CIG has been making a lot of noise about the “Death of a Spaceman” and the “vision” of Chris Roberts in bringing more consequences to injury and death in Star Citizen, and now it’s time to see if all of that “vision” translates into something that’s actually fun to play. Yesterday marked the release of alpha 3.15, which has been subtitled Deadly Consequences on account of the game’s first pass at new injury, healing, and death mechanics.
Central to this alpha build is the fact that player characters now have lootable corpses thanks to the addition of personal inventory, meaning that when players die, they will either need to make the sci-fi version of a corpse run or risk losing the stuff they had on their person. This also links to a variety of new mechanics including the potential to suffer a variety of new injuries, enter a downed state in certain circumstances, and be healed by other players with new medical tools and drugs. Players also can now heal up or respawn at hospitals that have been added across the ‘Verse.
Alpha 3.15 has also added the ability to find loot on NPCs and in containers, introduced two new ships in the form of the 400i and the Hercules, introduced the ability for certain ships to drop bombs, and added some new armors to the game. The landing zone of Orison has also been expanded with the opening of Cousin Crow’s Custom Craft, Providence Surplus, the Crusader Showroom, and more.
In other Star Citizen news, CIG has put together a a Q&A post that talks about persistence and server merging progress. It breaks down much of the technical matters the devs are working on, talks about how the economy will work once servers are merged, and also outlines a matchmaking system that will attempt to alleviate having too many players in the sandbox having similar interests, causing the sand in the sandbox to harden.
The post also projects that these features should be arriving next year, with the first version of the tech’s replication layer arriving sometime in the first or second quarter and the first version of a static server mesh between the third and fourth quarter, barring any unforeseen technical complications.
