The developers of Star Citizen revealed a large spread of new features and improvements targeting the upcoming Alpha 3.23 update, and there's a lot on the menu.
The reveal was made during the latest episode of Star Citizen Live, in which Cloud Imperium Games discussed the upcoming patch in detail.
It's worth mentioning that these elements are targeting Alpha 3.23, which means that some may not make the cut. On the other hand, we also heard that there is more, but CIG opted to keep some surprises under wrap. At the moment of this writing, the update is slated for the spring of 2024.
The first two elements are the new EVA animations and mechanics (excluding crawling on surfaces) and the new personal interaction system shown earlier this week.
Changes to reloading will let you pool ammunition from different magazines. A dynamic crosshair will be added to combat helmets to give players an idea of where shots will land when not aiming down sights. New scopes will make aiming much more visually pleasing and new visors are coming as well.
Distribution Centers are massive planet or moon-side structures belonging to various organizations that players will be able to interact with via trading, missions, or combat.
Master Modes will fundamentally change dogfights, closing distances and hopefully making them more engaging by having players select two different modes, one for cruising and one for combat, which have radically different speed potentials.
Precision Targeting will let us toggle a zoom during combat that will let us target enemy ships more precisely. This will work with gimbal and turret changes. Nearly all weapons will be gimbaled for easier targeting, and having gimbals won't reduce the size of weapons mounted on them. Players will still be able to fix their weapon aim if they so wish.
A new shopping app is also coming, alongside the new Starmap, a new minimap (albeit not all locations will have labels), and a compass.
The new character customization will include a face sculpting-like feature and many more facial scans to pick from.
Instanced hangars are also coming alongside freight elevators and other changes to cargo.
We're getting a previously-teased blockade runner mission type and a big change to Xenothreat.
On top of that, the economy will be rebalanced with some rather big changes to the price of ships in the game.
Non-final examples include the C8R Pisces for 500,000 aUEC, the Anvil Arrow for 2 million aUEC, the RSI Constellation for 10 million aUEC, the Hammerhead for 45-50 million aUEC, and the Origin 890 Jump 70 aUEC.
Some of these elements were shown at Citizencon, but we did not know which update would include them or when.
You can find more details in the video below.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded game that has gathered $663,143,949 in funding at the moment of this writing. It also has 5,059,326 registered accounts. Of course, not all of them are paying customers, as many register to try the game during free fly events like the one that's coming later this month.
During the last year, the game received just north of $117.5 million in pledges, marking 2023 the biggest funding year for the game ever and the sixth consecutive year of growth.
Star Citizen, which is currently in development exclusively for PC, will also have a single-player campaign titled Squadron 42. Cloud Imperium Games has announced that it's feature-complete, albeit it doesn't yet have a release date.
