Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 – New Settlements, Defenses & NPC Enemies Are Getting BIG Updates
Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 has even more Features, Locations in Pyro, NPCs Factions AND a load of additional dev responses on Stealth Gameplay, Missions and NPCs.
The Source For This is – Inside Star Citizen: Alpha 4.0 – Conflict Resolution
There is a lot of combat opportunities in Pyro.
It’s lawless, a firefight can potentially break out anywhere.
Very wild west.
A bit of a worry they said you could just be attacked while shopping
Hopefully in those situations the NPCs will effectively aggro to the aggressor.
The new Pyro outposts are built with combat in mind both on foot and with vehicles.
Tho it’s going to wildly vary based on the outpost.
They suggested changing inventory at shops could change the items on display which can be used as cover.
There are a load of expanded NPC behaviours for guarding, attacking and this combined with Server Meshing / Networking improvements (high more stable server framerates) should make for a significantly better FPS experience for players in 4.0.
The have schedule areas with NPCs staying within that zone doing various tasks / patrols.
There are Sniper Towers and watch nests as well. These can be useful to plan things out BUT also dangerous if full of enemy spotters.
There are different “classes” of NPC combatants with specific loadouts, traits and behaviours.
They might hold up in a room with a shotgun, lock you down and push you or run.
Techy – light Armour, SMGs, aggressive, get close to flush out or flank.
CQC (Close Quarters Combat) – Shotguns, very high aggression.
NPCs won’t be dumb dumbs, or try and fight you kung fu movie one by one.
Juggernaut – Very Heavy Armour, LMG, Slow but direct and coming towards you.
NPC Pet Kopions – With Collars!
Different factions may have different traits, stats and behaviours too
There are 2 Primary factions to “enlist” with:
Headhunters – Tiered Structured Armour Rewards – Higher – Tankier / More Resistant
Citizens of Prosperity – More “Civil” Weaponry – Less Kastak Arms – More Bearing.
Both factions are fighting each other and XenoThreat – they are very well geared and act like a PMC (Private Military Company). They operate out of P2, 3 & 6. XenoThreat act more cautiously and dig in. They are accurate and conserve ammo.
They talked about infiltration and sabotage missions, getting into an outpost disabling something or blowing up fuel. And a steal scrap mission. Get in, salvage as much aas you can and get out.
They showed off a mining facility / town.
There was Shadowfall as well a town in the shadow of a massive mountain on the shore of a lake. There are lots of temp fortifications. There are load of defenses that can appear at locations that you might need to take out – AA to Turrets.
Powerloader?
Did I miss something and they added stealth mechanics to the game? They keep mentioning stealth, but it doesnt exist mechanically at all.
And the reasons for using ground vehicles look like its “just because we wanted to show them in this video.”
Honestly concerning that the devs think a lot of this stuff, they are just straight making it up from their imagination when talking about it and none of its in game or being added.
Zac2806 (I believe Zac Preece) Senior FPS Systems Designer at CIG
It’s does exist. NPCs have perception meters, they have stealth tells.
We’ve got some new stuff in for 4.0 to make stealth better including different perception profiles to make NPCs have more suitable vision profiles for in and out of combat.
NPCs have things such as investigations, you can throw things to distract them, NPCs investigate corpses.
It’s just the spaces never supported that and we’re working towards outposts supporting this.
This includes things such as setting up patrol paths and having specific NPC patterns in outposts that you can watch and learn as well as manipulate, you’ll see this with raised elevation areas where you can observe before you go in.
Idea is with Sever meshing, sever frame rate is high enough for all of this to be responsive enough to make a proper stealth experience.
We’re really pushing ground combat NPCs at the minute to build a proper experience, I hope you saw the large improvement in 3.23 and we intend to keep this velocity
Is there a plan to have ground fps AI react appropriately to our ground vehicles?
We intend for there to be anti-vehicle NPCs who either grab railguns from the envrioment or have railguns in their loadout that focus on Vehicles, these NPCs will be at outposts and such.
Hopefully more to share with you soon but NPCs having vehicle specific responses is really important and something we’re lacking even with things like Kopions, so very aware of it and plan to address it
How would we be able to manipulate such NPC patterns? Assassins Creed as an example has the ability to throw something to alert them to inspect the place of impact or to whistle.
Correct, you can throw things like bottles, mags, weapons and that causes them to investigate.
I’m hearing terms like “bespoke” and “carefully crafted.” What happened to procedural generation? “Bespoke” and “carefully crafted” take man hours. I thought one of Turbulent’s jobs was to create the tools necessary to crank these things out quickly so it doesn’t take literal years to create one system.
We’re moving towards templates for encounters for areas, so we have specifically crafted encounters that are fun but are scalable for multiple locations.
That way you have hand crafted content that is fun and engaging whilst it being able to be applied to multiple locations.
It’s a bit complicated to go over in a Reddit comment but it’s standardizing encounters whilst making them a lot more in-depth.