Guard Frequency Episode 436 | Lickable Fish

Cits and Civs, Captains and Commanders, you’re tuned to episode 436 of Guard Frequency — the best damn space sim podcast ever! This episode was recorded on Friday, March 17 and released for streaming and download on Tuesday, March 21, 2023 at GuardFrequency.com

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This Week’s Schedule

• Flight Deck
  • Elite: Dangerous
  • Star Citizen
  • X4 Foundations
  • Starfield
  • Kerbal Space Program 2
• Feedback Loop

Links & The Like

Elite: Dangerous

Elite Dangerous has made some more adjustments to the Thargoid invasion. They’ve given us the hint that commanders aren’t supposed to fight in Thargoid combat zones anymore, they’re supposed to murder the recon ships. They’ve raised the bounty on the Orthrus interceptors, but they don’t seem to be any easier to find. Also, they’ve set up another easter egg scavenger hunt that is dropping some new hints about the next stage of the story. So maybe we’re going to find out what we’re supposed to do with the blue jolly ranchers.

Star Citizen

Star Citizen is getting a lot of press about their Early Access Pre-Alpha Release Candidate Prototype Experimental Test Build 3.18 that they released ON A FRIDAY – ahem, last Friday. Massively OP, Kotaku, even Ars Technica all wrote up the big news and the community’s overwhelming reaction to the bold new update. CIG has three different and exciting commercials online now, all advertising the new features as “playable now!” And the marketing push for Space St. Patrick’s Day ships, paint jobs and collectibles, is in full swing. So, as you probably guessed by now, the whole exercise was a complete fiasco. As predicted on this show last week, CIG got the data it needed in just a few hours on Friday, but it got lots and lots more over the weekend. Very data, so concurrency. Between inadvertently screwing the whales, killing characters repeatedly, disabling the character reset and repair systems, stranding the players who did get into the game via that pre-existing broken ASOP terminal bug… This was a very bad week at CIG. But it’s OK now, Disco Lando apologized for about 90 seconds at the beginning of this week’s ISC, so we’re good. And just so we can fully explain how great everything is, I’ve brought a friend along to talk about software Quality Assurance, you know, for reasons.

The Rest

X4 Foundations revealed another feature we can expect from its upcoming expansion: multiplayer. It’s a reprise of the limited multiplayer it beta-tested a few years ago, and one of its primary characteristics is that it is griefer-proof – at least it’s supposed to be. Starfield got a rating from the Australian Classification Board, and SPOILER ALERT: there’s gonna be so much of “the drugs” in this game. Like, all the drugs. But, practically no sex or nudity… well, at least until the modders get a crack at it. But, it’s not all the good news. Sony is once again very mad at Microsoft for making Starfield a PC/XBox Exclusive, and is not shy about telling regulators about that while trying to stop the Activision acquisition. Also, Kerbal Space Program 2 released its first patch this week. And, in typical early access fashion, Creative Director Nate Simpson warned everyone that the dev team was doing their best, but “keep in mind that the order in which fixes roll out is not just contingent on priority – it also depends on the complexity of the problem that’s causing the bug.”

Community Questions

• Pick the superior somesay this week: the original or the reboot?
• Do you plan on helping out with the concurrency testing on the Live Server, or would prefer to wait until some of the bugs are smashed?

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