This past weekend, we reported on the news that Star Citizen had to delay the addition of personal hangars and other related gameplay elements from alpha 3.23, opting instead to add those long-awaited features to sometime in later content patches. CIG followed up on this announcement in its weekly Q&A video, which brought on senior lead gameplay engineer Chad McKinney to explain why the decision was made.
According to McKinney, instability was the primary concern: The systems that govern instancing, inventory, and summoning spaceships were linked to the entire feature, and its stability was rickety enough that it would affect the game experience for everyone, not just a few isolated cases like mining and salvaging bugs.
“This is the kind of thing where the game could just literally be unplayable,” McKinney explains. “Ever since 3.18, we’ve been a lot more cognizant of what kind of risks we wanna take on whenever we’re going into the release.”
While stability concerns were the primary deciding factor, other considerations also played into the decision, such as the length of time to complete related cargo overhauling, revisions to kiosk UI and freight elevator design based on feedback, and personnel changes that required onboarding for developers.
The rest of the video answered questions related to personal hangars, which confirmed that hangars will generate a ship lift that’s big enough to accommodate the largest owned flyable spacecraft, acknowledged that players could potentially invade a hangar instance if they’re determined enough but could still get a crimestat for PKing, and confirmed that party members will only be able to access their own inventories and not that of other party members; that feature may be added later, but CIG is concerned with players abusing that functionality.
The complete video awaits below, as well as a video summary from The Noobifier and a written summary on Reddit.
