After delays and setbacks aplenty, Star Citizen’s 3.0 Alpha has finally been deployed for public testing to backers.
3.0 is now in the hands of the Evocati, or early testers, to find any weird and wonderful bugs before it’s released to a wider testing pool on the PTU. Testing could go on for weeks depending on what’s found. The update sent out to testers reads:
“We’re absolutely thrilled to announce that an early version of 3.0 is now available for the Evocati Test Flight on PTU!
“Also, in addition to all of the new features and updates that 3.0.0 brings, we’re also testing the launcher and patching system. No more daily 20GB+ patches!
“Publishing a first build to Evocati is always huge milestone in the development process of Star Citizen, and this is a particularly giant step towards getting 3.0 in the hands of all backers. As this update is so massive, we’ll start with modest testing goals today to allow everyone time to get familiar with changes, and then we’ll look to ramp up quickly in the coming days. “
No more 20 GB patches will be sure to relieve some users who don’t have the connection speed to handle that kind of throughput in a timely manner.
Alongside the testing for 3.0 finally beginning, a massive set of patch notes for 3.0 have also been released. Digging through them reveals a huge number of new additions and changes to Star Citizen. Lets dig in shall we?
Firstly, three new moons now have planetary surfaces: Yela, Daymar, Celkin, and the asteroid Delamar. These provide over three million kilometres to explore which come with outposts and derelict ships. They also come with a rotational day and night cycle.
Breathing, stamina, and heart rate are now a thing to watch out for, the ATC (air traffic control system) is now used for landing, there are four new ships and the Ursa rover being added in this release.
There is now five mission typed to try which include delivery, bounty, missing person, derelict, escort types.
Levski base which is situated on the Delamar asteroid is finally accessible. That is the base that was shown in this year’s Gamescom demo.
Cargo boxes are secreted around the place and can also be acquired by destroying cargo ships. These boxes can contain items which are stored in a “cargo grid” and what you can pick up will depend on the cargo crate size.
A new hint system is also now in the game along with Subsumption NPCs at Grimhex, Olisar, and Levski.
According to CIG there is content that will be added to 3.0:
“Other content and features are in and listed in the notes, but currently not the focus of this testing phase as they undergo bug fixes and polish. Additionally, there’s content that is not listed in the notes that are intended for live release and will be added iteratively during the testing cycle.”
These are some of the main points from the lengthy patch notes. Some players are reporting not much improvement in terms of performance, but as Star Citizen is still in alpha that’s to be expected.
