Star Citizen Thread v6

[Neo-ST]

Didnt SC have that city-race thing?

It did (does?). CR thought it was gonna put Star Wars' pod racing to shame.

EDIT:
My God, what if he tries to do exactly that? He already has 2 "pods" in-game.
It wouldn't surprise me considering he already ripped off Dune and other IPs.

 

[AkenBosch]

For instance, how about making a space racing game. Where you can map a racing track around stars, stations, asteroid belts, planets, etc, with flags/beacons, starting/ending spots, and more. This could be even added to ED in some smart ways. A person can be the organizer, setting up the track, add some extra features to the ships to help navigating the beacons, and so on.

More or less you have just described how actually a Buckyball race (or Elite Racers', for all that matter) is set up. ED didn't provide any official means or tools to organize such events, but enough means to find a smart way nonetheless.

http://www.buckyballracing.org.uk/

 

[shadragon]

you're probably looking at multiple lawsuits in multiple countries

Any money left over after a collapse will just make the lawyers rich.

They said they could do the project for $500K on Kickstarter. They got 2.1 million and went on to crowdfund an additional 158+ million more. They also took out bank loans and received government tax credits, in multiple jurisdictions, for millions. They're still collecting money.

They promised regular financial reporting to backers. Funders got none.

They promised Open Development. Funders got none.

They promised accountability, then modified the ToS (multiple times) to remove it.

They promised mod-able multiplayer (hosted by the players.) Funders got none.

They promised a hundred star systems. Funders got one.

They promised financial responsibility. Then bought $20,000 space doors for their office and a $20,000 coffee machine.

They promised stretch goals. Then deleted the page they hosted for them.

They promised delivery dates. Then missed every single one by months, if not years.

They promised the BDSSE. Funders got ~15% of a partially playable pre-alpha demo.

This is what they promised. You decide what they actually delivered.

 

[Neo-ST]

Any money left over after a collapse will just make the lawyers rich.

They said they could do the project for $500K on Kickstarter. They got 2.1 million and went on to crowdfund an additional 158+ million more. They also took out bank loans and received government tax credits, in multiple jurisdictions, for millions. They're still collecting money.

They promised regular financial reporting to backers. Funders got none.

They promised Open Development. Funders got none.

They promised accountability, then modified the ToS (multiple times) to remove it.

They promised mod-able multiplayer (hosted by the players.) Funders got none.

They promised a hundred star systems. Funders got one.

They promised financial responsibility. Then bought $20,000 space doors for their office and a $20,000 coffee machine.

They promised stretch goals. Then deleted the page they hosted for them.

They promised delivery dates. Then missed every single one by months, if not years.

They promised the BDSSE. Funders got ~15% of a partially playable pre-alpha demo.

This is what they promised. You decide what they actually delivered.

 

[Tippis]

They promised financial responsibility. Then bought $20,000 space doors for their office and a $20,000 coffee machine.

Yeah, but look at the bright side, they also bought hideously nonfunctional fancy furniture for people to use as working desks rather than proper computer desks that would have cost them ¹/₁₀ as much and that would also been kind on and ergonomic for the workforce.

e: Correction: fake nonfunctional fancy furniture.

 

[PiLhEaD]

They promised... and promised... and promised... ...This is what they promised. You decide what they actually delivered.

Well said.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

This is what they promised. You decide what they actually delivered.

Ah, yes. Coop SQ42. The game fully funded at 6 million (BOTH games!). A huge universe.... i don't call 100 systems huge, but maybe ED has spoiled me. Oh, and modding, and private servers.

I'm very curious when some of those things will arrive. Most curious where SQ42 has got to as well. The backers never voted for the scope of that to be massively expanded.

 

[Tippis]

Ah, yes. Coop SQ42. The game fully funded at 6 million (BOTH games!). A huge universe.... i don't call 100 systems huge, but maybe ED has spoiled me. Oh, and modding, and private servers.

It's not quite twice as many as Freelancer, so that's pretty huge, right? Right? [noob]

So what if there were 200+ in X³:TC — that game is disqualified for reasons.

 

[AkenBosch]

So what if there were 200+ in X³:TC — that game is disqualified for reasons.

Actually there were around 230 sectors in that game if I recall correctly, but it's been some years...

@shadragon - your recap of the SC history so far was as succinct as it was sad. :|

 

[lysan]

No way I need my Pew Pew!!!

Back to CQC with you..

Listen to elevator music....in the lobby....waiting...to pew pew

 

[Mengy]

There are plenty of pew-pew games. I wish there were more of clever non-pew-pew games though, for people like me.

Kerbal Space Program and Astroneer are two good examples of space games without pew pew, and it's part of why I love playing them both. I do agree though, I wish there were more non-combat space games, more creativity with the space games being designed today.

Devs and we, space game fans, can always strive to get something better, but essentially there's nothing to compare against for ED at this point.

This is pretty much true. I'm very critical of how Frontier has developed Elite Dangerous but honestly there just isn't anything out there today to compare it to, no direct competition. Star Citizen is vapor ware even still and who knows when it will come out, if ever at this point. NMS has actually blossomed into a good game surprisingly, but it's very basic compared to Elite Dangerous. Sure NMS does some things better, but overall Elite is just the much better package. Evochron Mercenary is an okay game but it doesn't have anywhere near the polish nor flair that Elite has (although again it does do some things better). X3 might be Elite's closest actual competition, but it's just not as good.

I'll take how Frontier is developing Elite over how CIG is doing Star Citizen any day of the week, and I say that as someone who really doesn't like the path that Frontier has developed Elite on!!!

 

[Han Zulu]

Maybe there's some kind of theme ↔ aesthetic ↔ gameplay interdependence at play here. While I think it's hard to fully separate space from, say, pew-pew or exploration — that's been a winning combo since the 1800:s — maybe there are some game types that simply don't do well in that environment, whereas others do, and until that has been explored by “someone else, definitely not our company”, game companies will keep going for the combinations they know work.

Maybe, but I since I've seen shows with episodes without a single shot being fired, and happening in sci-fi/space story, and being really good, I believe it's possible. There's just not many companies that dare try to find a new niche.

For instance, Call of Cthulhu is a popular property and it has been adapted in all kinds of forms and mediums. As far as games go, though, the really good CoC games only exist in the…

…drumroll…

…hidden object game genre, of all things. :S
No idea why. They just work there, and are pretty universally horrible everywhere else. Maybe it's that fundamental motif of helplessness and hopelessness in the source material that doesn't transfer well to the regular power-fantasy genres, whereas the methodical puzzling interspersed with some frantic timed puzzles really fit with what's going on in the books.

So what are the limitations of space as a narrative backdrop, and why haven't the boundaries been pushed? Or, more worryingly, since SC is continents away from any kind of boundary worth pushing and is on the brink of failure even within the very safe realm of what everyone is always doing in space, will anyone ever dare experiment any further?

There are actually games that are finally pushing the genre, Detached as an example. Nothing to shoot there, as far as I got in the game at least. It's a space-puzzle on a high VR level. So I still believe the limits can be pushed.

Didnt SC have that city-race thing?

Yup. In a demo video, but nothing has come out of it. I thought it looked amazing, and I want to play that, but it will never be done because space-pew-pew with pirates will come first, and second, and third, and ...

 

[Han Zulu]

Kerbal Space Program and Astroneer are two good examples of space games without pew pew, and it's part of why I love playing them both. I do agree though, I wish there were more non-combat space games, more creativity with the space games being designed today.

Exactly. Those are examples that stepped out of the template. More could be done in the space genre.

 

[Han Zulu]

More or less you have just described how actually a Buckyball race (or Elite Racers', for all that matter) is set up. ED didn't provide any official means or tools to organize such events, but enough means to find a smart way nonetheless.

http://www.buckyballracing.org.uk/

What I'm talking about is to provide more tools for it.

How do you flag the route and turning points in the Buckyball? Are there tools to provide for it? Is there a rewards system built into the game? Are you paid in credits for winning? How is a "win" decided by the system?

I was part of an attempt to a SLF race few weeks ago, and the things that were difficult to do were:
1. Where is the starting point
2. How do you fire the starting "gun"
3. What's the path
4. How do you prevent/penalize when someone goes outside the path and how is it checked?
5. Turning point, how to do it instead of having someone sitting there with a ship
6. Arriving at the goal, how is it decided and handled (I haven't seen anything built-in for it)
7. rewards
8. and more

All those things are players doing it manually, and the attempt we did... failed.

I know it can be done better. And this is just the beginning of the thoughts I have on the subject.

(Just imagine Star Gate 1, the Space Race episode, but in a game)

 

[Backer42]

Maybe game designers need to think out of the box? there is a reason why movies and TV shows like Star Trek was so popular, not a whole lot of pew pew going on in them.

Even the excellent 1990s Star Trek point&click adventure games by Interplay had horrible and completely unnecessary space pew pew in them. As if some suit in a board meeting opened a checklist and asked the developers: "You can shoot space ships like in Wing Commander, right?"

But the current issue is more about online PvP and huge universes: Old school people like Chris Roberts dream of massive multiplayer online battles, which are simply impossible with the current technology. Eve's time dilatation or Elite's immersion-breaking P2P match-making is all you get and the cloud isn't going to fix that. And of course, billions of planets/stars like in NMS as slight variations of a boring formula instead of the beautiful handcrafted planets of the previews.

Instead of making the space games which are already possible with gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage space, Chris Roberts dreams about the impossible just like 1998 with Freelancer. Yes, we might have massive online real-time multi-crew capital ship space battles in ten to twenty years with gigabit fiber at every home and quantum computer server grids able to handle the whole thing. But we are not there yet. We cannot store a hundreds of stars 3D galaxy on a computer yet, so we have to use the same workarounds we used in 1984 to get something on a single floppy.

But there a things possible now which weren't back in 1997. Modern era flight simulators come with a complete low-resolution terrain map of our planet and all existing airports with all runways in just 100 GB. That was impossible 20 years ago. But these developers made at least these products instead of dreaming of copying the whole planet with all cities, buildings and vegetation into a simulator, because that is still impossible.

But it seem that sci-fi space games always attract these types wanting to make games for sci-fi computers, so we get none.

 

[Han Zulu]

Back to CQC with you..

Listen to elevator music....in the lobby....waiting...to pew pew

Isn't that interesting? Many players demand space-pew-pew and get it in CQC... but it's not popular at all. How come? Conflicting interests? Players think they want pew-pew but in reality that's just a minor part of what they want?

I play PvP a few times. Even pew-pew with NPCs. It's fun. But it's not what I want to do hours on end every day. I tried, because I wanted to rank up my combat, but after a few days, I wanted to do something else.

Anyway. I'm leaving that side-tracked topic now.

 

[Kerrash]

...Players think they want ...

Same can be said of many aspects. I think the truth is closer to players not being able to adequately describe what they want.
And the worse you can do with that is try to appease everyone.
That's how you end up with major scope creep

 

[Han Zulu]

Same can be said of many aspects. I think the truth is closer to players not being able to adequately describe what they want.
And the worse you can do with that is try to appease everyone.
That's how you end up with major scope creep

Agree.

I think SC is failing not only because of scope creep but also because it's trying to be another space game doing what all other space games do but just "better". There are plenty of space games, shooter games, FPS, PvP, pirates, and on and on, but they had the chance of doing something new and different. And failed because they just want to make a better copy of what already exists.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Same can be said of many aspects. I think the truth is closer to players not being able to adequately describe what they want.
And the worse you can do with that is try to appease everyone.
That's how you end up with major scope creep

You literally throw anything to wall to see what sticks. That's how those huge SC pledge goals were created.

As for shooting I just had very interesting discussion with friend this evening. We discussed how all games, especially massive online games, despite any good intentions ends up being shooting or hitting other entities with magic spear.

Like it or not, that's what hits with most of *active* game playing audience. Of course, there are people who will like other aspects of your game, but most of them will instantly connect with pew pew and everything else will be boring to them. Also this is most easiest way to balance and measure skill or success in game. Anything else is very, very hard to measure as success.

Major issue is that these big games, graphically and concept wise, take lot of time and money to develop. Thus those who actually pay will call the shots. Lucky is that developer who finds a way to add more than pew pew in a game and gets away with it.

Also biggest paradox and crux is that some people - quite a lot people actually - want sandbox space game with very vague gameplay rules. And some people want proper MMO with balanced stuff. Chris promised to both sides.

 

[Mole HD]

Agree.

I think SC is failing not only because of scope creep but also because it's trying to be another space game doing what all other space games do but just "better". There are plenty of space games, shooter games, FPS, PvP, pirates, and on and on, but they had the chance of doing something new and different. And failed because they just want to make a better copy of what already exists.

In Star Citizen, Chris Roberts is simply trying to remake Freelancer the way he originally envisioned his masterpiece before the big bad Microsoft stole that chance away from him...Sqn 42 is merely a rerun of Wing Commander...both the failed movie (he now directs in Sqn 42 cutscenes with proper Hollywood actors) and the successful game that brought him to notice in the first place.

I have a feeling he's not really trying to make a game for other people to just go and mess up the dream by actually playing it (them), he's just trying desperately now to prove a point to himself.