Star Citizen has two character dress-up modes: armor, or no armor. Armor means you have protection both from the environment (heat/cold and space) and from misadventure. Clothing means you look good but that’s about it. Armor allows you to have pockets, attach weapons, med pens, backpacks, and utilities. Clothing means you just get pockets. Without a helmet, you get no HUD. On the other hand, clothing is better for role-players and while I am not a role-player myself, I did spend a lot of time in just clothing to see how far I could go in the game without wearing any armor (the answer was: it depends. No, there are no Depends in the game). Armor also provides players with EVA abilities with built-in jet-packs and magnetic boots and gloves that can stick to the hull of a ship. Clothing…well, if you’re outside of a ship in space in just pants and a shirt, you need to review your life choices, and quickly.

What this presentation showed is that it’ll won’t need to be exclusively one or the other going forward. Players will soon be able to mix and match clothing and armor in different ways to expand their form and fashion options. Clothing will be getting some much welcomed buffs that will allow us to wear backpacks and carry weapons and utility items as if we were wearing armor. It also means that the game can allow or disallow access to certain areas based on what you’re wearing, as in certain secure areas that might not let you in if you are wearing armor or are visibly carrying weapons.

More importantly, I guess, is that clothing and armor is going to start affecting our abilities in the game through a specialization system.

The presentation covered a contrived scenario which saw a party of “players” donning appropriate clothing and armor that allowed them to fill certain “traditional” and less traditional MMO roles such as “tank” or “driver”. Each ensemble was presented with a grid of stats like protection, mobility, stealth, active scan, G-force, and EVA mobility.

Depending on the role you wish to fill, or the type of activity you wish to undertake, you’d wear a specific class of armor…note that the armor shown is not the only suit of armor that would be considered to be “tank” armor; there are several suits that exist or that will exist in the game that cover that role, and although the benefits are only imparted when wearing parts from the same set (or possibly from the same class of armor), players will still be allowed to mix armor parts with clothing to gain a specific look at the expense of specialization benefits.

Monster Hunter

And then we somehow segued from talking about armor to talking about…the long-absent sandworm.

The rest of the segment was devoted to talking about the sandworm — the valakkar — and why we might want to tackle one: raw materials. The valakkar produces valuable pearls and teeth that can be used in crafting items. CIG showed a pretty lengthy video of the party from the start of the presentation getting out there and attacking the apex valakkar, and how it ended up wrecking them in it’s own right.

The segment ended with a montage of some/many/most/all of the creature designs we can expect to see in the game at some point.

Thoughts

This was a weird segment because it started out talking about clothing and armor, and ended with a Mutual Of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom style montage of animals. I guess neither of the two had enough content to drive their own presentation, and since they could easily slip from armor to combat against the sandworm to talking about critters we have yet to see, they munged them into one segment.

I appreciate the ability to mix armor and clothing because I really don’t like the idea that everyone is running around in armor, all the time. Although I am not a role-player, I feel that today everyone is min-maxing their experience since it doesn’t cost anything to wear heavy armor with a shotgun on one side and a railgun on the other…it just screams aggression, and makes me feel like aggression begets aggression. It also feel boring, and with helmets on 24/7, negates the work that people are doing in the character creator. Making clothing more viable — and in some cases necessary — pushes people into making choices that they might not otherwise make, so take that, PvP centric folks who think PvEers should be pushed into PvP whether they like it or not. Enjoy your T-shirts!

The valakkar battle was apparently epic, though with the power of editing we couldn’t really tell how truly bad-ass it is. The battle alluded to proper prep by showcasing the kind of vehicles and armor that players might need to bring to this fight, so in that regard I guess it meshed well with the wearables discussion. I think we can view the valakkar fight as an open world boss battle, and I’m OK with that. Relying on such a set-piece to provide materials for crafting, though, is a bit questionable. Will we really have to do hardcore prep just to collect a few resources needed to make a dining room table or a set of sequined pants? Probably not; I’d expect valakkar materials to be required only by the most high-end products, but we don’t have any specifics, so my question stands for now. Also I think I see some form of gator animal in that montage that I requested for the swamp biome in my first post.