Journal Entry: Day 4
Today marks my final day of Star Citizen. I’ve finished my journey - I’m glad I could be a part of yours.
I started with Star Marine. I didn't like the gunplay - it's uninspired at best. The weapons are unbalanced - for example the electro shotgun appears useless, and everyone just uses the assault rifle.
The character animations are jerky and crappy, meaning hitting a target is luck at best, and it just doesn't look good.
It just wasn't that interesting. It wants to be a fast paced CoD style shooter, while lacking the fluidity and speed of that type of game. The arena is made up of narrow rooms and corridors, but is a surprisingly large map - I spent a round only once seeing an enemy.
As a game - the only new thing it brings to the table that I could see is the zero g area - though I wouldn't be surprised to find out games like Halo and CoD Iwar have also done it already. It was relatively pointless in Star Marine, however it's an interesting mechanic for the Universe - one could imagine boarding actions for example starting from space. As it stands, Star Marine is just not that good.
Arccorp hasn't really changed. There's a few shops open, a few npcs standing behind counters... but that's about it. The most fun I had was clipping through a random door to the launch pads and falling to my death. It still lacks life. One would think with all the mocaping, surely some random NPCs could be added purely to have some people walking around. The place is empty. There is no reason to go to Arccorp.
My first attempt to re enter Port Olister - ended with a crash to desktop.
My second worked, and I decide to start a mission - 'ICC Scan Probe' seemed like a good choice. I summoned my Avenger, and warped to the 'probe' location. A nice Irish lady asks me to check out something her sensors have picked up at a different location.
I warped to the location, and found the wreckage of a ship, with something beeping and flashing within the wreckage. I EVA'd out of my ship, over to the beeping object, and discovered it's the blackbox audiolog of the doomed ship - A generic log is played 'I've finished my journey - I'm glad I can be a part of yours.'
Not the most interesting of discoveries perhaps, but I was actually excited. This is actually compelling gameplay! Not massively deep or an original story perhaps, but the combination of flight, and EVA is well done and speaks well for future missions. What else could I discover out here? Perhaps I would have a mission to retrieve something off a doomed ship. Perhaps a station infested with xenomorphs that need to be slaughtered?
It's on my way back to my Avenger when it all goes wrong. Trying to reenter my ship sends me flying out, and the Avenger into a spin. And although I attempted a Gravity-esque maneuver, it failed, leaving me floating helplessly as my ship spun off into the distance.
At this point, I shut the game down. I have no more energy, no more effort I can put into playing this game. I am turning back while I still can.
To sum up my experience:
The animations are completely horrible. Both your character model, which causes nausea - and that of other characters which lurch around looking ridiculous. The other characters are probably due to the bad fps/ping/tick rate/latency/whatever, but the player character animations have got to go.
The flight model is not great. If the focus of the game becomes more towards first person, with the ships simply a means to get from a to b - this perhaps isn’t a big deal, although those who wanted the game for the ship combat will not be happy. There’s supposed to be a big change coming however, so guess we’ll see.
I only tried the one mission, and didn't touch on the 'Pirate' side of things - but from what I saw, they are probably the best aspect of Star Citizen right now.
The missions appear to be interesting mechanically, if buggy and storywise uninspired. The combination of flight to get places, zero g movement, and various areas of interest has huge potential. The bugginess of it however breaks this part of the game as it stands - but if those are fixed, this aspect of Star Citizen could potentially carry the game to something worth playing.
What happened to the music? It’s not something I mentioned in my logs, but I remember an impressive orchestral score - now it’s more of a droning wannabe industrial cyberpunk.
The graphics are as pretty as ever. Crusader the system is actually quite nice, I like that the various places of interest are all in orbit around the gas giant - it gives a great sense of scale.
The FPS is below average. Even had it not been laggy, it still wouldn’t have any compelling reason to play this rather that rival FPS games.
And... that's it. I'm done. I feel no need to touch this game again until there's a significant update. Over the 10 or so hours I've spent on the game over these entries, there was nothing that really compelled me to keep playing.
I'm trying to think of what was fun and... yeah. Well. Some of the bugs were funny, and the locals were nice enough, the mission was good right until it bugged out and forced me to quit... well, I'll leave you with this - this is what happens when you go from prone to standing while moving your mouse left or right.
