Yogi Klatt, one of the CIG developers overseeing vehicle combat experience, recently showed up in a German gaming forum to answer some questions about the controversial implementation of Master Modes, the new flight experienced introduced in Alpha 3.23.
Following this discussion, a topic also appeared on Spectrum, where Yogi reiterated some of his comments, including the fact that the current weapon and item tuning in Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 is just a placeholder for Alpha 4.0, as it will need an overhaul when the resource network and engineering gameplay arrive in Alpha 4.0.
When 3.23 was released, CIG categorized ship weapons into three groups of Anti-Fighters (high rate of fire and low DPS), Anti-Materials (low rate of fire and high DPS), and Non-Specific (falling between the first two groups). According to Yogi, the upcoming 3.23.X patches will still contain some changes to the weapon tunings, but players shouldn’t expect any big overhaul before Alpha 4.0.
Yogi believes that the pace of the flight combat is too high and the time-to-kill (TTK) is too long. While this comment raised some disagreements in the forum, the developer further explained that the team’s intention is to have more fighting and less hitting.
CIG previously explained that the flight combat was supposed to be positional, with the fighters wrestling to find that perfect position to hit their target. This is an contrary with jousting, where players fly towards each other while opening fire, pass by each other, rotate, and repeat it again.
In fact, Master Modes was supposed to fix jousting, but it’s still there even in the PvE fights against AI. The truth is you can avoid jousting only by ships as nimble as Gladius and Arrow at the moment.
Somewhere in the German forum, Yogi admits that he is not really interested in the current state of the game, saying that he believes it all comes from the fast combat pace. Yogi avoided to tell what fixes have been considered to slow down the pace and reduce the TTK time, leaving us clueless for the future of Master Modes.
Since its implementation, Master Modes have been heavily criticized by the community. A quick look at all the Master Modes feedback on Spectrum would give you an idea of how furious some players sound towards the new changes.
However, as Yogi mentioned, even Master Modes is not considered as a new flight model for CIG. They see it as an upgraded iteration of the older flight model, and Yogi promised in his Spectrum comment that there will be more iterations coming in Alpha 4.0 and 4.1.
So, while it seems like CIG will gradually fix Master Modes, players rightfully sound exhausted for not having an enjoyable flight experience after 12 years.
