Dumpster Fires

(Obviously, anyone expecting weekly or even monthly updates on this blog was probably highly optimistic.)

So. Star Citizen released its 3.18 patch a couple of weeks ago. Everything worked perfectly and was widely acclaimed as the best patch any company has ever released.

And then I woke up.

If you’re reading this blog, then you probably have read other gaming sites that have described the patch as a complete and utter disaster. While that might be slightly overstating things, I have been heard to remark that, while in the past I would say the game has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie, now I have to say it has more bugs than the entire Starship Troopers franchise.

For most of the time since its release, I wasn’t able to even log into the game. This was not a unique experience. Posts on the official forums lit up. Gaming sites sat back to watch and eat popcorn. Cats and dogs were living in sin together. Marshmallow men started to wander the streets. (The last two may have been made up. Maybe.)

In some ways, though, this wasn’t completely unexpected. 3.18 was pitched as one of the most significant ones since…maybe 3.0? It was so big a deal that it threw off the quarterly big patch cadence; we had exactly one major patch last year. (This year isn’t looking great either, although we might get three.) It was going to introduce Persistent Entity Streaming, which would allow ships and inventory items to be dropped anywhere…and stay at those dropped locations until someone else came along and acted upon it. I’m still dubious on how that will ultimately work out, given game population and the sheer volume of stuff they can be carrying with them. Not to mention the volume of medical gowns that shows up every time a character respawns after having been killed off.

But I can definitely say that it works. There was a limit previous to this that only allowed three vehicles for a player to be spawned in at once. I was able to spawn in six recently-and most of them I left at an outpost until I returned an hour later, to find them still there. (Two were in bad shape; I think some wind blew ship wreckage on top of them with predictable results.) This is a big deal-there are ship concepts still on the drawing board that will need to be able to carry heaps of vehicles, and while it’s silly to assume they’d all belong to the same player…well, some people go crazy in SC.

This change also allowed the game to do something that the developers have been promising for years, something that kept getting pushed back, and back, and back: the first iteration of salvaging gameplay. You can strip the hull off of wrecked ships now, where you generate recycled material to sell at the various trade kiosks around the star system. Anyone can do this with a hand tool-in fact, the small canisters can even be used to take that recycled material and do some spot repairs on your own damaged ship. (It won’t reattach a wing, but it can likely at least cover up the exposed metal framework.) But it really shines with the salvaging ships in the game, one of which has been actually in game for a few years at least, and the other just recently released with this patch. (I can’t speak to how effective they are-they aren’t ships I have.)

It’s still the first iteration, so the heavy duty salvaging is still on the horizon. But as the mining gameplay loop shows, the devs will likely iterate on it hard.

These are just a couple of the most significant changes in the patch. But…I did use the phrase “dumpster fire” in the title, right? Even though people are having better luck logging in, there are still plenty of challenges. Missions may not actually be accepted when you accept them in the contract manager; it lags like crazy sometimes. Speaking of lag, bounty targets aren’t having their “neutralize target’ marker on them right away all of the time, which means if you kill them off beforehand, you don’t get paid, and you fail the mission to boot. (Technically, it’s “incomplete”, but it’s likely to go away when you log off, which is effectively failing the mission anyway.) More problematic is the fact that hangars at various landing sites don’t acknowledge your requests for landing sites; there’s a workaround, but sometimes that workaround doesn’t work. This can be a problem if you need fuel badly, or worse yet, are about to dehydrate to death and NEED to get inside to buy a drink. Starship claims are a little tricky, as well as storage of those ships. And these are just the things I personally experienced in my limited amount of time I’ve had since being able to log in again.

The devs, fortunately, are aware of all of this, and have been working. The fact that I can log in now more or less consistently is proof of this. There’s a 3.18.1 patch on the immediate horizon that will (hopefully) address some of the more critical bugs. Maybe, maybe not, but we’ll find out. Once the more critical bugs are taken care of, we should be able to get back to the “film” instead of “franchise” comment about the bugs in the game. There are still things I really want to try out that came in the patch, like the starship race tracks (which I will undoubtedly wreck on more often than not, because I suck at racing) and the changes in how cargo hauling (where the cargo can be interacted with now-which makes piracy possible).

The devs are going to want to make sure things are running relatively smooth real soon; after all, May is when they do their big Invictis Launch Week sales and free-flights for people who haven’t backed the game; being unable to log in would be a very bad look for prospective customers….