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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ok, I know we love to shit on that “game”, but that video in and of itself left me speechless.
It’s objectively a good target for ridicule that the game has raised enough money to make the next Grand Theft Auto off of a strange and exploitative business model, been in development for over a decade, and still has no release date. At the same time, there’s more game in that public alpha than a handful of fully released products, so calling it a scam never made sense.
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.
Spending more than a basic access package is absolute stupidity and those that do it and regret it have no one to blame but themselves. I spent $45 dollars and play the exact same game and can buy most of those expensive ships with in game money after a few days of playing.
I have had hundreds of hours of great times in Star Citizen. Your anecdotal experience and very emotional hatred for this project because of your own bad financial choices doesn’t make my good experience, the most common experience, untrue. The massive, growing number of active users trumps your loud minoroty’s passionate hatered. Hatered 100% based on hot, salty tears because you wasted your own money on pretend spaceships like a spoiled child, not based on an objective look at things. You were 100% informed about the realities of this project, you just ignored it. I know this because I’ve been following it too and didn’t spend buckets of money on a videogame that isn’t even done yet. Because that would be really irresponsible of me.
This game keeps making money and keeps adding more users. This is because it is fun to play for more people than not. Otherwise they would be failing after this many years. Grow up, get a life, focus on games you like, ignore the ones you don’t like a healthy adult. Don’t spend money on speculative projects if you don’t want the project to change, caveats have been everywhere saying as much since day one. The only person that lied to you was you.
Not enjoying the game is a fair criticism. It is slow paced and there is no pvp off switch, only things you can do to minimize risk by learning best practices. It’s not for everyone. It’s going for a sci-fi second life vibe, it’s not very gamey. I don’t think everyone expects that. And the prototype criminality system is rather useless right now, you’re right, so you get griefers and undeserved fines here and there. I can still have a lot of fun despite these things, but I can totally see it being not worth everyone’s time, especially for the lesser flushed out jobs. I have had my share of bug induced rage quits.
But yeah, they are making a huge game in good faith, any claim of it being a scam is childish. Any claim that it’s not fun is a valid opinion if they’ve actually tried it.
They know whale hunting is paying for the game, without them it’d be a tiny, indy, space game we’d have all forgotten about by now like they thought they’d make back in the original in Kickstarter. Some people have better stuff than me because they earned it, some just bought it, but it’s more RPG than competitive shooter and the in-game progression is fair so far so it hasn’t been world breaking yet, plus it ads a lot of diversity and multicrew options right out the gates. So it’s not great, but it’s less shady than premium currencies, battle passes, or loot boxes to me.
@Stillhart @SeaOfTranquility even if it comes out its gonna be pay to win garbage. They sold goddamned star destroyers for thousands of dollars, you think those won’t have an advantage?
I can’t believe there’s people who still defend the amount of time and money that’s gone into this. It boggles the mind.
I will never let myself live down the stupidity and shame of falling for their bullshit not once, but twice. I’m ~$150 poorer thanks to my impressionable college-brain thinking their “complete in a few years” line back in 2014 was even remotely possible.
Well, think of it so that you spent $150 on a class on media literacy and a crash course on the dangers of unethical business practices.
Before Star Citizen got announced, I tried to get up a project that would’ve been better, bigger, and far more revolutionary… only I didn’t lie about it, so funding fell on blank stares at best, and a bunch of insults at worst.
Congrats, you voted with your wallet to get conned, so you got what you voted for. Same with No Man’s Sky.
The average citizen has no vision or perception of the costs involved, so you either con people, or nothing gets done.
Are you a well-known developer though? One of the reasons why Starfield attracted so much attention was the name Chris Roberts attached to it. As flawed as his legacy is, he’s a household name in the industry. Are you? What was your project about? How big was your team?
Precisely, you just described what’s needed to pull a con. My project was just an engine capable of running a real-scale galaxy with consistent time travel, we had no great concept artists capable of churning out eye candy marketing material. Should have made it a solo project about digging mines, or something.
I prefer that they are spending the money one actually developing advanced/new engine technologies than just releasing a half baked cames and a huge profit.
They got loads more money than they expected and increased the scope to match.
(I agree on the pricy ships though)
Even if they went bust and the game failed, I would be happy if other big studios got the engine.
Oh, so they’re like, actually making something with all that money, huh. Wow
Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and quality 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.
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.
Star Citizen 4.0 ?! Can we have Star Citizen 1.0 first maybe?
I mean, no? Version numbers don’t dictate the release readiness of something.
You want them to just call what they have now 1.0, before they implement the Alpha 4.0 features shown there? Because that’s the gist of what you said.
