Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.
I booted it up yesterday. Flew around at 10 FPS and gawked at some pretty locations. Bought armor and weapons for my allotted alpha money and crashed.
Booted it back up today, all gone. FPS was better. Took an elevator and got stuck in an ether-world. Respawned. Had to wait 10 real-time minutes for my ship to be “delivered” to the station it should’ve already been at. Flew to a lagrange point just to see the volumetric gas clouds. Couldn’t find any stations. RTB, quit, uninstalled.
I’m going to be brutally honest; if they do not start designing their ship cockpits with at least input from a real pilot then I’m gonna start being upset about it. You can’t see anything! Huge canopies in fighter cockpits, can’t see shid. I would accept this if they had implemented synthetic vision so you could just x-ray through the ship hull, but you can’t, and I’ve never heard them talk about it so I assume it’s not on the table. A lot of the ship HUDs are also dense with useless information, blocking more of my view.
Waiting 10 whole minutes to get your ship back is the devs not respecting the player’s time.
I know why they do it though, they want people to buy more ships so that they have one ready while the original is in a cool down period. This is also a similar tactic used by shitty mobile phone games.
Disagree. The intention is for SC to be a space sim sandbox, so I’m surprised they’re only making you wait 10m.
When you take your car into the shop and have to wait a few hours for it to be repaired, you don’t think “the solution they want me to go with is to buy a second car for this moment”, right? But that’s the argument you’re making here. If this is the lens you see all games through, then it’s impossible for anyone to make a game that’s just literally normal life.
Conversely, I could argue that mobile games are built around instant dopamine rushes. Any 10m wait is explicitly accompanied with an option to pay the wait away immediately. Afaik, that’s not an option here, if you’re a new player, you have to wait that 10m no matter what. Correct me if I’m wrong. But that’s not a very good job at capitalizing on the wait time.
The intention is for SC to be a space sim sandbox,
But it’s not, it’s a tech demo where your ship blows up on the pad for no reason
This isn’t a good argument, though. You replied to somebody stating the intention with a description of a game that’s in alpha.
Generally, they want everybody to have a good time, but that’s not realistic right now. Star Citizen isn’t being marketed as a fully functional game is being marketed as an alpha where people can see features that are being worked on.
Getting mad about one thing working as intended because something else isn’t right now just sounds like your expectations aren’t aligned with reality.
What value do timegates add to video games? How does the user experience improve or degrade if the wait is, say five minutes? One minute? None? Is the point of the simulation to wait for everything? What’s the difference between acceleration humans can’t survive and wait times? What’s the line we can’t cross to suspend disbelief?
I personally think it’s all made up so making me twiddle my thumbs for 10m is fucking stupid. If I wanted a waiting simulator I’d play “kickstarting Star Citizen” or a less punishing game like Desert Bus.
What value do timegates add to video games?
Well, if taming dinos in ARK was instantaneous, it would massively change the game, and turn it into nothing but a constant stream of t-rex (or other large predator monster) battles. Those 1-hour countdowns are a time-gate for balance.
If reloading in CS:GO was instantaneous, there would be no tactical decision around when you do it, or danger presented by it happening at an inopportune time. Those 3-second reloads are a time-gate for balance.
There are tons of time-gated mechanics across all sorts of games. You just don’t like this one.
How does the user experience improve or degrade if the wait is [less]?
Well, it means that other players may have to contend with them too-quickly returning to a fight as though nothing happened, which would be pretty crappy if you just got finished killing them. It would mean that if you fly across the solar system in a ship with a very fast Quantum Drive, you could potentially just summon your large, slow ship at your destination, effectively obviating the difference in travel time.
What’s the difference between acceleration humans can’t survive and wait times? What’s the line we can’t cross to suspend disbelief?
It’s not about realism, it’s about game balance. Your ships are something you need to take care of. Dying is and will have major consequences (loss of items, for instance). Do you think that Eve’s manufacturing timers are about realism, or that they are disrespectful to the players? Should a tiny shuttle take the same amount of time to build as a Titan (the largest ship class in the game)?
It’s game balance.
In spite of your short attention span, these are good questions. The point of a proper simulation isn’t to be fun, and game that wants to be fun is usually not a perfect simulation. A game that wants to be a fun simulation has to find the middle ground. I’ve heard it referred to as “the good suck”: It sucks to have to wait for something in a game to happen, but it contributes to a larger, sometimes desired feeling of immersion. But yeah, there’s always a line where the suck outweighs the fun.
In the case of SC, if the game literally makes you sit and do nothing for 10m, that’s one thing. But my guess is it doesn’t. My guess is you can do other things in the meantime. So it’s basically like any game: you can’t just do anything you want at any time, otherwise it’s not a game, it’s a skinner box.
In the case of SC, if the game literally makes you sit and do nothing for 10m, that’s one thing. But my guess is it doesn’t. My guess is you can do other things in the meantime
What do you mean by ‘guess’? Have you not played it?
It gives combat stakes.
TTK is obviously substantially longer than an FPS, so instead of the 15 seconds you need for an objective mode there, you need something more substantial for battles to fundamentally work.
“But that’s the argument you’re making here”
That is clearly NOT the argument they are making lol, stop making up stuff! The argument is it’s a game. It’s written there…
The only time you have to wait for the ship is if it’s destroyed or lost. If you fly it to the station or landing zone and stow it, the delivery is immediate.
And you can buy and rent ships in-game, using in-game money. This is about preventing you from instantly jumping back in the same ship repeatedly which could have huge implications for PvP, for instance.
The point still stands though. Arbitrary time restrictions like this make it more difficult to enjoy the game because you don’t get to fly the cool spaceships anymore, now you’re stuck on land or in a station somewhere until the timer expires.
Or, you know, you could
a) do stuff there since the landing locations are not just empty waiting rooms,
b) use another ship that you bought (in-game),
c) use another ship that you rent (in-game), or
d) fly/ get a ride with someone else.
Exactly. One could spend at least 10 mins just getting provisions like food liquids and gear by walking/running across the station and trams. Plenty to do with how spaced out (no pun intended) the facilities are. Maybe they should put ship insurance kiosks near the apts so that by the time you get to the space port you’d have to wait a minimum amount of time.
Those are excellent points if the game wasn’t a broken mess where your ship will blow up on the pad for no reason. It’s a tech demo, they even say as much, so I don’t understand why you have to insist that it’s a real game that people totally play for realsies. There are like 14 people who play the current iteration seriously, everyone else are just trying to keep up to date on the status of SC.
I would be a much bigger fan of SC if I didn’t have to grind for days to experience half of what this tech demo wants to demo me. Are we alpha testers or are we suckers? Also the game ate my money, anyway.
The time restriction will make sense when there is a game to play, not while it’s a tech demo.
There are like 14 people who play the current iteration seriously, everyone else are just trying to keep up to date on the status of SC.
At this point you are just flailing.
If you actually had any clue about SC or had bothered to Google it, you’d know DAU numbers (50,000 average daily players across all regions, in 2022), and you’d never have made such an inane claim.
And no, CIG does not call it a tech demo, they call it an alpha, the 2 of which are not remotely similar.
I’d like to meet those 50000 average daily players, because they sure aren’t on any of the server I play on.
I’m glad you’re having fun. This is not a reasonable response to criticism of your favorite space toy simulator. I have invested money into this, too. I also want it to thrive. I hope you have a lovely day.
“I’m just spreading literal, factual misinformation, but if you call me out directly then you’re being unreasonable and rude.”
Real pilots rely more on the instruments than the window
Yeah but they have a useful instrument panel. The panels in SC are not particularly useful except for combat. There’s 3 separate graphs that display your power usage in the Cutlass, not counting the HUD.
I’m not trying to be snarky, but landing in hangars or on pads in SC requires third person mode. You have no tools to check your clearance except experience. I have no issue landing F-35s in VTOL VR without autopilot assistance, or flying IFR/VFR in MSFS, but in SC I feel like I’m piloting a brick through a tank-commanders vision slits. Even dedicated fighters place the pilot so low in the cockpit that the entire bottom half of the screen is just interior and MFDs. Real fighter pilots can look down at a decent angle, because visual is essential in dogfighting which is the only kind of fighting this game has.
“A lot of the ship hud is dense with useless information.”
Ok, I know we love to shit on that “game”, but that video in and of itself left me speechless.
Oh, so they’re like, actually making something with all that money, huh. Wow
We’ve been trying to tell y’all this for years, we just want you to have fun and not listen to horrendous “journalists” that smear Star Citizen for clicks. But you don’t create multiple offices across the world with over 1000 full time employees and dozens of third party contractors if you’re trying to scam your fans. You also can’t create a AAA studio from the ground up in just a few years. This studio started with 8 people in a basement and it grew slowly, because you have to. Only so many people are looking for work at a time and only so many of them are hirable. It took them 10 years just to have as many devs as other AAA studios, but they knew they had the budget to go AAA from early on. So for a long time there weren’t enough people to deliver a game of this scope in a reasonable time. They knew it, we knew it, it was part of the plan. They were hiring like mad across the world for years and years because the payoff in the end will be a well supported AAA game like no other. Now that they are chugging along at full speed, people are starting to see what the rest of us have been trying to show you. Yes, Chris Roberts wants to be a billionaire CEO. But he also wants to build a rad game in good faith and has the money to do so.
So yeah, it’s taken a while and will be a while still, but it’s a genuinely fun game to play, even now. If it goes belly up tomorrow I’ve already got my money’s worth of enjoyment out of it. Every quarter, new massive updates drop. Once Squadron 42 is launched and running smoothly I think it will change a lot of hearts and minds. Just play SC during a free fly week. It’s janky as early access games always are, but genuinely a fun time.
You should all be angry at the shitty hit pieces that deprived you guys of quality online scifi shenanigans by lying to you about this game and remember gaming news isn’t always good journalism, sometimes reputable sites will post tabloid garbage because there are no rules, only shareholders and click quotas.
A AAA game company needs to release a AAA game to be one, so while they may be poised to be one in the future, they haven’t reached that label yet.
I suppose, if you want to argue symantics. Their intention is to build a AAA game is my meaning.
Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and logic of their decisions what you want, but they were always very honest and transparent about the work they are doing and the huge goal they are chasing.
I like the person casually walking into the fire at 19:05. I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly, most noticeably at the end of the video.
Amazing tech demo, but I wonder if they’re focusing on the right things. Physics-based nosebleeds are cool, but not as noticeable as getting reflections right.
I am in shock at the number of people upvoting positive comments about this scam project. Until they refund all the people they defrauded to get the project off the ground, they will continue to be dragged down by their own fucking karma.
Suckers want to spend money on it now, knowing everything we know now? That’s on you. But plenty of us didn’t know we were being conned at the time.
