[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Roshar]

Suckers. /10chars

Please post productively. Infracted. -Edge

[KyrtF]

You're changing goalposts. You were saying that all of those games are the same as SC.

They aren't.

For one....they exist as games and have associated gameplay witj defined game mechanics. Star Citizen is a glorified tech demo with a ToDo list that includes basic gameplay and game mechanics.

I am saying that if you want to defend Star Citizen based on what CIG hope to some day add, then other games should be afforded the same courtesy during any comparison.

And I will say it again. SC already has things in it that none of the games you said already have all of (some of them have none).

It has space legs. It has seamless transitions such as an 8 minute QT which it uses to load in content. And it has localised physics grids which it hopes will someday work properly.

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Really? Define seamlessness? How about, getting up out of a bed, walking through a space station, requesting a ship, walking to said ship, climbing into said ship, walking through the ship to the pilots seat, flying to a moon, landing on the moon, walking from the pilots seat to a ground vehicle sitting in the cargo bay of the ship, getting into the vehicle that is in the ship, driving the vehicle out of the ship onto the moon, driving across the lunar landscape to an outpost, getting out of the vehicle and walking into the outpost to meet up with some friends, another friend arrives in a larger multi-crew ship, you walk back to your land vehicle and get inside, then drive it inside of your friend's ship, get out of the vehicle and walk through your friend's ship to one of the seats on the bridge, then sit back and relax while your new adventure begins. All without a single loading screen, all without leaving first person, all without "teleporting". *That* is seamlessness. Show me the big list of games that does *all* of that.

I'll admit it....I can't think of another game that has you wake up in a bed and then require a half hour of travel and fiddly interaction simply to meet up with friends.

Pixel count would be resolution, so no, that is not fidelity. Fidelity would be the attention to detail in the universe as a whole, and the amount of interactivity with said details.

Fidelity would then be having you need to eat and sleep every 20 minutes then? Designing a universe at one tenth scale?

The point I am trying to get across is that a lot of SC backers appear to have very different ideas about what these terms mean.

It's more than just animations. Proper positioning, especially in relation to cover, seeing exactly where people are aiming, little things like that make a huge difference in a tactical FPS environment. This isn't just in relation to the attacker either, now you know exactly where you are in relation to cover as well. So often in an FPS do you think you are behind cover when in fact you are not, because your floating arms aren't in the same place as your 3rd person model. It also offers much better immersion through VR, and SC is a game that would greatly benefit from VR (as would any flight sim or driving game).

Of course it has an impact. Of course it does. Thats why proper FPS games are going out of their way to draw in crowds of professional gamers who can take advantage of the mechanic.

And no....SC isn't going to get VR. It'll need a complete overhaul of several systems to get VR to work.

[Cyclone Jack]

I'll admit it....I can't think of another game that has you wake up in a bed and then require a half hour of travel and fiddly interaction simply to meet up with friends.

Psh! WoW, when it was good, had massive travel times to meet up with friends. But it seems you've finally noticed that all of those games you posted earlier that do what SC does, don't in fact do what SC does. Baby steps.

Of course it has an impact. Of course it does. Thats why proper FPS games are going out of their way to draw in crowds of professional gamers who can take advantage of the mechanic.

Or maybe because it just costs more to do properly than just creating some floating arms and a gun. To be honest, I'm actually surprised PUBG doesn't have a true first-person mode, did the guy that made it do the original battle royale for ARMA3?

[masterhorus8]

It has seamless transitions such as an 8 minute QT which it uses to load in content.

100%* false. Try again.

*I guess really only your reason for QT is wrong, the rest prior to the word "which" is true, among other things.

[Miyani]

What do you mean by "true" 1st person mode? Because you do have 1st person mode ONLY matches o_o and yes, it’s the same guy (Playerunknown).

I haven't been following the conversation all too well maybe it is something similar to this?

[zealo]

What do you mean by "true" 1st person mode? Because you do have 1st person mode ONLY matches o_o and yes, it’s the same guy (Playerunknown).

Usually the camera position of the player does not entirely match where the actual game model is as seen by other players in shooters. Normally done cause excessive head bobbing is annoying for many. Star citizen tries to combine the two so the camera of the player matches the position the rest of the model is in as seen by other players.

This usually isn't done that way outside the likes of Arma cause the game needs to provide the stabilising effect your brain does subconsciously in real life.
Id assume this is what "true" first person mode refers to in this context.

[Cyclone Jack]

Pretty much what zealo said.

Typically in a first person shooter, you exist as two floating arms. Since nobody wants to play a game where they fight other floating arms (that's the stuff of nightmares), the game places a proxy character at your location, invisible to you, that other players can see. This means that you (your floating arms and camera) and your character (the model other characters see) are not the same entity, so the two are never 100% the same. They can approximate fairly well, and some games even use a full model for your character, though even then odd things happen like this https://twitter.com/ollymoss/status/697926382861492224.

Any FPS going for more realistic gameplay should be using true first person, IMO, where what you see and what others see are always the exact same, since you are both viewing a single entity. However, this comes at a greater cost since there are a ton of little things that can easily break true first person. As zealo stated, the head bobbing is a big problem (put a GoPro on your forehead and walk or run down a hallway, then watch the footage, then thank your eyes for being so damn awesome). Positioning of everything needs to be taken into consideration so that you aren't blocking too much of the viewport when walking, running, shooting, reloading, crouching, crawling (prone), etc. What happens when there is an explosion that knocks the character back? Do they fall down? Do they need to get up. Even things like shoulder pads can get in the way and cause issues.

Also, that pic is hilarious! Thanks, Miyani! I got a good, hearty laugh with the Doom part.

[KyrtF]

Psh! WoW, when it was good, had massive travel times to meet up with friends. But it seems you've finally noticed that all of those games you posted earlier that do what SC does, don't in fact do what SC does. Baby steps.

I don't recall waking up in a bed in WoW. I do remember hearthstones and teleports and pirtals and meetibg stones in WoW though. And I remember the pain and annoyance that the travel was and why Blizzard got rid of it.

And yes...I'll freely admit Star Citizen promises to add a number of bad, irritating and down righr annoying game mechanics that other games saw fit to get rid of a long time ago.

Or maybe because it just costs more to do properly than just creating some floating arms and a gun. To be honest, I'm actually surprised PUBG doesn't have a true first-person mode, did the guy that made it do the original battle royale for ARMA3?

Ahhhh...no. You see those floating arms and legs? That's extra models and animations that the devs have to do. In some ways, it's more complex and time consuming to create this type of system. They could very easily just use an existing model and put a camera pov on the face. There are reasons why most devs go the route they go but in reality its a design decision. There are some plus points but also some cons. Gameplaywise, there isn't a lot of difference so long as the system is developed properly.

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100%* false. Try again.

*I guess really only your reason for QT is wrong, the rest prior to the word "which" is true, among other things.

Do you ever pay attention to what the devs say? Content is loaded in as needed and no...they can't store the data for an entire planet or moon let alone a star system in memory.

[masterhorus8]

Do you ever pay attention to what the devs say? Content is loaded in as needed and no...they can't store the data for an entire planet or moon let alone a star system in memory.

Yeah, it is loaded as needed, but the QT has nothing to do with it.

[Cyclone Jack]

I don't recall waking up in a bed in WoW.

Then you never logged out in an inn.

[1001]

Yeah, it is loaded as needed, but the QT has nothing to do with it.

Is that confirmed?

[anaxie]

SC fanboy here, just my 2 cents, not that it matters much but...

I don't really like crowdfunding but this is one of the biggest ever and it's a video game set in space, which I like so I thought why not. I've also always wanted a well made open world sci-fi MMOFPS since speculation on what Titan was back in the day. Destiny feels too much like Halo which I'm not too fond of and it's not open world (supposedly Bungie wanted it to be more ambitious like SC but publisher deadlines killed that). I also really like Cryengine so this puts it above the other space games with planet landings for me.

As for the criticism on this site, I'm not really surprised considering the ToA thread on here which probably negatively influences the opinion of some on crowdfunding, and probably other experiences like Mighty No. 9 (and also the fact that there's an opinion for everything and lots of thrashing on this site); in fact I heard about NMS first, while it was in dev, so when I heard SC was a crowdfunded game I initially didn't want anything to do with it. I got bored one day and by luck looked it up on a free fly weekend, it was definitely an alpha game but I could immediately see the potential. Will it live up to all the things they've said maybe not, but in the last two years you can definitely see an actual direction for what they are making the game into. Might still take a while but if there has to be one game that takes the time without publisher oversight then I want this to be it.

It's been 5 years in dev but they started from scratch in a basement and grew to a team of 350+ with 5 studios across the world, with original Cryengine devs, the guy who designed the Ironman 3 suits, and a bunch others. A video game definitely will be made. Even on this site people complain all the time about publishers and games like ME:A, which started dev around the same time and seemed unfinished.

As for the ship sales, whatever. The game wouldn't be made at all without them, and those who spend that money can do whatever they want. I've spent $500 in small purchases here and there.

You don't like crowdfunding...

lets look at what crowdfunding gave us

Pillars of Eternity 1
Banner Saga 1/2
Wasteland 2
Divinity Original Sin 1/2
Darkest Dungeon
Grim Dawn
SuperHot
Cosmic Star Heroine (Chrono Trigger inspired)
War for the Overworld (dungeon Keeper 3)
Shadowrun Returns
Shadowrun Hong Kong
Witcher Trilogy
Battle Chasers Nightwar
Yooka-Laylee
Elite Dangerous
Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey
Satelite Reign
Shovel Knight



Games soon to come out thanks to crowdfunding
System Shock Remake
Torment tides
Phoenix Point
Pillars of Eternity II
Banner Saga 3
Wasteland 3
Pathfinder Kingmaker
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Stygian
Psychonaughts 2
Shenmu III|
The Bards Tale IV
Bloodstained Ritual of the Night (essentially castlevania since Konami are fucking idiots)

No I would say THANK GOD for the Kickstarter what has come from there has caused a revival in genres of shown everyone how fucking awful the AAA developers are.



All i konw is that AAA developers are fucking trash these days

Thanks to KICKSTARTER we have seen a renissance REAL horror genre games, isometric / CRPGS and Turn Based RPGS and and thanks to XSeed we are seeing a fuckton of localization because WOW! The West and PC gamers really love our games says Niho Falcom. So now we get our JRPGS back since Square has no idea what the hell they are doing anymore.

[Daffan]

So many people invested in CiG but they can't even provide a fun ship flying or combat experience after almost 4yrs of AC and have no idea what they are doing with control parity or gimbals.

At least ED will be down in flames when it comes out, so its got that going for it.

[Cyclone Jack]

That’s correct, however, now make a list of scam projects…

It’s sort of like Steam Greenlight/Steam Direct, an ocean of shit with some sweet ass pearls floating on top that might make the entire navigate worth it, until there are proper laws in place to secure crowdfunding, I really can’t blame anyone for disliking the damn thing.

Which isn't really any different than publisher-released games. There's always been a ton of shit out there. The only difference is now you can get $60 AAA shit, some $20 indie shit, or maybe you back some $40 crowdfunded shit. But, if you are discerning enough, you can find those 'sweet ass pearls', as you call them, and get an amazing game. This is the entertainment industry as a whole (books, movies, music, board games, etc).

[Wilian]

That’s correct, however, now make a list of scam projects…

This is where being educated on how you spend your money steps in.

[masterhorus8]

Is that confirmed?

Since patch 2.0, we've known that QT is seamless as well. There was a cool video from back then that had someones ship showing up as a spec on the screen, and you see the spec move pretty quickly from one QT location to another. The animations we see are just that, animations (additional proof of that from a bug that sometimes caused the animation to stick after finishing the jump). If anything, QT needs things to load even faster than without it, because the load is based on number of pixels visible of the object (one of CIG's videos shortly after Pupil to Planet mentions this), so if you're getting to a location faster, more data will need to be loaded in faster.

[Malibutomi]

[masterhorus8]

@Malibutomi I read someone mentioning that the LoDs improved with the latest update. Have you noticed this, and if so, how did it change?

[Deleted]

So after selling ships that doesnt exist in game, followed by selling land that has no mechanics the next step from CIG is to sell mechwarrior suits.

There is no point talking about the technical debt they aquired selling concepts, its already clear they will not deliver on all mechanics. So why not selling ANYTHING? Mechsuits ? why not.

1. concept ships : see blue on image. lol. mechanics attached to ship roles inexistent. 20+ crew ships while game runs at 5fps with more than 4 people in vicinity doing stuff.

2. land, no mechanics

3. mechwarriors hahahaha

[kenn9530]

So many people invested in CiG but they can't even provide a fun ship flying or combat experience after almost 4yrs of AC and have no idea what they are doing with control parity or gimbals.

At least ED will be down in flames when it comes out, so its got that going for it.

combat is only a small part of the game and even in its current form is far better than whats in current games, while it is not the final iteration of light/combat, the flight model currently in 3.0 is fairly smoothed out.

What is it excatly you don't like about the flying when its supposed to resemble something of a realistic simulation without being too overlay complex for the user, and for combat there is not so much you can do when things are meant to be as realistic as possible.