Like the mission I described where I have to climb in a derelict with hostile NPC I have to shoot to get a box to deliver in a station ?
Not really. What you described are game mechanics, not
game play. Game play is how game mechanics combine to create meaningful decisions that the player has to make. What you described is a bog-standard platform puzzle, without the additional wrinkles that games like EGS bring to the table. There’s an early game mission in EGS that is very similar to what you describe, but despite being a story mission, the environment it takes place in will vary due to the procedural nature of the game. It’s taken place on an airless moon, in the frozen arctic, in irradiated wastelands, and in swamps, plains, and forests. All these bring their own hazards, plus there are weather related hazards, and hazards inherent to the crashed ship itself. Your environmental suit can be configured to handle just two of the hazards you may face. Which enhancements you choose bring, as well as how you cope with the other environmental hazards, is up to you.
Did I mention that an overly aggressive NPC faction is also interested in the crashed ship? One that can make your early game “interesting” if you anger them too much, even if you kill in self defense?
All this was done with a two person team, following an iterative “playable now” Early Access strategy, is because they got their core systems in place before they started “prettying up” their game beyond their engine’s native abilities. Game breaking bugs were quickly squished, balance issues fixed, and new game loops were fleshed out, in an iterative process that ensured their player/tester cohort remained engaged in the game long enough to find these issues in the first place. It’s a pattern I see time and time again in playable alphas and early access games.
This is a pattern I don’t see in Star Citizen. Instead I see a focus on overly detailed assets and visual enhancements at the expense of gameplay and even the underlying core of the game. I see backer money wasted on redoing assets over and over again in a vain effort to stay relevant to current generation of games, and because the underlying core of the game keeps changing.
And that’s why I’m going to wait for a free fly event, and not rebuying into this disaster, to see what this game, seven years late and counting with Squadron 42 completely mission, is like today. Chris Roberts is a wastrel who’s delivered only a tithe of the gameplay his backers have paid for, while the Roberts clan has siphoned away a second tithe,
that we know of, from backers as well.
