When Star Citizen announced its plans to tweak its development process last week, it also noted that features on the game’s roadmap were going to be reshuffled. The announcement, however, didn’t explain where those features were going and when players could expect to (maybe) see them return. That information has now been shared as an accompaniment to roadmap updates.
The first feature is salvage gameplay, which is described as a “two-quarter task” for RSI to complete. As such, this bit of gameplay is being shoved back two quarters to make room for FPS mining and refueling. With that in mind, the team working on salvage gameplay has been directed to work on FPS mining and quantum fuel mining for patch 3.7, which will also introduce caves for players to mine in. After that, fuel harvesting and quantum fuel harvesting will be added to the roadmap and worked on, and then work on salvage will begin.
The next point is regarding Star Citizen’s security system, which controls who has access to areas and objects based on things like reputation, faction, and item ownership. This feature set is being taken off of the public roadmap in order for CIG to re-prioritize which direction development needs to focus on. In the meantime, resources allocated for security features have been redirected to working on social AI, creating prison environments, improving the law system, developing reputation and in-game organizations, and other features that are teased to be announced at CitizenCon.
Finally, the addition of sweet-looking bounty hunter armor has been shuffled back from patch 3.7 to patch 3.9. That patch will introduce improvements to NPC bounty missions and add PvP bounties as well as the armor. Which kind of makes more thematic sense, certainly.
