Narrative Event: Hunt the Polaris

[icycalm]

https://x.com/RobertsSpaceInd/status/19 ... 4588222650



There's a little trailer on Twitter that's not on YouTube.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... nt/mr3vgh8

Imagine the US Navy going, "Uh, so some bad guys stole one of our big ships. We need you to go out in your fishing boats and take it out."

Some people just paid $2k for a ship bigger than a Polaris, so I think we'll be ok.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... is_is_sick

Hunt the Polaris is sick

I love how the whole server comes together, with their ships big and small, to hunt down this monstrosity.

Zipping around with a large group, splitting up to search and mop up any fighters.

Then the Polaris fight starts and everyone starts blasting it, lasers flying everywhere, people dodging the turrets.

It's incredible. Love that PvE is finally getting some love!

This is what the XenoThreat Idris mission was like during Overdrive and it was one of my favorite missions. I'm glad to see they brought it back in a new form.

The only thing that sucks is the payout. The whole lobby is accepting the mission only to find out that there are 10 out of the 100 ppl actually there fighting the Polaris and once we do all the work we get 20k maybe less cuz the whole lobby wants to accept it. They got to change it to where you have to be at the actual mission to get payout or something.

I did the mission 8 times today while I was refitting my ships in my hangar. I have over 100 scrip. I ain't boverd about the money.

What is scrip good for?

Trading for Wikelo favours.

I was going to plan a weekend session so we could do this, but the way it's set up for the whole server to join I just don't see the point.

It's global to the whole server, so everyone does the same mission at once, no need for grouping or coordinating.

Trying to find the enemy escort ships is exhausting, the Polaris is at least sort of easy to find because the entire furball trails it the whole battle, but trying to cycle targeting to get the Hammerheads is near impossible with so many hostile players everywhere all the time so it's hard to know who to avoid and who to shoot. And the scan system takes so long to get a read not to mention you've got to nose down a thousand rounds of laser fire to even try and get one, so the entire scan system is as likely to get you killed as it is to make it any easier.

There are apparently one or two web hangar rewards as well. A chair and maybe also a shirt? This is the chair:

Salvaged Polaris Captain's Chair (Hunt the Polaris Mission Reward)| Star Citizen Collectables
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihfCCW2vZ6g



It's pretty cool. I can see us using them in Pyro/Grim HEX/Nyx and generally pirate hangouts.

So basically do the mission whenever you can/want. Then bump this thread if you get the chair so we can see how many chairs we got. And look into whether there's also a shirt involved.

I have no idea how long this mission will be offered, but it may end with Invictus, so let's say two weeks at best. I'll try to get it done soon.

[shubn]

You can accept the contract and go about your day, and if it gets completed, you get the chair. That's how I got mine. Of course, we want to actually do the mission at some point, but if you at least want to secure the chair, that's what you can do.

As for the shirt, it's a reward for completing the three Navy Patrol Training scenarios that appear in your contract manager's "Priority" tab. They are very easy, and took me about 15 minutes to complete in total.

[ExiledOne]

I got the chair.

[Some guy]

I got the chair.

[shubn]

I got the chair for icy's account and for clones 1, 3 and 4.

[icycalm]

Turns out the official announcement for this mission (event?) was in the Invictus page: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/c ... -Whats-New

HUNT THE POLARIS
Breaking News: UEEN Ship Hijacked by Frontier Fighters

In an act of treasonous piracy, the evermore dangerous Frontier Fighters have disrupted our proud Invictus Launch Week to further their extremist agenda by stealing a UEEN Polaris en route to Area18.

Rowena Dulli, attaché to the CDF has called for “all CDF members and patriotically minded pilots to hunt down these terrorists and take back what is ours. If the Frontier Fighter movement is not quelled, we could be facing another XenoThreat level conflict.”

The most recent sightings of the Polaris report it attempting to leave the Stanton system.

[icycalm]

Hunt the Polaris #1 with shubn and The Cult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofY0BTbwLe8



Hunt the Polaris #1 with recoil and The Cult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI22hl23Jes



So I want to finally do the Hunt the Polaris debrief that I've neglected for months. This is a terrific mission and I was sad it was a limited-time event, but now they're bringing it back in the next update for the final phase of the Frontier Fighters Finale and I want to make sure people know how good it is in case they missed it and want to try it.

What's great about it?

Well, it's a server-wide event, so you can join with your Aurora or whatever and take some potshots at the Polaris or its escort, and if the others beat it you'll get the mission clear too. And sure, you'll have fun no matter what ship you bring to the fight. Hell you can probably even bring a bike and hop aboard and play Halo if you time it right. But the real greatness appears only if you bring a capital to the fight, and in particular an Idris.

So there are several phases to the mission. It's been months so I couldn't remember the entire mission flow, but early on there is a point where you arrive at a location where I think the Polaris is supposed to be, or to have been, and there are several beacons you need to check, I think 3 or 4 of them. So at that point I was in the bridge, manning a remote turret I think it was, and someone else was piloting. And the accepted way to go about it would have been to simply mosey on over to all 3-4 beacons with the Idris to check them out. But then someone said, "Let's just send our two F7s to check out the beacons while the Idris patrols between them". And that blew my fucking mind.

Right on cue, recoil and shubn ran down to the hangar and jumped into their F7s and shot out the front, one going left and the other right, to check the first two of the beacons, all the while I was sitting in the bridge without having done anything to facilitate any of this, as if everyone else on board was an actor hired to give me a cinematic experience. I think the first two beacons turned up nothing, and then at the third or fourth we found some enemies, or enemies approached, and the mission just kept going. It wasn't a long mission by any means, but it wasn't a straightforward chase either: there was a CDF Hammerhead iirc that we had to (optionally) protect, and several waves of reinforcements for the Polaris, and I think at most one or two small ships from the rest of the server arrived to help us out, so the entire mission fell on our shoulders, and our Idris. It wasn't super hard but it wasn't easy either, and it did feel like an accomplishment in the end when we blew up the Polaris. Can't remember if we managed to save the allied HH or not. Maybe not, iirc.

But the highlight of the mission was that moment when the sheer breadth of tactical options afforded by StarEngine's capital ship mechanics dawned on me, and all the hundreds of hours (might even be over a thousand by now, it's been three years...) and tens of thousands of dollars we've sunk into the game felt not merely justified but essential. All the bugs, the wait times, the load times back when I was still on a potato, it was all worth it and more than worth it for that moment of pure interactive cinema.

And this isn't even a complex or lengthy mission. It's pretty cookie-cutter by Star Citizen standards, and we're well on track to get entire HOMEWORLD-level first-person CAMPAIGNS over the next few years. Hunt the Polaris is merely an appetizer, but it's still one of the greatest real-time levels and moments of all time, right up there with the moment when I completed the first mission in GTA3, or found the Warthog in Halo, or the hang glider in Far Cry, or built the first shed in Rust.

Hunt the Polaris #2+3 with shubn and The Cult
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxkELutyE88



We played the mission again a few days later with far fewer players, I think we had about 5-7 the first time? And the second time we had only 3-4, including a newcomer we'd just recruited and were showing him his first capital ship. And... we struggled... and failed it. But then we went again right away, and that time we beat it, also saving the Hammerhead iirc.

Honestly I could keep playing this mission periodically, sprinkling it among other content a couple times a month easily, so I am super happy that it's coming back with the new event, and it seems we'll keep seeing it, and I hope they keep working on it and complexifying it.

It also shows you how important it is to have friends who've bought capital ships. And many people to man them. It's just an entire other level of complexity and interactivity that no game can match, and even Star Citizen can't match it unless you're rich and popular lol.

God I love this game. And this mission.