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In addition to the upcoming changes to fixed weapons, turrets and ESP, what other near- or long-term changes to gunnery and controls are planned or under consideration?

TL;DRFuture plans include weakening gimbal assist, more weapon-focused changes next quarter, and capacitor gameplay from 3.11 onward, so players must make meaningful decisions rather than constantly firing.

Yogi KlattGameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience Team

Gunnery and controls. How long have you got? Okay, so gunnery for us is the process of aiming and firing your weapons. So we're somewhat closing in on that. So we kind of know what kind of modes we want to have when you fire weapons. I mean, we have fixed, we have manual or free, and then we have gimbal assist. Gimbal assist, for example, is a bit too strong. So later we want to debuff it a little bit. But for that we need more support from the sensor systems. But combat as such is undergoing a huge change at the moment. So what John just said is in the next quarter we're going to have more focus not just on the missiles but also especially on the weapons. So the future patches will change the way players employ the weapons. So they need to be really careful when to employ the weapons. So they need to pick the times when they do it and they need to decide when not to do it because employing the weapons will have a lot of disadvantages as well. During combat, we want people to commit to the decisions that they make. In this regard, there's a lot of stuff coming. I think we mentioned capacitors.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

I was just about to ask about capacitors.

Yogi KlattGameplay Programmer, Vehicle Experience Team

Capacitor gameplay as such is quite interesting for us. We're going to have this both on the weapons and on the flight model later. It's like the concept of stamina, right? So if Star Citizen were a fighting game, right? At the moment, what happens in combat, everybody's just punching, right? There's no consequence in not punching, so everybody punches. For us, that means players can tape down their fire button all the time without or only with little consequence. And that will drastically change in 3.11 onwards. So you need to decide when to punch. You need to decide when to block. And so we're slowly going into that direction of having really short decision-act loops, right? Sorry, it's called OODA loops: observe, orient, decide, act. So effectively analyzing your situation, then deciding what you do, and then doing the stuff that you want to do. And having a lot of small decisions, small loops in combat. That was a mouthful. What I'm saying is we want the players to make a lot of important, meaningful decisions in combat. And so the capacitor changes on the weapons and later on the thrusters, they will help us achieve that.

Star Citizen Live›Targets, Turrets & Take-Offs·
Published on this date.3 Jul 2020