Star Citizen Devs On HUGE Changes To Ship Combat & Origin 600i Rework
Star Citizen’s CIGs recently interviewed a variety of it’s staff about various ships, game mechanics, master mode drama, the 600i rework and more.
I wanted to go over the juciy information that CIG gave us from SCL Taking Flight in a bit of detail and give a bit more context… let’s jump in:
Star Citizen Live: Taking Flight
John Crewe (Vehicle Director @ CIG) & Ben Curtis (Vehicle and Weapons Art Director @ CIG) joined Jared to talk about various new vehicles & upcoming features:
The Crusader Spirit is in concept sale… they apologise that there was a problems with inconsistent stats on the various media which caused a lot of confusion in a perfect storm of everything going wrong, however they are all corrected now.
They wanted to add an additional Bomber to the game with the Spirit A1 to give more diversity and options to more gravity and ground specific bombing. The A2 will get different bomb options in the future but they also wanted a smaller bomber too. It made sense for one of the Spirit Variants to be this. Bombing mechanics are very much still a work in progress and a load of other systems need to come online… so bare that in mind.
Things like the Centurion & Ballista / Air Defenses will play a huge part in countering bombers too. Bombs have minimum arm distances / “safe” ranges… these currently however don’t work as intended, for example the minimum arm distance for an A2s bomb say is 50m… if you drop it at 45 it won’t go off… but then if you travel another 5m up it will suddenly go off… They are working on solving those issues too.
VIP transport isn’t in game yet… they have a design document for it but no timelines for when it will be done.
The GreyCat STV seems pretty popular and is a good all rounder between racing and utility.
CIG have changed a load of ground vehicle speeds. There are new tyre and ground vehicle handling improvements coming that will further enhance these and other ground vehicle changes that are incoming.
Ships and Vehicles and Balanced based on needs and feedback, they do not purposely plan to nerf things from concept at launch… John Crewe took some flak based on having to make some nerfs and changes on things like the Ion and ground vehicles… but they needed to be done.
There is a Mid-High Tier RSI Mining Ship they will be making in the future. They will be fully concepting this out… they are finishing the design brief now. It will go thru the pipeline fully from concept to flyable in one big push… we don’t know when it’s coming out tho!
The layout will get done first so the internal rooms, which then will allow them to confirm the size and exterior. The art style and visuals will then be concepted and designed.
CI want to clarify that ship manufacturers might evolve over their lifetime, try new styles or designs that are a bit out of their wheelhouse… however there will always be bits for players to identify that a ship is a particular manufacturer.
Aegis originally was potentially going to be an ageing manufacturer that only had older ships in production as they had lost a load of military contracts they relied on to Anvil … but CIG have since revived the manufacturer and there are new ships and concepts… the only constant is change…
Players reactions to the Master Mode changes are varied… it is a huge change.
Basically having QCM (Quantum Control Mode) which is your travel mode, you can cruise at high speed, QT long distances and QB shorter distances BUT you have no weapons or shields… alternatively you can be in SCM (Standard Control Mode) which is your combat and utility mode you have access to your weapons, shields and things like tractor beams and mining lasers if you have them BUT you can’t go above your SCM speed (which is upto 300m/s) nor can you QT. This makes players have to choose what mode to be and if you want to fight… well it might be hard to then run away, this also solves jousting and brings combat zones much closer so you can see the pretty ships and hopefully not crash into each other.
They expected that some players would be upset over the changes but it was necessary.
They will be going over what is happening with all this in a lot more detail in the near future.
600i Updates What We Know – The 600i fell a bit short on it’s release, they didn’t make effective use of it’s space and wanted to improve it’s internals. It is a big internal rework.
They have done a new high level concept pass, worked out floor plans, added some additional functionality and improved the internal spaces.
The ship is not in full production and is just in it’s reconcepting phase.
The captains quarters and bridge are staying pretty much the same.
CI will be going thru the 600i in a lot more detail in the future (at the IAE / ISC) but they showed us some of the updates:
The outside the Crew Quarters has a central living and connecting area on a split deck. This is in the middle section of the ship
The rear section of the 600is are where the modular changes that define the variants.
The ship is split across 3 decks.
The exterior of the ship is pretty much the same. Tho weapon and turret placement might get tweaked.
Let’s look at the Explorer variants interior changes:
The 600i Explorer has a Cargo Lift area, it can fit a Nova Tank on and in it. The main large elevator can only go to the outside of the ship and main cargo area.
There is more lift access in the cargo room that allows you to move cargo between other decks too.
There is an armoury for the top deck of the Explorer.
There is a middle deck storage room.
CI had also previously said the 600i was going to get some medical facilities and have at least a T2 bed (which currently allows for respawning in). I assume that is still the case. Tho those facilities were not shown.
Let’s take a look at the Touring Variant Now:
The back of the touring module with bar and meeting table was shown… amazing open viewing area and glass window.
A social & connecting space, water, RGB lights.
A pool and steam rooms, with a water wall which are basically a scaled down version of the 890Js facilities.
CIGs New Video Set “The Only Constant” Replica Constellation Phoenix Ship Interior for ISC / SCL / Other Video Content is at their new UK Studio in Manchester which is starting to open up. It wasn’t built for CitizenCon, it’s for a range of Video Creation and livestreams.
Some of the videos shown at CitizenCon were filmed in August so there has actually been quite a bit of development beyond what we have seen.