Sure, we’ve had one day of CitizenCon, but what about second day? The weekend event for the 12 year-old sci-fi sandbox Star Citizen has indeed continued with another series of panels that showcase the promised future of the game as it continues to inch through alpha development, and we’re here to once more provide a rundown of what was showcased.
Here’s what was offered up during day two’s series of panels. And if you happened to have missed day one, we covered that too.
Crafting your home
Day two’s panels began with Crafting Your Home, which focused on SC’s upcoming crafting features that will let players cobble together gear and housing items. Once more, it all looks pretty typical for the MMO genre, but CIG espouses the addition of crafting as a new way – and a new reason – to play the game.
Crafting will effectively add a layer to the resource gathering that’s already in-game right now, but there will also be more raw materials to find and material refinement for all gathering outside of just mining. Players can still sell their refined materials if they want to, but crafting promises the ability to let players create weapons, armor, and even vehicles and ships – all of which can potentially be better than things found in a shop and can be traded among players. Finally, crafting will allow players the ability to build bases, whether they’re individual locations or “a sprawling town” with org members.
Crafting starts with blueprints (aka recipes), which are awarded via reputation gains, looting, or direct purchase. Following that, material quality will play a factor in the upcoming stats system that’s applied on crafted items. As one might expect, material quality and material choice will have an effect on the stats of the final product, and there will be different types of crafting machines added.
Stats and item use can also be improved by putting together higher tier items; most items offer tiers one through three, but vehicles can be crafted up to tier five, and existing vehicles can get to higher tiers via upgrade blueprints. Blueprint upgrades are achieved through the process of research – a series of objectives that are specific to a recipe and will require players to specialize.
Finally, this panel discussed the much-wanted ability to build bases. CIG offered a work-in-progress demonstration of base building, from structure placement to resource management, all the way to upgrading buildings and establishing what ends up being a player-built outpost. Base building will offer not just places to land but also opportunities to build farms and ranches, defense bases, or full landing ports.
Construction vehicles incoming
Dovetailing with all of the base building features that were shown off, the next panel offered a look at several upcoming vehicles to support the in-development gameplay. The devs explained that vehicles designed to support base building is needed since the drones that put structures together – and the structures themselves – come in multiple sizes, which means multiple vehicular logistics will be woven in to make it all hum.
The first construction vehicle displayed is the Argo CSV, which comes in two variants: the CSV-FM, which can carry two medium-size construction drones, and the CSV-SM, a small flatbed hauler that can be driven in-game now.
Next up was the MISC Starlancer family of spaceships. The Starlancer BLD is focused on construction with four large construction drones available, the Starlancer TAC is a combat-focused variant with turrets and a launcher bay designed to house the Mirai Fury, and the Starlancer MAX is the space truck version that will be flyable at this year’s Intergalactic Aerospace Expo event.
CIG then unveiled a redesigned version of the Pioneer, a massive ship that effectively works as a mobile base to support terrestrial base building, with the ability to field four extra large construction drones and on-board facilities for crafting, refinement, extraction, and medical needs.
The devs circled back to last year’s CitizenCon promise of releasing 10 vehicles within 12 months, admitting that only six have released so far and promising that all but one ship will arrive before year’s end. That means the Legionnaire will be left behind but the Intrepid, Guardian, and Polaris are scheduled to release.
The features of Star Citizen’s full release
Finally, the second day’s panels ended with an extremely lengthy discussion about SC’s 1.0 release, which CIG confirmed will be the full release of the game, with fully realized game loops, an improved starter experience, and the end of resets in-between patches. “No longer will we reference that the game is in development,” said senior game director Rich Tyrer during the panel. “This will be a fully released and polished experience.”
The devs then moved on to what features 1.0 will bring, including a main story that effectively works as a tutorial for all of the features the sandbox has to offer, as well as the guilds that represent the in-game professions both lawless and lawful and the start of the guild reputation progression. The story will reportedly move players through the systems of the game, which is the point when CIG unveiled its fifth planned star system: Terra.
The 1.0 release is also going to bring mechanical changes, such as adjustments to insurance reclaims (with larger ships taking longer) and the addition of rare transferable warranties; an established endgame that combines things like open world content, more instanced missions, and dynamic events; and the introduction of security sectors for lawful systems similar to EVE Online’s, while lawless systems will have no such security but will house high-quality resources.
The update will also have a deep focus on organization activity. This begins with a new station warfare feature for lawless systems that revolves around player orgs gaining access to special structures that grant shield protection for owned planetary bases. Access to this benefit requires player orgs to assault shield network stations, hold them to earn tokens, then use those tokens to purchase shield protection. This fight resets weekly, so orgs ideally are motivated to keep fighting for reasons beyond just ganking and piracy.
In addition to the org warfare for shield protection, 1.0 will let orgs build and own space stations. Doing this will require “vast quantities” of resources and materials, but it will also grant org members access to run system-wide org activities and offer amenities that can be customized by adding wings and specific station rooms. Of course, if you build a big enough space station in a lawless system, it can become the target of other player orgs.
We should note here that none of the features of 1.0 – or indeed the release of 1.0 itself – was given any sort of date for arrival. In the end, it looks as if Star Citizen’s aspirations to becoming an actual sci-fi MMO have at least been outlined. The trick, of course, is actually building those dreams out with a timeline and then carrying it out.
