In this week’s episode of Star Citizen’s Around the Verse, Cloud Imperium says it’s reduced its must-fix issues by 50 over the last week, bringing us that much closer to the release of the 3.0 alpha for the earliest outside testers, though we should probably note that not all the issues were actually resolved, just set aside. That means there are now 26 must-fix problems left to go.
“We’ve tightened the focus of our first test plan for the Evocati, which will be traversing and experiencing the expanse of the new universe and all that entails,” CIG’s Eric Kieron Davis says. “Then, while we’re getting larger test support, we’ll continue to polish and bugfix more features, push them out for more testing, and so on and so forth until release.”
The episode’s content preview this week focuses on the mission system specifically. It’s heavy on the tech jargon, but toward the end, the devs dig into the philosophy behind really building out every detail of the mission system — customization built on top of procedural generation, not just one or the other, and not just slapping down some quest text and NPCs or letting a spreadsheet do the heavy lifting.
“I’ve never had any interest in purely procedural content,” Persistent Universe Game Director Tony Zurovec says bluntly. “I think it tends to feel formulaic and repetitive and bland. That approach gives you practically an infinite amount of variation, but when there’s nothing more, I think that it falls apart on the experience – it lacks the depth to really to make an area feel alive and unique and interesting. My personal taste is that I want key NPCs at a given location, for example, to have real backstories and well-thought-through motivations and reasons for being there in the first place, and not to be NPC faces that have had their trace rolled from a random number generator and whose connection to the rest of the universe feels isolated and bereft.”
Yeah, I could pretty much listen to Zurovec argue this all day – who’s with me? The whole shebang is down below.
