Star Citizen fans can now watch a meaty episode of Around The Verse focused on the 3.0 release and Cloud Imperium Games’ high-level plans for 2018. The team doesn't reveal a lot of new information, but the video still offers some interesting insight.
The bulk of the episode focuses on an interview-style chat with Persistent Universe Director Tony Zurovec and his thoughts on the “challenging” nature of releasing 3.0 before the holiday break. As expected, committed developers were coding, working and fixing bugs until the very last second. Some, like Developer Engineer Ahmed Shaker, even deployed a series of live hotfixes over the holidays to improve player experience on the fly.
Hitting that strict deadline came with some obvious drawbacks. Zurovec acknowledged that many promised 3.0 features didn’t make it to the final build, but the team now has what he calls the “basic skeleton” for more significant evolution going forward. The Director also reaffirmed CIG’s quarterly update release plans that favor faster growth at the expense of critical feature deployment. Being able to bring changes to backers in a more seamless way is something that excites the team.
In admitting the 3.0 milestone was reached in a very limited form, Zurovec spoke candidly about the severe performance problems still plaguing 3.0 today:
“It’s not that we don’t see the issues. It’s not that we don’t want fix the issues. It’s just that by the time you finally get all these pieces interconnected and working, you’re able to test it then time does start getting short.
“Obviously on the performance side - 3.1 - one of the primary focuses of 3.1 is going to be to deal with speeding the game up: finding the source of some of the biggest problems in terms of server and client frame rate and bringing those up substantially to improve the player experience.”
The discussion then shifted to life beyond 3.0 and the features backers may get a taste of later this year. One such element is the larger procedural planet system that will spawn the game's massive universe. With so much more real estate to leverage, Zurovec sees that as a chance for actual gameplay strategy to begin. In other words, the ships you have, the environment and players around you will truly start to matter. According to CIG’s latest production report, that tech should be in place by the end of 2018.
Before all that can happen, though, the team needs to focus on giving the player purpose and creating the complex server infrastructure to make that happen. While highly anticipated jobs like mining, for example, didn’t make it into 3.0, the team is working on them.
That’s all augmented by an environmental mission system driven by a technology called Probability Volumes. Probability Volumes are small pockets of the verse that behave a certain way based on environmental factors and the actions of other characters. PVs will make certain sections of space more conducive to piracy, trade or other professions. They will respond to the larger in-game economy, and create emerging actions in the world based on that information. They’re the reason your crew may come across a massive asteroid belt or witness an unexpected intergalactic heist. The goal is to skew these special moments a bit more toward fun than reality. If Probability Volumes work as they should, the player will be too busy to notice them.
What Zurovec and his team must now work to create a solar system of servers that can analyze the necessary data to realize that vision. This can get especially difficult when traditional player action might involve traveling from one side of the verse to the other. While the 3.0 foundation has essentially been laid, there’s still lots more to do.
Star Citizen is available now for backers on PC. Tune in Friday at 3 p.m. EST for a new Q&A series called Reverse The Verse.
How do you feel about Star Citizen 3.0 now that you’ve heard a developer response to it? Should CIG have waited longer to offer a more polished release? Tell us in the comments section!
