Star Citizen Alpha 3.8 is out now, bringing a ton of new content to the MMO. Cloud Imperium Games has been teasing these additions for months now, with the teams working on the game slowly developing and deploying new features aplenty. And it’s not just new features coming in Star Citizen Alpha 3.8, the game is also getting revamps to a lot of backend and frontend content.
The new content that leads Star Citizen Alpha 3.8 is a massive revamp to combat and a bunch of other areas. Melee combat is being expanded, yes, players will now be able to use melee weapons. A bevvy of new missions will include a ton of different gameplay elements. Multi-crew and co-op missions are being added in this update. For example, there’s a new mining mission spawning in the universe. The previously teased law and order additions are also in the game now in an early state.
And yes, there are some new other new weapons, as well as new ships too. The ARGO MOLE offers a complete mining solution for small crews. The new Animus missile launcher offers some devastating firepower against ground targets, while the Behring P6-LR Ballistic Sniper Rifle offers some long-range ordinance.
For backend changes, the new Server-side Object Container Streaming (SOCS) system will allow the servers for the game to handle a lot more users per instance. SOCS is a massive overhaul of the server architecture that balances the game’s servers load based on player activity. So the background processing will not need to take every state of the universe into account, as it will only need to handle calculations around the player. This also ties in the aforementioned gameplay additions.
This new system is combined with the Procedural Planet Tech Update (Planet Tech v4) and a new planetary weather system to embellish planet-side life and immersion quite a bit. Star Citizen players will notice much more varied terrain and tons of new details. This patch introduces a tremendous detail improvement and much more visual fidelity to every planet and moon in Star Citizen. The biggest change behind the scenes with the new planet tech is that the developers will be able to output a ton of new planets at a much faster rate than before.
Here’s what Chris Roberts, CEO of Cloud Imperium Games had the following to say about the launch of Star Citizen Alpha 3.8:
“I couldn’t imagine a better way to close out the year for Star Citizen than by adding both major technology like Server-side Object Container Streaming, our new procedural planet technology: Planet Tech v4, as well as new gameplay and features like melee combat and content such as the ice-planet of microTech. While we have a lot of additional features and content in the pipeline I’m incredibly excited about what our players can experience in Star Citizen today.”
