This past episode of Calling All Devs was primarily about planned updates to the core gameplay loops of Star Citizen — primarily, injury and death mechanics, hacking terminals, and personal inventory features.
A lot was made about the game’s planned health, respawn, and death mechanics that CIG discussed previously. In essence, each individual limb will have its own health pool that combines to create an overall global health pool. Injuries can range in three tiers of severity — tier one being the worst and tier three being negligible — and will have different effects on player performance like an inability to aim or difficulty moving. Handheld healing items like medipens will restore functionality, but too much damage to a single limb will require specialized care to fully heal. Healing consumables aren’t meant to be an instant fix so much as a way for players to power through their injuries and finish the fight, and there are plans for a blood drug level that players will have to manage as well.
Managing character injury will become vital, since respawning away from a landing zone means your dead body will drop all of its equipment. This is meant to encourage seeking medical help from other players that have specialized ships and equipment or from hospitals in the future, though dying close enough to a landing zone will see players respawn with all of their gear. There are instances where damage exceeding a player’s overall health pool will occur, however, which means instant death no matter what.
There are plans to have handheld radar tools that will work similarly to the recently updated radar scanning and pinging, with the added level of ambient noise affecting results and detected players receiving an alert that they’ve been pinged. As for hacking, that promises to become its own game mechanic that uses a hacking keycard that lets players open doors, disable shields, and do other things. In the same vein, repairing computer systems will be similar, just in reverse (naturally). Alpha 3.15 may have some of these features available. As for inventory, there are not many surprises here, though there will be an update to the mobiGlas to help players manage inventory better.
