With the Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 update very close to launching, Cloud Imperium Games has shared a new video that's all about the upcoming improvements to first-person combat in the game.
Reloading will be available in two different ways, as explained below.
For Star Citizen Alpha 3.23, reloading is kind of two parts. First, you got your backpack reloading, and then you've got your ammo repooling. Backpack reloading solves a problem where for example you find yourself in a combat situation and you need to reload but you don't have any spare mags on your suit but you have them in your backpack. What you can do now is pull additional magazines from your backpack at the cost of an increased reload time.
It was just filling up a lot of your inventory, so we decided with backpack reloading that we wanted to kind of condense that gameplay and just do it more on the fly. It is a reload, but it takes a little bit longer. It's going to play a very simple animation so the combat flow isn't broken, but you still need to think ahead because this long reload duration can be painful in combat if you're not careful.
With repooling, let's say you got three half-empty magazines. The idea is you just hit a key binding, the animation will play like a rummage, the magazines will condense down into full magazines, and then automatically discard the empty ones. As a result of this process, you will save precious item ports and then you will have your ammo condensed into your fuller magazine so you're ready to unleash their full potential onto your enemies.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 also improves recoil for a number of weapons, such as sniper rifles and pistols. CIG said:
Recoil is part of the identity of the weapon and it will also allow players to express their skill in a certain way. We have different kinds of recoil: very subtle recoils and very wild recoils. Depending on that, you can paint an image of either this is a very harsh very very aggressive assault rifle or a very gentle pistol, maybe even with a silencer on top of it.
The developers have also added a 'whole new suite of iron sights' for the majority of weapons available in Star Citizen. Moreover, scopes can now have different levels of zoom, from 2x to 4x all the way to 16x. Lastly, there are new hit markers and a new dynamic crosshair, though players can use either or neither if they so prefer.
According to the developers, all these changes combined will level up the Star Citizen FPS experience to 'triple-A levels' when Alpha 3.23 lands on live servers. We don't know yet when that will be, but it should be soon. Until then, stay tuned.
