Star Citizen Orison Landing Zone Preview
Welcome to some More Star Citizen, Orison in the latest landing zone for Star Citizen, a floating city above the Gas Giant Crusader. This is planned to be coming in Alpha 3.14 the Q2 end of June Patch. And today we are going to have a bit of a preview of the beautifully scenic location.
They are still working on finishing off the geometry and some of the basics and assets.
And this preview is just that… a preview and Orison is going to look magnitudes better when completed. It’s a clean and uncluttered location that should be surprisingly easy to navigate.
The Commercial Platform or Main Hub in Orison is known as Cloud View Centre.
Influenced a little by a theme park or modern malls/shopping centres.
Out of the Tram Station you have a R&R area…. With fancy little trees…. The city is basically a lot of floating gardens AND they have made use of wind to blow cherry blossoms around.
A Calming Space… and a cool space whale statue… we know that they are working on space whales (Stormwhals) that live in the gas giant below and they will occasionally breach the surface to say hello and potentially have some gameplay with them… tho that is a while away in terms of development. It sounds like we will be able to see them eventually as part of the tourist scene around the area.
The Hab Block at Orison is called Green Circle; it’s a mixture of hotel and apartments.
There are huge open areas and even a communal hot tub / spa area overlooking the Landing Zone from here. They are trying to add greenery and homelyness to the habs here.
Stratus is the main shopping building. It’s going to be very different from other zones. There is a massive Voyager Bar on the Roof, with incredible views.
In future releases (so I assume Orison V2) they will be adding Orison General, this is where hte the showroom and ship shop will be for Crusader Ships.
Also the new life/medical mechanics will be featured around the area too assumedly with a hospital/clinic there.
They’ve also been building out maintenance access points and mission areas where players might be assigned to do some repair work OR sneak into an area for some reason!
They showed some bits of the trade hall on the Commercial Platform.
Remember this is all just on the Commercial platform and what appears to be for Orison V1 coming Q2 with the 3.14 Patch.
There is even more that’s being worked on for V2 and beyond later this year too with more platforms and shipyards!
What CI didn’t show here was anything on Volumetric Clouds OR the Gas Giant Crusader itself at this stage… very much looking for to that!
Wear, Tear and Dirt… Ships and Vehicles in Star Citizen will get dirty as they are used… and this dirt will help build the character of a ship but also be appropriate to where it’s been.
They are currently working on their first version of visual degradation for vehicles.
Part of this is Dirt… there are 2 concepts going on here, the environmental build up… snow, mud, dust, grime will build up over time in layers.
Wear is a subtractive element… it has paint fading or scratches forming. This could be for many different reasons.
The first version we are getting is just cosmetic and for a limited amount of ships. Panel edges, ridges, corners these will look to wear quicker and have more dirt build up… it all looks very cool!
Wear, Dirt, Damage & Aging are all basically different things that all happen to ships are they are used.
Some higher end ships like the 890 jump might be more resistant to paint fading or scratches as they use higher end materials for that purpose.
There is still a lot of work to do before the feature is supposed to turn up in 3.13.
Especially for Dirt. But one day we will see a story on each of our ships… and their wear and tear will literally tell a tale of where they have been!
Cleaning is a thing too, in the initial release this will be done as part of accessing the repair terminal. I am looking forward to seeing how some of the ships like the Reclaimer look after being cleaned.. As I am pretty sure they were dirty!