The Star Citizen Thread V10

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SC wins again!

Best immersion timer out there!

It certainly is! Purchasing immersion chariots and watching "we are pipelining the win stage in these very early stage zero-tier implementations of alpha development" immersion win videos for nearly a decade and there is still no game!

Genuine Roberts could continue this for several decades with absolutely no degradation in entertainment value :D
 
Because people have massively overblown expectations. They expect massive battles, betrayals and sex scandals like from a huge novel (GoT, anyone?) every goddamn week and then they are surprised they don't get it and instead they get mundane, "realistic" politics and stuff.

Or simply expectations to meet what we have been previously told, that should be mundane, "realistic" politics

We are over due the Federal Presidential election, as Hudson's Term ended June 1st, since it was the last 4 years of Halsey's 8
And have heard of only one of the annual Alliance Presidential elections

But this is completely OT
 
Ah, still pretty much a fangirl. Stopped at a random point in the video and she is talking about the Fobes article and saying that people who are "outside" the project probably aren't lying or trying to mislead, they just don't understand.

Ugh....
What does she mean by "outside" the project? Not having backed with sufficient whale oil? Are the basic 60 USD backers outside the project, too?
 
Ah, still pretty much a fangirl. Stopped at a random point in the video and she is talking about the Fobes article and saying that people who are "outside" the project probably aren't lying or trying to mislead, they just don't understand.

Ugh....

Certainly holds some merit. Most people not invested in Star Citizen take a superficial glance and immediately make up their mind based on the spare facts that are available without spending hours on available videos or going through hundreds of posts which all demonstrate how hostile discussing the game can become. I mean imagine hearing about Star Citizen then selecting a random stream or video then sit there for 10 minutes straight staring at a QT slipstream without any gameplay at all. I d say thats enough to make up your mind and voice your opinion. Its not a very educated one but its a first impression and that counts as well.

Now you could educate that person by pointing out all the good things in Star Citizen or even provide links showcasing engaging gameplay or quality development (good luck :D) because there are many games on the market that appear boring and simple and only reveil complexity or great design after you dive in for a time. In Star Citizens case spending more time only reveals the rotten stench. And of course engaging the SC community anywhere on the internet (apart from protected places which are pretty rare nowadays....) more likely results in you being attacked or ridiculed then answers.

Now I have the feeling that good old Batgirl has a misconception of people "inside" the project like most pro-SC people have. Where you not being a backer, not being concierge, not knowing any CIG folks personally or simply having a less-then-optimistic view on the project marks you as an "outsider". What kind of an expert do you have to be in order to be "inside" the project exactly? Because if its knowledge that immediately terminates 90%+ of all people discussing the project and makes me an expert due to all the things I know (tho I would never label myself that way....). If its monetary investment then that includes a lot of people who are less then happy with how SC goes. Also many articles in the past were written by authors who had access to Star Citizen either by being backers themselves or having an available account to check things out and perform their own research. But of course these people (that includes Derek Smart) are all outside the project because Batgirl and Co utilize a certain combination of qualifiers that is pretty much impossible to match and ensures that only people speaking positively about SC remain on the "inside".

A lot of people critizising the Forbes article fail to understand that Forbes focused on an area they are pretty knowlegeable about....finances. They are not discussing or analyzing existing features/mechanics or try to paint a verdict on SCs quality as a game. While a lot of people who are impressed with SCs qualities immediately translate that good impression on every other aspect of Star Citizen even tho that doesnt have to be the case.

Now Batgirl is an entertainment tuber. I just wonder what kind of "qualification" she has in order to dismiss financial articles written and hosted by companies with experts on their payroll whos job it is to research such things on a daily basis and who probably have a lot more options and sources to verify claims of all sorts. This goes for a lot of youtubers engaging in "analysis" of Star Citizen when they are simply gamers with no further expertise of the involved topics. That doesnt mean Forbes is automatically more credible then she is but it does mean that without a reputation to back up her statements she needs to provide a bit more background or arguments to enable others to believe her.
 
I think for "inside" read "onside". You may have a game package, lot's of ships or nothing, but you still embrace the dream of what SC/SQ42 project is all about. You recognise that what we have today is a stepping stone on the journey that is eventually going to lead to space game utopia and the vision that CR has shown me you then be a reality. Such is the onside persons grasp of the vision that they are able to see beyond the obvious warts that exist.
 
This is so obviously true I don't understand why anyone actually wants overly long travel times. The thing that makes the galaxy huge is the number of stars in it. Even if we had instantaneous travel to any system in the galaxy it would still be a mind-boggingly long time to explore all of them.

This is where Star Citizen has an advantage over Elite. It can learn from Elite's mistakes. They should be cutting down travel times. There should never be a situation where a bunch of friends want to meet up in the game, and by the time they'd gotten themselves sorted out and are all in the same location, it's the end of the night.
 
Thats just it. There are actually a LOT of games on the market from which mistakes Star Citizen could learn, ED just one among them especially as SC attempts to touch so many genres at once. Tho in hindsight it appears that CIG refuses to accept other games limitations or experience in those matters and insists to make the same mistakes on its own. Reasons for this?

Could be many. Pride, ignorance, self-inflated ego, comforting by the fanatics telling them they cant do wrong.

If mentioning or discussing other games within CIGs walls is indeed taboo its no wonder they cannot learn from others.
 
I don't think many want overly long travel times. But, both for conveying sense of scale and making an explorer career a tough one, it somehow has to. If any point in the galaxy is just a few clicks away, there's no challenge, no sense of accomplishment.

Is it fun? No... Well maybe for some, but does it have to be? As for trading or mining or even fighting, there may be more interactions with the environment than with deep exploration but the result is the same: only those who can afford what's required (be it skill or time given the activity picked) will succeed. And I'm OK with that. I'm OK some more invested than me found the first Guardian sites, or unriddled the Thargoid ARG, or even simply reached the Anaconda.

Now let's put things on perspective: what's long trips in ED? going through and through the galaxy and some few times a remote station or planet far from its main star. Are they mandatory? No. Unless you want to do certain mission or unlock certain engineers/components based on this precise topic: exploration.

What's long trips in Star Citizen? Basically going anywhere in this tiny half-baked star system (I'd say even walking inside cities is a chore). Is it mandatory? Well basically yes as anything currently requires you to move inside this pocket-sized 'verse.

Some seems to think CIG will learn from FDEV's "mistakes". Ha! I don't think so as they're totally focused on making you live "fantabulous ship activities" during your travels, and making you witness the fidelicious fidelities of their assets by making any mundane activity as fidelicious as poosible, be it sitting in your cockpit, carrying crates, fulfilling missions, taking the train, taking a dump. You name it.
 
This is where Star Citizen has an advantage over Elite. It can learn from Elite's mistakes. They should be cutting down travel times. There should never be a situation where a bunch of friends want to meet up in the game, and by the time they'd gotten themselves sorted out and are all in the same location, it's the end of the night.

Indeed, however, as things stand, you can meet up quickly in ED as long as you have a decent jump range ship, even if you start the session on other sides of the bubble. And multicrew sends you direct to the ship.

The question for ED is what happens when we have space legs. Will they do away with MC telepresence and make people meet up, transfer over, or will they keep telepresence as well as having the option to physically meet up.

What SC could do with is provide some sort of teleport system for players to get to their friends ships to meet up... although i can imagine the reaction from the hardcore people to that suggestion.

As things stand, CIG seem to be taking some of the worst aspects of ED and making them (subjectively) worse.
 
Imho, long travel times should be a feature of space games that style themselves as "sims". Because if you take that away, you might as well be playing War Thunder with an extra button to teleport to a different map. And because from a universe-building perspective, the second your universe has people traveling to the next star system in less time than it takes me to commute to work in the morning, goods distribution concerns and economic believability are gone.

The caveat, of course, is that there needs to be a point to the long travel and/or a way to skip/mitigate it.. The latter has been thrown out the window by the premise of multiplayer, meaning that the core tool in simulators to alleviate uninteresting travel time, namely time compression, is gone. So your only option then is to only have it vaguely-longish-but-not-really and giving it a point, and here imho is where ED fails and SC should pay attention. You want to provide a navigation challenge, some degree of mechanical requirements, systems to operate, maintenance to take care of, stuff to do that means flight isn't reduced to point-and-stare. But when the game premise is gravity-defying supercruise and ww2 combat, well, it's tough to give a point to smart navigation in the absence of long-range heat source scanning, hiding behind bodies or by going cold, drifting, trajectory calculation, ECM systems, and long-range weapons. Also, fuel not being a concern.

tl;dr: long-ish travel times could (should) be done well, but ED and potentially SC just don't care much about it and are trapped in arcade navigation/combat models anyhow.
 
Ah, still pretty much a fangirl. Stopped at a random point in the video and she is talking about the Fobes article and saying that people who are "outside" the project probably aren't lying or trying to mislead, they just don't understand.

Ugh....
They key to higher understanding is understanding that you don't understand.
 
The caveat, of course, is that there needs to be a point to the long travel and/or a way to skip/mitigate it.. The latter has been thrown out the window by the premise of multiplayer, meaning that the core tool in simulators to alleviate uninteresting travel time, namely time compression, is gone. So your only option then is to only have it vaguely-longish-but-not-really and giving it a point, and here imho is where ED fails and SC should pay attention.
IMO you fail to see what long travel in ED is for, which Skizomeuh defined quite well just a few posts above - it's for exploration. If you trade, PvP, PvE, do majority of the stuff in Elite, you don't need to encounter long travel. If you want to explore, you will encounter long travel.

Elite's devs know exactly right what long times are used for and proved this repeatedly by cutting down the in-Bubble travel times over time to an amount that is accepted by players. If you are in the Bubble, you can get anywhere within few jumps (remember, it's only ~300 Ly across, 10 jumps from one side to other for average jump range ships, usually less). If you explore, you cannot - and that is appropriate.
 
Imho, long travel times should be a feature of space games that style themselves as "sims". Because if you take that away, you might as well be playing War Thunder with an extra button to teleport to a different map. And because from a universe-building perspective, the second your universe has people traveling to the next star system in less time than it takes me to commute to work in the morning, goods distribution concerns and economic believability are gone.

The caveat, of course, is that there needs to be a point to the long travel and/or a way to skip/mitigate it.. The latter has been thrown out the window by the premise of multiplayer, meaning that the core tool in simulators to alleviate uninteresting travel time, namely time compression, is gone. So your only option then is to only have it vaguely-longish-but-not-really and giving it a point, and here imho is where ED fails and SC should pay attention. You want to provide a navigation challenge, some degree of mechanical requirements, systems to operate, maintenance to take care of, stuff to do that means flight isn't reduced to point-and-stare. But when the game premise is gravity-defying supercruise and ww2 combat, well, it's tough to give a point to smart navigation in the absence of long-range heat source scanning, hiding behind bodies or by going cold, drifting, trajectory calculation, ECM systems, and long-range weapons. Also, fuel not being a concern.

tl;dr: long-ish travel times could (should) be done well, but ED and potentially SC just don't care much about it and are trapped in arcade navigation/combat models anyhow.

There's a very good reason why ED functions the way that it does: it's a game that is supposed to be entertaining to a reasonably broad audience. Putting in hyper-realistic mechanics will restrict the market to a tiny minority of players. I would never call ED a sim, it's more a sim-lite - gives a sense of scale and piloting but definitely plenty of non-sim/'arcade' aspects.

RE: believable, I would say that in a game or other fictional endevour 'believeability' is mainly down to internal consistency. yes, rules are different from real life but you can immerse yourself in the process. Hyperspace/warp/FTL travel is a standard science fiction mechanic or trope simply because it cuts down on time taken, and puts travel over vast distances in a humanly comprehensible fashion. Going full sub-C travel only will mean decades are spent on interstellar travel. How do you represent that in a multi-player environment? Or in a way that actually has involving gameplay?

Star Citizen appears to be less sim-like than ED. And they also want to sell to a large audience (if the game ever gets released).

I cannot see a mainstream game that has commute-length system travel. Hell, I'd not play a game like that.
 
IMO you fail to see what long travel in ED is for, which Skizomeuh defined quite well just a few posts above - it's for exploration. If you trade, PvP, PvE, do majority of the stuff in Elite, you don't need to encounter long travel. If you want to explore, you will encounter long travel.

Elite's devs know exactly right what long times are used for and proved this repeatedly by cutting down the in-Bubble travel times over time to an amount that is accepted by players. If you are in the Bubble, you can get anywhere within few jumps (remember, it's only ~300 Ly across, 10 jumps from one side to other for average jump range ships, usually less). If you explore, you cannot - and that is appropriate.

To me, that's close to the worst of both worlds. Shipping goods light-years away is shorter than my 21st century morning commute, yet people somehow starve if I don't do a round to the grocery planet in the next system. And while exploration involves a longer time gate (and yes, it's very much needed), that time gate is 1) stupidly short in-universe (how the galaxy is only settled in two locations when random Joe can fly to the galactic centre in a few hours remains a mystery) and 2) completely devoid of interest from a mechanical point-of-view. Supercruise was a player-driven afterthought and it shows, the game was by far a better fit for PoI microjumps. That said, it means we get a pretty way to zoom around, whereas the original design would have deprived us of those sights, so it's not necessarily for the worst in that regards: the sightseeing is imho a major plus of the game. But it massively breaks the believability part of the in-game universe and still fails to address making navigation involved and/or interesting. Considering SC operates under the same constraints (scifidrive + multiplayer + point-blank combat), I'm not sure how they can address this but I'm curious to see them try if they get there.
 
Well, according to their development plan and the ships currently in the game there will be multiple ways to get around that will cut down on travel time.

  • Olisar to ArcCorp 15 minutes for a small ship / 4 minutes for a large ship / most likely less than 2 minutes for a capital ship
  • Public transport for players to get around with
  • Ship transport services
  • Player created ship transport services through carriers
  • In-system jump points as shortcuts within systems for some ship sizes (Rumors, no facts)
  • Improved quantum drives (not sure if even A rated quality drives are in the game atm)
  • Oversized quantum drives for short-medium range at cost of heat and fuel (Avenger Titan can use a S2 quantum drive for example)
It can also be well used for how missions are presented where there are plenty of missions created for small ships around a planet and it's moons and the larger ship you have the longer range mission you can take since the travel time would be equivalent between larger planets across a system.

  • Small ships = Local Planet and Moons
  • Medium Ships = Local Planet Cluster in system
  • Large Ships = System to System mission
  • Capital = Multi-System Travel
Now, when/if/how those mechanics gets put into the engine unless they are revised and completely changed that is another issue entirely.
 
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We wouldn't need to bother about travel times with time compression, but since we're stuck with MP as game concept there is concessions to be made. I wouldn't have made them as harshly like having to press "J" 50 times and make ppl go through the same thing over and over, but then again, game engine might limit what I think would be best in the MP environment.
 
I cannot see a mainstream game that has commute-length system travel. Hell, I'd not play a game like that (SQ42 is another beast entirely).

To be fair, Chris Roberts and CIG was pretty clear on the part that SC would NOT be a mainstream game that would hold your hand.

It will be more akin to EVE online in what people are drawn to it with grouping up in fleets during an hour, travel to another location for an hour and wait two hours while getting drunk and waiting for an enemy and HOPEFULLY get a 10 minute fight.
 
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