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Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

robertsspaceindustries.com

31–40 of 241 posts

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#31
post #9

I bought a ship relatively late, in 2013. I also built my gaming PC that I'm still using to this day around then hoping to have something beefy enough to play Star Citizen. Obviously that was stupid, lesson learned. Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of those hug…

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

A word of caution that the newest expansion is still pretty buggy for a lot of people.

The console release is in the early fall, and that's when most of the community expects the PC version to reach a more acceptable level of stability.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually looks amazing. Hope they can get it to an appealing state before the engine is outdated again!

They still on Lumberyard ???. Reminds me of Duke Nukem sequel who never was released because the dev team kept switching engines every few years because of envy.

Gearbox eventually released that game, and it was complete mess of outdated gameplay and unpolished things cobbled together to fill the game time somehow.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#33
post #9

I bought a ship relatively late, in 2013. I also built my gaming PC that I'm still using to this day around then hoping to have something beefy enough to play Star Citizen. Obviously that was stupid, lesson learned. Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of those hug…

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun.

It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is a bit wonky. The FPS gameplay looks supremely uninteresting, I think they should have focused more on the roleplay and exploration aspect.

On the whole it's a really great game, but no game will ever really play like a personal movie or novel.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#34
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun. It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is…

EVE, Elite, and Star Citizen have all done the walking around + ships and it's all been pretty meh (with the first never really going live except for an apartment). It's a cursed feature apparently.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#35
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun. It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is…

It's hard enough to achieve that in any game unless you put the player on rails. Even games the size of a city tend to have massive immersion breaking compromises (look at any Bathesda game, Cyberpunk, etc.) Now try scaling that to a whole non-procgen universe!

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#36
post #17
post #3

Is there an actual game to play now? When I backed this a decade ago I kind of expected to see this game before I turned 30.

Maybe you'll be able to bridge the rest of the time with Half Life 3. Oh wait..

In my view, Half Life 3 did come out. It was just called Wolfenstein. For all practical purposes, there is no longer a HL3 shaped hole.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#37
post #6
post #3

Is there an actual game to play now? When I backed this a decade ago I kind of expected to see this game before I turned 30.

You can see people play this on Twitch, but it'll only be fun if you have a bunch of buddies to roleplay with in the world. Not much of a "game" yet for lack of interesting gameplay loops. Here's a bunch of people having a good time and making a video out of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31v7sSGfTm8

For all the vastness and detail in it, this world is still only a partialy complete single solar system and an even tinier fraction of what was originally promised (about 100 handcrafted star systems). At the same time it is empty, desolate and devoid of fun things to do. The sheer size of everything, which sounds so cool on paper, is a fundamental curse for the gameplay: PvP relies on players encountering players. PvE or anything with NPC involvement needs to be handcrafted to be fun. Generated missions always have a bland structure and get repetitive and boring fast.

The end result is that there is no really good way to actually make use of all that empty volume that the game already has. And that ratio is only going to become worse if all the other solar systems get added. And Star Citizen revels in that available playground with excessive travel times, low ship ranges, few ways to discover and intercept nearby ships, etc.

For comparison, Elite: Dangerous has an even vaster playing field, but it does three things that make it work: the vast majority of the galaxy is designed for lone explorers cruising out there and trying to survive without assistance. The rest of the gameplay is contricted to "the bubble", a tiny part of the galaxy that contains civilization. There, all the PvP and PvE gameplay is concentrated. Little tricks help focus most of the gameplay on very few spots in each solar system, forcing encounters to happen quite naturally. Arrival in a solar system is always at a specific point near its star. Likewise, trading and resupply happens at only very few places in each system. These are the places you need to reach as a miner or trader to make money. And these are the spots to stake out as a pirate or bounty hunter. Supercruise also turns the vastness of space within a system into a playing field of reasonable size that also reveals most of the traffic.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun. It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is…

> make tradeoffs between realism and fun

Isn't part of goal for SC to be far more realistic because that's only way to be immersive?

I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I've read that there's a planet that has player spawn in one area, with space port where their space ship is being in other area, and you need to get to train station, wait for the train, ride the train to space port to get to your ship, entire process taking 10 minutes to complete?

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#39
post #9

I bought a ship relatively late, in 2013. I also built my gaming PC that I'm still using to this day around then hoping to have something beefy enough to play Star Citizen. Obviously that was stupid, lesson learned. Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of those hug…

It's funny to think the development of Star Citizen started in the same year that Falcon 9 first launched.

I like Star Citizen for being the one constant thing in life. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I know there will always be a Star Citizen roadmap to look up.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#40
post #19

How do they have so little done after so long? And with so much money? I understand game development is very difficult but I don’t think games normally take over 10 years to make.

There has been an absolute mountain of work done on Star Citizen, it's just not in the areas you would expect. As far as I can tell, all the money went into building an engine that generates more money which in turn allows the project to drag on, with all other considerations being secondary. That doesn't mean they're not working on an actual game (or games), but it follows that almost all the effort goes into the in…

>Judging by what's being accomplished, the often-repeated reasoning of "it's just very complex and ambitious" is not enough of an explanation.

It's not. You grow your game organically and incrementally and release early if it is too complex to be ready at launch.

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