Back to search

What are your current takeaways from the initial PTU testing of healing and injury so far?

TL;DRRichard Tyrer says feedback on inventory and healing has been generally positive, with inventory improving through quality-of-life additions and bug fixes, though more work remains and live play will reveal more.

Richard TyrerSquadron 42 FPS Game Director

I think my biggest takeaway is that I think people have been generally happy with the features that have gone live. I think going back all the way from Evocati to now, if I treat them individually, if I look at inventory, I think when inventory went live, it was fairly rough. We had some really big issues with the timings and the performance. I think I saw like 89 minutes to be able to change a helmet. And the scaling of the icons was not scaling correctly to the resolutions. So when we were making it on 1080, it's fine. And then somebody was going to 4K and the icon was going like five times the size. It wasn't going small, it was going huge. So people are playing on high resolutions, which you'd expect, people who are playing Evocati to have decent PCs. They've got, like, I can only see one icon, and then I'm scrolling for hours and hours because they've got lots of subscriber items. And it's like, what is this? And so I think we had some significant bugs that really had a large detriment on the experience. We also had quite a lot of quality of life that was kind of missing, that we were still adding, and based on the feedback from Evocati that we did add. I think in the version that went in yesterday, I think since Evocati, we've added sorting, we added filter categories. We should be adding instant filters so you don't have to apply them. I saw that yesterday. We've added interaction points for consumables, so like med pens and magazines and grenades, so that it moves the interaction points away from the character. And you also get tooltip comparisons that correspond to the numbers, so you can quickly see, okay, is that full? Is that half capacity in terms of magazines? So we've added a lot of improvements in quality of life between now and then. We've also been fixing a lot of the bugs that we've had. The biggest priority ones where we've had items being eaten and so on and so forth. They're super critical, right? We don't want anybody losing anything. So I think inventory is starting to get to where we want it to be for our tier zero at least. And I think that's good to see. We still want to do lots of improvements and we'll be rolling straight onto them. So I'm happy in terms of the progress there. And I think I've seen some feedback threads now where people are still giving us feedback, and it's great. And we're reading it all and digesting that and taking it down for improvements. I think for healing, other than some people don't like beams, and that's some people's preferences, I think that has gone down well. I think we've seen lots of people being really engaged with the healing and medical gameplay in terms of the different drugs, in terms of the masking of those drugs and injuries. Obviously, medical beacons are going live as well, and we've seen quite a lot of usage in that, so that's good to see. I think I'm really looking forward to seeing both of these go into the live environment to see how they play out in a more natural environment, because obviously on the PTU, people are jumping on there to try and test the features, which is what we need. It'll be interesting to see how they percolate to just general play over a period of time, because it's kind of like when we released actor status T0. They take a long time to really get a sense of how the player base is going to play with them at scale. But overall, I think the feedback has been fairly positive across the two features. And we're not finished. We've still got a long way to go. But yeah, it's been good.

Star Citizen Live›All About Alpha 3.15·
Published on this date.22 Oct 2021