Patch 5.2: The Thunder King

Issue #6 - The Last Train to Cairo

The darkness in Egypt is ancient and its malevolent tendrils work tirelessly to spread their influence across the world. Issue #6; The Last Train to Cairo, will call upon you to contain this dire threat once again.

In this update you will play through a new, deep and revealing story within Egypt. Travel back in time to unearth powerful artifacts which can help you in the future, and see how the wondrous locations of The Scorched Desert looked in ages past.

Enjoy the Issue #6 cover here, and read more details about the upcoming content below.

The cultists and their dark prophet Abdel Daoud are working in the shadows under the influence of their god Aten. The Atenists seek to undermine and weaken the tireless Marya who bravely stand against them. You must come to their aid and free some of their captured warriors.

The enigmatic undead weapons dealer Said can also offer invaluable advice and guidance on how to best work against the cultists. Uncover the ultimate purpose of the Atenists and their prophet to see the true danger they present to the world.

Be sure not miss the climactic end fight on top of the train to Cairo, where you must stop its lethal cargo!

 

In addition to the many missions in the new story line, and their side missions which can be taken to gain powerful rewards, Issue #6; The Last Train to Cairo, also offers the new and unique Whip Auxilliary weapon.

The vicious Whip can be used for great area damage, but also for buffing your team or sneaky crowd control. Use the Whip to encourage your team mates to run faster or snare tricky opponents and pull them towards you.

A new presence will also make itself known in Issue #6. The veil between worlds is tearing from two sides. Both the adventurous players, ever searching for new challenges, and the ominous powers beyond our dimension, ever looking for access to our world, have long been spoiling for a fight.

The most rare and powerful patterns found in Lairs can now be utilized to instigate an epic confrontation with an immense foe. Gather in groups of ten to take on this devastating Raid size adversary in a titanic struggle in a shrouded location somewhere in the South Pacific. The battle is surely a trap, but will you bite with Jaws of Steel?

But that is not all you get in Issue #6; The Last Train to Cairo. A new Veteran and Recruitment system will become available. For each month you are or have been a member you receive points which can buy unique rewards. Every new person recruited also gives you an amount of points equal to a month of Membership.

A completely new ranking system will also be introduced to Player-versus-player combat. You gain PVP experience points and eventually ranks when you or your team kills other players. As you go up in ranks you are awarded with new tokens, which can be used to buy fresh PVP uniforms.

Check out the full size screenshots from the upcoming content in Issue #6 here.

Issue #6; The Last Train to Cairo is scheduled for release in the beginning of March. Members will get two days early access to the new content in Issue #6.

Death of a Spaceman

My goal with Star Citizen is to build a universe that I want to play in day after day, one that fully immerses me in the environment and stories that happen around me.

In Star Citizen’s persistent universe I want events to happen, governments to fall, wars fought and players becoming legends. I want to see a Galactapedia that grows from week to week, reflecting not just the ongoing content Cloud Imperium plans to continually generate, but also the great deeds achieved by players.

Pilots in the original Privateer had to return to base before they could save their games.

To achieve this sense of a living history, there needs to be a universe where time progresses, characters die, and new ones come to the front. Beyond this, I want people to have a sense of accomplishment when they complete a really difficult trading run or kill an especially infamous pirate. I hate the current game trend in single player games where the game auto-saves every 2 seconds and if you die you just start a few steps earlier. This makes you a lazy and sloppy player. I bullied my way through games like Mass Effect or Gears of War, running in guns blazing, knowing if I died I would always just re-spawn a few steps earlier. In Wing Commander or Privateer, you had to complete the mission to move on. There were no mid mission saves. This created a sense of anxiety towards the end of the mission if you were badly damaged and your shields were low, but if you managed to limp home successfully, you felt a sense of accomplishment.  Without the risk of losing something you’ve worked hard towards, the sense of achievement is cheap.

The last single player game I played that give me an extreme sense of accomplishment in beating it was Demon’s Souls. How they handled death and re-incarnation of your ghost / body was consistent with their world and fiction and because I couldn’t save mid-level, clearing a level, especially after a difficult Boss fight was immensely satisfying. It was also one of the most frustrating games I’ve played! I think Demon’s Souls was too much on the “punishing” end of the difficulty spectrum, but it really did remind me of the value of having something to lose when playing. You can’t have light with dark and you can’t have reward without risk.

Demon’s Souls offered difficult, deadly boss battles which lead to a uniquely rewarding gameplay experience.

In Squadron 42, this is pretty easy to achieve. You need to complete the mission to move forward and you can’t save while in space. You die you just go back to the previous save point, normally before you launched on the mission.

The tricky part is really how failure is handled in the persistent universe of Star Citizen, as you can’t just set back the game to an earlier point.

The simple solution is that when your ship is destroyed, you manage to eject and drift in space, where you are picked up and returned to the last planet / landing location to claim your new ship sans any cargo and upgrades you had (unless you had bought additional insurance) and head out into space again.

This is the mechanic EVE Online uses, with the extra wrinkle that if another player blows up your escape pod, a stored clone of your character is activated, re-spawning your character and effectively making him/her immortal. In EVE, death is allowed for in the fiction and is balanced out by the cloning mechanism, which allows for loss of property but not your character’s skills (as unlike Star Citizen, your character in EVE has RPG skills that you learn)

The death mechanic in EVE is clever and well woven into their fiction.

But I’m not interested in making EVE 2.0 with cockpits.

One of my goals with Star Citizen is to make it feel very visceral and real. I want to feel the effects of physical damage on my character, loss of limb or other mishaps that can happen in the danger of space. If my character has been through several wars, I want to see the scars on him/her – perhaps a cybernetic arm because one was lost in firefight or the wrong side of a dogfight. I want to be able to walk up to another player in a bar and SEE that he or she is a grizzled veteran with the battle scars to prove it. This is the kind of detail, texture, and immersion that I want to achieve with Star Citizen.

I also feel that if everyone can be cloned easily, it fundamentally changes the structure of the universe. You now have a universe of immortal gods that can’t be killed.  Death is just a financial and time inconvenience that has no further consequences. The life and death cycle of humanity is what has brought us our history, our need to “make a mark” in our time, to push forward. If I want a living, breathing universe that has a lot of the dynamics of a real world and is inspired by the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, immortality for all is problematic.

The flip side is that while perma-death is realistic, it is not a lot of fun if the first time you’re on the wrong side of a dogfight you lose everything and have to start again.
I want Star Citizen to be immersive AND fun.
The death mechanics that I have in mind keep a feeling of mortality and history without making it frustrating or killing (pun intended) the fun.

The life and death of a Spaceman. 


The Character creation screen will be done “in-fiction”. You’ll start the game in 1^st person view looking at two bathroom doors – one with a male sign and one with a female sign. Which door you walk through will determine what sex you are when you walk into the washroom. Walking up to the mirror, you’ll see your reflection. Wiping the condensation off of the mirror with your hand (or some similar mechanic) will change / reveal your facial appearance. When you’re happy with how you look, you will exit and return to the UEE recruitment office and officer. You’ll fill in your name on the MobiGlas form and also specify your beneficiary in case of death: this could be a family member, son, daughter, uncle, aunt or someone entirely new (although not another player character).

Read more here!