Developer Cloud Imperium Games is continuing to evolve its space sim Star Citizen, with a new event and a look at new upcoming features and content.
First of all, a new event has been launched involving the capture of a massive (242 meters long) Idris Frigate.
Some players already received a taste of this event earlier this months when it was tested on a dedicated server, but now it's on the live servers.
The event will cause Idris Frigates to spawn at a certain time on random servers. Some of them will actually be manned by developers, while others will have an AI crew.
Players will be tasked with disabling and capturing them, and then they will be able to control them at will. There's even a contest involved that gives people a chance to win an Idris for themselves, alongside other goodies.
I suppose it's also a good chance to test the Idris before it finally gets delivered into the hands of players. The event comes with a smaller update, alpha 3.22.1. You can find the full patch notes on the official forums.
The second piece of content for this week is a new video discussing the new Master Modes, which will basically change combat radically. Players will have two modes at their disposal, one dedicated to combat, and one dedicated to navigation.
When you're in navigation mode, you fly much faster, but your weapons, shields, and countermeasures are deactivated. When you enter combat mode, you go much slower, which intends to make air battles much tighter, more similar to a World War II dogfight.
The other new element showcased is precision targeting, which will help players target specific enemy ships' parts more accurately. An added bonus is that the zoom included in precision targeting will let players enjoy the looks of shops more (before they blow them up).
Lastly, a new episode of Star Citizen Live focuses on the upcoming and massive Distribution Centers, providing more information on their features via a Q&A with the developers.
The features discussed in both videos will come in Alpha 3.23, which is currently slated for April.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded game currently in development exclusively for PC and consistently evolving.
Its fans have pledged $666,572,010 in funding with 5,096,023 registered users. As usual, not all of them are paying players, as many accounts are created for Free Fly events.
That being said, Star Citizen received over $117.5 million in pledges in 2023, marking the biggest year of its history and the sixth of consecutive growth.
A single-player campaign named Squadron 42 is also in the works, and we recently heard at CitizenCon that it's now feature-complete. We're still waiting for a release date, which might be announced at the next CitizenCon in October 2024.
