Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games released the latest alpha update for Star Citizen, which includes a bevy of new features and improvements.
The headlining feature for 3.7 is the cave exploration system and personal-mining tools. This feature adds procedurally generated cave systems to asteroids, planets, and moons, enabling players to use the updated scanner system to track down potential resource-rich locations, send in small retrieval teams into the caves, and utilize the new personal resource extractor to gather up rich minerals and ore that can be sold throughout the system.
Don’t think that this will be a cakewalk for people trying to make a quick buck. Pirates also have new ways to intercede merchant ships and smugglers by utilizing the new quantum ship-stopping feature, which is part of the QED, or a quantum enforcement device. This allows pirate ships, mercenary ships, or bounty hunters to pull fleeing ships out of quantum drive travel and disable their vessel or board their ship.
This opens up all new possibilities for raiding the vessels of other players. You can use the QED as well as a propulsion dampener to keep ships from fleeing, enabling you to board the ship and either commandeer the crew or steal their cargo.
This adds a meta layer to the way smuggling operations work, and even gives players an opportunity to make a quick buck by using a QED to disable a ship, steal their cargo, and then offload it at the nearest black market outpost.
To help make things more streamlined from a mission perspective, they’ve also added the ability for party members to share missions, which is pretty cool. This way if you party up with someone and you’re currently doing a mission, you can share it with your party members just like in a typical MMO.
You can see how these features can combine together for emergent gameplay experiences, like when a team was formed to raid a cave, as captured by YouTuber Rexzilla.
The video is pretty cool, with a large team slowly trekking through the tight corridor space of a cave to track down and take out the opposing team.
It’s like a mixture of Rainbow Six and Star Wars: Republic Commando.
They’ve also added some new character customization options, allowing players to further refine their face and make use of more hair options. This was something a lot of gamers were asking for, so they listened to the feedback and expanded the character creation utility.
They’ve also added new enemy swarm tactics to Star Marine and Arena Commander.
The ship physics have also been updated, allowing players to make use of refined landing. You can see what the new landing physics are like with Abe Plinkin’s video below.
Also, there are more weapon accessories added to the game, so you can customize your weapons to fit your play-style.
You can learn more about all the new features and content added to alpha 3.7 by visiting the official Star Citizen website.
