While the opening beats of Star Citizen’s CitizenCon event may have started with some disappointment, the remainder of the event had lots of things for fans of the space sandbox to get excited over to the point that the Carrack’s delay became something of an afterthought. Features for patch 3.8 like character persistence, better performance, and new planet generating tech were shown off, while the game’s future promises some big additions like the new Theatres of War multiplayer mode and its second star system.
Let’s talk the immediate future first: Patch 3.8 will be introducing the first phase of the planet microTech, a new planet generation system that has made the work of two years now only take two months, the first steps in character persistence (meaning less wipes in-between major updates and players get to actually keep the stuff they earn and buy in-game), and the first implementation of Server-Side Object Container Streaming (SOCS) which effectively “slices the Star Citizen Universe into various Object Containers, which automatically scale in size based on player location and gameplay” to improve performance overall.
Looking forward to Star Citizen’s next year, players can expect the New Babbage landing zone of microTech, the launch of the Carrack explorer ship, and the planned arrival of Theatres of War, a Battlefield-esque 20v20 battle for territory control over three rounds that meshes the space combat of Arena Commander with the FPS gameplay of Star Marine. All of these items are due to launch at certain points in 2020.
Finally, the distant future of the game looks to introduce the second star system of Pyro, Jump Points that link star systems together, and the integration of Quantum, a new backend technology that lets the devs simulate hundreds of NPC behaviors without actually generating them in-game for the purposes of adjusting and tweaking the Star Citizen economy in real time for more realistic supply and demand. The arrival of SOCS in 3.8 will also lay the foundation for server merging to allow thousands of players in a shared world instead of dozens of players fragmented across multiple server instances.
As for right now, the Star Citizen free fly event is now underway, a lore-filled Galactapedia is now online, and the opening and closing demonstrations are now on Star Citizen’s YouTube Channel, with videos from all of CitizenCon’s other panels due to premiere in the next several weeks.
