Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

HansAcker

HansAcker
Agony_Aunt said:
!RemindMe 6 months
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At first glance, it doesn't look bad if you ignore the quality of those changes:

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VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Agony_Aunt said:
You'd think someone who works at the JPG factory in a senior position could afford a better car.
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Guessing that's a project. (His other car is an 890 etc...)

Still that explains why JC has looked particularly rough in recent vids I guess. Glad the geez is alright.

(Although honestly the whole ship team looked particularly wiped out in the run up to the Invictus ship reveals. Crewe's illness may be totally unrelated, but you've gotta wonder whether a crunch cycle has battered them a bit.)
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
HansAcker said:
At first glance, it doesn't look bad if you ignore the quality of those changes:

View attachment 394845
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Those green ticks look primarily like a ton of refactors for things reworked already multiple times and/or just visuals/UI related stuff. And most of it is still either broken or already confirmed as needing more “refactor”…

And it is already June. “A watershed year for SC”.
 

cigwatch

cigwatch
VR Golgot said:
Guessing that's a project. (His other car is an 890 etc...)

Still that explains why JC has looked particularly rough in recent vids I guess. Glad the geez is alright.

(Although honestly the whole ship team looked particularly wiped out in the run up to the Invictus ship reveals. Crewe's illness may be totally unrelated, but you've gotta wonder whether a crunch cycle has battered them a bit.)
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I mean, crunch and burnout will make you physically sick. Get less sleep, pile on some stress and the immune system is going to have a much harder time. Suddenly that morning run can end up with a viral infection that your body has no juice to fight and you end up looking like a ghoul, because you still crunch.
 

Phlegm

P
Ever wonder if this game would have actually been a finished release if they hadn't made the bonheaded decision to build a spaceflight sim in a third-rate first-person shooter engine that barely works for its intended purpose?
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
Phlegm said:
Ever wonder if this game would have actually been a finished release if they hadn't made the bonheaded decision to build a spaceflight sim in a third-rate first-person shooter engine that barely works for its intended purpose?
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I'm sure Chris would happily restart in MS Flight's engine ;)

* AhMMM, soo, there it is. We did! We created Earth! *

* The one hundred solar systems will be, just a little bit later. In the weeks and months to come... *
 

Cosmo

Cosmo
Phlegm said:
Ever wonder if this game would have actually been a finished release if they hadn't made the bonheaded decision to build a spaceflight sim in a third-rate first-person shooter engine that barely works for its intended purpose?
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If Chris Roberts sticked to making Squadron 42 (Wing Commander style game) it would've been finished years ago. Maybe they'd release a trilogy by now. CIG's biggest mistakes are:
  1. Choosing an unsuitable engine that is difficult to learn and modify, and has bad networking features
  2. make an MMO on top of the single player SQ42
  3. Pile on milestone after milestone to raise more funds.
  4. Sell concept versions of unfinished ships often without specific features that were promised
  5. Take money from the Calders and other big investors
  6. Put Chris Roberts in a manager / CEO position where he repeatedly changes features, because he sees something cooler in other games
  7. A bunch of disconnected development teams working on different stuff that doesn't fit together
 
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cigwatch

cigwatch
Cosmo said:
If Chris Roberts sticked to making Squadron 42 (Wing Commander style game) it would've been finished years ago. Maybe they'd release a trilogy by now. CIG's biggest mistakes are:
  1. Choosing an unsuitable engine that is difficult to learn and modify, and has bad networking features
  2. make an MMO on top of the single player SQ42
  3. Pile on milestone after milestone to raise more funds.
  4. Sell concept versions of unfinished ships often times without specific features that were promised
  5. Take money from the Calders and other big investors
  6. Put Chris Roberts in a manager / CEO position where he repeatedly changes features, because he sees something cooler in other games
  7. A bunch if disconnected development teams working on different stuff that doesn't fit together
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I don't think these were mistakes. Why release something and let it fizzle out if you can not release anything remotely finished and live opulently for almost fifteen years.
 

VR Golgot

VR Golgot
'ED refugees' make great SC veterans :)

Welcome! I also came from ED a couple years ago. Currently what game is better is very subjective, but I switched because walking throughout the ship, having physical cargo, etc just feels way cooler and immersion, and the pvp potential is way higher, particularly with organized events.

The biggest drawback is the servers are hugely strained, causing all kinds of server lag, teleporting NPCs/players, etc. This is usually more noticeable on the ground due to you being able to perceive smaller changes in location easier than ship fighting when you are 500m from your target, but still can be annoying fighting ships at times too (I find pvp to usually work a little better than vs npcs in that respect but not always).

With that in mind:

On foot gameplay is immersive, esp being inside huge ships. Enemy NPCs now act intelligently and have different traits/personalities (aggressive in combat vs falling back, etc) and can work together. However server issues make it hard to tell sometimes. Enemies only spawn in select areas or for specific missions. You won't wander the wilderness finding random bad-guys (though now you may find creatures that could attack you). I currently like pve fps stuff in Elite better because it's smoother and I like the stealth mechanics+jetpack.

Cities are largely empty shells. However every main city has a spaceport (you can walk around the terminals), some sort of transit system like a subway/metro, a large area with shops, habitation/hotel, hospital, and sights to see. Sometimes they have even more. The gas planet has floating platforms with buildings that you can explore on-foot and often spawn bad-guys with missions. Supposedly they are, or at least were, expanding one of the cities to have larger fps areas with underground tunnels and missions available. Not sure if they is still being worked or not.

Different materials/ commodities you find CURRENTLY just sell for different amounts of money. Ship upgrades are simply buying components you want and Swapping them in for the older ones. Not nearly as indepth as elite, though to compensate there are 4x the number of ships/vehicles as are in Elite, and growing. In the future, you will need to find/trade for materials to craft stuff (base building, ship building, etc)

There is smuggling in SC but it's not exciting. You rarely every get scanned. I wish this worked more like Elite where you get scanned before entering a spaceport instead of randomly, and on very rare occasion, police already out of no where to scan you. When that happens you need to remain still or you get fined. Some ships have "shielded" cargo bays where scanning can't detect what's in them, though not sure of that feature works or not yet. But there are valuable drugs to find, smuggle, and sell for profit. The other thing is you can't sell illegal goods at most places - only some select places that aren't protected by an "armistice zone" (area where players cannot pvp).
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Best suggestion I can give is to just watch a stream. You can see what the actual gameplay is like in real time, and a lot of streamers for SC in particular are very happy to answer questions about the game. It will give you a realistic idea of not only the gameplay, but of the completeness (or lack thereof) and the frequency of bugs - both of these should be well understood before you decide to buy in.

To answer a few specific questions:

Re: FPS Gameplay - when you aren't getting killed or teleported into the middle of nowhere, the first person gameplay is quite good. It is already more fully featured than ED Odyssey ever was. That said, there are a lot of bugs and incomplete systems still. But, for example, you can grab a gun and shoot at NPCs (with horrendous AI currently) for a handful of credits, you can use a personal tractor beam to load cargo boxes you "found" in another ship into yours, etc.

Re: Cities - the cities each have a spaceport you can land at, as well as shopping areas where you can buy necessities like water, personal equipment like armor, ship weapons, etc. Most of the city areas are "not useful" but you will be surprised at how much you can actually traverse. There are also smaller outposts, which some gameplay loops like illicit trading center around. And yes, there's a "outlaw" port called Grim Hex.

Re: Materials - at present, the commodities you can gather are basically just sold for credits, which you can then use to purchase ship equipment or new ships, along with covering expenses like repairing and refueling. Long term, there are vague ideas of crafting, but these systems have not really been fleshed out at all (yes, even after 12 years).

Re: Smuggling - currently it is the same as ED, but with fewer features. You can buy "illegal" goods in certain places and sell them in others, and it is profitable, but the quantities available are low. The true smuggling gameplay loop doesn't really exist yet, and is one of the many systems that are sort of in a placeholder status at best. Eventually, the plan is to expand this and there are ships with dedicated smuggler holds, but again that is still essentially vaporware.

In the end, the common thread to understand and take away is that none of the game's systems are complete, and most aren't implemented at all yet. SC is very much a work in progress, and many would call it more of a glorified tech demo than a game. But if you are the type who can set your own goals and make your own fun, there is stuff to do and you can have fun with it (setting aside the utterly gamebreaking bugs).
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