Tons of new information was made available during this year’s CitizenCon. They rolled out details on the new persistent universe updates, the all new planetary dynamic weather systems, stealth, AI improvements, and non-lethal melee takedowns.
YouTuber TheXPGamers did a two part video series covering all of the updates and all of the new information set to arrive in Star Citizen over the next two major alpha updates, which includes alpha 3.8 and alpha 3.9.
Alpha 3.8 will include the new non-lethal melee takedowns, which will allow users to incapacitate foes without outright killing them. This is great if you’re doing a bounty mission but you don’t want to kill the person you’re supposed to bring in. You can bop them over the head and throw them to the ground and then take them back to your ship.
In alpha 3.9 they will implement the dynamic weather effects, which is actually a lot more than just a visual change for the game, it will actually impact gameplay.
In the second part of TheXPGamers’ video he talks more about how the dynamic weather will alter visibility when things like snow storms take place and fog up your windows or frost up the equipment.
But it goes beyond that.
While you might see ice caking up on the wheels of a ground vehicle, or freezing over the sides of your ship, the cold weather will also impact your player-character. Temperatures that are too low will eventually cause your character to catch cold, shiver, lose consciousness and die of hypothermia.
In order to combat harsh weather effects, you will need to equip your character with suits or gear that will be able to withstand the harsh planetary conditions. This will also apply for lava planets, or planets with poisonous atmospheres, or planets with difficult breathing conditions.
Additionally, they showcased some of the new stealth missions for alpha 3.9, which will include infiltrating outposts using a disguise in order to steal information or take out a specific NPC. That adds an extra layer to the game that will surely make it interesting to play.
On top of all of this, the AI will also be vastly improved so that they’re better situated for reacting to noise and players barging into unauthorized locations. AI ferries will also be a thing, which opens up the possibility of hijacking the ferries and killing the crew and selling whatever valuables you can find from the ship.
This kind of emergent gameplay will all be part of the revamped persistent universe, which will allow objects to actually stay in the universe where a player has left them. So if you take a ship, park it on a planet and hide it there with the intent of coming back to retrieve it, it will still be there until you retrieve it or someone else does. This kind of persistence will tie into the game’s resource management, so that different asteroids will have a finite number of resources you can ore, meaning you’ll constantly have to move around to find new ore deposits and you won’t be able to settle with farming just one location.
There are a lot of really cool features and updates planned for release in the next alpha builds, so I’m looking forward to that.
You can learn more about Star Citizen by checking out the official website.
