Star Citizen player event talks ship plans, building mechanics, player housing, and lowered priority for Theaters of War

This past weekend saw fans of Star Citizen converge in Shanghai and Hong Kong, China, for some Bar Citizen community events. Normally this wouldn’t even be a blip on the newsroom radar, except the Hong Kong event offered lots of informational tidbits from CIG about the game’s near and distant future. Here are some of the more interesting details shared:

• The Hull-C’s release will likely be the only large size ship to come out this year, primarily because the devs want to see what its launch will do to both server performance and the overall in-game economy; those economic effects will likely be felt only when players are able to move things between Stanton and Pyro.
• The base-building system is being designed like the pre-fabs found in Fallout 4 as opposed to individually built panels and pieces, and it will likely be arriving when the Nyx system comes out. Incidentally, there’s no timeline for either feature, and CIG has flatly stated that base building will not be available in the still-developing Pyro system.
• On the subject of player housing and ownership, that will be a thing arriving to the game, but it will primarily be instanced much like owning an apartment. Players will also be able to own multiple housing instances, but they will not be able to take ownership of a station.
• CIG finally said the quiet part out loud: The mixed arms Theaters of War mode is still being worked on, but not with a large team or priority. Some features from TOW, like the ability to spawn into other people’s ships, are being added to Arena Commander, and “there is a group that is testing different game modes when they’re doing work on it,” but for the most part it is being pushed aside.
• The end of sales for Squadron 42 is not an indication of the single-player game’s impending release. CIG has also flat-out stated it is not coming out this year.
• The devs “double, double pinky swear” that price changes for existing ships will be communicated well beforehand on the game’s forums.

In other SC news, this week is starting off ticket sales for this year’s CitizenCon event, while the game’s weekly schedule of events called attention to a month-long Foundation Festival event for July that encourages players to create tutorials and help other players, while this week’s Inside Star Citizen episode will focus on alpha 3.20’s focus on Port Olisar.