game has gone from Kickstarter to demo, to hangar module, Arena Commander then alpha 3.0 and then evolved into what we have today with over 4m player accounts, 1.7 million of them having a game package.

Active players play 3 hours a day average in 2022 with 36 million hours spent in game. There are now 835 staff world wide working on Star Citizen & Squadron. 500 staff are moving into the new office in the next few weeks in the UK.

Chris showed off the only constant a connie phoenix interior… a real set in the new office, which will be used for future recordings.

It has a bar… and looks amazing… 

Chris toasted the next 10 years and beyond.

Now for the Presentations… Not all of the stuff will be in 4.0… but it is expected to be part of the 4.x cycle.

We were treated to a look at the planets of Pyro and look it the various alien biomes there. From Giant Crater Impacts, To Streaks of Obsian, Red Messas, seas, petrified forests and a load of new flora… but also big improvements to terrain and planetary generation.

They also showed off various outposts, stations and homesteads that we may be seeing in the not too distant future it a little side video outlaw lifestyle, with various different NPCs living their daily lives on at these landing zones & POIs.

There was a New Investigation Missions Presentation that looked to show us the direction CI are going for tools to build out detective missions.

We will be able to take missions that require us to search around areas, find info, scan around for more, use medical scanners to determine cause of death, extract emails from mobiGlas’, find hidden areas and put a case together for what happened. You can finish a mission early with “enough” data but it might be worth spending some extra time investigating to get to the truth and maybe a bonus.

CI are building out Massive New Underground Facilities. They showed off a concept of a mining facility with a corporate exterior it leads down to a huge industrial complex underneath, massive freight elevators, kms of tunnels for logistics, roads & rail but also functional machines and control centres. These will be used for a whole range of gameplay and missions.

CI are changing Ship Combat with Master Modes basically a distinct difference between a travel mode QCM Quantum Control Mode, where you will be able to QT, QB (a short range Quantum) or cruise at very high speeds HOWEVER your weapons, shields and many other systems will be non functional.

Instead you can be in SCM (Standard Control Mode) where you will be capped at a maximum of 2-300ms speed (tho you can use boost to temporarily get above that) but you will access to all your weapon systems, shields and items.

CI hope that this will make combat and dogfighting less jousty and happen in a more enclosed area at slower speeds as ships are going to be in SCM when actively engaging.

Changing between these mastermodes takes a few seconds and leaves your ship vulnerable too… ITS A MASSIVE CHANGE but may well produce the type of gameplay that CI want to capture with SC. 

Star Citizen is improving it’s Cities, expanding them out, improving their assets and making them look great! Lorville 2.0 will be getting a facelift first and they are making it really really massive, opening up new areas, building interiors, roofs to land on as well as less in the way of restrictive no fly zones so you can really explore and get close.

One of the most important Future Features was shown off. The Resource Management System and CI have a working prototype.

It will control power, coolant, data, fuel ect… and their movement around the ship and to components. These circuits can be broken / damaged & components can need maintenance. This leads to true multi-crew gameplay but also will allow for ships to be disabled rather than explode, boarding, engineering gameplay, damage control and much more. 

They are building gravity generators which can be turned on and off but also life support systems that produce oxygen and you need to make sure they are maintained. CI said that this will also lead to things like getting Capital Ships in game and bases.

In the Talking Ship presentation CI unveiled the Crusader Spirit series that is sort of competing with the Cutlass / Freelancer. 3 ships the 

C1 for cargo, A1 for bombs, E1 for VIP Transport. There is a good amount of firepower and defence on these 2 crew ships. And they are currently on concept sale starting at $100.

The GreyCat STV is also now driveable, it’s a Sports Terrain Vehicle a 2 seater reasonably solid transport, with a little room for cargo. It’s going to be a good racer it seems and it went on sale from $35.

CI also mentioned they are reworking the PTV and are going to be making a UTV Utility Terrain Vehicle.

More over they are working on a Medium Mining Ship and want the community to help pick the manufacturer, with the vote currently being in favour of RSI.

Just when we thought CitizenCon 2022 was over CR’s talked about the Future Of Star Citizen and how it’s hugely affected by the work that’s ongoing in SQ42 for over 2 hours.

It sounded like SQ42 is about 2 years away.

But there are a load of changes and new features coming to the PU:

They are making the interaction with objects more intuitive and less clunky.

FPS Scanning will allow you to do a little ping to see details of items nearby or a charged ping to see longer range and thru walls, tho this makes you easier to detect. There is a lot of info available at a glance.

Ladders and Ledges are much easier to use and more forgiving, you can jump on and off ladders. EVA 2.0 has you flying around with your EVA pack if you have one, and pushing and pulling yourself on ships and structures.

Hover Trolleys will help with a lot of logistics and cargo gameplay they are much better than wheeled solutions.

They are refining and streamlining the cockpit experience, better huds, less clutter.

There is a new Starmap in development as well as a minimap, you may have to map an area yourself if the map isn’t feely available… but the minimap is highly detailed.

This along with the ability to be able to QT anywhere (even without a waypoint) will really open up exploration. There will be various things to find in deep space, salvage sites, missions, loot…

One of the biggest initiatives was updates to AI. They are able to work together using various tactics, search for a player and share information with other NPCs, they are much more deadly (but not inhuman) all their behaviors are systemic.

A huge change to gameplay was announced Attributes and Techniques.

So Techniques, you’ll basically get better at takedowns and climbing ect… with cleaner more pro animations as you do those things more.

Attributes have you gaining improvements in Strength, Agility, Endurance & Fitness that affect your ability to carry, run, need food or swap weapons… the more you lift heavy things… the more you will raise your strength… we didn’t get any form of timescale vs tangible game bonuses tho…

There is a new mobiGlas thats coming out as well… it’s much better looking and provides the foundation for future apps, blending ship and personal status with emails, environment data, objectives and more.

At the end of CitizenCon CI announced their New Community Hub. It’s a better looking easier to use version of what they previously had with more tags and filtering, the ability to follow creators.

Boom, that’s your summary of CitizenCon 2022… there was a lot of tangible dev information there and it was awesome to see Chris Roberts brought out of storage to talk to the community at length.