Well, May is upon us and June is right around the corner. With the 3.0 Patch slated to come in towards the end of June, IED is excitedly looking forward to the new game play mechanics that are going to come with it!

The breakdown is mostly focused on things that are being completed in May and not on anything else that is uncompleted as of yet.

So, what exactly is coming in 3.0 and what has May brought us?

• First up, mission givers. So Miles Eckhart is going to be making a debut for us to get missions from. More on missions in a minute, but these things all tie into one another.
• Derelict ships are coming, so as much as I would like to be salvaging them, it seems they’re just going to be places to explore for now, though keep an eye out for more on this as time draws near, they may slip this in on us.
• Debris fields go hand in hand with derelict ships, all that damage and pieces of ship floating around don’t all drift away from the ships themselves and give you something of a nuissance, if not a hazard to traverse.
• So one of the biggest deals for everyone in every department is the item 2.0 system, which ties into pretty much everything you can interact with, including:
• Pickup & carry for CARGO! Cargo is definitely coming, though if this is just going to be a representation of the mining or actual back breaking, moving items from point A, into your hold and taking them to point B, remains to be seen but from what I’m gleaning, it’s either going to be here in 3.0 or 3.1
• Which brings us to the Cargo game code, I hear the words but I don’t know what the developers mean with this stuff, it’s looking like this is the magic right here and with this, and presumably missions in game, we can hopefully get some missions to move cargo from point to point.
• Commodities are coming, which are units of tradeable cargo that you can fiddle around with, so X number of commodities are going to make up X amount of cargo, now if this is per crate or a portion of a crate, I have no idea but either way, it looks very promising.
• Inventory system for cargo. This is what lets you actually manage the cargo, I’m guessing this will be used for the player as well as for the ship (i.e. do you have grenades on your person, and available grenade hooks on your armor) so that you can tell what type of cargo (Small crates? Large containers? etc) are in the hull. This will probably be some cargo manifest in your ship to let you keep track of your own ships inventory.
• Subsumption Base Functionality is coming in 3.0 and I am excited for it’s arrival! “This is the initial release of the foundation technology that drives all of the AI, mission, dynamic content, and conversation logic. The mission content previously created with FlowGraph has been replaced and the implementation time to achieve a desired effect has been cut dramatically.”
• Along with “The overall system that will be used to create mission flows when we start building missions like Patrol, Assassination, Smuggling, etc.” So what this means is that the groundwork for smuggling (yay IED) and other more SOD and INTEL related missions will be coming online once this is in place.
• The MISC Prospector is going to be in although some code bugs remain, whether this is game breaking stuff or just cosmetics, I don’t know but to get to mine an asteroid or material off of a moon is exciting.
• Mining is coming in 3.0 and with it and the cargo implementation, IED personnel are going to have a reason to sit down, buckle up and melt some of the gold in their GPU’s. I don’t personally own one of these gems (though I will at some point) I am excited to see screenshots and footage of our members burning up the landscape for glorious profit.

That’s all for May and we’ll keep you posted on anything new in the next newsletter. -Lord Corwin.