Surprise! Star Citizen has dropped the long-await, longer-promised, oft-ignored mech suit.

I don’t think this is exactly what people wanted when it was announced back during the original Kickstarter, but it’s a good start.

With the release of 3.24 “Cargo Empires”, players are now freely moving goods around Stanton. It’s certainly been A Road from paper doll inventories to our current semi-functional state of physical commodities bundled up in various size crates that our characters have to move. One of the growing pains of Star Citizen inventory has been figuring out ways to allow characters to move these boxes and right now everything relies on tractor beams — hence the occasional community moniker of “Beam Citizen”. CIG is still trying to figure out how to allow players to interact with the world so that not everything is using the flavors of tractor beam we have currently: hand-held, rifle, and ship-based.

The ARGO ATLS does not deviate from tractor beams, it seems, as a player can enter the suit (with the customary time-killing animations that are cool exactly once) to use a powerful and very fast tractor beam to move cargo boxes. Since 3.24 also nerfed the power, speed, and distance of the three previous tractor beams, I can only assume that the ATLS is the “pinnacle” of cargo moving with beams for those who want to move boxes and move them quickly. What it does not do is allow us to move multiple boxes at once; that’s what the hover dolly is meant to do, but the hover dolly was pulled from the public test universe (PTU) late in the game due to bugs and has not made it back from the ICU.

As someone who has moved a lot of boxes in 3.24, the trickiest part has been finding a way to land a ship in the hangar (or bunny-hop it) in a way that minimizes the distance between the freight elevator and whatever cargo deck the ship has, and then to find a decent position to stand in that allows for the use of whatever tractor beam I have on hand so I don’t have to run a box, held aloft in the air by SCIENCE, because time is money, friend. The hand-held Multi-Tool tractor beam is good for small boxes and small distances, the rifle beam is good for other boxes and medium distances, and a ship-based beam (if the ship even has one) covers all other aspects but is dictated by where it’s mounted on the ship. The ATLS, then, should allow a player to stand anywhere between the source of boxes and the destination — even giving a bit of a height boost which should help when dealing with ships with an elevated cargo deck like the Spirt, Hercules, Caterpillar, or MSR — and move boxes quickly and at a distance.

In the end, though, CIG has only created a hierarchy of differently-abled tractor beams, and knowing gamers, there’s no kill like over-kill, which will make the ATLS the new defacto means of pushing cargo. I am hoping that having this suit on the tarmac will allow for ships to land normally, and the mech can move to a central position between the elevator and the cargo bay to float boxes because angling a ship’s ass towards the elevator seems like an immersion-breaking tactic which is only compounded by the increasing size of hangars. Still, boiling it down, the ATLS is just another tractor beam. Meanwhile, the hover dolly is weakly proclaiming “I’m not dead yet!” and the poor Drake Mule is rocking on it’s heels while sucking its thumb in the corner muttering something about crows.

At a meta level I think it’s worth mentioning that CIG has a habit of keeping a bunch of vehicles close to the vest until the 11th hour, but as Chris Roberts survives off of the bombastic effects these reveals have, most of them were big-ticket, impactful ships that drove backers to the pledge store. The ATLS is not necessarily a pledge-driver, but it’s not completely insignificant in the same way the Drake Mule and Tumbril Cyclones are; both can be used, but are just present and are not fulfilling their intended purposes. The fact that the ATLS was released with functionality seems obvious — no one needs a mech that does nothing but looks cool — but that 3.24 was the right time to release it with functionality at all seems to me to be a Good Sign that CIG is now looking at their checklist and are finding bandwidth and purpose to work on some of the long-suffering bullet points that were promised to players almost two decades ago. I hope this signals momentum.