Star Citizen: A PC-Only Space Sim by Chris Roberts

Forget No Man's Sky. Check out Planet Nomads.

edited 13th Dec '15 7:31:54 AM by AnotherGuy

Looks like Space Sims are gonna become the rage for a while until the market for it becomes oversaturated.

What the trailer doesn't show is that you get off the planet and conquer other worlds. Muah-ha-ha.

Oh, there's also Rokh. Which is DayZ ON MARS! FYI - you don't need a zombie threat there. The planet itself is trying to kill you.

edited 13th Dec '15 7:39:03 AM by AnotherGuy

Goddamn No Man's Sky is getting rekt, all that boast about the feature is now moot.

edited 17th Dec '15 10:03:23 AM by YoKab

Well... Time to start upgrading my comp!

The one thing I hope is that the planetary procedural generation isn't all big rocks in space. I'd like to see biomes.

That's positively ancient.

In other news, the Vanguard is now flyable. It's strafing rate is absolutely ridiculous, and it basically murders every other ship in the game short of a fully crewed constellation. Balance.

edited 20th Jan '16 1:43:59 PM by CaptainCapsase

I cast Reraise on the thread with this:

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen .

Found the article about the game in question referred to on Rock Paper Shotgun, and I decided to have a little read. Turns out to be one of the best written articles on any game I've ever read, and it's on Kotaku? I swear, the next thing to happen is going to be human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together... mass hysteria.

Small nugget:

"One person in particular put it best: “Chris Roberts is surrounded by some incredibly talented people whom he pushes to the absolute limit, then demands that they stay there. There were some absolutely amazing things coming out of Star Citizen. Enough to fuel several AAA games. If Star Citizen does end up hitting the goals that Roberts has planned (by beating his horses to death to get to the finish line), there is no doubt in my mind it will be amazing."

Doesn't help that Roberts did a poor job planning ahead, and that the lack of coordination between the out-sourced devs cost him some major setbacks.

At least Roberts realizes now that he needs to reel in expectations and goals instead of constantly expanding.

Well they are no longer owned by Gawkers, so their staff is allowed to be professional again!

But in all seriousness, as someone who has followed the Star Citizen debacle for a while, a lot of this isn't news. It's nice seeing it all together (Though the article is focused mostly on the development side and skips on a lot of the controversies that have plagued the game from poor community managers to rather disputable changes to terms of services).

It's still all up in the air what game, if any, will come out of this.

I'm more of a semi-disinterested observer of the game, as the first time I came across it was either a Jimquisition video or one done by Razorfist, (I've watched videos by both guys on the game and boy howdy did they seem unimpressed), so much if not all of that article was new to me.

I hope the backers get some sort of game out of this - over 125 million dollars is firstly a lot of money, and secondly a Doctor Evil-type level of ransom.

Mind you, most of that comes from people who have given frankly ludicrous amount of money. Like, read the 2nd comment, and it's from a guy who dropped 2000 bucks' on this. Like... Wow. Why?

Kotaku has an article about them and like, on one hand, yeah, these people deserve a game, but on the other... something about having more money than common sense?

And look, I know the power of Nostalgia. I own hundreds of Transformer Figures, and I've given Kickstarter money to games based on nostalgia factor that are in Development Hell. I get that.

But dropping 5 figure numbers of money on this? WTF???? And these are not millionaires either...

edited 28th Sep '16 7:29:40 PM by Ghilz

Are you interested in giving the current state of the game a brief whirl? If so, you're in luck: the game's got a brief free period from now until October 30th. You only get a single starship, but it's a fighter craft from the looks of things so at least you won't be stuck with a boring freighter.

So this came up in my Youtube feed:

So...there were backers who wanted to be able to spend $28,000 on this game? And the devs actually decided to do it?

SMH

As I undertsand, they're not charging a thousand bucks so you can spend almost thirty thousand. This insane $27,000 bundle is only available to those who have already sunk at least a thousand in it. It's only for the absurd backer tier in the first place.

This game...

I don't know what to make of it. Like, I hope it's a solid game that'll get horribly crucified for not being the Single Greatest Thing Ever. But I have no idea if it'll ever get to that point. A bundle of video game units shouldn't be nearly $30k, ever, and I'll argue digital bullshit shouldn't be a hundred in the first place.

Why do they need the money, on top of the hundred million they raised? What the hell is really going on?

Really incompetent management and poor game engine choice, from the looks of things.

I know that switching from Cry Engine to Unity wasted a huge amount of their time and resources. Worse yet, they had initially tried pulling off what Ubisoft and Square Enix typically perform with their titles and have several smaller game devs assist in production. Problem was, they didn't do a good enough job staying in communication, and this resulted in the FPS game world assets such as doorways, stairwells, hallways etc being incorrectly sized. The smaller dev also forgot that the perspective of a VR FPS player is going to cause some odd visual issues that a typical FPS player wouldn't encounter (namely, remember how most FPS games actually have the 'camera' placed around the upper torso?)

edited 9th Jun '18 10:22:11 AM by SgtRicko

Seems to be similar issues with MN 9, TBH.

MN 9 and SC aren't even in the same league of dysfunctional. SC also has a rabid, almost cult-like fanbase that's still throwing literal millions at this project despite the current level of completion being laughable while being rabid towards anyone who doesn't share the conviction this is going to come out and revolutionize gaming. Sid Alpha got death threats against his own life and his daughter's when he commented on the 27,000$ DLC pack.

Seriously, some of the videos of people reviewing ships is laughable. "Oh this ship here has a crew station. It doesn't do anything yet, but it's so cool. And there's this seat here. You can't interact with it, but it's so cool. And this ladder here. You can't climb it yet, but it's so cool."

Comparing MN 9 and SC is frankly at this point an insult to MN 9. Coz ya know, they released a game.

I mean in terms of why production is floundering. Mismanagement, making more and more promises, etc. It is true that MN 9 backers were not as toxic as SC’s more rabid supporters.

MN 9 backers were less forgiving, which is probably why a game was eventually released. If they were as rabid as the SC backers, Inatune would have milked their wallets even longer.

Another free period for the next couple of days has come around, and this time I managed to give the game a try. I've only played it for a couple of hours, but honestly I think the opinion I have now will likely be the same several more hours down the line.

Said opinion is that while Star Citizen's attention to detail and immersion is absolutely impressive (I didn't know they bothered to model the ship interiors so intricately, even the bigger freighters!), it is sadly still a seriously buggy mess in dire need of further optimizations and additional content. A few quick notes:

• This isn't a hardcore space sim, at least when it comes to the controls. It's pretty clear the devs wanted players to quickly get the basics of piloting their crafts down, and left the nuance to more complicated moves, such as drifting via inertial momentum, or the oddities that the lack of a "down" in space means for orientation and approach.
• You'll definitely need a powerful rig to run this title efficiently. My framerate was probably averaging around 15 fps and less with frequent brief freezes and stutters, along with texture pop-up. My desktop has a Ge Force 1050ti GPU, a Ryzen 5 CPU, 16gb RAM, and an SSD boot drive, which I even made a point to install the game on for any hopeful improvements in load times. At least the graphics look sweet.
• I'm reminded of No Man's Sky, in more ways than one. That's certainly due to how the missions system in No Man's Sky works akin to the system in Star Citizen - kill a marked target, find and harvest materials, examine a sector, rendezvous with individuals, etc.
• The SFX is clearly borked, especially in the FPS PVP mode. In almost every match, the sound, especially the announcers, would only begin to talk well when the game is already in progress. I've also heard delayed grenade detonations which took more than 5 seconds to sound off.
• If you're not following one of the bounties or missions, exploring the bases on each planet is gonna get boring, quick. Not much lively behavior in the outposts and space stations, save for the occasional player you might encounter.

Edited by SgtRicko on Aug 26th 2018 at 1:40:52 AM

Ok seriously screw this game, it's buggy to the point of irritation. Buggy enough to the point where I've seriously gained a large amount of respect and appreciation for the current state No Man's Sky is in, which certainly has its share of ugly glitches.

I decided to give Star Citizen a second shot today and actually try to get into a dogfight, or at least finish a contract assignment or two. Nope, couldn't even figure that one out - I only got as far as selecting two jobs from the contracts list, supposedly "tracking" them, and... that's it. Couldn't figure out how to actually locate the mission location within the orbit of Crusader (the game's starting point, which happens to be a gas giant with a small space station orbiting it).

After asking via the local chat, I was told that I'd likely see the waypoint markers appear once I approached one of the small moons around Crusader's orbit, so I decided to do that... which in itself is tricky, because you're supposed to "Spool Up" your Quantum engines and warp towards the target. That requires you to face towards it with no obstacles in the way and briefly charge up your engines - should be easy, if No Man's Sky was an indication, but nooo, this game's glitchy map interface refuses to properly display every now and then, the ship suddenly stops the Quantum jump process for no apparent reason, or it simply refuses to jump at all.

Eventually I get it to jump towards the destination and arrive, but I've still yet to reach the advised planet. Thus, I go back into the map interface and figure out just where I need to go next. During this time must've pressed the wrong button, because all of a sudden I couldn't get out of the "look/context" mode... oh, and it was at this point that a random starfighter decided to engage and attack me. Not sure if it was an actual player or NPC AI, but given that the hostile had some oddly long periods of nothing between strafing runs I'm leaning on the human troll side of things. During this, I'm struggling to figure out how to exit the "look/context" mode and properly pilot the craft, and begin to realize that the controls probably glitched out. For some reason I could spin the craft around and even occasionally fire off the cannons, but whenever I'd left-click anywhere near the cockpit's frontal view my character, still stuck in the "look/context" thinga-majigger, I'd wind up selecting the option to EXIT THE CRAFT IN SPACE WHILE THE SHIP STILL HAS MOMENTUM. Granted I was insanely lucky the first two times that happened since my craft was just spinning around aimlessly, not actually moving with any significant speed, but the third time I wasn't - I exited while the engines were still pushing forward, meaning I got to watch as my starship rapidly floated away from me, leaving me stranded in the middle of the black abyss.

First time I rage-uninstalled in a LONG time.

Oh, and those weren't the only issues either. The last time I was playing I decided to quit on one of the nearby moons I had disovered, thinking I'd start on the starship or nearby it, akin to No Man's Sky. Nope... I started off back on the Space Station near Crusader's orbit instead, with the previous ship still stuck on the planet's surface. I had to choose one of the other four as a result, but at least my second choice, the Avenger Titan, was a pretty-looking ship and handled well.

Oh, another thing - it's damned near impossible to effectively engage targets when the framerate is so low and the interface doesn't reliably activate 100% of the time. Yeah, that was another issue during that absurd moment where I was trying to figure out how to get the damned ship working again during a battle.

Safe to say, I won't be touching this game until it finally reaches a proper release and a ton of fixes.

Forbes op-ed:

And Your Monthly 'Star Citizen' Controversy Is...A $20 Paywall To Watch CitizenCon

So CIG is charging $20 for people to watch their Citizen Con stream.

This isn't normal, right? I'm correct in thinking this is kind of shitty?