This week, Star Citizen’s regular video series is all about earning that rep, outlining the reputation system that’s arriving in alpha 3.13 as well as detailing what the system means for the game and how it will evolve and grow.
At its core, reputation in Star Citizen is about filling up two bars with NPCs and with organizations: Affinity, which measures how much a mission giver or group likes player characters, and Confidence or Career, which measures how certain a character or organization respectively believes player characters can get the job done.
On the subject of the Career metric, organizations can have several scopes associated with certain mission types like bounty hunting, jailing, or piracy depending on the company. Each successive scope has standings, with higher standings offering better rewards, and players with higher standing can even take group mates with lower standing on missions that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
When the system arrives to alpha 3.13, it will focus mostly on mission completion, but the reputation system will be further expanded to take into account player actions across the ‘Verse. What a player does during a mission, what types of missions players take on, their behavior in the game, dialogue choices made during NPC interaction, attacking a certain group’s holdings or ships, and even what a player is wearing when talking to certain NPCs can affect reputation to the positive or negative side.
Finally, the devs want to ensure that reputation isn’t just earned but maintained, as there are plans for a “drift” that slides reputation back to neutral over time. The idea isn’t to enforce a grind, according to the devs, but to give players high-end goals that take effort to reach and keep, as well as make players stand out and give them reasons to keep coming back and doing missions they like or want to do. The video below offers many of the explanations, as well as a rundown of patch 3.13’s feature set and promise of its arrival soon™.
