Star Citizen Becomes an Extraction Shooter – Contested Zones 

Welcome to some more Star Citizen… those crazy devs at CIG are adding Extraction Shooter gameplay. Let’s talk about it and asteroid bases, pyro stations / gameplay area in general a bit as well… 

Contested Zones are coming with Alpha 4.0 and are apparently similar to an MMO dungeon. 

It’s a more open area, the spaces always exist, you can go into them anytime. It’s not a dynamic event.  

Clearly influenced by an extraction shooter. 

More Rewards the longer you are there. 

Go in, explore, fight, loot. 

They are right next to the rest of the station services. 

You can set a spawn and then go and loot these areas. 

Often these areas are in massive disrepair, with no power, minimal or no life support. 

Booby Traps, Dangerous Creatures (just kopions atm, but more in the future), you keep progressing through doors that lead you to more combat and loot. You’ll need to make choices where to go, there are keycards, puzzles, traps, other players. 

This is very much a PvPvE area but at varying scales. 

You can go solo OR with a group. Fight your way in, loot and get out. 

The enemies there aren’t spawned by missions BUT will respawn over time. 

They want bosses here. 

They talked about the doors having timers as well, so you’ll want to hold the area for them to open to get more loot. 

I am a little concerned that there will be no restrictions to entry to these areas and you will just have players waiting at the exits… 

The social zones in stations will be green zones / safe, so once you are out you can bank your loot. 

Having an easily accessible Extraction Shooter as part of Pyro is actually pretty cool. 

I think that’s one of the reasons I like SC… they can have a load of gameplay loops like this they add in.  

Obviously, development time is long partly because of that BUT for me that just means more game for longer? 

Asteroid Bases 

There are a number of asteroid clusters in Pyro, and they are using some new tech. 

Asteroid bases make use of procedural asteroids and then they “carve” bases into them using the station interior pieces they already have. Really, they are Asteroid Stations. 

They provide a load of additional gameplay area and potentially a nice blend of space combat then straight onto a station for FPS for missions. Again, animals and gangs can be there. There are a load of options and routes into these “bases”. They can have some awesome combined arms gameplay. 

They said there is cool loot here. 

12 Stations in the 4.0 release of Pyro. 

One of them is JP station. 

The stations are bigger and much more damaged / in disrepair compared to Stanton. 

There are various brands / Station Names you might see Starlight Service Station, Obituary, Gas Light, Mugumi Refueling, Checkmate Station, Ruin Station. 

Ruin is the BIG main station in Pyro. Tons of gameplay opportunities there. 

More generally stations in Pyro have the same facilities as Stations in Stanton but it might be more expensive and a bit different.  

You can access external freight elevators from your hangar so you can go out and load a large ship like a Hull-C. 

Ruin has the Ghost Arena… but CIG didn’t really give us more info other than we will neeed to go there and see. 

The rough and ready gang is one of the factions and station operators in Pyro. 

They basically own the fuel and repair service stations. 

They aren’t crazy hooligans though, they run a business and try to not get dragged into unnecessary fighting.