Roberts Space Industries - Star Citizen

General
143

It hasn’t done much for me…the initial trailer looked great and I was excited to see how it turned out, but it doesn’t feel that groundbreaking or amazing. Maybe it’s because I’m spoiled with the idea of Infinity, but even Elite has been fun for me to play. P2W is a huge dealbreaker for me and I know you can buy ships in SC and that kind of ruins it. I haven’t done much research on SC though so I really can’t talk about it…

However I do have this point to make:

My dream game does involve spending loads of cash for internet spaceships…Except that the game isn’t SC but Infinity. We aren’t much different than the SC fanbase except fewer with respect to that. I know the quote is taken a little out of context, but at the end of the day we’ll still be paying for internet spaceships.

That being said I do still agree with you. SC is best put as meh for me too.

144

Yeah, that didn’t come out like I wanted it to. You know what I mean ;).

1 Like
145

I know, it was unfair :smile:

146

I’m pretty much agreed. I threw enough money to secure me a pretty ship that I liked the look of and could feasibly walk around in.

Then the ship selling/re-selling mania kicked in when they were doing their “oh noes the cheap packages are ending soon” or some crap and just checked out. When there’s a decent prototype there to play with, I’ll be back, but I had no interest in that hype machine.

The other downside of that craze is that there will now be fully established clans in SC at the moment of release, complete with navy and all. Anyone starting from scratch on day one will be ridiculously far behind.

1 Like
147

I feel like trying to justify or interpret the amount of hype on some kind if linear scale as if any amount is ever justified or too little is not justified is pointless. I don’t base my enjoyment on how much fun some random amount of other people think they’re going to have and this gets into pointless levels of meta real fast.

Ill go over the reasons i’m “hyped” for star citizen, though. First and foremost is the ship combat, it reminds me of the old ICP in design and is incredibly indepth in detail of physics, ship design, and continuity. Independently operating thrusters with real physics impacts and specific routes through the ship that can be damaged is a huge step forward for space gameplay. None of that “press R and D and W at the same time to make sure your getting the most out of your ship” which always struck me as gamey if fun, now it depends on the real thrusting config of your ship how best it’s used. And im not just speaking based off their many well fleshed out design documents either, im talking about the gameplay already existant in their arena commander prototype. It’s already a ton of fun(when its not crashing or lagging) and i’ve experienced these points first hand. An unbelievable amount of attention to detail is present here and it’s a breath of fresh air.

Second, multi crew ships, walking in ships, and first person gameplay in general including FPS. I know a lot of people don’t care about this. I didn’t either until i played hazeron just thinking it would hold me over till infinity and then i understood how much it added to the game when done right, and how much i’d feel it’s absence. Im excited for this also because it’s the first step big budget games are taking into “everything games” where you have multiple layers of gameplay and professions from the top down from giant economic powerhouse megacorporations, to battles in space, to individual people. I really love it when games do this, (dust 514 was sadly a failure though) and i want to see more attempts and what’s essentially a fully featured hazeron.

Star citizen sacrifices quite a bit for this though, there’s the pay to win arena commander right now and annoyingly knife edge practices in regards to their business model. It’s no eve and will have instanced gameplay and lots of NPCs to fill in gaps. But, luckily for us star citizen is a lot more than the single player campaign/persistant universe/arena commander, it’s also a platform for countless mods and custom servers. Because they;re planning to give the community tools to hose their own persistant universe the possibilities in this case really are huge. Im more excited to see the mods that come out of SC than the game itself, i want to work on one myself depending on just how far the API goes.

Additionally star citizen has already far surpassed the quality of contributions ever offered up by infinity’s community, just due to sheer size and very rigid, clearly laid out requirements. I love you guys but just look at the redeemer which also has a fully fleshed out and animated interior.

(there is). been playing arena commander quite a bit this week, im only flying a shitty underpowered 300i that pales in comparison to the superhornets and mustang deltas some people have shelled out for, arena commander right now is without question pay to win, but it’s still fun playing the underdog when there’s so many novel mechanics and gameplay in just arena commander. Supposedly, they’re planning on an in-game “arena credits system” to try and break this setup without annoying people who’ve paid for ships to be carried into the PU.

Yesterday i was playing against 2 superhornets with only an aurora (the hands down worst ship, it’s like a tiny, slow, minivan that’s easy to shoot and has little firepower to speak of) and we managed to pull off a 3:1 victory regardless. There is fun to be had with the prototype, and it’s further along than the ICP was that’s for sure.

2 Likes
148

Sure, but there are plenty enough space arena games out there, and that wasn’t what Star Citizen promised to be. If anything, it was a distraction from getting the final game out.

Regardless, E:D has sated my space combat needs at the moment.

1 Like
149

[quote=“mattk50, post:147, topic:136”]
Im excited for this also because it’s the first step big budget games are taking into “everything games” where you have multiple layers of gameplay and professions from the top down from giant economic powerhouse megacorporations, to battles in space, to individual people.[/quote]

Can you say a little about the multiple layers of gameplay? Is this the same sense of layers as found in EVE Online? Is this simply people organizing at the level of alliances, corporations and individual operations?

And why do you think that Dust 514 failed?

150

Eve doesn’t really have the layers im talking about, it has economic interaction and various sizes of organizations but it’s all just a horizontal scale of the same layer of interaction, everything revolves around spaceships, mining in them, trading in them, fighting in them. People were excited for walking in stations when they thought there would be actual interconnected gameplay, not just eyecandy. Eve is relevant however, because the combination of dust514/legion and eve certainly composes these layers.

The most extreme illustration of what im trying to define is the (now defunct) hazeron. You’d start naked on a planet with a small knife fending off all kinds of terrifying creatures, and eventually end up as the leader of a vast galactic empire managing an entire economy, fleets of warships, hundreds of cities, and conducting diplomacy, but it’s not the progression that’s important here. The important here is that all those stages exist in the same multiplayer universe at the same time and in significant detail, for every individual player. I used to dump my new recruits on barren planets ( made easier a gun and power armor) and told them to make it back to the homeworlds on their own. In later versions when credits were less worthless i would set automated credit rewards for any number of things from pirate cleanup, to settling habitable planets, to conquest of our neighbors. Meanwhile we’d have people working on top of the line tech 32 designs, people conducting diplomacy, people conducting “diplomacy”, leading npc troops in ground invasion efforts, and people just fucking around playing poker while in orbit of a pretty planet or landed in a nice forest, or playing poker in an enemy ship they just boarded and forcibly repossessed using a hefty dose of c4. All simultaneously in a way that every layer affected others naturally, not in some forced overly specific way predetermined by the devs. And not in a way that makes other players feel as if there’s a way you need to play to have fun, no specific goal that drives people towards any specific layer.

It’s the difference between “you can colonize planets!” in eve where it’s just an abstract UI with barely any depth and “You can colonize planets” in hazeron where that can mean taking a squad of troops in power armor down to the surface to secure a LZ from hostile wildlife, so your large colonization ship can begin offloading supplies to jumpstart industry and agriculture while population grows, eventually becoming a self-sustaining colony that produces all the oxygen and food it needs while extracting whatever resource you need it on, while remaining capable to defend itself and containing a happy, disease free populace. And use it as a staging point to go invade the neighboring empire, butcher their leader and make a signature line of leather jackets named yiffweave out of their skin if enough people disliked them.

Star citizen is not that huge of a step in that direction, but it’s a start with ship interiors and a combo of fps/ship based gameplay. Functional ship interiors are a LOT of fun, especially when you can tie up a misbehaving crewmember and toss them out the airlock before vaporizing them with your primary weapons array.

Dust 514 has failed in my eyes because of the failure to ever integrate as originally envisioned with the eve online universe. Last i checked in eve, dust players still get listed in local of random systems in eve and dust’s market items are still in the market window despite inability to manufacture or do anything at all with them as an eve player. It was not able to attract a large enough playerbase due to it’s console exclusivity and insufficiently unique gameplay, despite the addition of the resource gambling between corps. Though i believe that had already been done in COD, not sure exactly since i don’t play COD. This lead to CCP pulling funding and resources away from the project before it was done due to the resulting low profits preventing it from ever really getting finished. Additionally there was some really bad timing with monocle gate and the world of darkness stuff. Did i mention it’s on consoles for no reason. The objectively worst platform for first person shooters. What a joke.

1 Like
151

[quote=“mattk50, post:150, topic:136”]
The important here is that all those stages exist in the same multiplayer universe at the same time and in significant detail, for every individual player.[/quote]

Gotcha. I’ve been arguing in favor of multidimensional gameplay for years, but the idea just doesn’t seem to catch on. Layering is one way of pursuing that, but the general pattern is that the experiences in the game are all first-class experiences*, and they have a network of relationships between them, not simply a layered stack. If I engage in salvaging, that is a first-class experience for a player, completely fleshed out. Related to salvaging is ship manufacturing, but also black marketeering. Both of those are first-class experiences. If I then get into ship manufacturing, then I’ve got a way of interacting with the world of cargo hauling - another first-class experience. And so on. Instead of moving up the layers of the game’s experiences in a progression, there is a network of experiences that I can move around in.

Does it require a lot of gameplay to be designed? Yes. It also requires a gameplay engine that allows all those different forms of gameplay to be represented, and a graphics engine that can depict them all. Most of all it requires somebody to consider this a good way to entertain players. The Shores of Hazeron guys seemed to have the right idea. My recollection is that the visuals were a bit rough. They could have stayed as simple as World of Warcraft, but not rough like EverQuest.

*A first class experience is one that the player can spend all their time doing and feel like they are playing an entire game. The salvaging game. The combat game. The exploration game. The manufacturing game. The galactic conquest game. And so on. None of them exists merely to get to another experience. None of them is “The boring stuff so players can later get to the good stuff”

152

Thats a good way to describe some of it. By layers i didn’t just mean a linear stack but a stack of different scales of gameplay that are also networked together in various ways, it’s a bit different from just lots of first class experiences in that it also includes an element of progression that applies to most if not all experiences. For example, trading on an individual scale between two characters on some rock somewhere, and trading between two massive empires. Salvaging an abandoned ship or salvaging an entire empire’s ruins. Combat by knife fight and combat by 100 ship fleets, handcrafting a bone needle and empire scale manufacturing etc. This adds an extra dimension to the idea of first class experiences IMO, that makes them more than just what you described. It’s also arguably easier to get a lot more depth this way than just trying to flesh out individual professions.

Hazeron had a lot of serious problems, the visuals were only the most obvious. It’s probably for the best it’s down, pretty sure the lone dev was losing his sanity. Fantastic example of this kind of game though.

153

This, right here, was the last thing I learned of SC before recategorizing it from “omgmusthavenao” to “meh”. Same with E:D for that matter. Single player games, or what is essentially single player games that require an internet connection, simply do not interest me.

Even if they did, there’s also the whole business model causing me to not touch SC with a 6 foot pole.

2 Likes
154


snippet from the new tutorials on the test server. they’re all like this.

155

Is it me or did the cockpit glass animation not fully fall into place in second vid?

1 Like
156

Yeah, it’s supposed to be flush with the hull. minor compared to the bug where your head and camera ends up behind the flight seat, i guess. Test server shenanigans are fun.

157

I’ve resurrected IBS thread at SC forum. It would be great if any of us, who have a Citizen status, contributed to make this thread as active and popular as ED thread on the same board is. It would be a great help to IBS’ publicity.

And please, keep it civil and constructive and don’t act like agressive fanboys - NO MATTER WHAT. Don’t give to moderators even a single reason to close it.

Cheers

1 Like
158

I posted some support on the thread. I’ll look to gauge some of the reactions over the next few days / weeks. I will likely post in the Concierge sub-forum as well, the mods generally contain all threads posted there regardless of subject matter.

159

Probably a good idea to avoid anything that leads to the apparent friendship with D. Smart, too.

1 Like
160

I thought this look at smart’s game was quite funny(turn on captions if you need to):

Especially part where they threatened the reviewer with a ban for reporting a bug.

2 Likes
161

. . .

. . .

He’s doing everything he’s accusing Roberts of doing and then some. I knew he was a quack, but this is just ridiculous. :expressionless:

162

3603f2b845db9597ff84b70043f8e79adf2e3ea9e4b6.png697×385

W32.MyDoom@DS

1 Like