Oh hey, that's that Star Citizen-related dingamabob, innit? Is that still a thing? Feels like it's been years.
Squadron 42 Trailer
- Thread starter B-Cell_v1legacy
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Six years. Still alpha.Chimpzy said:
Sad thing is, this thread now has me looking on their web site and tempted to upgrade my lifetime hull. I know I shouldn't, I *know*, but still want...
There are some ship tour videos on YT i'm watching right now, some look great. But none of it exists. My heart sees awesome ship with weapon points, cargo bay, jump drive, cockpit, and I'm wondering which ones are faster, tougher, all that stuff, but my head knows it's wrong.
While I won't argue about Roberts state as a professional, its worth noting both Freelancer and Wing Commander were delayed, overambitous, miles overbudget projects that directly led to their parent companies getting bought out due to the financial strains. Not a ringing endorsement of trusting their finanical management (whether they can deliver their ambition with an effectively unlimited budget is a toss-up)KingsGambit said:
X3 had saves, and I want to keep the destroyer that I lost fighting in hostile space.KingsGambit said:
Just let me save-scum, and I will buy it.
If you like your Destroyer, and or carrier you should keep your destroyer, and or carrier.
I think you and Silent are right in judging it. He made great games, but ran the projects/studio badly. What's clear is that four years after promised delivery on a project that no longer matches what was promised, having so much money caused the project to derail. What was a single player space sandbox now has a persistent world, planetary flight/landing, first/third person views and FPS combat, motion capture and Hollywood actors, etc.Seth Carter said:
Between this thread and the trailer, I've been watching videos all morning and afternoon. What's there looks incredible. Watching someone walk around a high fidelity ship interior with functioning cargo doors, ramps, airlocks, moving seats and instruments, it's very impressive and immersive. Going thru a hangar door, entering the ship, the cockpit, taking off, flying to a jump point and going FTL, flying to a planet, entering atmosphere, landing, leaving the ship, walking on a planet into a facility to physically pick up a box. All animated and mocapped, no loading screens. It's crazy. But the fact it's still alpha four years late, with no end in sight and the majority of that $100mill+ gone by now it's worrying.
It's a weird title to be sure. It can't be called vapourware like Duke Nukem Forever was for the 9-10 years (before Gearbox actually made it), it's not beta, not a tech demo...it's just in eternal development. With a publisher controlling milestones and budget it would have released already, but complete freedom, 50x more money than they planned on raising, a need to justify having so much money and no one to kerb Chris Roberts means the ambition kept growing. I wonder if it's a symptom of crowd funding. What happens if one tries to raise $1mill to fund a project but backers pledge $10mill? I wonder if any other games have had a similar development history.
I don't know if S42 will have manual saves or not, heck we don't know if it will ever release or not. I'm not going to argue against X3, I love those games and while there are flaws, they aren't relevant.Gergar12 said:
But consequences are generally good in games. Dark Souls wouldn't have birthed a genre had it not reintroduced a cost of failing back into ARPGs. Having something to lose makes victory sweeter. I'm not making comment about any specific approach, and I'll say I'm not a fan of "hardcore" games for the most part (does Don't Starve count?). But as long as ships are insured (I believe cargo/gear is also insurable outside the most extreme high risk systems) you lose nothing more than time. There's a lesson to be learned from losing a ship, whether it's to avoid a mistake, equip better guns, position differently, accelerate harder, etc, etc.
X4: Foundations is out next month and while it doesn't have planetary flight/landing, it does have walking, no loading screens and saves, not to mention station building and the ability to fly almost everything.
Honestly, the whole Star Citizen thing is such a mess.. and it makes me genuinely angry, because if they had just come out with a decent idea for a space game rather than trying to build the bloated, feature-creeping massively multiplayer multi-game virtual storefront they seem to have ended up with they could have built an incredible game.
At this point, even if they did pull everything together and somehow deliver on the game they promised (which isn't going to happen) think for a second about what it's going to be like. You have people who will have already spent thousands and thousands of dollars buying enormous stables of virtual ships, vehicles, land or whatever they need. In other words, you'll be competing with people who have already bought their way to victory, just like real life. If real life was fun, you probably wouldn't need your virtual spaceship fantasy.
The fact that the game seems to be falling into a permanent cycle of making new ships, selling new ships to fund development and then having to sink that money into making even more ships, with actual work on the game's mechanics or core features being slow and almost incidental by comparison and most of the marketing focusing on the ships and the storefront, suggests that there is a definite problem with finances.ebalosus said:
At this point, even if they did pull everything together and somehow deliver on the game they promised (which isn't going to happen) think for a second about what it's going to be like. You have people who will have already spent thousands and thousands of dollars buying enormous stables of virtual ships, vehicles, land or whatever they need. In other words, you'll be competing with people who have already bought their way to victory, just like real life. If real life was fun, you probably wouldn't need your virtual spaceship fantasy.
Do you harbour the same doubts for this Squadron 42 side-game?evilthecat said:
Honestly Squadron 42 is really what people were asking for with the kickstarter pitch for Star Citizen.
No one in their right mind wanted this to be freakin EVE Online on steroids or anything, and who knows who long the service will be up if they even manage to maintain interest for the game long term with support?
We just wanted a simple Sci-Fi Flight-Sim Action game ala Wing Commander and Star Wars X-Wing.
Impressive- they've managed to make armed starfleets look boring. A 3 minute trailer with absolutely nothing in it.
Yes and NoSamtemdo8 said:
They are using "amazon lumberyard". From what I understand it is CryEngine 3 however it also has Amazon Bloatware. So effectively speaking Amazon can monitor your network communications within the game.
Also someone who is smug and full of glee that I haven't invested a single penny into the game - For something that costs so much RSI are very much cheapskates.
They keep on tacking new reward tiers usually, which has the obvious pitfall of a)Not being part of the actual design vision. b)Suddenly you need to go find people that actually know how to do whatever (I think it was Pillars of Eternity or Torment whatever its called that started rushing out to hire buzzname writers and so on when they passed their original goals (both those netted about 4mil on ~1mil askings)).KingsGambit said:
Which kind of is the problem, really. I guess some system could be designed to adjust for excess pledges where people could put in their max, but if the project got major interest it would scale everyone's individual contribution down to only meet the budget.
The current kind of standing of it leads to the "Well now we've got to do more" approach for project developers. Sometimes its feature creep, sometimes its stunt-casting talent, sometimes its novelty merchandise that has been historically a bit hit and miss. Some ideas grow organically, but most of it seems sort of forcefully tacked on. Like No Mans Sky (which wasn't kickstarted of course, but had a similar rush of interest in what was originally a much more distinct concept) mutated off into a base building game at some point, which is utterly divorced from its original presentation as a constant journey.
Shroud of the Avatar was the other semi-big one, getting 11 million of its 1 million goal. That actually released in March and, well, you might have missed it. It certainly didn't revive the Ultima Online style MMO that it was kind of going for.
I harbour doubts.Samtemdo8 said:
I mean, let's talk about boring corporate stuff for a second. In a normal video game studio, a game has one or more directors and one or more producers (sometimes called project managers). The director's job is to oversee the creative process of the game, to come up with the concept and cool ideas and to make the game as fun as possible. The producer's job is to ensure the game is delivered on time, and that the project is workable and achievable and doesn't go over budget. This often means the director and producer are in conflict, as part of the producer's job is to force the director to kill their darlings and compromise for the sake of completing the project.
In Cloud Imperium games, Chris Roberts is the "chairman & CEO" but in practice he has a vast and nebulous role which effectively leaves him as the director of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 while also being unaccountable to any producer. This probably seems great if you're a fan who is fully on the hype train, it means the Roberts can do whatever he wants without being held back by the crass demands of actually producing a sellable product. In reality, however, it's a terrible, terrible idea and you can never, never trust anything good to come out of this process, and that would be true even if Roberts was not an easily distracted obsessive perfectionist who has a long history of not being able to finish games on time or within budget.
Anyway, let's move on.
There's a restaurant in New York which sells a $2000 pizza. It's literally topped with flakes of 24 karat gold, and is essentially just a mix of really stupidly expensively ingredients thrown together like Foie Gras, Truffles and Caviar. It is, by all accounts, horrible, because it turns out just throwing a bunch of expensive things together doesn't make something which tastes good, but it exists because people assume that something which is expensive must automatically be good, or why else would it be expensive?
Even if we take out the huge problems with Star Citizen/S42 development, we are still left with a big problem. The problem that it is a $2000 pizza. Everything about the game seems designed to give the impression that it had a lot of money spent on it, or that no compromise was made in its creation, but that doesn't translate into a good game. Cryengine was designed for first person shooters. It's actually a terrible engine for the game they want to make, but it has a reputation for being visually stunning. It looks expensive. It looks high quality, therefore that's the one. Then there's the cast, which is like a nerd culture dream team. But hollywood has professional casting agents for a reason. Just putting big names or recognisable people in every single role does not make for a good cast. It makes for a lot of "hey kids, it's (literally) Mark Hamill!" moments and again, it makes something look expensive, but expensive does not mean good. When you write roles specifically for actors based on their previous work, you're probably not going to get original or interesting performances.
Finally, since Star Citizen and Squadron 42 use the same basic engine and framework, we can infer from the state of Star Citizen that development of the actual gameplay part of S42 is.. well.. pretty dismal. People have been waiting for fundamental improvements to the core systems, or even for those systems to be added in at all, for years now. Meanwhile, development seems to be focused on pumping out more and more buyable ships because, frankly, that's where the money is now.
Well, if that were true, and I don't think it is because I'm pretty sure if you brought that up to the Star Citizen community you're going to get accused of being goonFUD or some bullshit, I'm kind of with you. That is totally what Chris Roberts should have done, just stopped putting out stretch goals, taken the money they had and crafted a really solid, tight and focused single player experience. But again, Roberts doesn't know how to deal with the management of business side of making games, and thus saw this as the chance to realise his dream of a perfect, impossibly giant supergame which people could retreat into and never again have to face the harsh realities of real life, and a lot of overly credulous, short-sighted fans seem to have totally bought into that dream, which is an unworkable dream which will never really happen.Samtemdo8 said:
We could have had an awesome spaceship game. We're not going to get one. That's why this whole episode makes me angry.
So I figured while it's on the mind and being discussed, I'll take a look at what is there right now. The tier I pledged at 6 years ago included access to both S42 and SC alpha/beta/release. After logging in, I downloaded a small installer. Running it downloaded about 11GB of data, which after completing *then* downloaded another 37GB.
On firing it up, it includes three game modes. Arena Commander is dogfighting against players or AI. There was an FPS module and there was "Star Citizen". That last option included two further options...the alpha persistent universe or the Hangar module, which loads the player's choice of hangar within which they can explore their owned ships and change equipped gear (apparently). I started with the hangar just to try figuring out the on-foot controls and to see my ship. It wasn't intuitive but after some google-fu, I summoned it, boarded it and played with some switches. The ship itself is great, tho it has collision issues in two of the four hangars. Walking around it, the way things open, close and animate is great. Visuals and sound are really good.
The persistent universe, I had so much trouble loading into. Kept crashing, sometimes before loading in, sometimes 5 seconds after, sometimes 45 seconds after. I verified the game and even reinstalled. In the end, I double the size of my OS paging file which seems to have fixed it (but which I resent doing because I have so much RAM I shouldn't need to, and no other game needs it). I have a top CPU from two generations ago and the top GFX card from this gen. You begin in a space station with other players and NPCs. There are some shops for avatar items like clothes and weapons. The clothes don't seem to be implemented yet. There's a central computer bank for summoning ships, calling up one's "fleet" and letting the player pick which they want. It then loads the ship onto a specific docking bay and you have to find that specific landing pad for your ship (ie. it is not instanced). I actually quite like that feature, it's really immersive and feels like you're actually in a space station.
The UI is hard to figure out. My character fell over dead at one point and I'm not sure why. It monitors health, heart rate, oxygen tank levels...I think it's a little too much detail. There are tabs for repairs, contacts (players? NPCS? No idea), ships, equipment, avatar loadout and missions. So on the missions tab, I think they are random, they are seen by all players and they have time limits. I'm not very keen on this. I wasn't able to complete one tho I did try.
I did get to my ship and take off. The controls with KB/M aren't optimal (I might see if there's a way to get steam controller working but that's really time consuming), in particular the mouse controlling pitch and yaw. I took off and went in circles for ages. I did figure out take off, landing, landing gears, thrusters eventually. However as soon as I got out of the "safe zone" around the station, I was accosted by two hostiles and after attempting to do battle, my guns and engines stopped working so I logged off.
Came back later, guess my ship persisted and got destroyed. Claimed it on insurance, had to wait 15mins and when it came back, it had no doors so I couldn't get in. More google-fu revealed the doors thing is a bug, had to claim it again, waiting 15mins again, this time it had doors. Had to log at that point.
I gave the dogfighting module a go while waiting the 15m. Being a noob I can't blame the game entirely for my difficulties but I think I sorta got the idea. I don't understand how weapons/shields/energy works yet, but the flight mechanics and aiming I got and I got a couple of kills. This is a thing where flying different ships with different loadouts and in different "arenas" should play out differently, with handling, acceleration, energy management. I didn't spend enough time to get into it into it.
I don't know how much of the galaxy exists and there are some complex mechanics I haven't worked out yet. 4 years late, the fact is it is a different beast than the kickstarter proposed. There are working, highly detailed ships, flight mechanics, planet surfaces and structures, ground vehicles, FPS weapons/combat, ship damage states, etc. But that is just a collection of mechanics, not a game. If after 6 years they've just got mechanics and still no fleshed out game in sight, they've got a tech demo and that's worrying. Considering that there are still bugs and many things aren't finalised or implemented yet (including many ships), how much longer might it be before release?
On firing it up, it includes three game modes. Arena Commander is dogfighting against players or AI. There was an FPS module and there was "Star Citizen". That last option included two further options...the alpha persistent universe or the Hangar module, which loads the player's choice of hangar within which they can explore their owned ships and change equipped gear (apparently). I started with the hangar just to try figuring out the on-foot controls and to see my ship. It wasn't intuitive but after some google-fu, I summoned it, boarded it and played with some switches. The ship itself is great, tho it has collision issues in two of the four hangars. Walking around it, the way things open, close and animate is great. Visuals and sound are really good.
The persistent universe, I had so much trouble loading into. Kept crashing, sometimes before loading in, sometimes 5 seconds after, sometimes 45 seconds after. I verified the game and even reinstalled. In the end, I double the size of my OS paging file which seems to have fixed it (but which I resent doing because I have so much RAM I shouldn't need to, and no other game needs it). I have a top CPU from two generations ago and the top GFX card from this gen. You begin in a space station with other players and NPCs. There are some shops for avatar items like clothes and weapons. The clothes don't seem to be implemented yet. There's a central computer bank for summoning ships, calling up one's "fleet" and letting the player pick which they want. It then loads the ship onto a specific docking bay and you have to find that specific landing pad for your ship (ie. it is not instanced). I actually quite like that feature, it's really immersive and feels like you're actually in a space station.
The UI is hard to figure out. My character fell over dead at one point and I'm not sure why. It monitors health, heart rate, oxygen tank levels...I think it's a little too much detail. There are tabs for repairs, contacts (players? NPCS? No idea), ships, equipment, avatar loadout and missions. So on the missions tab, I think they are random, they are seen by all players and they have time limits. I'm not very keen on this. I wasn't able to complete one tho I did try.
I did get to my ship and take off. The controls with KB/M aren't optimal (I might see if there's a way to get steam controller working but that's really time consuming), in particular the mouse controlling pitch and yaw. I took off and went in circles for ages. I did figure out take off, landing, landing gears, thrusters eventually. However as soon as I got out of the "safe zone" around the station, I was accosted by two hostiles and after attempting to do battle, my guns and engines stopped working so I logged off.
Came back later, guess my ship persisted and got destroyed. Claimed it on insurance, had to wait 15mins and when it came back, it had no doors so I couldn't get in. More google-fu revealed the doors thing is a bug, had to claim it again, waiting 15mins again, this time it had doors. Had to log at that point.
I gave the dogfighting module a go while waiting the 15m. Being a noob I can't blame the game entirely for my difficulties but I think I sorta got the idea. I don't understand how weapons/shields/energy works yet, but the flight mechanics and aiming I got and I got a couple of kills. This is a thing where flying different ships with different loadouts and in different "arenas" should play out differently, with handling, acceleration, energy management. I didn't spend enough time to get into it into it.
I don't know how much of the galaxy exists and there are some complex mechanics I haven't worked out yet. 4 years late, the fact is it is a different beast than the kickstarter proposed. There are working, highly detailed ships, flight mechanics, planet surfaces and structures, ground vehicles, FPS weapons/combat, ship damage states, etc. But that is just a collection of mechanics, not a game. If after 6 years they've just got mechanics and still no fleshed out game in sight, they've got a tech demo and that's worrying. Considering that there are still bugs and many things aren't finalised or implemented yet (including many ships), how much longer might it be before release?
Samtemdo8 said:
You wot!?
The game that CR sold us was an online spiritual successor to Freelancer and Privateer, with the single-player campaign being a stretch goal. I backed the game expecting them to focus on the former moreso than the latter, and feel to this day that they're wasting time, money, and resources on something I didn't particularly care for in the first place.
I backed Elite Dangerous for much the same reason, and although I criticise FDev for removing the promised offline single-player a mere three weeks away from launch, I always intended to (and currently do) play the game in online mode, because that's what I wanted.
The people who pretend that most people backed SC for SQ42 are akin to the people in the Elite Dangerous fandom who pretend that most people backed that game for offline single-player despite what the developers of either games actually intended. I at least applaud SC for not kowtowing to the carebears and other assorted scrubs who want to drag space-MMOs down to WoW's level.
From the kickstarter page [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen]:ebalosus said: