Roadmap Roundup

Hi everyone,

Every week, we update the Public Roadmap, moving, adding, or removing cards. There is very little context given, and the community is then forced to take that limited information and speculate on what it all means.

Over time, we’ve come to recognize that as a primary method of communicating our open development strategy, the Public Roadmap isn’t fully realized. What’s missing is a brief, explanatory note accompanying each Roadmap update with insights into the decision-making that led to those moves, additions, and deletions. So, we’ve decided to add a weekly note that accompanies each roadmap update. This meets our primary goal of offering a transparent look at our development. A secondary benefit, and one we think you’ll like, is that the community will get to hear directly from us more often about what’s going on in development and why. The net result is that our communications should be more transparent, more specific, and more insightful with all of you who help to make Star Citizen and Squadron 42 possible.

What this means for you:

1. More Transparency – We’re going to accompany every Roadmap Publish with a form of written communication that we feel will better represent our roadmap updates and, more importantly, communicate with you any changes being made and why we are making them.

2. More Information – We want to update you more often, with more voices, from more developers. As we mentioned and demonstrated with our recent Staggered Development FAQ, we have been actively brainstorming several ways that we feel can do even more in terms of communicating and keeping you all in the loop with our progress. This Roadmap communication is just one piece of that puzzle.



Thanks,

-CIG Community Team

Notable Changes for September 6th, 2019

Salvage

We project Salvage to be a full “two-quarter task,” similar to the development of the initial release of Mining. After carefully evaluating all factors, we made the decision to push Salvage back two quarters to make room for both FPS Mining and Refueling.

First, for the release of 3.7, it didn’t make sense to implement caves without gameplay, so we tasked the team on Salvage with creating the FPS Mining and Quantum Fuel Mining.

Second, we’ve made the decision to re-task the team focused on Salvage in the quarters to come with closing out a full refueling game loop, which will include Fuel Harvesting and Quantum Fuel Harvesting. These will both be added to the Public Roadmap soon. Once completed, the team will then move on to focus on Salvage.

Security System

The security system controls who has access to areas and objects based on various factors such as reputation, ownership, keycards, and faction. It will automatically issue warnings to people breaking the law and, if ignored, will flag them as criminals to security forces.

This is a feature-set that we’re looking forward to continuing to develop, but have made the decision to pull off the Public Roadmap while we re-prioritize and determine when we want to focus more heavily on its development. This decision was made for a number of reasons, namely to re-allocate development resources to the following:

Social AI: All non-combat AI and behaviors, such as bartenders, shopkeepers, tourists, security, vagrants, and more.

Prison Gameplay: Delivering Caves and FPS Mining in 3.7 allows us to move on to another feature: Prisons. We’ll create prison environments by mixing and matching procedurally developed caves with bespoke entrances and hubs attached, to deliver Prison gameplay loops.

Law System Improvements: After specific infractions and capture by authorities, criminal players will wake up in prison, and must either serve time, earn merits, or find a way to escape the prison with or without the aid of fellow players. We’re currently working on this feature-set, but aren’t quite ready to put it on the Roadmap just yet.

In-Game Orgs & Reputation Systems: In real life, if you join a membership club, you might get some benefits attached – think discounts at certain merchants, free or discounted roadside assistance, etc. This feature-set will be tied to elements of the existing reputation system and introduce gameplay and in-game benefits related to being a part of specific in-game organizations. More details to come (we’re going to wrangle Tony Z for this one).

Some unannounced features (see you at CitizenCon.)

Bounty Hunter Armor

The Bounty Hunter Armor Set was originally planned for 3.7 but has been re-prioritized to align the asset release alongside the Bounty Hunting gameplay (Bounty Mission NPC Improvements & PVP Bounties) coming in 3.9.

That’s all for this week’s Roundup – join the discussion on Spectrum here.