Today I woke up to the news of a significant financial event for Cloud Imperium Games: Star Citizen patch 3.24 is live for the Persistent Universe. Not only should the release ensure positive year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth for August, but probably for the third quarter as a whole, especially if the new features are well received by the player base.
How, a reader unfamiliar with Star Citizen may ask? By doing what many companies do around a major content drop: have a cash shop sale. CCP Games holds sales around EVE Online expansions. Square Enix holds Final Fantasy XIV sales when expansions like Dawntrail drop. So why not CIG? The only difference involves some of the prices. Okay, all the prices.
Looking at the offers is a bit illuminating. For example, I had always heard one only needed to pay $45 to create an account and play Star Citizen. I guess to not start off in a hole a better package is required. CIG is offering a Nomad Jackal starter pack for only $76, marked down from $95.
Here are the associated ship and vehicle offers I see, in order of presentation.
C2 Hercules - For $400 a player can purchase a Hercules Starlifter C2 with 6 months of insurance. The Crusader’s starlifter chassis is tuned for heavy commercial/industrial cargo and vehicle transport. The ship's massive 696 SCU cargo bay accommodates two tank-sized vehicles and is well armed and armored for operations in hostile zones. (Forgive EVE players for snickering at the thought of a 696 SCU cargo bay considered "massive".)
Caterpillar - For $330 a player can purchase a Caterpillar with 6 months of insurance. Haul massive amounts of cargo without all the frills, bells, and whistles, although the ship's modular design, detachable cab, and a dedicated tractor beam station seem some significant bells and whistles to outside eyes. Still, the features allow for effortless multitasking and customization on the fly. The ships also have two manual turrets plus room for additional ordnance when travelling in dangerous areas of space.
Constellation Taurus - For $200 a player can purchase a Constellation Taurus and a Revel & York Hangar. The ship's 168 SCU of cargo space accommodates a huge payload of freight and ground vehicles. Once again, please excuse EVE players for snickering at the idea of a ship with half the cargo space of an exploration frigate as having a huge payload. The rest of the description sounds like marketing fluff. I'm pretty sure any ship designed for cargo gameplay in Star Citizen requires at least one industrial-grade tractor beam.
Freelancer MAX - For $150 a player can purchase a Freelancer MAX with 6 months of insurance. The ship is the classic Freelancer with an expanded cargo capacity, fuel tanks, and advanced thrusters and requires a crew of four players.
Hull A - For $90 a player can purchase a Hull A and 6 months of insurance. The Hull A is described as "The perfect ship for starting a serious career in cargo hauling." Once again, excuse EVE players for snickering as in EVE Online, starter cargo transport ships are given out as rewards from completing career missions designed for new players.
Hull C - For $500 a player can purchase a Hull C and 6 months of insurance. The marketing material for the Hull C describes the ship as "The most popular enterprise-level cargo hauler in the 'verse." The ship's iconic telescopic cargo spindle packs 4,608 SCU onto easy-to-load cargo blades. Stop laughing EVE players, Star Citizen is not only played on a different scale but is set 20,000 years in EVE's past.
M2 Hercules - For $520 a player can purchase an M2 Hercules and 6 months of insurance. Advertised as "the galaxy’s premier tactical starlifter", the ship's heavy armor protects a "giant" 468 SCU cargo bay designed to transport vehicles as large as Tumbril’s Nova tank. EVE players might not laugh as not only can the ship land on planets but the ship fits ten large guns. Still, I've spent $520 to subscribe to EVE Online for the last two years.
MPUV Tractor - For $40 a player can purchase an MPUV Tractor and 6 months of insurance. Advertised as a sturdy designed that won't break the bank, the cargo loading equipment has dual tractor beams allowing players load and unload ships with ease.
Mule - For $45 a player can purchase a Mule and 6 months of insurance. A wheeled vehicle with room for six small boxes, a front-mounted forklift allows for easy, hands-off loading and unloading of cargo onto or off of larger vessels and decks.
RAFT - For $125 a player can purchase a RAFT and 6 months of insurance. A small ship which can hold 3 32 SCU external cargo containers. Designed for a crew of two, a single player can effectively operate the ship, including loading and unloading cargo using controls from the cockpit.
Reclaimer - For $400 a player can purchase a Reclaimer and 24 months of insurance. Comparable to EVE Online's Noctis, the Reclaimer crew of 4-5 players can strip deep space wrecks of valuable resources as well as refining and storing up to a Constellation’s-worth of raw scrap. According to the marketing material, "Tractor beams, floodlights, advanced scanners, and a manned cutter make this the ultimate large-scale salvage rig."
Sabre Peregrine - For $170 a player can purchase a Sabre Peregrine and a Sabre Peregrine serial number. From the information I've gathered, the ship is a military-grade racing ship without the ability to mount weapons.
Vulture - For $175 a player can purchase a Vulture and 24 months of insurance. Similar in appearance to EVE's Venture mining frigate, the Vulture is a single-player ship specializing in salvaging. The ship is advertised as, "The model of self-sufficiency with daunting weapons, reliable shields, and 12 SCU of cargo capacity."
I know some Star Citizen players might not appreciate some of the comparisons to EVE Online ships. Reading through the patch notes led to a desire to point out how, shall we say overpriced, the ships appear to an outsider? But looking at early sales, the ships are selling relatively briskly and $500,000 in sales today is a distinct possibility.
One matter I won't poke fun at is the content players saw dropped overnight. I'll conclude this post with the patch notes for Alpha 3.24 with the wish everyone logging into the Persistent Universe don't run into many bugs.
Gameplay
3.24 fundamentally changes how players interact and organize their belongings. From Cargo, to items to ships. Freight Elevators will introduce a new mechanic for retrieving and storing larger items at various locations. Hangars will now be instanced and in case of personal hangars, persist everything within them including the newly added Hangar Decorations. Ships are now spawned via Ship Elevator and Item Banks now replace the omnipresent local inventory.
Personal & Instanced Hangars
Introduction of new tech that creates an instance of the player's hangar to allow for uninterrupted management of cargo, inventory, and vehicles. Personal hangars are found at the player's home location and allow for customization and organization of the hangar interior.
All hangar types are instanced, meaning they are able to physically stack on each other in the same location without interference. All hangar types have ASOP terminals, Item Banks, and Freight Elevators (SCU fright amount depends on hangar size). All hangar types have ship elevator platforms which will lower when players request a ship to be spawned. Any ships already on the platform will be lowered and then stored via asop. All hangar types should be accessible to party members of the Hangar owner.
Personal Hangars exists for the player at the selected home location at all times and is as big as the largest ship on the player’s account (ships purchased in-game don’t increase size of personal hangar at this time). This update includes a polish pass of minimum hangar sizes for all ships. Any items, decorations, and vehicles left inside the Hangar should persist as well as recover their state and move to new shards after a crash recovery, though objects will be cleaned up if left on the ship loading elevator.
Freight Elevators
Implementation of systems and content for players to physically load and unload cargo to and from their ships by conveying cargo to and from hangars, landing pads, garages, and docking collars. For the new cargo flow we will be storing cargo in the local player inventory and allow them to use the freight elevator in their hangar to access the inventory physically. This will be extended to cover the location inventory access that is currently handled by personal inventory. This means that anything stored to or retrieved from local inventory at a location must be accessed by the freight elevator. Furthermore we will remove the 'invisible' player inventories for vehicles in favor of using physicalized inventory inside the ship. All ships have at least some small personal inventory that the player can put personal items for easy access. Additionally, we will be adding physicalized inventory containers available for purchase that players can use to store and haul larger items in the cargo hold. The freight elevator kiosk will have added functionality for inventory management including sub inventories like these boxes so players can move things around and recall it for manual transfer on/off their ships.
Tractor Beam Use Adjustments
Tractor Beam use on the multi-tool has had its cargo mass balanced to restrict use to cargo sizes under 24 SCU (multi-tool can no-longer move 24 SCU crates) and to reduce usable distance. Both handheld tractor beams have had their movement speeds reduced.
Players can find Freight Elevators in personal and staging hangars, as well as outposts and scrapyards. Players can interact with a Freight Elevator Kiosk (FEK) to load items onto the elevator platform. Players can put items on a Freight Elevator platform and then interact with the kiosk to store items to their warehouse. Players can see information about mission relevant items when storing and retrieving them via Freight Elevator Kiosk.
Cargo Hauling Missions
With the introduction of Freight Elevators, we have created a suite of legal missions where players are tasked to move cargo containers between locations. These new hauling missions will generate procedurally across the Stanton system, seeing the player transport goods back and forth to various Jump Points, LEOs, Lagrange Points, Landing Zones, Distribution Centers, and Outposts. These missions can be completed either through the freight elevators in the player’s personal persistent hangar or through the cargo loading areas (currently exclusive to Hull-C pilots).
Mission Flow
The current suite includes Cargo Hauling missions of 3 variants: A to B, Multi to Single, and Single to Multi. Each variant can come in 3 different quantity grades: Small-Grade, Supply-Grade, Bulk-Grade. Higher tier hauling missions are reputation gated and will require doing intro and smaller grade missions to progress.
Any player with the Contract can view and request the associated mission cargo through any Freight Elevator Kiosk at a pick-up location (even a party member’s personal hangar). When requesting mission cargo at a pick-up location through a Freight Elevator Kiosk, the requested cargo appears on the Freight Elevator. Based on the Contract’s Volume token, the requested containers are capped to different SCU sizes: Small-Grade: 4 SCU containers or smaller. Supply-Grade: 8 SCU containers or smaller / 16 SCU containers or smaller (depending on the mission). Bulk-Grade: No container size limit. All mission cargo containers requested in Small-Grade and Supply-Grade Contracts can be moved by using either the one-handed or two-handed Tractor Beam tool. All mission cargo containers can snap onto a ship’s cargo grid with suitable dimensions. When all Deliver objectives on the HUD and in the mobiGlas are finished, the Contract completes.
Commodity Kiosk Updates
Players can buy different SCU-sized containers via Commodity Kiosk. Upon purchase of commodities, players can chose to automatically load them onto a stored ship at a cost of aUEC for the automatic loading service. This will take an amount of time based on amount and size of boxes, during which the ship will be inaccessible for automatic loading process (information on loading progress is visible on ASOP terminal).
Item Banks
Item Bank Kiosks exist in various places in all landing zones and space stations. These kiosks replace the old local inventory. Using these kiosks, players can store, retrieve, and equip FPS items.
Hangar Decorations
3.24 brings decorations into player's hands. These new decorations can be purchased at Kel-To and Dumpers Depot then retreived from their hangar's freight elevator. These decorations can be placed anywhere a player wants in their Hangar and have full interactions like sitting on chairs and couches (caveat that the Ship Platform will delete items stored on the ship elevator while storing ships). Hangar Decoration will persist in personal hangars but will get deleted in staging hangars (Hangars that you don't own outside of your main landing zone)
Soft Death Breaching Polish
Set default breach amount for exterior doors to 100% during soft death. Fixed up Cutlass, Freelancer, and Constellation breach amounts.
Law System Updates
It is no longer illegal to damage, destroy, tow, scrape, or structurally salvage an unowned vehicle. Made towing hostility only hostile to the owner of the ship. It is no longer illegal to tow ships outside of green zones. Slightly increased the grace period that players are allowed to tow an owned vehicle before they receive a Crime Stat in order to allow blockages to be removed. Added a countdown to the warning for towing.
Additional Gameplay Updates
- Added Carry lowered FPS weapon keybind (ALT + R)
- Added ESP Dampening Strength Modifiers to Game Settings Tab
- mobiGlas Contract App UI Polish
Ships and Vehicles
Master Modes Atmo Flight Controller Re-tuning
Made many, ongoing atmospheric flight updates to nearly every ship in the game. This update tunes the atmospheric flight speed and yaw capabilities of ships to most ships as well as flight controller changes to tune afterburn and SCM speeds in and out of atmosphere.
Ship Cockpit Camera Polish
Ship 3rd Person Camera Updated with smoother vibration, along with the same affect changes applied to cockpit to reduce HUD movement.
Hull-C Shield and Health Updates
- Removed SDFs and Shields from Spindles and Attached Cargo of the Hull-C
- Greatly Increased the Hull-C Spindle Strut Health
Additional Ship Updates
- Updated Aurora series and Origin 135c cargo physics proxies to help manual loading of cargo
- Increased RSI Mantis Engine Attachment Health
- Reduced RSI Mantis Emissions
- Corrected Erroneously Fast Tuning on the SanTokYai
- Fixed Erroneously Large Starfarer Fuel Tank
- Reduced the Esperia Prowler's Emissions to make it more in line as a Stealth Dropship
- Greatly Increased the Health on All Ship Gimbal Sizes
- Increased Overall Spread Values for Vehicle Cannons
- Reduced Vehicle Laser Damage by 10%
- Ground Vehicles Physics Improvements Polish to help with movement and Tractor Beaming
- Added many new Cargo Hauling Rentals to all Rental Shops around Stanton
Core Tech
Ultrawide UI Updates
Ultrawide UI Scaling will Now Base grid sizes on height, not width, and relative to a 16x9 aspect ratio. Stopped markers from not inheriting scale (because that breaks when aspect ratio above 16x9). Removed logic which was offsetting markers up when going more wide-screen.
Additional Core Tech Updates
- Added slight boundary violation grace time to Planet Kill Volumes for vehicles. (This may help with many random deaths while flying close to planet surfaces and water)
- Made Further Ship Debris Collision Physics Performance Improvements
- Vulkan Performance - Reuse the GPUBuffer, instead of re-creating them to improve performance and memory fragmentation
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