When NPC AI doesnt work its up to the players to take on their jobs to keep the world running. That involves hand-loading your ship as well as cleaning up places. Its about * NPC loyalty* or something ^^
As always I have the feeling that SC pro-fans only consider the good stuff while disregarding the blatantly obvious bad stuff while most people here can take it ALL in which results in skepticism or criticism.
Group dynamics in video games isnt something new. Star Citizen isnt going to reinvent or enhance groupplay (based on its current state). Star Citizen intends to make use of a well established and well known feature that other games breathe and live.
Multiplayer.
Its a simple word for a very complex thing. Because Multiplayer is divided in several layers. At the most basic level all you do is put players into the same box allowing them to interact with each other.
Star Citizen has this at the most rudimentary level. The basic iteration is apparent at the obvious lack of proper implementation resulting in desynch, lag, positioning issues and all kinds of character-related glitches and bugs. You can go into detail and assign each of these things to different areas (netcode, 32 vs 64bit etc) but the harsh reality and its indeed an ugly truth is that all these things are just insufficiently implemeted or refined in order to allow consistent or high-quality multiplayer interaction. At the state Star Citizen is in after 10 years of development its hard to believe CIG ever had a master or design plan they were following in any way. You would assume that "Single or multiplayer" is your VERY FIRST major decision and everything afterwards is dependent on that first decisions requirements. If you want people to play together your netcode needs to be good enough. The netcode capacity will determine how much features and detail you can put into the environment. The more I think about this the more I come to the conclusion that Star Citizens developers are a bunch of chumps or maybe just the boss is.
Star Citizens lack of multiplayer architecture is a gigantic red flag for a multiplayer game this deep in and all the "early days" mantras wont change the fact that all these years have passed and all those millions are gone for what exactly? A tier zero skeleton where
players have to find their own fun?
As mentioned this is just basic stuff. After 10 years CiG is at the point other companies are after their first 3 months. First you bring players together and get your code up to snuff in order to allow said players to interact together in a variety of ways. Collision detection, interaction, exchange, persistence..theres a whole list of things you can do depending on how detailed or extensive you want your multiplayer options to be. What do I NEED, what do I WANT (not the same thing)....what do I DROP in order to achieve the best middle result?
Most games dont use user-facial-simulation because its not needed for gameplay and just a bore on performance or a side options hardly anybody will use or is interested in to begin with. Star Citizen does it so you would be justfied to assume that feature is important for the game itself. Only its not and it seems that user facial expressions are at best a visual tertiary feature, thrown in for what reason exactly? Fidelity? Star Citizen has no problem to use triggered animations, has horrid hitboxes or collision detection and its character code results in all kinds of funny moments.....
where is the priority on fidelity in all this? Or does Fidelity mean something different in Star Citizen?
"Multiplayer Sandbox" is a well known genre today but it doesnt mean its a
literal sandbox.aka an empty box where you put players in to do whatever. But thats what Star Citizen is right now. You have missions and you have mining but to be frank its implementation appears to be an afterthought or again, these things were worked in without any kind of design or masterplan considering how badly they interact with each other.
How good a multiplayer game is depends in no small way on the content you provide and also the group functionaliy you implement. Easy to use UI or group features that allow people to get together quickly/efficiently. Apart from simply grouping up this would also mean trading, informtaion exchange, even ingame third-party support. Hell I m sure I could fill PAGES with ideas for MP functionality all included into an easy-to-use UI that implements fluidly into the game world I created.
IF I HAD ANY KIND OF PLAN TO BEGIN WITH.....
After 10 years of development all these things are either tier zero or theoretical.
So after a decade CiG is struggling with the very core of multiplayer functionality. Again, this is simply the very first layer. I dare to say that Star Citizen might look pretty but this
premature focus on visual quality has delayed and sabotaged overal game development to a degree that only begins to explain the clusterfarce we can see. When you are more concerned with all pixels having the right color or that your assets have the highest polygon-count possible you tend to neglect the boring yet critical stuff (CIG claimed it didnt but what they say doesnt really mean anything when we have evidence what happened). And so we have an insufficient netcode and persistence that sometimes works....and sometimes not. How blind or stubborn do the people telling CIG "you do your thing Chris, you da man" have to be to not see this? Blind fanboys are great for your ego but only criticism will allow you to improve.
So far this has all been about the technical foundation and we dont even have to go any further. I mean a professor or teacher would simply
refuse to continue disregarding the folders or other stuff you might have. "Get the base in order, then we proceed" is what he would tell you. In CiGs case there is no teacher or professor or anybody who would have the power to tell them what to do. CiGs CEO is a 5 year old high on sugar running after every shiny thing or blip in his visual field and his 500+ employees run after him. Chris doesnt understand whats happening, he doesnt seem to understand his duties or obligations and he gets easily bored.
Multiplayer content.
Various games handle this in various ways. Some offer predetermined content that is implemented beforehand waiting for its number to come up. This requires a development vision that pre-defines how players are going to play the game. The more freedom you allow your players the more "open-world" it becomes. Other games bid on procedural content generation where the game produces the content on the players interaction or preferences. I m thinking Anarchy Online for this where mission running was a big thing and the player controlled all kinds of aspects for the missions he would face. While the advantage is obvious the disadvantage is the rather
shallow application that it produces. Other games again have an open-minded approach where they just toss the player into a room with lots of toys and watch what happens. EVE online admitted that the game today looks drastically different to what the creatores originally envisioned or rather, they never thought that player-driven-narrative would express itself so much. Starbase is trying to up the playing field here. Thisapproach doesnt mean its easier or means less work involved tho. Starbase especially demonstrates a solid and massive foundation on which visual asthetic is tacked on and due to its robust and well defined nature
IT ACTUALLY WORKS RELIABLY....EVEN IN ALPHA! Thats why "its alpha" statements usually only point how how clueless you really are when you use it as a blanket excuse for every problem Star Citizen have.
All of this, which is the major focus of development is just PREPERATION when it comes to player engagement. Lots of games make a good first impression but become boring quickly either due to design or because of unforseen ramifcations. If its the latter its a catastrophe for the company. You dont want to dump millions of dollars and years of development time into a game that people stop playing after a week (Wolcen had and still has that problem). The reasons are manyfold. Not enopugh content, too buggy you name it. Lots of games might ve been STARS in the sky if they had more time available for refinement, polishing, bugfixing (Mass effect Andromeda, NMS and to a lesser degree Fallout76) but are living in eternal second place because they misjudged the timing tho NMS seems to have come out of it which is exceptional in itself. And it does because NMS's only mistake was
to release too early whereas games like Fallout76 and Anthem LIED from the get go promising stuff that never existed in the first place. I wonder which kind of game Star Citizen is in this.....
Many Multiplayer game companies have actual SCIENTISTS on their team in order to judge, assess and advise game development for successfull player engagement. World of Warcraft really is the main provider here even tho they werent the first. Their decade long pole position and size simply forced them to pour more and more money into player analzysis to secure that position. What makes people interested, bored, what makes them stick around etc etc. The scientific side of this is already massive and the things you can actually transport into your development (especially after release) are even bigger challenges but
multiplayer dynamic is what drives and shapes a multiplayer game...not its looks.
When I look at Star Citiozen its multiplayer capabilities seem to be
random resuilts at best, not intended and designed efforts. Mining worked out but its just so-so and looks good because the rest of the options you have are so bland, underdeveloped or outright bad. I know some people say it "holds its own" but its at best a twist on something many other games do. Does Star Citizen mining have anything at all that other games could copy in order to benefit from? If your answer is "space legs" then you need to understand that you really meant to say "nothing"
After a page I finally come to the topic that made me write this post to begin with ^^
EVE and World of Warcraft raiding shows that there is indeed a large group of players who are perfectly content and happy to play second role. Everybody wants to be the leader but hardly anybody has the mettle or talent for it and so most players look on the few actual leaders with envy thinking "i can do just as good" but living in a reality that tells them flat out "NO - you dont". So much for the group of players who would be happy to crew a capital ship. But again, this is just a superficial look that never breaks the surface....apparently a cornerstone of Star Citizens development. I tried to lead raids and I learned quickly that I dotn have the stomach for all the drama and the backstabbing that happens in the background. While most people only see the fame and glory leadership also involves a lot of tedious and downright sucky stuff that nobody likes to do. If you dont like to circle the honey or dont like to talk, argue or reason with people than leadership isnt for you. Its a truth you might net see or like but I think thats also a reailty. I was far better at following and support because even tho most people dont realize it....how good of a tool you are depends mostly on YOUSELF....not the leader. He only taps into the pool or potential YOU provide and he can fail to utilize you in a good way, which means he sucks at leading not that you are bad at what you do. We could take this to real world topis easily because I think its so interesting and also important but.....yeah
EVE and WoW raids "peasents" are happy to follow leadership and play second role because they have their task or role are expected to perform and they know what they do is important, critical even making them part of the success. This goes both ways. The leader expects performance, the one following expects some kind of return value. Shared loot, challenging content that forces you into groups...theres a list of factors that drive player engagement and interaction and its almost always reward-oriented. Than you have your tiny niche community which goes to extreme efforts for nothing tangible in return.....every games
roleplaying community. Often belittled but most of the time simply ignored. These players are capable but simply have such a different taste or preference that most of the playerbase "doesnt get it". More importingly, most companies dont waste a second thought on these communities when they create the game. They have their place and most roleplaying communities
overcome game restrictions to entertain their preferences, not because the developers wanted them to do what they do. The best these folks can hope for is that the devs are open minded enough to even allow them to roleplay without much difficulty.
This seems to be the dominant theme when talking about multicrew mechanics in Star Citizen.
The roleplaying appeal! Yes, there certainly will be people who want to be space janitors or are fine with sitting around for 7 hours before their responsebility comes up but when even the developers state that this is the driving force of SCs multiplayer engagement or the focus of its development and its used to explain SCs questionable design decisions you are not a hater or pessimist when you say or think "wut...?" or "is this a joke?". Like Diablo 4s announcement meme "is this an an aprils joke?" either the developer is so out of synch with what hes doing and what players want or he just takes the mickey. For Blizzard it was a harsh wake-up call and one they still recover from. In Star Citizen this feels like a weak justification attempt because youknow SOME of your players do and like this.
High quality doesnt automatically translate into high ratings when it comes to video games. World of Warcraft has been
dumped down for years on end and most "pros" or veterans will tell you that it was done for the worse.
It doesnt matter tho if your game continues to grow, keep its players and florishes. I didnt believe it living through it but WoWs success proves me wrong or the minority in this argument. Blizzard obviously did know better then I did. Even tho WoWs "dumping down" process has come with significant advantages in regards to quality of life improvement so most critics will probably swallow the bitter pill because the whole package is still good.
If your game alienates or confuses most players before its release as Star Citizen does (so many people who never played it to begin with already have a strong opinion about it) it doesnt help you with the BDSSE title and again, the "claim" of BDSSE doesnt really matter if only a tiny fringe group of space nerds say it while the majority of players says "okay boomer whatever" as it happens with many 20 year old games. The company has failed then...simple as that. As a company
you dont want this, it might still happen but you certainly dont intend for it to happen or plan it or spend 10 years and 400 million dollars for that result. And the worst thing is that even the rare fringe group of players who would allow for those scenarios to become a success are theory at this point. Or did anybody crew an Idirss so far? Has Star Citizen AT LEAST provided the proof of concept for those scenarios to actually work?
No need to answer. CIG isnt that far along. They cant even provide evidence (proof of concept) that they can even possibly do what they claim they want to do. There are no capital ships in the game and the game itself doesnt allow for the required crews to play it to begin with.
We all know the "its early days" mantra but only taking such a glimpse enables you to realize how pre-historically "early" we are talking here.
Its eye-opening too. For one it explains neatly why Chrs Roberts was unable to secure any kind of publisher for funding. Not because he didnt want it but because he couldnt. The question is only if
he even tried or if he knew exactly he "got nothing" and so went straight for the least demanding or proficient source.....the gamers. Next on the list is what we know....he DID actually approach the clueless people. While a lot of folks have backgrounds in various development related fields its safe to say that the vast majority of backers would only have 2 requirements (more if you want to be nasty....).....money and interest.
Chrs Roberts wanted that money so he had to spark the interest. And he obviously did but in hindsight.....how much of what he told backers in 2012 was fabricated and a lie? No need to hold back
If you are honest and familar with what happened during the years (sorry all you "I just recently joined SC" folks....you have no say in this). How much of it was at best faint hope and how much was intentional deception? How did CiG a corporate entity became the cheating spouse or the bully kid of yours that disappoints you over and over again but you still give it another chance, more time and "hope for the best"?
Is that "normal"?
I think its pretty unsurprising why terms like "sunk cost" or "cult" float around when it comes to Star Citizen. It doesnt generalize the community but it dominates and explains its development or persistance to stay around. Even before its release Star Citizen today is already obsolete. Regarding its multiplayer architexture its even insufficient and its trump card....the visual representation is barely holding up to other games coming out today. Whats left is
NOSTALGIA where people link Star Citizen to their memories or good times they had and oftentimes just like most nostalgic memories....its all a made-up illusion of yours where you fool yourself to be able to disregard or ignore the reality. When people say "everything was better in my time" its the equivalent to "I never had such a great time in any other game that I didn in Star Citizen". Its the only thing you
CAN say because you are unable (or rather the game is unable) to provide actual evidence for those times. I was killing Ragnaros in WoW when he was end content. I have no trouble describing the hardship, the appeal and the fascination as well as the feeling of achievement I felt when we finally overcome stage ONE and also later when we eventually distributed the spoils. I know full well how ugly original footage looks today and if I tell this to my nephew (6 years old) and he comes back with "this looks like crap" I ll even agree with him "you had to be there to understand" is true but also useless to him. Its just nostalgia really. Its what made me perk up the first time I can remember. Talking with somebody who was telling me of these epic gameplay sesssions he had in Star Citizen. And because what I heard sounded fantastic and completely different from what I knew I took another look myself. And I simply couldnt see any of the fun and great stuff I heard about. But that peek also showed me all kinds of ugly things or problems that that person never cared to talk about in the first place. For example some peoples superficial focus or mistake to link visual asthetic to quality...in short....suckers.
You dont need to actually buy in yourself or spend actual cash in order to have an opinion about what you see. The first thing is if the stuff you see "makes you" spend your money to begin with (and its something all scams rely on so they made it an art in itself). Many people who did buy in admit afterwards that they wouldnt do it again based on what the game actually is. And because its so widespread a comment and the core playgroup of Star Citizen is so small (in actuality) you wonder if this procedure isnt intended to begin with? Flash people with whoa moments so they make that first step and spend money. I know how marketing works but at some point you need to leave the hype behind you and talk facts. Thats the area where Star Citizen really fails. With facts. Getting facts for starters is like pulling teeth because the people who have an agenda will do everything in their power to NOT admit to any negative qualities or intentions. They feign ignorance, misunderstandings, language barriers etc...there are so many reasons which make me beliebe that the person knows full well whats happening and whats what but he doesnt want to admit the other is right. In short....a dishonest talking partner and thus a waste of time. While there are great Star Citizen related discussions to be had which even adress other things than joking, teasing or bashing the project you know you have found a Star Citizen Sheriff when said person only talks about the good things and refuses to talk about the bad or when he does is doing so in the best possible way. Its like talking to a marketing person or politician. You are unable to nail these people to anything because they masterfully move the goal posts, distract and deflect and twist meanings and oftentimes stubbornly refuse to admit anything that doesnt match their message, regardless how obvious the conclusion or evidence held up but at the same time you dont trust them even a little bit. I wonder how many people coming here fail to realize what they are doing or if they do and actually deserve the treament they receive just waiting for the moment to be able to play the victim card. A kind of forced politness and annoyed tolerance at best.
Most of the time today I see comments from people who just joined the fray and who judge the game based on its current state, disregarding the bumpy road and events that lead to today. Some people certainly are like this but shills and fanatics do it because it allows them to easily dimsiss things they have no answer to. "Oh I dont care about what happened 2016 or what was said back then...I enjoy the game NOW" but as most people will tell you....context matters (in addition for this being pretty rude and ignorant towards those folks who enabled you to play it today just saying) and if you disregard it your opinion is at best entertaining but not
qualified in all this. Coming to a threadnaught that has discussed this topic for longer then Star Citizen actually runs with a "I just have fun" really is at best a "thanks, kid, now go play" encounter. We heard it numerous times, know about it and accepted it...we simply MOVED ON from there so usually the follow-up is "why?" to assess if theres something new and intreresting to dissect? Its not an attack, its not a refusal to enjoy the game.....you came here. And you are surprsed when people react to what you throw into the room?
Disagreement is a pretty normal thing on the internet. And how its handled here actually makes me value this thread a lot more than other forums. People can be cruel and harsh and also rude but its usually the exception, not the norm.
Regarding the ups and downs, the mind-twisting deceptions and manipulations, tle laughs and salty tears and everything combined....
this thread actually holds more SC related content than Star Citizen...I say that with glee and its actually a pretty cruel thing to say....because its true. And everybody who comes here to discuss the state of the game rather than play it agrees with me....in part. And if you do it in order to defend it all the while labeling us haters and worse....you only confirm that statement.
OUCH....again moved far from the topic at hand. Do I even try to reel back? Nah, maybe in another post ^^
