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Star Citizen in a must watch 13 minute nutshell


redirishlord

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@ Rootsrat: ED is probably good enough to deserve it's own thread. Also SC is a very realistic dogfighting/fps/econimic simulation, not an "arcadey" game, I was hoping to showcase those features when i started this thread but I think there are getting buried under speculation from folks who haven't actually played SC. I'm smiling as I type this and just trying to share the SC love :-)

I played the Arena Commander and the Hangar modules - like I said, I own these two. I know there is also a race module available, but I have no access to it, so I can't comment here. But there is certainly no economic simulation in SC. All you can do is dogfight in the AC or race - or hang around the hangar ;) 

 

I'm guessing you can make money in races. That's all the economy that SC has for now plus the real life ship transactions on the website and grey market of those on eBay ;)

 

The hangar module has very clumsy animations and there isn't much to do. Being inside your ship is awesome, I like how they've designed the interior, but I'm not a big fan of ship design in general (how they look from outside) if I'm honest. The dogfighting module is good fun, but it feels more arcade than simulation to me (maybe because I didn't really played that much and I'm probably not aware of many advanced functions. Plus I'm simply used to a different flight model).

 

I like the graphics - it's great, the sounds are OK (ED has placed the bar very near the top in the audio department), but what's released so far is definitely not enough for me to make an opinion about Star Citizen as a game, because to me it's not a game. It's an alpha build of couple of the most basic modules - flight model and FPP model. Saying that this is the best space sim out there or saying that it has a realistic simulation of economy is simply projecting the design and game concept through the hype that is all around it.

 

I'm sorry, but that's my opinion.

 

The stuff they've shown at Gamescom is great and I'm looking forward to trying it out, but I'm looking at what's really out there and not what's planned and promised and make my judgement and opinion based on that. 

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After playing for a few hours this evening, it looks and feels like a glorified tech demo at this point. I was able to do the following:

 

A) Walk through a hanger with about 7 ships. I was able to get into the cockpit / cargo bay of each ship save one (seemed non interactible - was the one from the multi-crew demo).

B) Arena Commander - Free Fly (Basically fly around with nothing to interact with but landing pads). Choice of 5 ships: Aegis Dynamics Avenger, Aegis Dynamics Gladius, Anvil Gladiator, Anvil Hornet F7C, and Anvil Hornet F7CM.

C) Arena Commander - Vandaal Swarm (Basically waves of enemy fighters with occaisional "elite" units to fight). Same 5 ships.

D) Arena Commander - Racing (Basically in-atmosphere racing - However it had the same flight mechanics as space which is odd). Same 5 ships.

E) Multiplayer versions of C and D (did not attempt cause I need to learn controls and flying better).

 

Animations on foot feel clunky and un-natural, it could just be the head bob effect. It felt like "stuttering" but my FPS was good. Boarding ships was cool, but I saw a lot of clipping and some of the ships bugged out a bit.

 

Free flying was fairly good, but I managed to bug out the landing on a few ships so they were not recoverable (i.e. could not reboard). On the other hand, transitioning from flight to foot was pretty neat. Landing pads had magnets for your boots but you could walk off the pad and do spacewalk with thrusters that worked well.

 

As a general thing, video options are minimal for any type of tweaking and there is definitely some framerate / aliasing issues that need addressed. I like the art style and concepts but considering its two years into development I feel like they are behind the curve a little. The controls are decent but feel very "loose" (I was using kb+m)... even after I got used to them I seemed to be blacking out / redding out a little too much when I don't believe I should have. Additionally, I would be hard pressed to do precision manuvers but then I'm a novice atm. Perhaps there is something I missed due to lack of a proper tutorial for us trial users. Combat was pretty fun, I managed to down 5 waves before running out of lives multiple times. My worst problem was hitting asteroids when dogfighting and hitting the edge of the simulation... lol they aren't always easy to see in general and the collision warning might need the range extended.

 

All in all, it needs a lot of work but I can see a bright future if they grab hold of it and I hope they do. Looking forward to one day trying it again. My best score with few hours practive was wave 9 and 44k score.

 

Edit: Lastly, I noted my FPS was stuck at 30... is that normal?

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@ Neovalen: I would call it early alpha rather than tech demo but same diff, progress contiues constantly which is good the recent 1.1.6a rebalanced shields & missiles making combat flow much better.

Hangar is early as well, customizable rooms & the ability to invite friends & organization members to come with the ability to exit to the ArcCorp (corporate planetside environment) landing zone end of this month. Animations are currently rough, the FPS module "Star Marine" (companion to "Arena Commander" dog fighting module) opens end of September with the new skeleton rig & new animations. I'm particularly excited for this as the combat module is intended to be very realistic (no built variable accuracy component rather the breathing & other animation dynamic is intended to create the challenge instead of "dice rolling", but the constant head bob & breathing loop bleeds into non-combat activity). Plenty more on that on their website (see the weekly Star Marine postings), oh there's even a non-combat FPS sport to be included as an arena option (Sata Ball, reminds me of Ender's Game if you've seen that, carry the ball through a zero gee environment while other players shoot / move through floating cover).

Arena commander 2.0 (as shown in the Gamescom demo video linked above) isn't due until after Citizencon (Oct, Nov ?) but should add new ship based game types. Currently ship developement is hit and miss; I have an Origin 315P which looks beautiful in hangar at this time (much depth & detail to the paint/skin of the ship, side doors & ladders animate nicely) but my Constellation Taurus (multi-crew cargo hauler) is very rough on the outside & even rougher (read: broken) on the inside with the saving grace being that 2 design leads have been working on the Constellation class since February & the ship will be updated soon (probably with the Arena Commander 2.0 in Nov?) based on feedback from the community. There is a deep bench of single seat fighters currently, but players are limited to their pledge ship(s) with free weeks/weekends & the like opening some/all other ships temporarily. Success in Arena Commander (or subscription or cash) earns rental credits (REC) that can unlock ships & weapons to try for a week of play.

I'm not all that savvy re- video options, but I expect my performance is at/below yours due to hardware. I did notice a slow but steady performance improvement over the last year (in the hangar and dog fighting arena) as they constantly optimize & improve (I hear that applies to network connectivity as well).

tl;dr

Shiny future ahead, looking forward to on hell of a 'verse to play in for years to come (like Fallout/Skyrim).

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Here's a great and reasonable article by Kotaku from yesterday. I hate to say, but they're right. As much as I want to see this game released, it's such a massive feature creep that by the time it's released my grandchildren may be able to play it. 

 

Also the fact that after 2 years of development all they have to show for is a clunky and boring Hangar module, invisible walls and bugged dogfight arena and a racing module... Something isn't right here.

 

https://kotaku.com/why-star-citizen-is-taking-so-long-1724835913

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Root: 

The main reason they outline (which I also think is the main culprint) is that Chris Roberts does not set proper deadlines... I can understand wanting to be a bit perfectionist about something you are passionate about, but if your project does not have a set timetable... nothing good will really come from it. You can always do better... the trick is to do the best with what you got to work with. 

(wee those project management classes paid off finally!)

 

Ofc. wanting to do cutting edge tech, as well as develop methods that nobody else in the industry use does not help a whole lot. It always cost more to be the pioneer. I guess the worst about this for the developers is that the longer they wait.... the better a product people are going to expect.

No matter what happens it is all going to be super drama, and people are going to go nuts on various forums etc. as each go into their own respective little groups. 

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Especially the ones that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for imaginary ships... 

 

I still wish SC all the best, the more space sims out there the better, but at the same time I can't help being a bit sarky about the whole thing due to the hype that's been built around the project and how many people fell for it.

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Personally, I think the project suffers more from "wishful thinking" than from out-and-out financial fraud.  Unfortunately, the outcome could be the same either way.

 

An open universe?  Grand Theft Auto 5 had what? ten times the budget?  Couple that with the mind-blowing amount of "work" that went into it, some 1000+ man years that resulted in a open world map that's not even comparable scale-wise to what Star Citizen promises.  Back when I was making speculative "off-the-shelf" projects for Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, there were several modders attempting to bring 3d mesh work onto planets to allow more interesting points of origin and destination.  A sphere measuring some 12k miles in circumference as a 3d construct raises all kinds of issues processor wise, let alone requiring serious modeling time to even attempt.  My biggest "vessel" was a 120km tether-sling (rotovator) made up of simulated cables and reels like on fishing poles, with each section measuring 20 km.  I bet I spent over 30 hours just tweaking those meshes so the offset between beginning and end points had less than 0.01% - the problem was no CAD or other 3d software is made to deal with objects of such scale.  In other words, pioneering in this realm always is fraught with problems that no one has the experience to predict.

 

I really want Star Citizen to succeed, and I'll admit it's mostly for selfish reasons.  A Space Sim in a persistent universe?  Oh man, my fantasies from Space Opera RPG days leap to surface memory when I look at the Chris Roberts site.  The pragmatic end user I've become (I gave up C when it went turbo ++) doesn't see how it's possible without hiring 70% of the game program developers in the world today and going the route of Rockstar - full on corporate model milestone driven deadlines and all.

 

Could be I'm still cranky about being left behind - crap DSL line and too few coins in the bank to even contemplate "investing" in a sim that may or may not ever move past the alpha stage of development. 

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n0mad23 - try Elite: Dangerous, it's already released and fully playable with seamless planetary landings module coming out later this year. It's still in development (10 years project), but it's perfectly playable game already with plenty of things to do.

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I read that article yesterday and think it was a fair portrayal of the development of the game. I'm going to wait until the next module is launched before jumping in. Show me something that will get me to believe it's moving forward and I'll bite. There's just too many good games that have come out this years that I haven't touched or finished yet. I'm still only about 75% through DA:I, just started playing Life is Strange, and only have about 10 hours in Witcher 3.  :facepalm:  I can wait it out for a bit since space sims and really any MMO games aren't my cup of tea. I did see that they made a top down fixed shooter browser game for free a while back that was kinda fun though. ::P:

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Elite Dangerous looks interesting, but I think I like the "vision" of Star Citizen better.  It's more Olde Skool Space Opera taken from the  imaginary head space played with friends around the kitchen table and rendered with microprocessor tech that was still pure sci-fi a decade ago, at least in my understanding of it.  After spending some more time looking at the Elite site, I might change my mind.  The online subscription aspect isn't appealing, but I haven't spent much time online gaming either.

 

I'm going to have to admit that since my daughter gave me Skyrim at the end of 2014, I really haven't had all that much "pull" to any other video games.  I've only played around a bit with 2 others in the last 8 months.  When I've had affairs with video games over the years, they've mostly tended to be simulators.  In retrospect, I'm pretty sure this has a lot to do with the open environments and freedom to get creative around things.  Skyrim, with the ability to nudge them game into what you want it to be, and this "open world" has been a huge surprise.

 

I think what Bethseda got right in its vanilla base is the importance of compelling story telling.  I'm hoping that those deeply involved with the development of Star Citizen bring that element in to the foundation of that universe should it ever hit Beta.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I got an invite to the early alpha social module but since I'm not a pledge I got locked out once my Gamescom time ran out. I'm thinking about it but not sure if I want to plunk money down until more is available - at least the fps portion.

 

Video is cool and I agree if they do all they say they will and optimize it I will play the crap out of this.

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Considering that the game most likely wont be released before the coming of the next (or next again) generation of GFX cards and CPU´s performance is probably not going to be an issue! :) 

 

Does look fancy, love the attention to detail. Only very few minor issues that I could spot off hand, but pffttt at nitpicking issues! 

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