Star Citizen Thread v6

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Yeah, theory crafting about SC being heavily EVE like is strong one within SC community. Truth to be told - if CIG would be capable to deliver game actually, and they would really stick with 'NPCs building my ship' pitch, I would totally commend them for that. That would be balzy. It would disappoint lot of wanna be pew pewers, but I guess that would solidify player base to be more pro-sim like.

However, seriously, CIG has never confirmed such gameplay. So that's all moot anyway.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Well, listening to how goods will become available, ships being delivered, cargo being loaded slowly, etc, one starts to wonder if the main thing people will be doing in SC will be sitting around waiting for things to happen. Hmm... well, suppose you can always go sit in the bar and wait for the barman to mix you a drink

Maybe it should be called Delay Citizen... it works on so many levels!

if SC involves sitting around then it has failed. the trick is to always have stuff to do, and the pieices will all be there to make it possible, just like it could be possible in elite........ got your own megaship and it will take 20 mins to unload / load / repair & rearm (imo this should be the max time for this sort of thing) this can be ok so long as there is an ever present missionboard of courier jobs where the ship is supplied.

ie CMDR whilst you are waiting we have an urgent message we need you to deliver, we cant risk it getting out so cant use normal channels, take this ship (super fast / or very stealthy so wont be seen) and deliver to Mr Smith at these co-ordinates and bring back his response.

or cmdr we are short on pilots and we need able combateers to join a wing to carry out a security sweep of these co-ordinates (supplied). You will be flying using one of our system security ships, try not to scratch it!

by the time you have done this, your main ship will have everything done.... no down time needed.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

i really hope this is how it all pans out and imo is how it should have been in ED (indeed iirc that IS the way things were going in elite back in the day - ie in beta, but FD dumbed it down due to a few people complaining........ )

Not really Mad Mike, what FD tweaked is production volumes and distribution a bit, making it less harsh. You can still max out station from modules, you just have to try really, really hard.

As for idea itself as proven by FD it will turn off big number of potential players. People hate looking around, while making with what they have. Very few enjoy journey. FD tried to balance game best it could to carter both sides of player base here. I don't see SC surviving more than 1 year if it tries to stick with hard core sim approach. That's not what market votes for really.

Edit: also in ED NPCs sorta building your ship. Just their production volumes are so high atm that you can get your ship and outfitting needs covered with ease. I personally think sometimes too much ease, however I have heard quite a few complains about stations maxed out recently. Maybe FD is still tweaking it to find golden balance which makes game interesting and still not very taxing.

 

[hunvagy]

Well, listening to how goods will become available, ships being delivered, cargo being loaded slowly, etc, one starts to wonder if the main thing people will be doing in SC will be sitting around waiting for things to happen. Hmm... well, suppose you can always go sit in the bar and wait for the barman to mix you a drink

Maybe it should be called Delay Citizen... it works on so many levels!

Well, our nickname for STO is Loading Screens Online. SC would feel right at home in that crowd then

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I am sooo glad that the devs didn't go that route. However, for those who want that sort of game, i suppose SC might provide it, if they can pull it off.

different strokes i guess .... for the record i am totally not interested in a fully player driven economy.... imo everything should come to you in any of the games via npcs (because after all we are but a cog in the machine, the world does not revolve around us)

but the ability to grab the bull by the horns and be pro-active to get the "stuff" needed ourselves to speed things up, i think is a nice halfway house between a fully player driven economy, and the..... imo totally fake economy in ED.

As for idea itself as proven by FD it will turn off big number of potential players. People hate looking around, while making with what they have. Very few enjoy journey. FD tried to balance game best it could to carter both sides of player base here. I don't see SC surviving more than 1 year if it tries to stick with hard core sim approach. That's not what market votes for really.

I agree many dont want it..... but i think many do as well. obviously its not my job on the line so it is easy to wax lyrical about how it "should" be. IF it were my money on the table maybe i too would choose to please everyone to sell to as many as possible - sure they may not be totally happy but if its the best available for now they will probably still buy it..

but i would like to hope the niche is big enough to actually pin a peg in the sand and say "this is the game we want" and go for it.

Even now I listen to David Braben speak and.... it sounds like he plays a different game to me, talk of "Hard Science" etc etc... I want to paly that game!.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

if SC involves sitting around then it has failed. the trick is to always have stuff to do, and the pieices will all be there to make it possible, just like it could be possible in elite........ got your own megaship and it will take 20 mins to unload / load / repair & rearm (imo this should be the max time for this sort of thing) this can be ok so long as there is an ever present missionboard of courier jobs where the ship is supplied.

ie CMDR whilst you are waiting we have an urgent message we need you to deliver, we cant risk it getting out so cant use normal channels, take this ship (super fast / or very stealthy so wont be seen) and deliver to Mr Smith at these co-ordinates and bring back his response.

or cmdr we are short on pilots and we need able combateers to join a wing to carry out a security sweep of these co-ordinates (supplied). You will be flying using one of our system security ships, try not to scratch it!

by the time you have done this, your main ship will have everything done.... no down time needed.

To make such game work just amount of theoretical game design work involved is colossal. I don't see CIG being capable to do this. Also it has to be optional. If CIG could find a way to make it optional - you would gain something for arranging cargo more slowly, more space perhaps? - but balancing issues are huge.

While there might be game in future that allows hard sim crowd to have such fidelity of features - after all it is doable - not any time soon. FD is doing middle road here, and while I was fan of slow loading times approach during beta, I now understand that would be wrong thing to do without anything else to go on.

Also for both games - SC and ED - I still haven't got clear answer why I would want to leave cockpit.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I agree many dont want it..... but i think many do as well. obviously its not my job on the line so it is easy to wax lyrical about how it "should" be. IF it were my money on the table maybe i too would choose to please everyone to sell to as many as possible - sure they may not be totally happy but if its the best available for now they will probably still buy it..

but i would like to hope the niche is big enough to actually pin a peg in the sand and say "this is the game we want" and go for it.

Even now I listen to David Braben speak and.... it sounds like he plays a different game to me, talk of "Hard Science" etc etc... I want to paly that game!.

I doubt that many want it sorry Mike. I would totally support it if there would be market. Problem is people already complain about waiting times, having to dock themselves, having to fly to stations, having to look and compare prices, etc. etc. etc. That's why FD middle road approach is lamented by so many, but in some way it is only way to enjoy AAA level space sim and getting it regularly updated.

As for David, he mostly concentrates on hard science behind the game, and I actually find it fitting quite well within game. How it is very different? Hard sci-fi does not mean game is uber detailed in gameplay. It is not hard core space sim, it is very accessible space game. He is just excited that they have done game where science is used in lot of places for both gameplay and creating a setting (believable Aliens for example). It is ok not to be excited about that than him, but I doubt it makes him see ED differently than we do. It is just different angle.

In a way SC is this 'screw reality, we want our hard core space sim' gesture from it's backers. And I am still arguing that if there would be someone who can actually deliver goods on that, we would already playing SC for a year now. But not with Chris.

 

[Ian Skippy]

i really hope this is how it all pans out and imo is how it should have been in ED (indeed iirc that IS the way things were going in elite back in the day - ie in beta, but FD dumbed it down due to a few people complaining........ )

the 1 small print i would add however, imagine my massive and rare ship was destroyed and i was looking at a 3 weekish construction time imo the option should be there to allow me to earn reputation points to jump the queue.

ie if at the factory where they are built i commit to supplying the materials needed, then i should be allowed to jump the queue, that way I can be proactive about getting my ship back.

TBH it is the kind of thing i expected in elite - actual living shipyards in the game with the features of the above. Sadly for me it seems enough of the playerbase dont want stuff like that as it is considered a "grind" to stop instantly getting their ship back, and FD do not seem to have the stomach to upset them......

Its a shame really, with ED, on the surface of it, DBs kickstarter / DDF "vision" does not seem all that outlandish (just talking about the space part of the game and ignoring the latter DLCs for now), however i doubt it will ever happen now, partly due to the "new" player base not wanting it.
OTOH I suspect CRs vision of SC IS so outlandish that I fear they may have over stretched and it may (i hope not) ultimately end up being a shallow MVP when it finally launches.

between the 2 of them, I think its possible we STILL wont have the space game many were hoping for...... maybe X4 can deliver? but i find the X games a bit too fiddly for my tastes.

I disagree. It is very tempting to go with 'all I want is the flightmodel and galaxy of Game X, the economy of Game Y, the etc etc', but that exactly is unrealistic. Apart from the economic side pretty much everything blows in x-games, and it always takes them a year or longer to make a new X game somewhat playable. ED or SC is as likely to get an economy as deep as X asx4 is to get Stellar Forge. And an economy in an x-game would break apart in days or even hours if it is shared among a million players.

I would like to see the BGS further evolved, as it have since launch, and the devs claimed they want to do.so. But an economy like an x-game? Never gonna happen. And what sc claims is just silly as ysual.

 

[Darkfyre99]

That sounds like what the guy i was talking to was saying, although he didn't give quite the same level of detail.

Oh my, if that comes to pass its going to be interesting to see how it works in reality. That's a hell of a lot of balancing of stuff required, plus expected user actions, just to make sure goods get to market.

When Ultima Online tried a realistic ecosystem and economy, during its beta, the result was hundreds of players, wandering a devastated countryside, desperately trying to find something to harvest for their shops, or monsters to kill for gold. EVE online is the only MMO I know of that has gotten something like that to work well, and I personally felt that game was too much like a second full time job to be enjoyable.

I also remember the outcry during Elite Dangerous' premium beta at having to haul biowaste to produce tea in sufficient quantities, and I believe Frontier's intention was for ships and components to also be produced via natural resources, but I don't know if that was ever implemented (I seem to remember it being much harder to find stuff during PB) of was quietly dropped along with the more realistic Economic Sim.

 

[Cmdr Snuffler]

Maybe it should be called Delay Citizen... it works on so many levels!

Hahaha. Just spat my coffee out
In saying that, the ED community did vote for a delay in ship transfers in ED. The 1st proposal from FD was for instantaneous transfer.
-
I can remember during the DDF stages of ED, pre alpha, we were discussing the chat/messaging system to chat to your friends.
Some people in the DDF actually wanted real time communications...so you say "hi" to a friend and because you're so far away it takes weeks/months to arrive. They were dead set that instant messaging breaks immersion.
So it's not just SC bods that want slow realism, some ED backers wanted a similar thing. While it's realistic, physically speaking, it's not feasible to have that kind of realism in a game.
-
From an SC perspective the thought of cargo simulator just hurts my head.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

I also remember the outcry during Elite Dangerous' premium beta at having to haul biowaste to produce tea in sufficient quantities, and I believe Frontier's intention was for ships and components to also be produced via natural resources, but I don't know if that was ever implemented (I seem to remember it being much harder to find stuff during PB) of was quietly dropped along with the more realistic Economic Sim.

Ships are still produced via resources gathered by background simulation (we are just providing surplus), but they boosted production levels scaling from gathered sources so it is not so hard to find them anymore.

So in nutshell ED still have background economic sim going on in background, it is just balanced that way so it does not produce very annoying results that make players quit. Even with that stations still are sometimes maxed out with certain lucrative goods or whatever nearest faction desires to get.

Also to find tea and coffee is still very hard, as it is one of go to goods to ship around for newcomers.

 

[BurnyBurns]

by the time you have done this, your main ship will have everything done.... no down time needed.

"No downtime needed"?

And yet, what you describe is just that: Downtime from what you want to do. As in your example, flying a certain ship full of cargo. Not hopping into a fighter. Not reading the mission boards.

Not being strung along with overcomplicated, contrieved distractions for which the devs have to bend over backwards to mask downtime. If downtime is not desireable in a gaming scenario, design your game to not have or absolutley minize that downtime in the first place, instead of creating overelaborate ways to mask downtime, which may not even be fun distractions for the players. Especially not if they're poorly implemented.

"Ohhhh boy, here we go. I have to wait for the cargo loading process again. The top secret offers of small side missions in provided ships that only I can and must do discretely right now will surely start to arrive any minute."

...

*logs off*

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

"No downtime needed"?

And yet, what you describe is just that: Downtime from what you want to do. As in your example, flying a certain ship full of cargo. Not hopping into a fighter. Not reading the mission boards.

Not being strung along with overcomplicated, contrieved distractions for which the devs have to bend over backwards to mask downtime. If downtime is not desireable in a gaming scenario, design your game to not have or absolutley minize that downtime in the first place, instead of creating overelaborate ways to mask downtime, which may not even be fun distractions for the players. Especially not if they're poorly implemented.

"Ohhhh boy, here we go. I have to wait for the cargo loading process again. The top secret offers of small side missions in provided ships that only I can and must do discretely right now will surely start to arrive any minute."

...

*logs off*

obviously its all down to the developers to decide what they want in their game..... but you choosing you do not want to do something is NOT forced down time.
taken to the extreme
IF all i want to do is trade using the biggest ship in the game, then by that logic i should be given the biggest ship from the 1st log in (which is possible in star citizen if you REALLY want that).... and them forcing me to fly a smaller ship is them stopping me having my fun in a big ship no?

(imo there is no right and wrong answer btw, there are your opinions and mine which its cool to share for interests sake... ultimately the devs will do what ever they feel anyway)

whether this stuff will make it into the game is not certain... but IF it does, you cant argue CIG have not been up front about it, so you can choose to buy in or not buy in if such features annoy you too much.

indeed IF it launches as some MVP with that stuff all stripped out, arguably it is the backers (like myself) who WANT that stuff in who should feel aggrieved as we were told it WILL be in the game.
(hell i am already in that position having to decide how important VR is to me........ and is it enough to demand a refund it now looking less likely to be in the game at launch).

 

[n4p0l3on]

i really hope this is how it all pans out and imo is how it should have been in ED (indeed iirc that IS the way things were going in elite back in the day - ie in beta, but FD dumbed it down due to a few people complaining........ )

the 1 small print i would add however, imagine my massive and rare ship was destroyed and i was looking at a 3 weekish construction time imo the option should be there to allow me to earn reputation points to jump the queue.

ie if at the factory where they are built i commit to supplying the materials needed, then i should be allowed to jump the queue, that way I can be proactive about getting my ship back.

TBH it is the kind of thing i expected in elite - actual living shipyards in the game with the features of the above. Sadly for me it seems enough of the playerbase dont want stuff like that as it is considered a "grind" to stop instantly getting their ship back, and FD do not seem to have the stomach to upset them......

Its a shame really, with ED, on the surface of it, DBs kickstarter / DDF "vision" does not seem all that outlandish (just talking about the space part of the game and ignoring the latter DLCs for now), however i doubt it will ever happen now, partly due to the "new" player base not wanting it.
OTOH I suspect CRs vision of SC IS so outlandish that I fear they may have over stretched and it may (i hope not) ultimately end up being a shallow MVP when it finally launches.

between the 2 of them, I think its possible we STILL wont have the space game many were hoping for...... maybe X4 can deliver? but i find the X games a bit too fiddly for my tastes.

Such complexity is impossible for mmo with current tech (esp networking)

 

[AkenBosch]

I disagree. It is very tempting to go with 'all I want is the flightmodel and galaxy of Game X, the economy of Game Y, the etc etc', but that exactly is unrealistic. Apart from the economic side pretty much everything blows in x-games, and it always takes them a year or longer to make a new X game somewhat playable. ED or SC is as likely to get an economy as deep as X asx4 is to get Stellar Forge. And an economy in an x-game would break apart in days or even hours if it is shared among a million players.

I would like to see the BGS further evolved, as it have since launch, and the devs claimed they want to do.so. But an economy like an x-game? Never gonna happen. And what sc claims is just silly as ysual.

I was starting to wonder why there was all this discussion going about realistic economy and production chains with yet not a single mention of any of the X games that have these as their main feature. Having this kind of deeply simulated economy is a great thing on paper, until you find yourself with your newly bought super destroyer and discover that no one in the entire universe has in stock the six 2 GJ shields required to defend its hull, and the only two station you found that had Photon Pulse Cannons available could only provide three of them out of the 12 you wanted, because one station is out of quantum tubes for production and meat and wheat for feeding the workers, while the other has run out of microchips. Then you'll have to wait for NPCs' to restock them on their own (could take real time months or not happen at all) or provide them yourself. Or even better, leave the bare-hull destroyer where it is and go set up an entire production chain of your own. Works wonders with the type of single player economy-based gameplay that the X games are aimed at, but I wouldn't wish to inflict that struggle on anyone in a MMO setting. Let alone expecting it to work, in a MMO setting.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Such complexity is impossible for mmo with current tech (esp networking)

are you talking ED or SC at this point? SC, well I cant say if it is possible or not, CIG are currently promising a lot of features many are claiming are, if not impossible, are extremely unlikley given the time and budget... time will tell.

as for ED.... My fall back to that is DB has always said all along that whilst ED may tick the boxes to technically be an MMO, he doesn’t see it as an MMO really and ED is not expected to have a lot of the features in there expected in your bread and butter mmo. .

One of the things I’ve done today is to put a load more stuff on the FAQ explaining how it’s different and how, in some ways, it’s an MMO, because we expect a massive number of players to play it. But in most ways that people will judge it, Elite: Dangerous is not an MMO.

http://archive.beefjack.com/features/david-braben-elite-dangerous-interview/2/index.html

, but I wouldn't wish to inflict that struggle on anyone in a MMO setting. Let alone expecting it to work, in a MMO setting.

Hi

all good points, but imo there is another way, a half way house of getting the stuff you need over time via the npcs working the BGS - which can be fudged somewhat - or giveing us the option as a series of fetch quest missions to bring the needed materials ourselves. (which we get paid for AND get our gear faster). Tho it would seem i am in a minority for actually thinking that kind of stuff where we are given purpose is enjoyable. Some just want to space truck all day or pew pew with none of the bits in between..... different strokes and all that.


that said SC is aiming to be far more of a generic (or true i guess) MMO than ED was billed as .
clearly some do not want this however so i am just saying what i would find enjoyable.

 

[xyphic]

obviously its all down to the developers to decide what they want in their game..... but you choosing you do not want to do something is NOT forced down time.
taken to the extreme
IF all i want to do is trade using the biggest ship in the game, then by that logic i should be given the biggest ship from the 1st log in (which is possible in star citizen if you REALLY want that).... and them forcing me to fly a smaller ship is them stopping me having my fun in a big ship no?

MMOs are always going to have grind and they're always going to have time sinks. You don't want everyone to be getting to endgame-level equipment in a few hours, or there's no challenge (and that means you'll have no players). The trick is making the grind and time sinks palatable through interesting and diverse gameplay. Taking the example of cargo loading / unloading, and if it takes (say) 10 minutes for each, the simplest thing that the developers could do is nothing; i.e. force players to either log out (not good for retention!) or force them to loiter. This clearly isn't acceptable for a modern MMO, so the next step is to provide the player with something they can do both to kill time and to be rewarded for that. Let's say you can be paid to mop the decks -- we know they have the mocap data for that -- and you have to go around pressing "use" all over the deck of a station, and when you're done you get paid. It's a time sink, and you get rewarded but fun it ain't, and you aren't going to do it more than once.

The same goes for careers like couriering. "Take this parcel to xyz" is no fun if the only gameplay mechanic is following a satnav. It isn't challenging, and again won't cut it. Quests like "go to xyz and defeat a horde, bring back loot" work well in MMOs but I don't see how they fit in the Star Citizen world. I can imagine being an Uber-equivalent driver might be fun for a while, particularly if there are stealth / evade mechanics involved, but now we're talking about implementing games within the game.

For me, having cargo downtime can only be a successful game mechanic if the game itself is designed with such downtime in mind. That means fleshing out those games within games, allocating resource to their implementation, etc. and not just saying "we'll think of something later". That whole "this sounds cool/realistic" thing can really work against you if you aren't careful, because it incurs a huge amount of technical debt and eventually you're going to have to start paying it off. I think this is where CIG's development model fails; the game's development should be heavily front-loaded with prototype gameplay to determine what works and what doesn't. But they're doing it backwards: they're spending all their effort making shiny assets and systems and then attempting to shoehorn gameplay mechanics to fit, and that usually necessitates heavy rework on what's already been done and polished. Fans talk about Item 2.0 and its ilk as being foundations for the game, but they aren't: they're disparate parts of a seemingly incoherent whole.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Quests like "go to xyz and defeat a horde, bring back loot" work well in MMOs but I don't see how they fit in the Star Citizen world. .

would "Research base at (X location) has been over run by pirates, we need you and a small wing of security personnel fly out and clear them out" not be the absolute generic mmo side quest for this? it seems a perfect fit to me.

I agree the trick is to have enough different ones to keep it interesting. Maybe i am deluding myself, but I STILL think SC is going to do ok, and they will release a game somewhat similar to what they are advertising.......

some of the stuff will get canned, some of it will be less shiny than what they are promising, but ultimately, I reckon they will eventually have a decent enough monitor based space game.

it would not be the 1st time i have been wrong however.

 

[Soliluna]

Saw this post on reddit, it made me chuckle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize...ravel_at_60_fps_is_a_beautiful_thing/dl85ts9/

Optimisations will make the game run 100x better. Golden.

I'd be surprised if they managed to make it run 1.3x better.

 

[AkenBosch]

Hi

all good points, but imo there is another way, a half way house of getting the stuff you need over time via the npcs working the BGS - which can be fudged somewhat - or giveing us the option as a series of fetch quest missions to bring the needed materials ourselves. (which we get paid for AND get our gear faster). Tho it would seem i am in a minority for actually thinking that kind of stuff where we are given purpose is enjoyable. Some just want to space truck all day or pew pew with none of the bits in between..... different strokes and all that.

With a well thought out gameplay loop and mechanics in place, you wouldn't even need to have fetch missions forced on you actually, gameplay would emerge on itself based on your needs. The super destroyer thing I wrote about above was meant as a typical example of a situation common (and frankly, quite annoying in my opinion) in X3/TC/AP, but I can bring you a personal one I still vividly remember from X Rebirth, that despite its many, glaring, sometimes crippling flaws also had some things nailed pretty well.
Differently from previous episodes, in XR capital ships are actually built out of several resources, the shipyard will need to have alloy panels for the hull, fusion reactors, wirings, weapons and drone to equip and so on. The first time I had enough money I decided to buy my "dream battleship" at a shipyard, so I went there and "put an order". I immediately saw construction drones starting their work in the drydock, and when the basic shape of the ship hull was starting to take form all the work stopped: the shipyard was out of fusion reactors, and there wasn't a single fusion reactor factory in the entire area of space owned by that faction.
Probably I could have left it there and go minding my businesses around for some days in the hope of someone restocking it, but I wasn't eager to wait days, or potentially forever (NPC economy is unpredictable). So I started my own quest for fusion reactors: found a big factory in another area of space that was producing them non stop but was always out of stock, that meant someone else was buying them as soon as they were produced. At that point I could have stayed there monitoring the production cycle to reserve the batch as soon as it was available on the market, hopefully before anyone else, and even so I would have needed several batches to provide the shipyard with the needed reactors.
I decided to take another road and see who the "mysterious customer" was: some minutes after the batch of reactors was ready, a freighter punctually arrived to empty the stocks, so I boarded it as a passenger to see where it was headed. A couple of jumps later we were in a different system of the same faction, en route to another shipyard that looked like it was churning out carriers non-stop. The interesting thing I noticed is that at the "jump node" of that system, where dozens of cargo ships came and went, from time to time also arrived freighters full on fusion reactors headed for the same shipyard, evidently bought from some other factories in areas I didn't search for.

End of story, I searched for a relatively isolated spot along the route from the shipyard to the jump node, and emptied the incoming ships of their reactors shipment. Faster and more interesting than simply waiting for production, and also a great gaming moment. No need for mission or forced scripting, but you need some solid gameplay loops in place to make it work, and I also have to add that all this adventure unfolded very slowly and required several hours of gaming, something that appeals to a very limited niche of players usually, and definitely not fitting (as always, in my opinion), for a MMO setting.

Aside from the discussion wether Star Citizen can include this kind of economy and related gameplay or not, it would probably be too dispersive for the larger crowd of potential gamers, that mainly goes after action and pew-pew before slow and emergent gameplay. As mentioned above in several posts, ED already brings some practical examples for this.