Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Colostomy Bag
Jan 11, 2016

:lesnick: C-Bangin' it :lesnick:

My god, character customization is now back on line.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Bootcha
Nov 13, 2012

Truly, the pinnacle of goaltending
Grimey Drawer
God Bless CIG for making my work harder. And by "harder" I mean easier to visualize and source, but also harder in that I have to loving rewrite, again.

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Bootcha posted:

God Bless CIG for making my work harder. And by "harder" I mean easier to visualize and source, but also harder in that I have to loving rewrite, again.

Doh!

Popete
Oct 6, 2009

This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs

Grimey Drawer
Finally finished downloading and had my first Star Citizen experience!

Wake up in Lorville, get out of the wankpod. Take a look around, lots of NPCs standing/sitting doing nothing environment looks nice. Notice a weird focus effect when trying to look out the window.



Then when I get up close it focuses in on the glass.



Ok weird but whatever, a small issue. Time to head to someplace to get a ship. Because I've followed this thread I have a basic idea how things work. I first need to find a space station and then call in a ship. How you would figure this out on your own I have no idea. Lorville is a labyrinth of elevators and corridors but nothing points you to what you should be doing. Of course there are big gently caress off signs floating in the sky that say Teasa Spaceport so I figure that's probably where I need to go. I find the train station and look at the map to see it's only 1 station and a transfer away. My ride on the trains is uneventful and fairly quick. I go to the Central Zone first and look around, it's a giant pyramid building with a bunch of NPCs standing around looking at guns. I'll admit the environments in SC are impressive, there is a real sense of scale here. But I'm learning pretty quickly that there isn't really anything else too it. It's just huge maps and long train rides but the only real destination that I can tell is the space port to call your ship. Why the game spawns you so far away from the Space Station idk. Looking at the train map there are lots of other destinations but I can't imagine there is actually anything there to do besides look at NPCs standing around. I complete my transfer from Central to Teasa Spaceport with minimal standing around for trains. In fact the timers for trains don't seem to be accurate because one shows up randomly when the timer says it's 40 seconds away.

Speaking of standing around, saw a few of these.



Also saw one of these, is this an actual reference to CitCon bag guy?



After bumbling around I make it to the hangar and find a ship terminal. I only realize how to call a ship because I've followed this thread. I pick the Aegis Avenger Titan since it's a courier and I figure maybe I can run a simple transport mission or something.

Ship spawns at hangar 6 so I follow the signs to the hangar elevators and make my way down. Again the game is giving me zero direction this is entirely me figuring it out from second hand info I remember from people in this thread playing.

My ship!



Again I know that getting into your ship is often a frustratingly complex task, there are no real context clues how you would enter. I look up a few YouTube videos on where the entrance to my ship is, but no luck. I finally figure out it's a ramp in the rear that highlights orange when I mouse over it but despite clicking all over it won't extend. I finally seem to click just the right spot and it extends. I enter the ship and close the ramp. Everything looks fine, a bit cozy but it's a starter ship so sure. I lay down on the bed and don't die so that's good.

Make my way into the cockpit, ok now to figure out the controls. I realize my joystick isn't plugged in but this game has mouse & keyboard support so that's fine. I figure out how to power on my ship and engines and even figure out how to lift off! This is going pretty well. I start to head up and realize the hangar doors are closed... poo poo, how do I open them? As I'm trying to find some context menu to talk to the space station I realize my ship is basically just suspended in mid air regardless of what angle I leave it at. The flight model is frankly poo poo. I have a lot of experience in flight simulators and this is not one. It's just a 3d model suspended in space, there is no weight or aerodynamics that I can tell it's just held up by string. Maybe it drifts slightly downwards but it that's it.

Ok I find a YouTube video that shows you have to select "comms" from the left panel, how on Hurston anyone would find the tiny "comms" button on the touch panel and know to click it I have no idea. It's extremely small and non-intuitive. Ok fine whatever, I press the button and tell the space station I wanna take off. Success! The hangar doors open and I head out into the 'Verse. I figure I'll do a sight seeing tour of the city and get a feel for the controls before heading into space. About 10 seconds after leaving the hangar I explode. No explanation, no warning, I didn't run into anything. I just explode.



I wake up in the wankpod and log off.

Popete
Oct 6, 2009

This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs

Grimey Drawer
Overall my experience was maybe more positive than I expected. My game didn't crash, things ran ok. At first and maybe this is an issue in the big open environments it ran like a slide show. I have an ok PC, usually run most other games at High settings just fine but this game it defaulted me to Low. I bumped it up to medium but it was really thrashing my machine and was stuttering like crazy so I lowered it back down to Low settings. Regardless the game looked fairly nice. I will say I think Lorville is impressive, the sense of scale in the game is cool and a lot of work has gone into detailing these environments.

Traveling around was kind of immersive the first time but I get the sense that doing that every time you login/die would get old really fast. It just takes up so much time and seems to be of no benefit. The city feels lifeless because NPCs don't even walk around from what I could tell. Everyone is just standing around staring at each other or display items. I explored a little to see if I could find a shop or something, but there doesn't really seem to be anything to actually do besides head to the spaceport and call in a ship. Didn't see a single other player.

I'll probably give it another go just to test out the spaceflight if I can make it out of Lorville without exploding. But if I have to do the wankpod -> spaceport trip more than a handful of times I really don't think I can handle it.

Xakura
Jan 10, 2019

A safety-conscious little mouse!

Popete posted:

Also saw one of these, is this an actual reference to CitCon bag guy?




No, bagman cosplayed as this fidelitious character.

AbstractNapper
Jun 5, 2011

I can help

Xakura posted:

No, bagman cosplayed as this fidelitious character.

Yeah, if anything the cosplay was too good. Even though the man clearly was suffering and possibly slowly suffocating.

AbstractNapper
Jun 5, 2011

I can help

colonelwest posted:

Lol even the video explaining the delays is delayed.

First it sounded like it would just be a day or two, now they “don’t have an exact date”.

"too early" is something that people at CInorG should be banned from uttering or writing.

Sarsapariller
Aug 14, 2015

Occasional vampire queen

Popete posted:

Finally finished downloading... No explanation, no warning, I didn't run into anything. I just explode.



I wake up in the wankpod and log off.

You flew into the no fly zone. Ironically most of the area around the spaceport is no fly. And they've made it next to impossible to see in recent patches. The penalty is death and a long respawning time on your ship and maybe even a trip straight to prison! Welcome to Star Citizen!

Sarsapariller fucked around with this message at 19:02 on May 23, 2020

Sarsapariller
Aug 14, 2015

Occasional vampire queen

Popete posted:

But if I have to do the wankpod -> spaceport trip more than a handful of times I really don't think I can handle it.

Every time you die, disconnect, login, or suicide. Given the averages, about 3 times per hour once you begin trying to do more than just walk around. The game is hilariously lethal.

Quavers
Feb 26, 2016

You clearly don't understand game development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqvIkyzaEg0

Xakura
Jan 10, 2019

A safety-conscious little mouse!
More lethal than cod

Popete
Oct 6, 2009

This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs

Grimey Drawer
The thing is there is a nugget of something here. It does look impressive at first glance. I absolutely could see how someone coming into this free fly weekend knowing nothing about Star Citizen and it's development could buy into it. It looks nice, it's environments are impressive. Sure it might not run well and there isn't a lot to do but hey it's alpha. If they got things this far maybe they can polish it up and work out the bugs. That's the trap Star Citizen has created to this point. They have a lot of art assets and destinations, there just isn't anything to actually do and diving anymore than skin deep shows how far they have to go.

Quavers
Feb 26, 2016

You clearly don't understand game development
And streamers get free ships to keep or !raffle which boosts their viewers, which makes them want to stream it more :v:

Tippis
Mar 21, 2008

It's yet another day in the wasteland.

Xakura posted:

More lethal than cod

They never qualified whether it would be to the player character or the player's hardware, now did they? :colbert:

Scruffpuff
Dec 23, 2015

Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?
"More lethal than COD" is another one of those legendary statements where Chris attempted to one-up another game while establishing a mental comparison, implying his game was in that league and had similar content, with neither being the case. He also picked a strange characteristic to one-up. "Better looking" than COD or "more tactical" than COD could have made sense, but "more lethal?" What does that even mean? That you die more often? Is dying the central characteristic of a COD game - the one that makes people play and keeps them coming back?

This guy does not understand a single thing about gaming, which is why he's the best guy to lead a project that has nothing to do with gaming.

Sarsapariller
Aug 14, 2015

Occasional vampire queen

Popete posted:

The thing is there is a nugget of something here. It does look impressive at first glance. I absolutely could see how someone coming into this free fly weekend knowing nothing about Star Citizen and it's development could buy into it. It looks nice, it's environments are impressive. Sure it might not run well and there isn't a lot to do but hey it's alpha. If they got things this far maybe they can polish it up and work out the bugs. That's the trap Star Citizen has created to this point. They have a lot of art assets and destinations, there just isn't anything to actually do and diving anymore than skin deep shows how far they have to go.

Yep that's the core of it. If you're an optimist or you give them the benefit of the doubt, it seems like it might be great. But then you buy in and you sit... and wait... and wait... and wait... and three years after your regdate, they've added ten new ships and one new mechanic that's just a meter-filling exercise and they've somehow raised 120 million more dollars off the back of all of that, and you start to get disillusioned. Then you get banned from the forums and told "No refunds."

Star Citizen is somehow perfectly designed to appear like a very promising game, but the reality is that it's been in stasis for 4+ years now, and all of their energy goes into marketing.

Last King
Sep 29, 2007

In corporate R'lyeh, Cthulhu works you.

Fun Shoe

Agony Aunt posted:

So, i took a look at the funding tracker and saw what i expected to see.

After a day of the servers melting and CIG unable to deliver a working envronment for the free fly, pledging has gone through the roof.

This is a perfectly normal thing to happen in a sane world.

you could say the same thing about the us economy and the stock market right now so...

ggangensis
Aug 24, 2018

:10bux:

Sarsapariller posted:

Yep that's the core of it. If you're an optimist or you give them the benefit of the doubt, it seems like it might be great. But then you buy in and you sit... and wait... and wait... and wait... and three years after your regdate, they've added ten new ships and one new mechanic that's just a meter-filling exercise and they've somehow raised 120 million more dollars off the back of all of that, and you start to get disillusioned. Then you get banned from the forums and told "No refunds."

Star Citizen is somehow perfectly designed to appear like a very promising game, but the reality is that it's been in stasis for 4+ years now, and all of their energy goes into marketing.

That's basically my story right there.
Backed relatively late, around version alpha 2.2.x (can't remember exact version). I saw the shiny website, everything looks solid at first glance. CR with that much funding and qualified people, what can go wrong?
So I've played for a few hours with my Aurora, looking at the nice models and the aforementioned sense of scale, but forgot about Star Citizen shortly after (not much to do, but well, it's alpha, right?). I decided to just give them a 1-2 more years and take another look then. Next time I've logged on was when 3.0 hit and there it struck me: What the gently caress is going on there? It got even worse?! So many millions, so many people so many years and this sorry excuse of a game is the best they can come up with? After having the pleasure playing 3.0, I've finally started doing some researche, found out about the warlord and the rest is history.

And that's an endless cycle. It doesn't matter when you've backed, as long as it was after 2.x you will see nothing but added fluff if you wait a year or two. That's all CIG is able to do at this point, they've hit the wall with their engine a few years back. They can try to emulate progress by adding more ships, some new locations, separate game modes like ToW nobody asked for, but the writing is on the wall: The MMO will never happen and the PTU is already dead.

Popete
Oct 6, 2009

This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs

Grimey Drawer
Played a match of Star Marine. Despite being a much more condensed experience it still runs like poo poo. It's playable but quite stuttery, I finished a match loaded into the next one and the game crashed. Overall it's a pretty rote shootmans mode and I don't really know what the point of it is.

Zazz Razzamatazz
Apr 19, 2016

by sebmojo

Popete posted:

The thing is there is a nugget of something here. It does look impressive at first glance. I absolutely could see how someone coming into this free fly weekend knowing nothing about Star Citizen and it's development could buy into it. It looks nice, it's environments are impressive. Sure it might not run well and there isn't a lot to do but hey it's alpha. If they got things this far maybe they can polish it up and work out the bugs. That's the trap Star Citizen has created to this point. They have a lot of art assets and destinations, there just isn't anything to actually do and diving anymore than skin deep shows how far they have to go.

And this might be the saddest thing about Star Citizen. Because if you gave a competent game developer $300+ million dollars and 8+ years to develop a spaceship game, you'd get a really great game. I just hope that SC crashing and burning doesn't kill the spaceship sim genre... Elite: Dangerous, the X series, and maybe whatever Bethesda is doing with Starfield might keep it going.

peter gabriel
Nov 8, 2011

Hello Commandos
Thought I'd install this and jump in, nope



Also, had to pause the client downloading the whole game again so I could use imgur, if it was downloading my internet froze :lol:
Great game, you have totally not been conned citizens

Sarsapariller
Aug 14, 2015

Occasional vampire queen

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

And this might be the saddest thing about Star Citizen. Because if you gave a competent game developer $300+ million dollars and 8+ years to develop a spaceship game, you'd get a really great game. I just hope that SC crashing and burning doesn't kill the spaceship sim genre... Elite: Dangerous, the X series, and maybe whatever Bethesda is doing with Starfield might keep it going.

What's going to kill the spaceship sim genre is that every space game where you actually sit in a cockpit is some kind of clone of a single philosophical dead-end. It's 24/7 Space Libertarianism where every man is a merchant trader-slash-pirate with his own ship. It's boring and lazy and leads to exactly the same mechanics with varying degrees of polish, over and over again. It's a tedious power fantasy that doesn't acknowledge the realities of physics, policitis, sociology, or economics. But the mechanics are all well established and best of all it's safe so you rarely see devs venture terribly far outside it, because their interest is in the switch-flipping, not the motivation for doing so. I feel like The Expanse is the natural end-point of such a universe if you actually play it out- and I'm astonished that nobody has bothered to build an Expanse situation yet.

But there's so much more you could do with your premise that would flavor the cockpit stuff and make it exciting!

Where's my Star Trek game where you fly around in a giant cruise ship and 90% of the time your mission is some weird philosophical poo poo or exploration or a terrifying space hazard? Or play as Ferengi if you can't escape space capitalism, introducing high tech to primitive worlds in order to make them into dependent client states.

Where's the game based on Rendezvous With Rama where your whole mission is to use 1970's-equivalent earth tech to explore a gigantic semi-wild, semi-hostile alien vessel that has appeared briefly to rocket through our solar system?

Where's the game based on Surface Detail where you're part of an intergalactic civilization waging a gigantic virtual war over your policy of building virtual afterlives and sending mind-copies of all the sinners to virtual hell?

Where's the game based on Ilium where you're part of a transhuman branch that decided to turn Mars into a real-world recreation of the Iliad?

I will grant here that Alien: Isolation is exactly the kind of space game I'd like to see more of, as well as some of the other greats: Homeworld, Independence War, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris, Outer Wilds. The problem is that most of these don't count as space sims in the minds of space sim players. As soon as you sit down inside a spaceship cockpit, it's right back to Space Libertarianism forever and that's just such a huge disappointment to me.

peter gabriel
Nov 8, 2011

Hello Commandos

Popete posted:

Played a match of Star Marine. Despite being a much more condensed experience it still runs like poo poo. It's playable but quite stuttery, I finished a match loaded into the next one and the game crashed. Overall it's a pretty rote shootmans mode and I don't really know what the point of it is.

The point of it is to show the citizens 'progress' - as are most things

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Xakura posted:

More lethal than cod

...all I said to my wife was that piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Last King posted:

you could say the same thing about the us economy and the stock market right now so...

The stock market is up? I guess people are playing silly buggers again. I guess another massive crash is coming soon then.

Last King
Sep 29, 2007

In corporate R'lyeh, Cthulhu works you.

Fun Shoe

Quavers posted:

And streamers get free ships to keep or !raffle which boosts their viewers, which makes them want to stream it more :v:

why stop there? they should add drops to twitch so if you watch the streamers, you too could get a chance at free loot...

Agony Aunt
Apr 17, 2018

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Sarsapariller posted:

Where's the game based on Ilium where you're part of a transhuman branch that decided to turn Mars into a real-world recreation of the Iliad?

Nice reference.

Last King
Sep 29, 2007

In corporate R'lyeh, Cthulhu works you.

Fun Shoe

Agony Aunt posted:

The stock market is up? I guess people are playing silly buggers again. I guess another massive crash is coming soon then.

well, according to the s&p 500, we're already back to fall 2019 levels and everything is a-ok.

Sample_text
Apr 28, 2018

by VideoGames
Went to start citizen reddit and did my search of the usual keywords:

- obvious/obviously [BINGO]
-clearly [BINGO]
- entitled [BINGO]
-rant [BINO]
-alpha [BINGO]
-troll [BINGO]

Then went on to look for the usual points/ideas
-you need to take a break from this game / be more patient [BINGO]
-you clearly don't know what alpha means [BINGO]
-paranoid lizard-men conspiracy ranting about :"WHAT ARE YOUR MOTIVES/AGENDA FOR COMPLAINING!!? HUH? HUH? " [BINGO]
-in yo face haters [BINGO]


Yep, business as usual.

bbchops
Jul 26, 2001

Ho ho ho! I'll have the same again!
Nap Ghost

Popete posted:

The thing is there is a nugget of something here. It does look impressive at first glance. I absolutely could see how someone coming into this free fly weekend knowing nothing about Star Citizen and it's development could buy into it. It looks nice, it's environments are impressive. Sure it might not run well and there isn't a lot to do but hey it's alpha. If they got things this far maybe they can polish it up and work out the bugs. That's the trap Star Citizen has created to this point. They have a lot of art assets and destinations, there just isn't anything to actually do and diving anymore than skin deep shows how far they have to go.

It's a series of sets and props you can push around to make imaginary space adventures. Given they started with CryEngine and added 300,000,000 dollars, they are very nice props. What they haven't yet demonstrated is whether they can put a game in there. As many of the citizens are fond of pointing out, no-one has attempted anything of this scale and complexity, and it remains the case that no-one has succeeded. I've seen no evidence that Chris Roberts is capable of changing that.

Sample_text
Apr 28, 2018

by VideoGames

Sample_text posted:

Went to start citizen reddit and did my search of the usual keywords:

- obvious/obviously [BINGO]
-clearly [BINGO]
- entitled [BINGO]
-rant [BINO]
-alpha [BINGO]
-troll [BINGO]

Then went on to look for the usual points/ideas
-you need to take a break from this game / be more patient [BINGO]
-you clearly don't know what alpha means [BINGO]
-paranoid lizard-men conspiracy ranting about :"WHAT ARE YOUR MOTIVES/AGENDA FOR COMPLAINING!!? HUH? HUH? " [BINGO]
-in yo face haters [BINGO]


Yep, business as usual.

Found best quote

quote:

Walks by SC reddit for monthly check in

looks around

shakes head

walks out

Danknificent
Nov 20, 2015

Jinkies! Looks like we've got a mystery on our hands.

Sarsapariller posted:

What's going to kill the spaceship sim genre is that every space game where you actually sit in a cockpit is some kind of clone of a single philosophical dead-end. It's 24/7 Space Libertarianism where every man is a merchant trader-slash-pirate with his own ship. It's boring and lazy and leads to exactly the same mechanics with varying degrees of polish, over and over again. It's a tedious power fantasy that doesn't acknowledge the realities of physics, policitis, sociology, or economics. But the mechanics are all well established and best of all it's safe so you rarely see devs venture terribly far outside it, because their interest is in the switch-flipping, not the motivation for doing so. I feel like The Expanse is the natural end-point of such a universe if you actually play it out- and I'm astonished that nobody has bothered to build an Expanse situation yet.

But there's so much more you could do with your premise that would flavor the cockpit stuff and make it exciting!

Where's my Star Trek game where you fly around in a giant cruise ship and 90% of the time your mission is some weird philosophical poo poo or exploration or a terrifying space hazard? Or play as Ferengi if you can't escape space capitalism, introducing high tech to primitive worlds in order to make them into dependent client states.

Where's the game based on Rendezvous With Rama where your whole mission is to use 1970's-equivalent earth tech to explore a gigantic semi-wild, semi-hostile alien vessel that has appeared briefly to rocket through our solar system?

Where's the game based on Surface Detail where you're part of an intergalactic civilization waging a gigantic virtual war over your policy of building virtual afterlives and sending mind-copies of all the sinners to virtual hell?

Where's the game based on Ilium where you're part of a transhuman branch that decided to turn Mars into a real-world recreation of the Iliad?

I will grant here that Alien: Isolation is exactly the kind of space game I'd like to see more of, as well as some of the other greats: Homeworld, Independence War, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris, Outer Wilds. The problem is that most of these don't count as space sims in the minds of space sim players. As soon as you sit down inside a spaceship cockpit, it's right back to Space Libertarianism forever and that's just such a huge disappointment to me.

i like this post a lot

Zazz Razzamatazz
Apr 19, 2016

by sebmojo

Sarsapariller posted:

What's going to kill the spaceship sim genre is that every space game where you actually sit in a cockpit is some kind of clone of a single philosophical dead-end. It's 24/7 Space Libertarianism where every man is a merchant trader-slash-pirate with his own ship. It's boring and lazy and leads to exactly the same mechanics with varying degrees of polish, over and over again. It's a tedious power fantasy that doesn't acknowledge the realities of physics, policitis, sociology, or economics. But the mechanics are all well established and best of all it's safe so you rarely see devs venture terribly far outside it, because their interest is in the switch-flipping, not the motivation for doing so. I feel like The Expanse is the natural end-point of such a universe if you actually play it out- and I'm astonished that nobody has bothered to build an Expanse situation yet.

But there's so much more you could do with your premise that would flavor the cockpit stuff and make it exciting!

Where's my Star Trek game where you fly around in a giant cruise ship and 90% of the time your mission is some weird philosophical poo poo or exploration or a terrifying space hazard? Or play as Ferengi if you can't escape space capitalism, introducing high tech to primitive worlds in order to make them into dependent client states.

Where's the game based on Rendezvous With Rama where your whole mission is to use 1970's-equivalent earth tech to explore a gigantic semi-wild, semi-hostile alien vessel that has appeared briefly to rocket through our solar system?

Where's the game based on Surface Detail where you're part of an intergalactic civilization waging a gigantic virtual war over your policy of building virtual afterlives and sending mind-copies of all the sinners to virtual hell?

Where's the game based on Ilium where you're part of a transhuman branch that decided to turn Mars into a real-world recreation of the Iliad?

I will grant here that Alien: Isolation is exactly the kind of space game I'd like to see more of, as well as some of the other greats: Homeworld, Independence War, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris, Outer Wilds. The problem is that most of these don't count as space sims in the minds of space sim players. As soon as you sit down inside a spaceship cockpit, it's right back to Space Libertarianism forever and that's just such a huge disappointment to me.

This makes me pine for a remake of Tie Fighter... No hauling or trading, just being a fighter pilot slowly realizing he might be on the wrong side of the war...

And Alien: Isolation was a fantastic game. If there was any justice in the world, the studio would have been allowed to make a sequel.

Last King
Sep 29, 2007

In corporate R'lyeh, Cthulhu works you.

Fun Shoe

Sample_text posted:

Found best quote

yea i had to stop reading and walk away for a bit when i realized the elaborate lengths everyone is tripping over each other to buy these ships:

trucutru
Jul 9, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

Popete posted:

The thing is there is a nugget of something here.

The actual nugget is that the companies have learned that people will pay for a game before it's actually done if those people think there is a nugget of something in there.

trucutru
Jul 9, 2003

by Fluffdaddy

Scruffpuff posted:

"More lethal than COD" is another one of those legendary statements where Chris attempted to one-up another game while establishing a mental comparison, implying his game was in that league and had similar content, with neither being the case. He also picked a strange characteristic to one-up. "Better looking" than COD or "more tactical" than COD could have made sense, but "more lethal?" What does that even mean? That you die more often? Is dying the central characteristic of a COD game - the one that makes people play and keeps them coming back?

This guy does not understand a single thing about gaming, which is why he's the best guy to lead a project that has nothing to do with gaming.

He was talking about the amount of people that would die before the game releases.

The Super-Id
Nov 9, 2005

"You know it's what you really want."


Grimey Drawer
Ok, return trip three. This time I made it to the space station and managed to request my Freelancer and got to the hangar and climbed in no problem. Could not figure out how to open the hangar doors. Managed to get my ship vertical and then walk out the back hatch and fall to the ground. Did not seem to be a way to reenter the ship which was now lifelessly floating vertically in the hangar. Fortunately I had used the bed in the ship so I exited to the main menu and then loaded it back up again. Started on my ship, great. Sat down in the cockpit and noticed that the ship now seemed to be floating in some sort of limbo beneath the planets surface. Started the ship up and then as soon as I began to maneuver it immediately blew up. Back to the wank pod.

Decided to give it another go and made it back to the space station, requested my other ship given that the freelancer had been destroyed and it would take 15 minutes to get it back. This time I asked in chat how to open the hangar and got some vague answers that weren't that helpful, but did mention the comms tab so I eventually found the option to open the hangar door. Flew into space (wee), and even managed to quantum travel to something that looked like a big desert planet, not sure. At that point I was trying to find a way to look up destinations and actually get to the fleet week thing but accidentally ejected myself into space and found myself flying away from my ship at high speed. The suit's EVA capabilities did not seem sufficient to overcome my velocity and get back to the ship so I exited to main menu and jumped back in to find myself back in the wank pod.

Overall the game is incredibly lifeless. There are npcs everywhere, none of whom seem to talk or have any kind of interactivity (they mostly just stared into space). Everything that I did involved awkwardly clicking on screens or buttons with almost no indication of what anything did or what I should be doing. There were tips that kept appearing on the screen that had nothing to do with what I was doing I was told to press middle mouse to perform a melee takedown, or x to go prone while I was still trying to figure out how to get out of the apartments where I started. Once I finally did get into the ships they were confusing and handled poorly. It was not fun at all to take off into space or to fly around in space. The most exciting thing that happened was accidentally ejecting myself.

I did get to see several t-posing npcs though, and also witness some pretty toxic responses to people complaining about bugs in chat, so I suppose I've now had the Star Citizen experience.

colonelwest
Jun 30, 2018

Sarsapariller posted:

What's going to kill the spaceship sim genre is that every space game where you actually sit in a cockpit is some kind of clone of a single philosophical dead-end. It's 24/7 Space Libertarianism where every man is a merchant trader-slash-pirate with his own ship. It's boring and lazy and leads to exactly the same mechanics with varying degrees of polish, over and over again. It's a tedious power fantasy that doesn't acknowledge the realities of physics, policitis, sociology, or economics. But the mechanics are all well established and best of all it's safe so you rarely see devs venture terribly far outside it, because their interest is in the switch-flipping, not the motivation for doing so. I feel like The Expanse is the natural end-point of such a universe if you actually play it out- and I'm astonished that nobody has bothered to build an Expanse situation yet.

But there's so much more you could do with your premise that would flavor the cockpit stuff and make it exciting!

Where's my Star Trek game where you fly around in a giant cruise ship and 90% of the time your mission is some weird philosophical poo poo or exploration or a terrifying space hazard? Or play as Ferengi if you can't escape space capitalism, introducing high tech to primitive worlds in order to make them into dependent client states.

Where's the game based on Rendezvous With Rama where your whole mission is to use 1970's-equivalent earth tech to explore a gigantic semi-wild, semi-hostile alien vessel that has appeared briefly to rocket through our solar system?

Where's the game based on Surface Detail where you're part of an intergalactic civilization waging a gigantic virtual war over your policy of building virtual afterlives and sending mind-copies of all the sinners to virtual hell?

Where's the game based on Ilium where you're part of a transhuman branch that decided to turn Mars into a real-world recreation of the Iliad?

I will grant here that Alien: Isolation is exactly the kind of space game I'd like to see more of, as well as some of the other greats: Homeworld, Independence War, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris, Outer Wilds. The problem is that most of these don't count as space sims in the minds of space sim players. As soon as you sit down inside a spaceship cockpit, it's right back to Space Libertarianism forever and that's just such a huge disappointment to me.

I agree with you on space games, it seems like even though we’re in the midst of a revival of the genre, it’s hasn’t really advanced much fundamentally from were it left off in the early 2000’s. But most genres in gaming are in sort of stuck in the same rut.

Go back 20 years and play a shooter like Halo 1 or the first Battlefield and you won’t see much of difference from today other than more polished mechanics and better graphics. It’s all just the same lone super soldier hero power fantasy played out over and over again, someone once imagined playing Arnold in Commando and we’ve never been able to get past that singular vision.

There were some earlier squad based games like Rainbow Six that mixed in AI teammates and RTS elements, but those are long dead and buried. I would love to play as a squad leader commanding multiple fireteams of competent friendly NPCs. It even the latest Ghost Recon games, friendly NPCs we’re just horrible placeholders for co-op.

There are plenty of great games out today, but I’d love to see the medium in general experiment more and advance new ways of experiencing and interacting with the game world. There are plenty of cools ideas floating around the indie sphere, but no one seems to have a big enough budget to really bring them together.

Maybe as indie gaming grows and more indie studios are able to break into the mainstream, tech like the tools in UE5 allows games to be built more cheaply, and the growth of VR changes how we experience games; maybe we’ll see start to see more novel experiences.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Beet Wagon
Oct 19, 2015





Scruffpuff posted:

"More lethal than COD" is another one of those legendary statements where Chris attempted to one-up another game while establishing a mental comparison, implying his game was in that league and had similar content, with neither being the case. He also picked a strange characteristic to one-up. "Better looking" than COD or "more tactical" than COD could have made sense, but "more lethal?" What does that even mean? That you die more often? Is dying the central characteristic of a COD game - the one that makes people play and keeps them coming back?

This guy does not understand a single thing about gaming, which is why he's the best guy to lead a project that has nothing to do with gaming.

The "More lethal than COD" thing is really perfect because even if he doesn't know it it shows exactly how unfamiliar Chris is with videogames in general and what they strive for. At the time he was trying to explain how the shooting mechanics in his game would be punishing and "realistic" - no auto health regeneration or other things you'd expect from other shooters, short time to kill, etc - to highlight how it would reward tactical play and teamwork (which were supposed to be big highlights of Star Marine), but the problem is he chose COD to compare it to. Anybody who has played COD multiplayer in recent times will quickly point out that the TTK in COD is often measured in fractions of a second. The multiplayer in the new Modern Warfare is so fast that any kind of tactical play is literally impossible, even in the big-battle modes that try to ape the Battlefield franchise. Instead of implying that Star Citizen was going to have slow, tactical gameplay with low TTK like... idk Rainbow Six I guess?, what he ultimately implied was that you'll be killed almost instantly, and you'll probably never even see the guy that did it. All in a game with huge penalties for dying, including character permadeath lmao.

Tangentially related, the only shooter I've ever played that is legitimately "more lethal than COD" is Verdun, an absolutely brutal WWI shooter where a single bullet kills you and half the team is shooting vickers guns at you as you sprint across an open field.

e: and maybe Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. That game does not gently caress around.

Beet Wagon fucked around with this message at 22:23 on May 23, 2020

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply