Star Citizen is effectively looking at its past, its present, and its future in a manner of speaking this week, as CIG has put out its latest roadmap roundup post for the sci-fi sandbox’s next tentative features, outlined work done over the past month, and kicked off its latest event to draw in new players/buyers.
We’ll begin with the roadmap roundup that calls attention to some new features being worked on for alpha 4.2.1 and alpha 4.3: The next interstitial patch tentatively promises two new hairstyles, missions from Wikelo that will let players chase specific rewards, and a new tool that will let CIG track player progression across multiple shards, while 4.3 preps a new lightning sniper rifle, some new armors, location-based mission discovery, and the arrival of PvE-centric cooperative zones; these are described as similar to contested zones currently in the alpha but instead focus on “investigation, puzzle-solving and cooperation with players [to] make completing objectives easier.”
Meanwhile, June’s progress report is up that mostly outlines AI and mission development that was completed to get alpha 4.2’s big ticket Storm Breaker sandbox activity functioning, though it does remark on progress for five different vehicles in the development pipeline as well as new missions in the near future, forward progress on the new version of faction reputation missions, and the next major story arc that’s promised later down the line.
Finally of major note is the start of the Foundation Festival event that tries to encourage new and veteran players to team up together and offers eight different ships for new arrivals to try as part of the free-fly event happening at the same time. Reaction to this event in the forums hasn’t been particularly gleeful as no new rewards are being offered the MMO’s long-suffering backers and the new referral program rewards are seen as either very underwhelming or angled to larger influencers. And that’s to say nothing about the previously reported cheating issues that players are still reporting today. But at least CIG did confirm that everyone participating in the free-fly will be able to try out the Drake Vulture salvaging ship. Yay?
