As part of Inside Star Citizen, a series of previews for upcoming major patches, the Star Citizen team unveiled the ship engineering gameplay that will be part of an overall ship gameplay overhaul. These changes are pretty major, and will change the way players assemble crews and fly their spaceships.
The long story short is that starting in Alpha 4.0, ships will essentially become component-focused, living and dying by the health of their individual parts. This has major implications for all aspects of ship gameplay, from combat to crew utilization.
With this new system, players can strategically destroy certain parts of the ship to render it unusable. For instance, enemies can choose to focus on ripping apart your ship’s armor with lasers, or use more ballistic-focused weapons to go right through the armor and hit components instead.
This also opens up a sizable new dynamic for players who want to take on engineering roles. Engineering-focused players will be able to use new specialized tools in order to fix and otherwise maintain these components on the ship. This also means that if you have the right parts and repair techniques, you can get your ship back into motion from being entirely dead in space. If a component’s about to explode, you can toss it into space or try to use a coolant or other repair systems to stop it. That said, the parts and components will also often be replaceable, including for upgrades.
Star Citizen looks like it’s finally moving towards more complex and multiplayer systems as it locks into its promised development refocus. It’s already introduced Cargo event mechanics so that players can tackle challenges together and figure out how to use the rewards. For 4.0 specifically, the Inside Star Citizen Series also tackled upcoming changes including NPCs and social factions, natural creatures and character creation, general faction gameplay, and more.
