Star Citizen
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Starfield has been in dev for 10 years and only has demos to show for it (and for marketing purposes, they want you to believe it has actually been in development since 1994, but that would be like Chris Roberts counting since Wing Commander). Star Citizen meanwhile has a live alpha test environment that backers can actually play in. It is mostly a sandbox yes but far more than the Hangar or Arena modules it launched way back when. And the 3.18 build ups the ante again with Persistence for all dropped items and abandoned ships, introduces persistent shipwrecks and 'soft death,' salvage, and physical cargo hauling, which on playtest is erupting into really fun game loops for salvagers, haulers, and pirates alike. People are leaving out snacks and bottles of water random places as gifts to other people -- making their own fun in completely new ways without any scripting but in thanks to the heavy lifting of new game tech like hull scraping, which leads to physical armor, ship engineering, repairs, etc. - you can leave your ship in a cave on a moon and in theory, weeks later come retrieve it like a dusty relic. You can leave bottles of water in a cave in the shape of a penis for someone to find 2 months later. I know of no other MMO even approaching that fidelity.
Depending on how you feel about it the website is still 'crap'
Don't need to buy anything but a $40 starter pack, everything is earnable in game. Backers of ship get 1 or 2 alpha quarterly releases to enjoy their item before it is available in the in-game kiosks. But also - free fly events.
The purpose of the Quanta system is so the economy is player-influenced, but never player driven. This is not going to be a game that new players feel like they already lost because they didn't have the biggest credit card when the game was in alpha or pre-order, and in release, no org should be able to monopolize the stars, there are no sources of passive income, etc. Frankly, some 'citizens might enter the universe and have a better time joining an org and crewing a sub capital ship or loading a freighter than trying to go it alone in an aurora and figure out the game out in space alone paranoid of other people.
The funny thing about the length of development: it's the refactoring and rebuilding of the engine, and the graphics, as you say. Yes, there is some serious tech debt in there, but also realizations they could never do what they wanted the way they first tried it. And some prolific changes in scope that happened after the fact. There's also a lot of drama with engine licensing: Originally, CIG acquired a perpetual license from Crytek for a cool $1 Million. But, TLDR, Amazon bought the entire thing, renamed it Lumberjack, and it's been a problem. The companies had to settle out their issues in court, and Alpha 3.18 will introduce Gen12 (in-house render framework) - at the moment, the implementation is that players can run either in Lumberjack or Gen12 (default), but they are otherwise identical, this was just a port off of Lumberjack. Next, CIG will yank lumberjack outta there while developing their own implementation on Gen12 using Vulkan to overhaul the rendering process, the game's Render Thread implementation is horribly bottlenecking even super PCs from running the client smoothly. The crytek engine, or whatever it is called now, was never designed for Object Container Streaming, or any of the processes that CIG put into core tech for the game:
I disagree that he will launch a cutback version of his game, far from it, CR had contingencies to release a cutback game if he experienced a flop - but that hasn't happened, and CIG cracked the code of fundraising: people love the game, want to support it, and will pay $90 for a space lorry and $1,200 for early ownership of an assault carrier.
https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cloud-imperium-financials-for-2021
CIG doesn't function like a traditional game studio or project, it isn't owned by an investment firm or company, it's fully independent, and relatively huge for an indie dev. It continues to grow, and it's going to have another growth spurt again now that it's established alpha live runtime servers in Asia, the asia SC community is only just taking off.
The original pitch for Star Citizen was EVE online with ship physics and twitch combat - your skill as a player determined outcomes, not how many RPG skills you waited to earn through timegating. There were never supposed to be seamless space to ground physics, the original pitch was landing zones were going to function damn near close to how Freelancer 2003's did, glorified menus. But sometime during the launch of the Answer the Call 2016 campaign, and the actual release of Squadron 42 vertical slice Demo (showing off a bit of everything the finished game should have, according to the demo), CIG took the leap, and what's followed in it's wake of years and years of developing increasingly complex pipelines for producing systemic content, sandbox features, etc.
The scope is still mindblowing and it would be wrong to simply ignore if you had any passing interest in it, as there is always Free Fly Events where access to the game is completely free of charge, and you often get access to some really cool ships (especially during May).
Some shots I've taken lately (I'll keep most of the PTU album to myself, it would give the average consumers nightmares to know what happens most of the time in the beta release of the alpha environment):
But you know, it's still an alpha, so emergent bugs emerge constantly, crashes happen, resets happen, and some players might go out of their way to spawn 60+ Origin 890 Jumps and 30k (kill) the server, but there's definitely more Play than Test now.
Post edited by Overheal on0 -
I do have an interesting story to tell about the other night though:
There's a dynamic event being tested in the PTU right now, xenothreat, and while there's not strictly a PVP prompt for it, the game is openly PVP, so people complained in chat that people were 'griefing' them, by 'joining' the Xenothreat NPC terrorist group.
Anyway, I picked up a Bounty Hunter contract for one of the alleged players, iirc his name was TenaciousTomm. I was miles away, on Orison, in my cloud city, it took yknow a good 20 minutes of immersion buying my gear from the test-patch wipe, getting into the black, heading over to the event location, etc. - and in chat the people complaining about griefing etc. still weren't killing this player, which I found interesting. Cmon guys. It's not like he's spawn camping, or grenade spamming like the 1 hallway chokepoint on the server, it's an open space nebula/asteroid field, deal with getting shot up by players with red IFFs. The whole time I'm on the way etc, I've been pointing out in chat they just need to rally the bounty hunters up and go hog-chase him or whatever, but apparently either nobody did. Because he was just straight chilling out there among abunch of dead wrecks in an RSI Scorpius, the new meta on the block:
The scorpius is a massive and agile 2-man heavy fighter with 4 heavy repeaters operated by pilot and a single turret with 4 heavy repeaters that can move to the front or rear of the ship. It's the X-wing if it was twice the scale and R2D2 packed heat.
I myself, really had nothing to directly counter this monstrosity, that launched in this patch for an accidentally stupid-cheap amount of in-game money (they left off a zero, nottheonion), so people loaded into the patch and went into full murderhobo mode in some of them. I didn't really consider buying one to counter, though I could have. Instead I figured to best way to handle this ship was to count on other players showing up (who kinda did) and just trolling them in response to harassing players who, argued, they'd rather play or test in the PTU than get shot (not a requirement, part of the PTU is to test chaos).
I was gonna go to the show in the Drake Vulture I pledged because it's awesome it flies like a Spinner car from Blade Runner and it eats shipwrecks, strong Homeworld vibes for me, and Venture vibes for others. But it has **** all for weaponry, say hello to 1 of my 2 little frens on it:
Those really ain't doing ****, and it would take me another hour to use the test-cash to buy a different thing than in my hangar.
The Devs loaned me this Drake Buccaneer for my vulture pledge (reasons I guess) and it can be a pretty good response, but not great here, it's an 'interceptor,' much smaller than the Scorpius, 1 seat, and that big gun on top of the spine is just 1 of the 8 heavy repeaters on the scorpius. This thing would get utterly wrecked.
So I decided on a wholly whos-the-bigger asshole approach and I brought a Light Fighter I couldn't say no to last year, the MISC Reliant Tana:
It has 2 of those Size 4 weapons on it, to the Buccaneer's 1, and the Scorpius' staggering 8, but I wasn't bringing it to get into a laser-trade at all: this comes stock with 20 size 1 missiles. It is a stupid amount of harassment potential for 1 seat (the 2nd seat on the Reliant is pretty redundant the pilot can run everything), and, critically, I was at least pretty sure the Reliant had a faster acceleration and top speed than the Scorpius. So that's exactly what I did, went out to attack him, encouraged others to join, and through death by 20 launches of 1 missile, slowly drained his sanity dodging missile strikes, depleting his flares having the gunner shoot them down etc. and burning through his supply of hydrogen (the scorpius consumes an asston) to avoid missiles during his encounter with the swarm - could be a size 1 missile, could be someone else's size 4 missile, you can't take that chance normally. The scorp tried, but he couldn't catch up to me to get into weapons range and I kept scooting away, and it really ticked him off, he tried to chase me when I jumped away to rearm but yknow, top speed issues fren. I had left him low on fuel, out of countermeasures, and the nearest friendly place for a criminal in Stanton to rearm at was a 20 minute round trip from where we were: mission accomplished, this guy no longer had the fighting potential to "grief" other PVE players, AND every missile-hobo on global chat knew he was a free target now. I blew him a kiss in global chat and promised to be right back after a rearm but the server crashed before I could get back.
I rejoined a different server and carried on with the Xenothreat mission and managed to work cooperatively with some players in the photos I posted above in part. We scraped an Idris hull and sold off the earnings to another player who was in a Freelancer MAX, I open op the back door for him, he does the offload, I get paid and feel like Greef Karga making a deal for 5 seconds.
When the server reset the event again I went back out in the vulture to retrieve event-boxes from wrecks of Starfarers. Scanned Alpha wreck, knew to fight 6 NPCs but I forgot to bring a good gun, I just had a pistol. Managed to take down 3 but 3 killed me when I had to traverse down a ladder, I really hope flashbangs are possible in the future. But anyway, I'm downed. And now instead of just being dead and respawning I am able to put out a 911 beacon. I get a nice "**** you cheesebread" over comms from Papi319 (?) turns out he's my medic and he's apparently annoyed momentarily that he accepted my beacon from across Stanton, about 10 mins away, but whatever. I'm just chillin:
It took him a while to learn how to even get into the wreckage, and then to get to my position, but when he did he apparently disconnected/crashed as soon as he tried to hoist me up free and clear of the hostile room (alpha problems). And then I could hear is squadmates nearby in proximity chat explain he crashed. lol. Anyway.
He finally decided he need to just drop and fight the 3 hostiles I used prox to help him time his attacks, he nearly bit it for a minute and played cat and mouse with the last one, frustratingly, because it was *right there* and it was about to tap him in the back for a second.
He tried to heal me again and - he crashed. lol. Alpha problems. THE LAST NPC walked right past him like la la la this is normal. 20+ anxious minutes of being dead hoping to get revived and back on mission, for him to get here, figure out how to get in, fine me, look for the NPCs, etc. etc. and it was about to go to toilet.
He FINALLY reconnects, I'm excited af at this point, he finally pops the guy, and I think 'my hero!'
And then he goes "Hey Cheesebread" over prox
"Yeah?"
"TenaciousTomm sends his regards."
BLAM. I laughed my ass off all the way to the hospital bed. I had just been the victim of my first MMO assassination attempt. I congratulated Papi on the hit and ask if he'd leave the other PVE focused players alone to loot the mission items from the wreck. He obliged to finish clearing the ship for them and left for the Grim Hex. I thanked the pirate and we went our ways. I did however leave him a 1-star review for his medical rescue service.
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