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Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
What I find interesting is that there is now enough content to actually create a compelling experience with a bunch of fun gameplay loops, but everything is so unbalanced, buggy and broken that you can't have fun playing it. If they want to sell a playable experience to people, they really need to spend a whole patch cycle just fixing these years old bugs. Make all these missions actually work, fix up all the ship and weapon bugs, and balance everything so an average player can make progress towards their goals. But they will never do that. They would rather sell a new ship reskin with broken weapons to their loyal suckers.

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Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
I've been trying to play 3.7.1 for two days now but you literally cannot get past the character creator without crashing, making it impossible for people to play. Only people who created characters before the hotfix patch can get in. Maybe in two weeks I'll be able to play the BDSSE.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Dogeh posted:

We need an org booth at CitCon.
Actually, I'm sure it's not too late to get one up and running.

Find more details in this thread: You need to have Anti-SC Goon access
I hope no-one minds me taking this on.
I will have more details by the weekend.

However. My artistic skills aren't the best.
Do we have an org logo?

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
I've been playing 3.7.1 for the past few days now. My conclusion is that Star Citizen has now reached the gameplay and balance of a Steam Early Access game. I have never seen the game as stable as it has been in a very long time. Unlike my brief experience with 3.6.0, you can actually play for hours without client crashes. Maybe, if CIG can maintain this level of stability, they might start getting a better reputation. There is a good amount of stuff to do and you can actually play and earn money and get better ships. They do have completed gameplay loops.

There are still lots of small bugs, though. Sometimes you can't get out of your cockpit. Some ships can't lock missiles unless you turn the weapon system off. Sometimes group fast travel will send one member off into a random direction. Sometimes mission NPCs don't spawn. Sometimes missions get stuck. And weapon balance is off where ships with only laser weapons literally can't break through the shields of certain ships.

However, it works most of the time where you can have fun while making progress towards whatever goals you have. How many years did it take to get to this point, though? And how many years will it still take?

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Fallout posted:

Just curious, is there a discord for goons that actually want to play this?

I'm kinda in mood for relaxing space sim stuff.

lol, the Goonrathi Discord is still around. Heck, some of us even tried 3.7.1 out last week. Of course, out of the 30-40 people on the server, only a handful actually bother playing the game.

It's also not a Discord specifically for making GBS threads on the game. That's what the Derek Smart Discord is for. In fact, most of the time we don't talk about Star Citizen at all.

But it is probably the closest thing to your desires.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Sandweed posted:

How much do the glasses cost?

Probably 700 UEC or so. I have no idea where you get them so I can't check.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
That's probably because most of the gaming world has given up on Star Citizen. Version 3.7 has reached the level of stability and gameplay content that coincides with a Steam Early Access title. They should have reached that point YEARS ago. Your standard "gamer" has the memory of a goldfish. They don't have the patience to wait a decade on a video game.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

The Glumslinger posted:

(Semi)serious question? What's the state of the gameplay? Is it still just trying to retrieve a box in space before your game crashes? Or have they actually added stuff to do yet?

The game doesn't really crash anymore, which is amazing. There are still some super annoying bugs around that can ruin your day, like being unable to get out of your seat, but those are pretty rare.

Missions typically are of the following variety:

* Carry a box. They work about 3/4 of the time. Pay is meh.

* Find a wrecked ship in space or on a planet and do one of the following (pay is decent):
- Retrieve the flight recorder and take it back to some place (box carry!)
- Find a dead person.
- Find all the dead people.

* Help an NPC out in space that is being attacked. Kind of difficult because they will throw a bunch of enemies at one or more NPCs who die quickly and then you fail. Pay is decent if it is near you, but half the time you fail anyway.
- Sometimes the NPC is actually a pirate and tries to kill you.

* Patrol an area and kill pirates. Really lovely because the pay is terrible and it just never ends and you run out of ammo and you often can't QT to the next waypoint so you have to try to slow boat it there before your timer runs out. gently caress this mission.

* Investigate an insurance claim.
- Explore a destroyed space station and try to find evidence to make a life insurance claim for a dead person's next of kin.
- Find a dead person in a mine.

* Save a comm station. You have to use your scanner and find some hidden probes near a comm station and blow all 3 of them up within a few minutes while some pirates try to stop you. It's a fine newbie mission I guess. Isn't that high paying.

* Hack a comm station. Great way to boost your crime stat. I think players can also get a mission to stop you.

* "Evict" people from a residence. FPS combat! Kill all the squatters.
- Sometimes the base has anti-air guns. That's annoying.

* Hunt bounties. Best mission in the game.
- Pay is excellent. 8k bounties are easy and you can complete them back to back to back in a Buccaneer every 5 minutes or less. 10k bounties are easy unless it spawns a Hammerhead whose shields are so strong it is best to just abandon the mission.
- You can hunt players with a crime stat! Super fun as the pubbies rage and cry in global chat because you can see where they are at all times and THAT JUST ISN'T FAIR gently caress YOU!@ Only pays like 5600 to 6000 aUEC, so they don't pay well for the time and effort, but you are mostly rewarded with pubbie tears.

You can also earn money by trading or mining. You need like 500,000 aUEC to make trading worth it, though. You can mine space rocks with a special ship or you can do cave mining with some cheap equipment. The most lucrative form of earning money is probably cave mining right now. Just watch out so somebody doesn't kill you and take all your stuff.

The game also has some form of ship upgrading. You can refit your ship and upgrade the parts, but for many ships they are already equipped with best in slot equipment. Or the stats for the equipment is all identical so there is no benefit to upgrade. Usually you can at least upgrade your shield and weapons, though, and a couple of the cheaper ships can get some use out of an upgraded power supply.

Finally, ship rentals are in. They are only worthwhile because they are bugged and you don't lose your ship after your rental period has expired. All you do is rent a ship, fly to another location, then make an insurance claim on it from that new location. Congrats, you just bought that ship for practically no money. Once that is fixed, though, rentals will be mostly worthless as there is no way to make enough money to justify the expense.

Nalin fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Nov 26, 2019

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Sarsapariller posted:

>> I quantum travel to hurston which takes 10 minutes of real time. Got up, made some IRL coffee, came back and modified my equipment taking a lightly armored loadout with silenced rifle for maneuverability.

Now we're entering fantasy territory. Flying from Grim Hex area to Hurston takes 30-40 minutes of real time if you have a small ship. "Lightly armored loadout with silenced rifle" is complete bullshit, Lorville is literally a non-combat zone. You cannot even point your gun, let alone shoot it.

No, the worst ships do Olisar to ArcCorp in 16 minutes. 10 seems reasonable, especially if it was a larger ship. Still a stupid amount of time, of course. Travel times should be cut in half.

Sarsapariller posted:

>>I stop at the local armory to see if they have any good equipment. Not much, but they do offer a hand held mining tool that I snag.

By "local armory" he means "Gun store." There are 4-5 stores at every station and landing facility. These are the only locations at the stations and landing facilities. Their inventory never changes.

The inventory changes per location. Stock won't ever change or rotate out, but different places sell different things.

Sarsapariller posted:

>>Take public transit back to the space station, launch my ship and take a mission to find a wreck and recover the black box mcguffin. Head out of atmosphere and travel 800km to the wreck. In approach I scan the area - clean. Park my ship and begin my space walk to find the box. Another player approaches and destroys my ship. I duck into a larger section of wreckage. Player searches for me (they don't know if I died in my ship or not). Then they exit their ship where I Eva around and place a bullet in their head.

This is plausible, though it doesn't really emphasize that the box-finding mission probably took 20-30 minutes to fly that 800km unless he got really lucky with waypoints. It's certainly possible that a griefer blew his ship up and then was stupid enough to get out and fly around. More likely what happened is that another player got the exact same "Find box in space wreck" mission and just shot him assuming he was an enemy, then got out to find the box. This happens all the time because the in-game mission system only has like, half a dozen locations to spawn missions in so poo poo gets doubled up constantly.

Each planet has a bunch of OM waypoints that get you around it pretty easily. You shouldn't have to slow boat that 800km. Plus many times those search missions act as a QT waypoint themselves, so you can just QT there.

Now, the second half is very true. A single wreck is going to spawn three missions: find the box, find a dude, and find all the dudes. When I was messing around with patch 3.7, I would routinely take all 3 missions if I saw them and make a bunch of money off a single trip. Rookie move to not take all of the missions.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Sarsapariller posted:

You can fit 96 boxes in a Constellation- if you want more, you're going to have to pay your artists to build a longer or wider version of the ship. Oops, hope you balanced everything exactly right! Oh, you didn't and now things are seven shades of hosed up with a bunch of small ships that can't even carry a single SCU? Time for the seventh refactor!

Mostly right, but the standard Hornet can carry 2 SCU and I don't think there is any physical box for that. I would bet that each ship was custom coded to show their boxes. It would make sense based on all the weird things I've seen in the game, like how some ships let you see your actual ship components, some ships have working item storage while some don't, and why ships like the Constellation magically don't have a working missile lock system. I would bet that every time they make some sort of change to mechanics, they have to manually apply that change to each ship. And, if, they forget one ship, well, magically it is the only ship in the game that can't fire missiles anymore.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Sarsapariller posted:

You are not factoring in that the player will be stopped 2-3 times per QT jump by pirates, "Security" scans, drive overheating, and random asteroids. It is extremely difficult to make long jumps without getting stopped even once. This also means you have to stay glued to the goddamn computer because otherwise a pirate might kill you before the glitches do.

They massively toned down encounters after players bitched nonstop about them. It was a very uncommon event for me when I played, to the point where I was actually trying to get stopped by the police for an hour and I couldn't get an encounter. And, if it was something like a pirate attack, you can literally just fly forward for a bit and you'll be out of the interdiction zone and you can just QT again.

Plus, players found out that if your ship isn't a single seater and has an interior, you can just get out of your seat and you won't proc any random encounters ever. They only happen if you are sitting in your pilot chair.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Beet Wagon posted:

Every ship has something representing physicalized cargo, as far as I am aware. The Mustang and Aurora both have cargo "boxes" rather than a hold and I believe the hornet has one as well. I know it used to have space for cargo under the turret, but a quick google says those 2 SCU are stored in a box somewhere on or in the ship. I don't have a hornet so I can't go looking.

Well, I know the cargo slot is an actual hardpoint on the Hornet and can be swapped out for a turret, but you are saying that they actually spawn a box inside an unreachable space inside that hardpoint? Because you can't open that up at all. I guess it would be completely like CIG to do that.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Chrysophylax posted:

Hot take but I don't think anything in games that starts resembling "waiting for things to happen" should take more than seconds

Doing stuff on the way to do the thing you actually want to do is something I want to see less off in games, tbh but I guess I'm just one of those instant gratification zoomers

All space games have some sort of travel built into them. In fact, most games do. Even in non-space games with fast travel systems, you will still have to travel from the fast travel node to your destination. The main difference is that most of those games either have shorter travel times or their traversal system is more interesting.

In Freelancer, you have to travel around a star system using sort of a spider web of travel lanes connecting POIs. Once you reach one POI, you choose the next thread to travel along. The individual jumps aren't that long so it helps keep you engaged as you are exploring all the areas in the system.

Elite: Dangerous does have some long travel times, but they are still far less than Star Citizen ones. The worst offenders in Elite: Dangerous are places with a 10 minute supercruise. Those places are really, really far out there. Your average in-system travel times are much lower and much more interesting as you can fly anywhere you want in supercruise (and there are supercruise related gameplay mechanics).

It is really going to suck in Star Citizen once they add multiple systems as we saw that those jump points are on the edges of the star system. If you have to navigate a colon every jump point, then spend 15 minutes traveling to the next wormhole, travel is going to be so tedious. CIG needs to ditch all the size 1 quantum drives and most of the size 2 ones. Anything less than 80,000,000 m/s needs to go.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Sarsapariller posted:

* Public flights to any major hub you've been to before. Doesn't even have to be animated- just make it a terminal interaction that ports your character to the new spaceport.

I think being able to choose which port to respawn on would probably work better.

Sarsapariller posted:

* More localized missions. poo poo should not be sending you more than 10 minutes out of your way unless it's deliberately taking you to a new hub.

Definitely. Combat missions are currently local like that, and are the best thing to actually do in the game, but half of them are unplayable and the other half either don't spawn with regularity or just don't work either. There is a reason I never really ever left Delamar when I was playing. It's just the best place to be.

Sarsapariller posted:

* Warp-to-friend, same deal as the other teleports but maybe on a timer. Maybe just let people hop into their friend's turret without losing their original position in the world when they leave.

Apparently they want to let you jump into your friend's NPCs. I don't expect it to happen any time soon.

Sarsapariller posted:

* Put a bunch of interesting poo poo in deep space that can only be discovered through flying and scanning. Secret cargo caches, pirate bases, whatever. Just give people doing the flying a reason to look around.

Definitely, but the way they designed QT makes that just impossible. They should have done a supercruise like system that Elite uses.

Hav posted:

They removed all the docking collars saying that they had no idea how to make it work. They've yet to re-appear, meaning that there's at least one more ship refactor coming, or a quiet pushing it behind something in the constant firehose of crap.

4.0 has ship to station docking. I'm going to guess 4.3 because ship to station will be delayed once to 4.1 and ship to ship will be 4.2 but then delayed to 4.3.

The Constellation snub fighter cannot be used until ship to ship docking works and CIG's goal is to make its iconic ship broken and worthless for as long as possible.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheDeadlyShoe posted:

This is one of those things they later walked back.

What's great about promising the world is that your promises stay out there in the common understanding, even if you retreat from them when pressed.

What? I thought this was something that was actually brought up recently. Oh well, there is no way I'm going to review things they said the past month just to make sure.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

lol, bringing up Space Engineers is such a mistake. It's probably the only game I can say, without any hint of irony, is buggier than Star Citizen.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Ambaire posted:

Have you actually played Space Engineers lately? They've mostly fixed rotors and pistons, and the game is actually fairly good these days.

I actually have. It is definitely a lot better nowadays than compared to a few years ago, but thrusters will still stop working when you disconnect from a docking collar, the docking collar itself may stop locking onto things, wheeled rovers will still fall through the world and explode, if your chat window is open and you are on the respawn screen you have to ALT+F4, shooting a small sloped armor block blows up your whole ship, sometimes destroying a block dislocates your whole space station from an asteroid, etc, etc.

At least all your ships don't randomly float away into space anymore.

Every time I play Space Engineers I experience a wide array of new, game breaking bugs that may or may not have existed for years. I still love the game, but drat.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

knockout posted:

I really want to like this game but they're making it very difficult.

The first time that I played, I clipped through my spaceship into the endless vacuum of space and had to suicide.

The second time that I played, I went to bed in my spaceship, came back to the game, and woke up back in the main default city or whatever.

The third time that I played, I was able to make it far enough to accept a contract, pick up a shipment, but then spontaneously combust while approaching my destination.

I love the level of detail put into this game. I love the way that it looks. I'm coming from Elite so I don't even mind emergent gameplay and making my own fun. But, Jesus Christ, it's frustrating to have any modicum of progress that you've made immediately and arbitrarily erased without any warning.

Your mistake is that you aren't doing bounty hunt missions around Delamar. Carrying boxes is just way too slow and you don't earn enough to justify the time. The mission also ends up breaking often. Many people who do it will try to bulk collect package carry missions from a single place, but I could never find ones from the same area.

Doing 8000 aUEC bounties around Delamar are easy, super quick, and work 8/10 times. It just sucks when you do so many of them that the missions stop being generated. But by then you will have made around 100k aUEC which should let you upgrade stuff.

I played Star Citizen for a week and tried out most of the missions. Bounty hunting is definitely the way to go to have some fun for a few days before uninstalling and playing something else.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Quavers posted:

:reddit: EU servers are full.
Just had to join USA server as keeps saying EU is full.

:v: Looks like a lot of people got shiny new PC's/GPUs for xmas.

:shepspends: They've got some Christmas pledge price changes too, expect lots more new players.


lol CIG should have released 3.7.3 instead of 3.8. All these new players get to experience the full on Star Citizen jank instead of something functional.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

His ship lost power because CIG did something weird with the power and cooling system where if you overheat your ship, your power reactor turns off and you are dead in the water until it cools off and you can turn it back on. In most combat situations this means you instantly die.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
It's like overheating your mech in MechWarrior, except it lasts longer and your shields go away and then you have to do the cockpit startup sequence all over again. Imagine overheating in MechWarrior during a fight and suddenly losing all your armor. You die instantly.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Inacio posted:

just tried 3.8.1, didn't last long. got bored when flying 600km to a waypoint that you can't jump to
verdict: game still boring

I have never had to fly that far manually, ever. Surrounding a planet are a bunch of OM-# jump points. Those let you quickly get close to mission areas.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
So, I know there was discussion on "moderates" a few pages back, but I just want to remind people that Goonrathi does technically still exist. While most of us do laugh at Star Citizen's continuous failures and fuckups, and most of us don't play the game at all, there are a handful who still do play around with it every now and then (usually around patch releases).

If anybody does want to try and form some pick up game sessions, you are always free to join us on Discord. https://discord.gg/q25QwWW

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

peter gabriel posted:

I am re installing this for some reason, I need more space adventures.
Installed the launcher, no buttons on it at all, nothing to launch the game.
Re installed it in d:/starshitizen and it now works, clicked to download the game, it is now stuck at 99% with 1.1mb left, I went out for an hour and came back to the same screen.
So far so good!

I had the same problem. I had to log out of the launcher and log back in making sure the "remember me" button was checked. If that button wasn't checked, it was still broken.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Jonny Shiloh posted:

I'd love to, but it's a bloody Aurora and about as much use as tits on a fish.

At least the Aurora is more fun to play with than the game's poster ship, the Constellation, which handles like a bus stuck on a frozen lake.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

skeletors_condom posted:

So are still allowed to post screengrabs if we cover the username and don't include a link?

Or what are the rules on this?

2nd post says to copy text and redact names. Not sure if screengrabs are okay.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheAgent posted:

sean tracy said they had been working on it for like 9 months, but it didn't require "that much effort"

I don't even know what that means

It was probably just one guy messing around with their tools in his spare time for the large part. That's how I read it anyway.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

TOW appears to be the same - it's a 'custom' PG World level (actually using PG Planets) using standard PU ships and weapons. They've taken the two 'teams' from Star Marine, and added some additional UI (for progressive spawn unlocks and showing progress, I think), but other than 'unlocking' the next stage I don't think there is any additional Code required?

Bullshit, there is definitely extra code involved. However, I can't really blame them or make fun of them for this. I mean, isn't it their job to create a fun game to play? It sounds like some guy on the team decided that since Chris Roberts can't create something fun, he would try. And, I mean, it does look pretty fun to me. I think the combat in Star Citizen is the most compelling gameplay experience so far and I do actually have fun flying around and shooting things. Making a TvT combined arms game is actually a pretty ingenious idea, provided it is done well. Star Citizen isn't really ready to be played as a persistent MMO, but it does have enough building blocks already in-place to host a compelling TvT game mode. It provides a lot of value to an increasingly jaded community.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheAgent posted:

combat in star citizen is -- by far -- its worse loving aspect

are you sure you've played star citizen, commando?

I totally have, but I guess I should say that it also really depends on the ship you are flying. Trying to fight in the Constellation, the worst ship in the game, is pretty terrible. Trying to fight in a Buccaneer, the most agile glass-cannon ship in the game, is pretty fun. The AI behaves itself most of the time nowadays, so you can get a good fight going. I won't deny that there are AI bugs, though, that can stop ships from flying right, but I find that most of the time things work fine.

Keep in mind that my only experience with the game recently comes from patches 3.7 and 3.8.1. It might have been a lot worse in the past, but nowadays things are playable.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheAgent posted:

so the only way to experience good combat is to spend real money

also the AI is still broken as gently caress, but this gamemode would be player v player, and any player v player combat in Star Citizen sucks and has sucked since the PU was released

No, you can buy ships in-game now. Granted the Buccaneer is waaaaaaaaaay overpriced, but you can rent a Freelancer or an Avenger Titan for a... reasonable-ish price, and grind out some high paying missions to eventually afford something else. The economy and ship prices DOES completely suck, though, and you are seeing more and more people calling CIG out on how poo poo the new player experience is. Somebody on reddit called it an inverted progression system and they are absolutely right. If you have no money and a bad ship, it is so extremely hard to reach the next level. But if you are wealthy with good ships, then it doesn't take much effort to buy anything you want. Huh. I think I finally understand just how real to life immersive this game is.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
Technically, 3.8 was supposed to introduce partial persistence where they wouldn't wipe your belongings with every new patch. So far this hasn't actually played out that way since they keep introducing money dupe exploits and wiping. They don't seem to have any of the logging a typical MMO would have so they aren't able to selectively deal with these issues.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

Hav posted:

How much sunk cost are in for?

Constellation kickstarter + a Cutlass a year later (later swapped to a Buccaneer for $0 because the Cutlass was trash). I never bothered to refund years ago because I was lazy. So... $310 back in 2013/2014.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

no_recall posted:

What about the idea of boarding? Forgotten? I remember a Cutlass was prized because of the boarding mechanics, but that seems like a lifetime ago. The idea might be great, but when implemented it might be slightly better than a potato.

Boarding is almost there. If you shoot at a door of a ship, you can knock it open and enter it. The only problem is that there is currently no way to stop the other ship. Presumably stuff like distortion cannons and whatnot will be able to tackle ships and bring them to a halt, but "the Combine Cannon and distortion weapons are not working as intended" has graced the patch notes for quite a while so far. They just don't work at all.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

h3isenbug posted:

Made me think of this:

https://youtu.be/X3HB4lLTYrU?t=3258

"We see in the analytics when a weapon is broken because..."

For a split second I thought he would finish the sentence with "...according to the telemetry data that weapon made way too much damage considering its number of hits", but instead he went with "...within a day or so everyone is going out buying it and using it"

This is like a Formula One or Nascar team stating that "...we realized that we need to adjust the setup, because in the telemetry data we saw that the other team won the race"

[Edit: Taxxe]



I would love it if CIG did a thing where people could request telemetry data from them on certain things. Somewhat just to see if they can produce results. Also because I want to ask them which missions are the most commonly abandoned because I am really curious how often missions break. I know I've tried getting working claimjumper missions before and ended up having to abandon like 10 in a row.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheAgent posted:

why are you putting yourself through any of this

if I'm playing a game and poo poo goes sideways twice or three times in a row, I'm loving pissed. my current experience with the latest warframe patch was infuriating, and I love that game. haven't played it in weeks

how y'all keep "testing" this poo poo is beyond me. like what loving fun is there when you're constantly fighting with bugs and server disconnects, especially with zero progression or persistance

like it just boggles my mind people would spend their time with star citizen

I didn't play it at all for the longest time. As I said, I only started playing recently with the 3.7 patch because I heard it was stable enough to actually play around with. I haven't really experienced any sort of server disconnects and the bugs I run into haven't been the kind that halt my progress. I'm also not "testing" the game at all; I know the IC is a complete joke so I don't bother spending my time with it.

I also play way less than you think. Maybe a couple hours a week. Just when I have the urge to shoot some space pirates in a bounty hunt mission.

I am literally that filthy centrist Star Citizen goon.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheAgent posted:

didnt you just mention you had to abandon a mission 10 times in a row? how is not halting your "progress"?

and btw, what loving progress? there is no progress lol

Yeah, but I spent all of a few minutes doing it because you can usually see right away if it will be a broken mission or not (thankfully).

While buying ships is pretty worthless because they are so stupidly expensive, you can actually earn the money to upgrade your ship and make it noticeably better. Many of the non-whale ships come with low or mid-grade parts, so you can play missions and earn money and equip yourself with better shields and weapons. It is a fun little gameplay loop while it lasts and it something easily achievable by spending a few hours per week.

TheAgent posted:

like if you are playing SC for it's terrible combat, theres a dozen or so better games with much improved space combat our right now for a fraction of the cost

with actual missions and progress n stuff

Meh. I actually like the responsiveness of SC's combat. I guess other people don't but that doesn't surprise me because it is entirely a subjective thing anyway. I just find that flying around in the incredible unrealistic asteroid clusters while dogfighting pirates in small spacecraft to be fun.

IMO, actually, the "Best Space Combat" award goes to Infinity: Battlescape:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079620/Infinity_Battlescape/

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

TheAgent posted:

but...all that gets reset. you don't keep anything. it will all be gone in like a few weeks

you do know that, right?

Of course. But saying it will be gone in a few weeks is being misleading. You usually have a few months before wipes unless something really bad happens within a cycle.

Do you have the same problem with Diablo seasons where you have to start a new character from level 1? Does that mean the game has no progress at all? Spending a week earning back equipment is not the end of the world to me. Of course, I'm not one of the weird people who try to grind out millions of credits every patch. I'm just saying that you can make goals in the game and progress towards them, within reason.

Some people can't have fun knowing they might lose things in the future and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. It's why many people avoid closed beta games because they don't want to lose everything in a future wipe. Many goons tried the Last Oasis closed beta and played for a wipe or two and decided to stop until release. That's fine. I might eventually make the same decision with Star Citizen.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Isn't all the dogfighting AI completely broken?

It works most of the time. It is rare that it breaks and ships stop fighting you, but usually when that happens the whole server is having issues.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
I was just trying to use it as an example of having to start fresh. You could substitute it with any type of survival game if you want. The point was that you seem to think that there is no merit in having fun with something if you will lose "progress" in the future.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

zcrow posted:

Chris waddles out in front of the camera.

"Guys it's been a tough couple years, but I'm super excited to share with you our new project, Squadron 88. Built on Unreal Engine it features a plucky squadron of navy fighters (who punch above their weight) against the evil Naa'ziii alien race. Pledge now"

Nah, Chris Roberts would pick the Unity engine. It will then take another 8 years before he figures out that Unity is a piece of poo poo.

Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf
After that Chris will switch to Unreal, but decide to make the whole entire game using blueprints. After 4 years, they will embark on a massive project to develop a system that automatically converts blueprints into native C++ code.

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Nalin
Sep 29, 2007

Hair Elf

UnknownTarget posted:

Besides it's also fresh content for the thread, don't scare him off. :P the one thing we haven't discussed, ironically, is what about Star Citizen is good besides the graphics. No I won't download it to gather content and contribute, I have better things to do. But I like hearing from people who actually play it.

I'm not going to be scared off. If anything I'll just get bored of the game and stop playing it for another year or two. That actually might happen in 3.9 because they are talking about making ships suffer "consequences" for flying fast. Slowing down combat speeds sounds nice, but in a game with lots of waiting, I don't want to wait even more to fly somewhere.

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