Star Citizen: $48,000 is only $334/month for 12 years

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Star Citizen: $48,000 is only $334/month for 12 years

Sarsapariller: Aug 14, 2015; Occasional vampire queen

Mission Report: 11/25/2019

My self-imposed mission: Find something, anything, approaching fun in the game.

Report Begins

I wake up in a new wank pod. More of a wank locker room, really. It would appear that players have been relocated to Area 18 on Arccorp for the duration of the convention. This is somewhat of an improvement over last year, when players were forced to spawn at Port Olisar and then navigate their way on a 40-minute flight across the entire system to Hurston just to get to the convention, with no prompting. However, Area 18 is clearly not happy to see me. No, not at all. The game appears to be angry. It is stuttering and glitching and lagging in ways that I haven't seen in years- it feels like I've gone back in time to 2015 when the servers could barely hold up under the weight of twenty people flying around Port O. My rig has not fundamentally changed since the last time I logged into this shitheap four or five months ago, so it seems likely that this is not a me problem, it is a Chris problem. As all problems in Star Citizen must, inevitably, be. I press the Y button to get out of bed, a clear and obvious keybind that I do not have to spend several minutes hunting for. I go to hunt for a Wonkavator down to the convention.

But it is not to be. Obviously the bounty that lies within the convention center must be protected from mere gawkers. I'm going to have to loving earn it. The first Wonkavator finally arrives and of course it will only take me down to the lobby. There is another commando in the elevator with me. He is twitching and jittering like a meth addict passed through a stop-motion horror movie filter. I try to ignore him and step inside. The elevator lurches into life and comes to a stop- I step out. It is the wrong floor, just another endless line of wank lockers. Before I can step in again, the doors close, stranding me. I reflect that it is actually really hard to navigate in this world because every interior space looks exactly the loving same, but my meditations are interrupted by another Wonkavator arriving. I manage to ride this one down to the ground floor.

Area 18 is looking rough. It has the art assets of an entire city now, but crammed into the space of a single CryEngine map. Every surface is just dripping with pointless art and cyberpunk clutter. Wires and hotdog stands and gun merchants and steam from vents and cars overhead and NPC's milling about everywhere. All of this is probably supposed to give the scene some semblance of life, but it is all so generic and poorly integrated that it mostly just looks like somebody's Unity asset store got sick and threw up all over a public shopping center. My frames plummet into the single digits and I try to navigate to the convention by following the bright pink, glowing ads. This is not as easy as it sounds. There are ads on every loving surface, I mean that, seriously. They plaster the walls and the ceilings and the sky and the floors- ads for fictional sodas and clothing lines and spaceships and brands, brands, brands. They flicker and spark and they animate and some of them are 3D and holographic and they clutter every surface so badly that the eye goes nuts trying to find something, anything, to latch onto. The bright pink convention ads aren't even the only bright pink ads in the area- it is really difficult to tell poo poo apart, visually. I reflect that if you were to show me a vision of my own personal hell, it would probably look a lot like the glorious future that Chris Roberts has imagined for us.

As I walk towards the train I am repeatedly spammed by requests for deep space assistance. These non-sequitur mission requests take up about 20% of the screen, flashing on and then timing out, flashing on and then timing out. They are constant. This was a bug introduced in the spring of this year- the NPC's constantly spam these global missions for help when they are under attack. You could not possibly get to them in time to help, and they pay next to nothing anyway, so it's literally just a visual bug that punctuates the hellscape that the game has become. Obviously, I note, it has not been fixed. I also note as I walk that the NPC's have not received any upgrades. They still spin in place, wander aimlessly through the furniture, and clip into one another. It seems like the sort of thing that a person intent on making an actual video game might prioritize instead of, say, more neon-glowing brand art. But I know nothing about games development.

The train shudders and jerks into position and I begin my ride to the expo. This is another Chris-guided static tour through the cityscape, swooping around buildings and zooming toward the big convention center. Again, I can't help but be struck by the ubiquity of the ads plastering every surface, but here it is kind of a mercy. Without them, the buildings would look identical- tall and red and grey, differing only in height and angle. The entire city is like a rough sketch, which would be fine if the game didn't insist on the player doing nothing but staring at it out of moving windows for long segments of the gameplay.

Finally I arrive. The convention center, at last! The bus stop I arrive at is perfectly identical to the one I departed from. Did I take too long and go round trip? I have a moment of confusion. But no, this is actually a new place, except they made it by just copy-pasting the assets from the last place. Everything in Star Citizen looks the god drat same. Every station, every planet, every hallway. It's all grey corroded metal and glowing ads and military numbers on doors. It becomes extremely disorienting.

Stepping into the hall, I am greeted by the first actual portion of the convention and what I see shouldn't surprise me, shouldn't shock me in the least, but somehow it does. It's merch. Digital merch. The front room of the convention is an in-game t-shirt and hat store because of course it is. There are t-shirts for every brand of ship manufacturer, as well as special t-shirts for the ship expo itself (they are pink). The booths are shockingly unmanned, and it is unclear if the NPC's here are simply very trusting with their merchandise in the presence of strangers or if they all wandered off to a bathroom and clipped through a floor, never to be seen again. In any case, their many, many shirts are free for the taking.

I should note here of course that wearing anything other than a space suit and helmet in the game will get you killed instantly by invisible pockets of vacuum, and that anything you buy here will be reset by the next patch, presumably released in the next couple of weeks. So it's really all just extra-double super spectacularly pointless with a side of loving fudge, but that's Star Citizen.

I struggle with another Wonkavator but finally, after this 20-plus minute journey, I disembark and find myself at the convention center. Lo and behold, it is the exact same featureless grey room as last year's convention on Hurston. It is RSI day, named for the Chairman Himself, and much like its namesake it is very clear that Roberts Space Industries hasn't done gently caress-all in the last year. It is exactly the same layout with the same ships and vehicles- not one element has changed, except the new "Mantis" ship. Except they built the convention displays last year when it didn't exist, so rather than move everything they've just kind of awkwardly plonked it in the center of the pile of ships. NPC's move around the same paths from the year before- many of their paths taken them directly through the nacelles of this new ship. That's fine, this is fine. I see my second other actual human being of the day, and realize that the server lag is even worse than I thought. He skitters around the convention center like the world's biggest cockroach, often moonwalking at 50 mph as he rockets from one place to another, head constantly inclined upwards at the slumbering polygonal behemoths around us. Just think, I say to him, one day you might own one of these! One day some of them might even be flight worthy! But actually I don't say anything to him because chat is broken and won't come up on my visor. I kill myself to leave the convention center.

Verdict: I'm a year older and probably not much wiser from the last time I did these convention reports, but things feel different this time. The game feels tired. The assets are being copy-pasted in ways that are obvious. The constant, constant shilling and hocking of wares in-game feels perfunctory, tired even. The new tram-ride to the convention center was as by-the-numbers as it gets. The wank pods were sterile and generic. I did not feel the Chairman's special obsessive touch on any aspect of the game that I played today. Which isn't to say that things are looking up for Star Citizen. It is as ragged and broken as I've ever seen it. There is no fun to be found, and barely any gameplay. One wonders why a new player would even buy spaceships at this point- there's nothing in the 40+ minute experience I just went through that even gestures at this being a space game. Indeed, it seems to be a laggy-pedestrian-shopping-simulator. The actual spaceport, and the wider adventures of the game beyond, are hidden behind an entirely different and unlabeled series of elevators and trains and consoles.

The game doesn't just have tech debt, though it does have that in spades. It has design debt. So many half-systems, so many assumptions about what the player knows already or needs to be told- they pile up around me as I play, in great heaps and drifts like accumulating ash from some monstrous design Vesuvius, already erupting and soon to sweep over and consume this entire landscape. No game could survive this. Even if this village weren't on fire, it would be choked beneath the thick clouds of Chris's rank incompetence. I fear that we will never truly know the extent of the disaster that's taken place inside Cloud Imperium until decades from now, when crack teams of archaeologists chisel the bones out of the hardened remains of this ultimate disaster. Look for me there- I'll be the guy who went out jerkin' it.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 07:12

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# ? May 31, 2024 13:01

Elderbean: Jun 10, 2013

Scruffpuff posted:

I must be missing the joke. My read on it: they're making fun of the outlandish claims of the first panel, and contrasting it to the claims of the second panel, which is to simply give players what they say they want without reinventing the wheel.

Is my read on this wrong?

I think it's "Look, the overlords are making ECONOMICS in their SOPHISTICATED game while the whole world is making GBS threads itself for PLEB TRASH."

# ? Nov 26, 2019 07:23

Zadda: Jan 27, 2007; Young Urchin

Scruffpuff posted:

I must be missing the joke. My read on it: they're making fun of the outlandish claims of the first panel, and contrasting it to the claims of the second panel, which is to simply give players what they say they want without reinventing the wheel.

Is my read on this wrong?

It was presented like this by a citizen, basically what the poster above me said

I'm not a meme expert but I guess the maker messed up by getting the panels in the wrong order :v:

[edit]

Astro Kat taxxe:
https://twitter.com/minionsart/status/1193291974754918400

Zadda fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Nov 26, 2019

# ? Nov 26, 2019 07:29

Popete: Oct 6, 2009; This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs; Grimey Drawer

I've never actually played SC is there actually any economy in the game right now? Like can you buy X resource from planet Y and load it into your ship and sell it at planet Z?

The econ seminar during Citizen Con was much like the rest of the Con, extremely boring and amounting to nothing. The guy talked for 30 minutes about how NOT to do an economy simulation all leading up to how they would like to some day hopefully maybe do it the right way.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 07:58

Solarin: Nov 15, 2007

Sarsapariller posted:

Mission Report: 11/25/2019

My self-imposed mission: Find something, anything, approaching fun in the game.

Report Begins

I wake up in a new wank pod. More of a wank locker room, really. It would appear that players have been relocated to Area 18 on Arccorp for the duration of the convention. This is somewhat of an improvement over last year, when players were forced to spawn at Port Olisar and then navigate their way on a 40-minute flight across the entire system to Hurston just to get to the convention, with no prompting. However, Area 18 is clearly not happy to see me. No, not at all. The game appears to be angry. It is stuttering and glitching and lagging in ways that I haven't seen in years- it feels like I've gone back in time to 2015 when the servers could barely hold up under the weight of twenty people flying around Port O. My rig has not fundamentally changed since the last time I logged into this shitheap four or five months ago, so it seems likely that this is not a me problem, it is a Chris problem. As all problems in Star Citizen must, inevitably, be. I press the Y button to get out of bed, a clear and obvious keybind that I do not have to spend several minutes hunting for. I go to hunt for a Wonkavator down to the convention.

But it is not to be. Obviously the bounty that lies within the convention center must be protected from mere gawkers. I'm going to have to loving earn it. The first Wonkavator finally arrives and of course it will only take me down to the lobby. There is another commando in the elevator with me. He is twitching and jittering like a meth addict passed through a stop-motion horror movie filter. I try to ignore him and step inside. The elevator lurches into life and comes to a stop- I step out. It is the wrong floor, just another endless line of wank lockers. Before I can step in again, the doors close, stranding me. I reflect that it is actually really hard to navigate in this world because every interior space looks exactly the loving same, but my meditations are interrupted by another Wonkavator arriving. I manage to ride this one down to the ground floor.

Area 18 is looking rough. It has the art assets of an entire city now, but crammed into the space of a single CryEngine map. Every surface is just dripping with pointless art and cyberpunk clutter. Wires and hotdog stands and gun merchants and steam from vents and cars overhead and NPC's milling about everywhere. All of this is probably supposed to give the scene some semblance of life, but it is all so generic and poorly integrated that it mostly just looks like somebody's Unity asset store got sick and threw up all over a public shopping center. My frames plummet into the single digits and I try to navigate to the convention by following the bright pink, glowing ads. This is not as easy as it sounds. There are ads on every loving surface, I mean that, seriously. They plaster the walls and the ceilings and the sky and the floors- ads for fictional sodas and clothing lines and spaceships and brands, brands, brands. They flicker and spark and they animate and some of them are 3D and holographic and they clutter every surface so badly that the eye goes nuts trying to find something, anything, to latch onto. The bright pink convention ads aren't even the only bright pink ads in the area- it is really difficult to tell poo poo apart, visually. I reflect that if you were to show me a vision of my own personal hell, it would probably look a lot like the glorious future that Chris Roberts has imagined for us.

As I walk towards the train I am repeatedly spammed by requests for deep space assistance. These non-sequitur mission requests take up about 20% of the screen, flashing on and then timing out, flashing on and then timing out. They are constant. This was a bug introduced in the spring of this year- the NPC's constantly spam these global missions for help when they are under attack. You could not possibly get to them in time to help, and they pay next to nothing anyway, so it's literally just a visual bug that punctuates the hellscape that the game has become. Obviously, I note, it has not been fixed. I also note as I walk that the NPC's have not received any upgrades. They still spin in place, wander aimlessly through the furniture, and clip into one another. It seems like the sort of thing that a person intent on making an actual video game might prioritize instead of, say, more neon-glowing brand art. But I know nothing about games development.

The train shudders and jerks into position and I begin my ride to the expo. This is another Chris-guided static tour through the cityscape, swooping around buildings and zooming toward the big convention center. Again, I can't help but be struck by the ubiquity of the ads plastering every surface, but here it is kind of a mercy. Without them, the buildings would look identical- tall and red and grey, differing only in height and angle. The entire city is like a rough sketch, which would be fine if the game didn't insist on the player doing nothing but staring at it out of moving windows for long segments of the gameplay.

Finally I arrive. The convention center, at last! The bus stop I arrive at is perfectly identical to the one I departed from. Did I take too long and go round trip? I have a moment of confusion. But no, this is actually a new place, except they made it by just copy-pasting the assets from the last place. Everything in Star Citizen looks the god drat same. Every station, every planet, every hallway. It's all grey corroded metal and glowing ads and military numbers on doors. It becomes extremely disorienting.

Stepping into the hall, I am greeted by the first actual portion of the convention and what I see shouldn't surprise me, shouldn't shock me in the least, but somehow it does. It's merch. Digital merch. The front room of the convention is an in-game t-shirt and hat store because of course it is. There are t-shirts for every brand of ship manufacturer, as well as special t-shirts for the ship expo itself (they are pink). The booths are shockingly unmanned, and it is unclear if the NPC's here are simply very trusting with their merchandise in the presence of strangers or if they all wandered off to a bathroom and clipped through a floor, never to be seen again. In any case, their many, many shirts are free for the taking.

I should note here of course that wearing anything other than a space suit and helmet in the game will get you killed instantly by invisible pockets of vacuum, and that anything you buy here will be reset by the next patch, presumably released in the next couple of weeks. So it's really all just extra-double super spectacularly pointless with a side of loving fudge, but that's Star Citizen.

I struggle with another Wonkavator but finally, after this 20-plus minute journey, I disembark and find myself at the convention center. Lo and behold, it is the exact same featureless grey room as last year's convention on Hurston. It is RSI day, named for the Chairman Himself, and much like its namesake it is very clear that Roberts Space Industries hasn't done gently caress-all in the last year. It is exactly the same layout with the same ships and vehicles- not one element has changed, except the new "Mantis" ship. Except they built the convention displays last year when it didn't exist, so rather than move everything they've just kind of awkwardly plonked it in the center of the pile of ships. NPC's move around the same paths from the year before- many of their paths taken them directly through the nacelles of this new ship. That's fine, this is fine. I see my second other actual human being of the day, and realize that the server lag is even worse than I thought. He skitters around the convention center like the world's biggest cockroach, often moonwalking at 50 mph as he rockets from one place to another, head constantly inclined upwards at the slumbering polygonal behemoths around us. Just think, I say to him, one day you might own one of these! One day some of them might even be flight worthy! But actually I don't say anything to him because chat is broken and won't come up on my visor. I kill myself to leave the convention center.

Verdict: I'm a year older and probably not much wiser from the last time I did these convention reports, but things feel different this time. The game feels tired. The assets are being copy-pasted in ways that are obvious. The constant, constant shilling and hocking of wares in-game feels perfunctory, tired even. The new tram-ride to the convention center was as by-the-numbers as it gets. The wank pods were sterile and generic. I did not feel the Chairman's special obsessive touch on any aspect of the game that I played today. Which isn't to say that things are looking up for Star Citizen. It is as ragged and broken as I've ever seen it. There is no fun to be found, and barely any gameplay. One wonders why a new player would even buy spaceships at this point- there's nothing in the 40+ minute experience I just went through that even gestures at this being a space game. Indeed, it seems to be a laggy-pedestrian-shopping-simulator. The actual spaceport, and the wider adventures of the game beyond, are hidden behind an entirely different and unlabeled series of elevators and trains and consoles.

The game doesn't just have tech debt, though it does have that in spades. It has design debt. So many half-systems, so many assumptions about what the player knows already or needs to be told- they pile up around me as I play, in great heaps and drifts like accumulating ash from some monstrous design Vesuvius, already erupting and soon to sweep over and consume this entire landscape. No game could survive this. Even if this village weren't on fire, it would be choked beneath the thick clouds of Chris's rank incompetence. I fear that we will never truly know the extent of the disaster that's taken place inside Cloud Imperium until decades from now, when crack teams of archaeologists chisel the bones out of the hardened remains of this ultimate disaster. Look for me there- I'll be the guy who went out jerkin' it.

You don't understand game development

# ? Nov 26, 2019 07:59

trucutru: Jul 9, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Quavers posted:

So Bootcha's vid will be ready in two weeks, 90 days tops

I heard from a good source that he's just refactoring the pipelines and as soon as he finishes clearing some blockers he'll be able to increase his production exponentially.

Luckily he switched to a staggered video editing agile development.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 08:00

Nalin: Sep 29, 2007; Hair Elf

The Glumslinger posted:

(Semi)serious question? What's the state of the gameplay? Is it still just trying to retrieve a box in space before your game crashes? Or have they actually added stuff to do yet?

The game doesn't really crash anymore, which is amazing. There are still some super annoying bugs around that can ruin your day, like being unable to get out of your seat, but those are pretty rare.

Missions typically are of the following variety:

* Carry a box. They work about 3/4 of the time. Pay is meh.

* Find a wrecked ship in space or on a planet and do one of the following (pay is decent):
- Retrieve the flight recorder and take it back to some place (box carry!)
- Find a dead person.
- Find all the dead people.

* Help an NPC out in space that is being attacked. Kind of difficult because they will throw a bunch of enemies at one or more NPCs who die quickly and then you fail. Pay is decent if it is near you, but half the time you fail anyway.
- Sometimes the NPC is actually a pirate and tries to kill you.

* Patrol an area and kill pirates. Really lovely because the pay is terrible and it just never ends and you run out of ammo and you often can't QT to the next waypoint so you have to try to slow boat it there before your timer runs out. gently caress this mission.

* Investigate an insurance claim.
- Explore a destroyed space station and try to find evidence to make a life insurance claim for a dead person's next of kin.
- Find a dead person in a mine.

* Save a comm station. You have to use your scanner and find some hidden probes near a comm station and blow all 3 of them up within a few minutes while some pirates try to stop you. It's a fine newbie mission I guess. Isn't that high paying.

* Hack a comm station. Great way to boost your crime stat. I think players can also get a mission to stop you.

* "Evict" people from a residence. FPS combat! Kill all the squatters.
- Sometimes the base has anti-air guns. That's annoying.

* Hunt bounties. Best mission in the game.
- Pay is excellent. 8k bounties are easy and you can complete them back to back to back in a Buccaneer every 5 minutes or less. 10k bounties are easy unless it spawns a Hammerhead whose shields are so strong it is best to just abandon the mission.
- You can hunt players with a crime stat! Super fun as the pubbies rage and cry in global chat because you can see where they are at all times and THAT JUST ISN'T FAIR gently caress YOU!@ Only pays like 5600 to 6000 aUEC, so they don't pay well for the time and effort, but you are mostly rewarded with pubbie tears.

You can also earn money by trading or mining. You need like 500,000 aUEC to make trading worth it, though. You can mine space rocks with a special ship or you can do cave mining with some cheap equipment. The most lucrative form of earning money is probably cave mining right now. Just watch out so somebody doesn't kill you and take all your stuff.

The game also has some form of ship upgrading. You can refit your ship and upgrade the parts, but for many ships they are already equipped with best in slot equipment. Or the stats for the equipment is all identical so there is no benefit to upgrade. Usually you can at least upgrade your shield and weapons, though, and a couple of the cheaper ships can get some use out of an upgraded power supply.

Finally, ship rentals are in. They are only worthwhile because they are bugged and you don't lose your ship after your rental period has expired. All you do is rent a ship, fly to another location, then make an insurance claim on it from that new location. Congrats, you just bought that ship for practically no money. Once that is fixed, though, rentals will be mostly worthless as there is no way to make enough money to justify the expense.

Nalin fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Nov 26, 2019

# ? Nov 26, 2019 08:07

Popete: Oct 6, 2009; This will make sure you don't suggest to the KDz
That he should grow greens instead of crushing on MCs; Grimey Drawer

Sarsapariller posted:

Mission Report: 11/25/2019

My self-imposed mission: Find something, anything, approaching fun in the game.

Report Begins

I wake up in a new wank pod. More of a wank locker room, really. It would appear that players have been relocated to Area 18 on Arccorp for the duration of the convention. This is somewhat of an improvement over last year, when players were forced to spawn at Port Olisar and then navigate their way on a 40-minute flight across the entire system to Hurston just to get to the convention, with no prompting. However, Area 18 is clearly not happy to see me. No, not at all. The game appears to be angry. It is stuttering and glitching and lagging in ways that I haven't seen in years- it feels like I've gone back in time to 2015 when the servers could barely hold up under the weight of twenty people flying around Port O. My rig has not fundamentally changed since the last time I logged into this shitheap four or five months ago, so it seems likely that this is not a me problem, it is a Chris problem. As all problems in Star Citizen must, inevitably, be. I press the Y button to get out of bed, a clear and obvious keybind that I do not have to spend several minutes hunting for. I go to hunt for a Wonkavator down to the convention.

But it is not to be. Obviously the bounty that lies within the convention center must be protected from mere gawkers. I'm going to have to loving earn it. The first Wonkavator finally arrives and of course it will only take me down to the lobby. There is another commando in the elevator with me. He is twitching and jittering like a meth addict passed through a stop-motion horror movie filter. I try to ignore him and step inside. The elevator lurches into life and comes to a stop- I step out. It is the wrong floor, just another endless line of wank lockers. Before I can step in again, the doors close, stranding me. I reflect that it is actually really hard to navigate in this world because every interior space looks exactly the loving same, but my meditations are interrupted by another Wonkavator arriving. I manage to ride this one down to the ground floor.

Area 18 is looking rough. It has the art assets of an entire city now, but crammed into the space of a single CryEngine map. Every surface is just dripping with pointless art and cyberpunk clutter. Wires and hotdog stands and gun merchants and steam from vents and cars overhead and NPC's milling about everywhere. All of this is probably supposed to give the scene some semblance of life, but it is all so generic and poorly integrated that it mostly just looks like somebody's Unity asset store got sick and threw up all over a public shopping center. My frames plummet into the single digits and I try to navigate to the convention by following the bright pink, glowing ads. This is not as easy as it sounds. There are ads on every loving surface, I mean that, seriously. They plaster the walls and the ceilings and the sky and the floors- ads for fictional sodas and clothing lines and spaceships and brands, brands, brands. They flicker and spark and they animate and some of them are 3D and holographic and they clutter every surface so badly that the eye goes nuts trying to find something, anything, to latch onto. The bright pink convention ads aren't even the only bright pink ads in the area- it is really difficult to tell poo poo apart, visually. I reflect that if you were to show me a vision of my own personal hell, it would probably look a lot like the glorious future that Chris Roberts has imagined for us.

As I walk towards the train I am repeatedly spammed by requests for deep space assistance. These non-sequitur mission requests take up about 20% of the screen, flashing on and then timing out, flashing on and then timing out. They are constant. This was a bug introduced in the spring of this year- the NPC's constantly spam these global missions for help when they are under attack. You could not possibly get to them in time to help, and they pay next to nothing anyway, so it's literally just a visual bug that punctuates the hellscape that the game has become. Obviously, I note, it has not been fixed. I also note as I walk that the NPC's have not received any upgrades. They still spin in place, wander aimlessly through the furniture, and clip into one another. It seems like the sort of thing that a person intent on making an actual video game might prioritize instead of, say, more neon-glowing brand art. But I know nothing about games development.

The train shudders and jerks into position and I begin my ride to the expo. This is another Chris-guided static tour through the cityscape, swooping around buildings and zooming toward the big convention center. Again, I can't help but be struck by the ubiquity of the ads plastering every surface, but here it is kind of a mercy. Without them, the buildings would look identical- tall and red and grey, differing only in height and angle. The entire city is like a rough sketch, which would be fine if the game didn't insist on the player doing nothing but staring at it out of moving windows for long segments of the gameplay.

Finally I arrive. The convention center, at last! The bus stop I arrive at is perfectly identical to the one I departed from. Did I take too long and go round trip? I have a moment of confusion. But no, this is actually a new place, except they made it by just copy-pasting the assets from the last place. Everything in Star Citizen looks the god drat same. Every station, every planet, every hallway. It's all grey corroded metal and glowing ads and military numbers on doors. It becomes extremely disorienting.

Stepping into the hall, I am greeted by the first actual portion of the convention and what I see shouldn't surprise me, shouldn't shock me in the least, but somehow it does. It's merch. Digital merch. The front room of the convention is an in-game t-shirt and hat store because of course it is. There are t-shirts for every brand of ship manufacturer, as well as special t-shirts for the ship expo itself (they are pink). The booths are shockingly unmanned, and it is unclear if the NPC's here are simply very trusting with their merchandise in the presence of strangers or if they all wandered off to a bathroom and clipped through a floor, never to be seen again. In any case, their many, many shirts are free for the taking.

I should note here of course that wearing anything other than a space suit and helmet in the game will get you killed instantly by invisible pockets of vacuum, and that anything you buy here will be reset by the next patch, presumably released in the next couple of weeks. So it's really all just extra-double super spectacularly pointless with a side of loving fudge, but that's Star Citizen.

I struggle with another Wonkavator but finally, after this 20-plus minute journey, I disembark and find myself at the convention center. Lo and behold, it is the exact same featureless grey room as last year's convention on Hurston. It is RSI day, named for the Chairman Himself, and much like its namesake it is very clear that Roberts Space Industries hasn't done gently caress-all in the last year. It is exactly the same layout with the same ships and vehicles- not one element has changed, except the new "Mantis" ship. Except they built the convention displays last year when it didn't exist, so rather than move everything they've just kind of awkwardly plonked it in the center of the pile of ships. NPC's move around the same paths from the year before- many of their paths taken them directly through the nacelles of this new ship. That's fine, this is fine. I see my second other actual human being of the day, and realize that the server lag is even worse than I thought. He skitters around the convention center like the world's biggest cockroach, often moonwalking at 50 mph as he rockets from one place to another, head constantly inclined upwards at the slumbering polygonal behemoths around us. Just think, I say to him, one day you might own one of these! One day some of them might even be flight worthy! But actually I don't say anything to him because chat is broken and won't come up on my visor. I kill myself to leave the convention center.

Verdict: I'm a year older and probably not much wiser from the last time I did these convention reports, but things feel different this time. The game feels tired. The assets are being copy-pasted in ways that are obvious. The constant, constant shilling and hocking of wares in-game feels perfunctory, tired even. The new tram-ride to the convention center was as by-the-numbers as it gets. The wank pods were sterile and generic. I did not feel the Chairman's special obsessive touch on any aspect of the game that I played today. Which isn't to say that things are looking up for Star Citizen. It is as ragged and broken as I've ever seen it. There is no fun to be found, and barely any gameplay. One wonders why a new player would even buy spaceships at this point- there's nothing in the 40+ minute experience I just went through that even gestures at this being a space game. Indeed, it seems to be a laggy-pedestrian-shopping-simulator. The actual spaceport, and the wider adventures of the game beyond, are hidden behind an entirely different and unlabeled series of elevators and trains and consoles.

The game doesn't just have tech debt, though it does have that in spades. It has design debt. So many half-systems, so many assumptions about what the player knows already or needs to be told- they pile up around me as I play, in great heaps and drifts like accumulating ash from some monstrous design Vesuvius, already erupting and soon to sweep over and consume this entire landscape. No game could survive this. Even if this village weren't on fire, it would be choked beneath the thick clouds of Chris's rank incompetence. I fear that we will never truly know the extent of the disaster that's taken place inside Cloud Imperium until decades from now, when crack teams of archaeologists chisel the bones out of the hardened remains of this ultimate disaster. Look for me there- I'll be the guy who went out jerkin' it.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 08:15

Scruffpuff: Dec 23, 2015; Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

Elderbean posted:

I think it's "Look, the overlords are making ECONOMICS in their SOPHISTICATED game while the whole world is making GBS threads itself for PLEB TRASH."

So basically by not being broke-brained I see the meme as funny and valid, but if I was a Citizen I'd see a completely different meme that outed me as insane.

It's like a Rorschach Test for idiots.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 08:15

Prop Wash: Jun 12, 2010

Excellent write up, I really felt like I was right there with you standing in the unity store.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 08:22

tuo: Jun 17, 2016

Mailer posted:

It's definitely just the way he looks. The game has a lot of animation jank and silly technical issues (a cutscene in the ship where his poncho and Cere's coat were still acting like they were out in gale-force winds was hilarious) but it keeps the framerate up and is genuinely fun to play. This is also a very strange thread to bring up that they should have delayed it for fidelity.

Oh, I wouldn't call it fidelity. I think they mainly should have polished the game more, not even in regard to graphics, but in regard to a lot of buggy stuff....like terrain clipping through elevator rides, technical issues even on consoles, a rethinking of some of the sliding sections and overall just a tad more polish. The game is fun, and I enjoyed playing it, but while playing it I often thought "couple more weeks, and this bug could have been squashed or this fight mechanic could have been tuned a bit" etc., but I assume it had to come out this year. I've seen far, far worse in regard to rushed games, and I don't wanna talk JFO down. It has it's strong moments, and is overall a solid game.

e: also it has BD-1, and that's already a selling point

# ? Nov 26, 2019 08:59

iron buns: Jan 12, 2016

Hello CInoG thread intern!

This is your friendly reminder that Q4 ends in 5 weeks.

Good luck!

# ? Nov 26, 2019 09:12

trucutru: Jul 9, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

8 is a lucky number in China, just saying.

Yeah, which is why all the IAP transactions end in 88 and why I mentioned that messing with their brains.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 09:13

his nibs: Feb 27, 2016; Welcome to the
Dream Factory; Grimey Drawer

echothreealpha posted:

Just read this, and it's pretty fantastic.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-star-citizen-thread-v10.463697/page-508#post-8131758

That dude just needs to buy an Idris

# ? Nov 26, 2019 09:18

trucutru: Jul 9, 2003; by Fluffdaddy

Scruffpuff posted:

I must be missing the joke. My read on it: they're making fun of the outlandish claims of the first panel, and contrasting it to the claims of the second panel, which is to simply give players what they say they want without reinventing the wheel.

Is my read on this wrong?

plucky CIG: we have the mega brains in here yet people are too stupid to notice.

The Chad EA: Derp-duhhh all we do is steal half assed ideas and yet all those gamer idiots suck our dicks.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 09:22

Dark Off: Aug 14, 2015

ATP_Power posted:

God it would kill me if their tree tech was Speed Tree, a product I was introduced to almost 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw6_47sabKg&t=55s

speedtree is free for lumberyard

# ? Nov 26, 2019 09:38

Sandweed: Sep 7, 2006; All your friends are me.

ATP_Power posted:

God it would kill me if their tree tech was Speed Tree, a product I was introduced to almost 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw6_47sabKg&t=55s

RIP sweet prince.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 09:56

Baxta: Feb 18, 2004; Needs More Pirate

echothreealpha posted:

Just read this, and it's pretty fantastic.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-star-citizen-thread-v10.463697/page-508#post-8131758

Called it, they just changed a bunch of floats to doubles and called it 64bit.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 10:01

CeeJee: Dec 4, 2001; Oven Wrangler

Zzr posted:

�Istandwithsandi. Poor vp has even been cut from the citizencon, she can't catch a break.

The VP slider was finally implemented and promptly set to zero.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 10:23

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

ATP_Power posted:

God it would kill me if their tree tech was Speed Tree, a product I was introduced to almost 10 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw6_47sabKg&t=55s

Nothing wrong with using SpeedTree, its an industry standard for a reason. It just works, they've basically just Solved trees formally.

That said, anything that looks good in SC is someone else's work. So yeah, they're definitely using SpeedTree.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 10:38

stinch: Nov 21, 2013

Quavers posted:

Perhaps it's much simpler: all the big directors - Sandi, Erin, Ortwin and co - were all having a fantastic party at the big mansion, while they sent lackey Chris to deal with the "idiot, snowflake whales"?

normally the thread has tweets from fans and Brian chambers of interactions between staff and fans. these are missing this year. I'm guessing the fans at the con were left to their own devices with the new game mode demo pcs and their own booths.

probably to facilitate the radio silence of sq42.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 10:52

Dementropy: Aug 23, 2010

trucutru posted:

plucky CIG: we have the mega brains in here yet people are too stupid to notice.

The Chad EA: Derp-duhhh all we do is steal half assed ideas and yet all those gamer idiots suck our dicks.

I admit, when I first saw it, all I thought of was the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guy is trying to be all fancy with his sword and Indy just shoots him.

It took me a bit to understand what they were really trying to get across.

So I guess the person who made that didn't really think things out.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 10:53

Ghostlight: Sep 25, 2009; maybe for one second you can pause; try to step into another person's perspective, and understand that a watermelon is cursing me

have you ever just rhetorically asked the internet "do you understand now the nature of man?"

# ? Nov 26, 2019 11:07

DigitalPenny: Sep 3, 2018

Zadda posted:

Just saw this re-posted without a hint of irony on a local forum:

I get as far a "just made" and the whole thing is in ruins ... The rest of the words are just to embelish the first two words that are clearly fiction.

If something had been made you could show it to me.

Even if you were to credit them for some amazing ideas .... 8 years in and only now, the buying and selling in your trading / pirate economy game is only justing getting through the high level concepts to start work on at some later date?

DigitalPenny fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Nov 26, 2019

# ? Nov 26, 2019 11:49

Sanya Juutilainen: Jun 19, 2019; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

trucutru posted:

Yeah, which is why all the IAP transactions end in 88 and why I mentioned that messing with their brains.

It's not caused by F2P mentality, though. It's just cultural difference - basically all of prices around here end in 9 or 90 or 900, etc ("Costs 199,-" instead of "Costs 200,-") and Chinese would find that laughable in return.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 11:57

Virtual Captain: Feb 20, 2017; Archive Priest of the Stimperial Order

Star Citizen Good, in all things forevermore. Amen.

The Glumslinger posted:

(Semi)serious question? What's the state of the gameplay? Is it still just trying to retrieve a box in space before your game crashes? Or have they actually added stuff to do yet?

Beet gave an answer to this I really liked:

Beet Wagon posted:

quote:
Without hyperbole, what are the things you can do in sc at the moment? Box collecting missions, instance dog fights, fps shooty bits, flying round planets...? I played for half an hour when it was free but got bored before I found anything to do.

You can do the things you listed, and nothing more. But sometimes much, much less, because the things listed often don't work lol

Virtual Captain fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Nov 26, 2019

# ? Nov 26, 2019 12:10

Scruffpuff: Dec 23, 2015; Fidelity. Wait, was I'm working on again?

Dementropy posted:

I admit, when I first saw it, all I thought of was the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guy is trying to be all fancy with his sword and Indy just shoots him.

It took me a bit to understand what they were really trying to get across.

So I guess the person who made that didn't really think things out.

That's more or less the same thing I thought. This really is an object lesson on how broken some people's minds are. Even taking out the fact that CIG's claims are absolute falsehoods and exaggerations, all that bullshit has nothing to do with making a game. It's about stealing from stupid people. Which is the only thing CIG seems to be good at.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 13:35

MedicineHut: Feb 25, 2016

No seriously, where was Erin?

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:06

Colostomy Bag: Jan 11, 2016; C-Bangin' it

I watched 98% of the dumpster fire and didn't see him. They talked to Chambers though.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:08

MedicineHut: Feb 25, 2016

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/cig-has-secured-enough-funding-for-another-year-of

Star Citizen: It�s official, the sky is the limit

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:13

echothreealpha: Nov 22, 2019

MedicineHut posted:

No seriously, where was Erin?

He's in some of the pictures in Twitter.

It's still weird that Erin and Sandi isn't on the stage or apparent in anything in Citizencon though.

MedicineHut posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/cig-has-secured-enough-funding-for-another-year-of

Star Citizen: It�s official, the sky is the limit

What 20-30 million in funding. It's looking like they'll barely get 5 to 6 million this month.

Unless they find another investor, which is also unlikely.

echothreealpha fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Nov 26, 2019

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:14

MedicineHut: Feb 25, 2016

echothreealpha posted:

He's in some of the pictures in Twitter.

It's still weird that Erin and Sandi isn't on the stage or apparent in anything in Citizencon though.

I think he asked his bro to be fully ringfenced from the CitCon bullshit so he can focus on what really matters, delivery (or as close as it can get) of SQ42.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:19

echothreealpha: Nov 22, 2019

MedicineHut posted:

I think he asked his bro to be fully ringfenced from the CitCon bullshit so he can focus on what really matters, delivery (or as close as it can get) of SQ42.

You can hope, but they also had to settle for a terribly scripted keynote demo. They can't even get that right.

Unless they decided to release a Squadron 42 prologue, made up of cutscenes for a binned episode 1. Think that's the only thing that's possible from now until 2021.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:23

Nyast: Nov 14, 2017; BLAZING AT THE
SPEED OF LIGHT

Sarsapariller posted:

Mission Report: 11/25/2019

My self-imposed mission: Find something, anything, approaching fun in the game.

Report Begins

I wake up in a new wank pod. More of a wank locker room, really. It would appear that players have been relocated to Area 18 on Arccorp for the duration of the convention. This is somewhat of an improvement over last year, when players were forced to spawn at Port Olisar and then navigate their way on a 40-minute flight across the entire system to Hurston just to get to the convention, with no prompting. However, Area 18 is clearly not happy to see me. No, not at all. The game appears to be angry. It is stuttering and glitching and lagging in ways that I haven't seen in years- it feels like I've gone back in time to 2015 when the servers could barely hold up under the weight of twenty people flying around Port O. My rig has not fundamentally changed since the last time I logged into this shitheap four or five months ago, so it seems likely that this is not a me problem, it is a Chris problem. As all problems in Star Citizen must, inevitably, be. I press the Y button to get out of bed, a clear and obvious keybind that I do not have to spend several minutes hunting for. I go to hunt for a Wonkavator down to the convention.

But it is not to be. Obviously the bounty that lies within the convention center must be protected from mere gawkers. I'm going to have to loving earn it. The first Wonkavator finally arrives and of course it will only take me down to the lobby. There is another commando in the elevator with me. He is twitching and jittering like a meth addict passed through a stop-motion horror movie filter. I try to ignore him and step inside. The elevator lurches into life and comes to a stop- I step out. It is the wrong floor, just another endless line of wank lockers. Before I can step in again, the doors close, stranding me. I reflect that it is actually really hard to navigate in this world because every interior space looks exactly the loving same, but my meditations are interrupted by another Wonkavator arriving. I manage to ride this one down to the ground floor.

Area 18 is looking rough. It has the art assets of an entire city now, but crammed into the space of a single CryEngine map. Every surface is just dripping with pointless art and cyberpunk clutter. Wires and hotdog stands and gun merchants and steam from vents and cars overhead and NPC's milling about everywhere. All of this is probably supposed to give the scene some semblance of life, but it is all so generic and poorly integrated that it mostly just looks like somebody's Unity asset store got sick and threw up all over a public shopping center. My frames plummet into the single digits and I try to navigate to the convention by following the bright pink, glowing ads. This is not as easy as it sounds. There are ads on every loving surface, I mean that, seriously. They plaster the walls and the ceilings and the sky and the floors- ads for fictional sodas and clothing lines and spaceships and brands, brands, brands. They flicker and spark and they animate and some of them are 3D and holographic and they clutter every surface so badly that the eye goes nuts trying to find something, anything, to latch onto. The bright pink convention ads aren't even the only bright pink ads in the area- it is really difficult to tell poo poo apart, visually. I reflect that if you were to show me a vision of my own personal hell, it would probably look a lot like the glorious future that Chris Roberts has imagined for us.

As I walk towards the train I am repeatedly spammed by requests for deep space assistance. These non-sequitur mission requests take up about 20% of the screen, flashing on and then timing out, flashing on and then timing out. They are constant. This was a bug introduced in the spring of this year- the NPC's constantly spam these global missions for help when they are under attack. You could not possibly get to them in time to help, and they pay next to nothing anyway, so it's literally just a visual bug that punctuates the hellscape that the game has become. Obviously, I note, it has not been fixed. I also note as I walk that the NPC's have not received any upgrades. They still spin in place, wander aimlessly through the furniture, and clip into one another. It seems like the sort of thing that a person intent on making an actual video game might prioritize instead of, say, more neon-glowing brand art. But I know nothing about games development.

The train shudders and jerks into position and I begin my ride to the expo. This is another Chris-guided static tour through the cityscape, swooping around buildings and zooming toward the big convention center. Again, I can't help but be struck by the ubiquity of the ads plastering every surface, but here it is kind of a mercy. Without them, the buildings would look identical- tall and red and grey, differing only in height and angle. The entire city is like a rough sketch, which would be fine if the game didn't insist on the player doing nothing but staring at it out of moving windows for long segments of the gameplay.

Finally I arrive. The convention center, at last! The bus stop I arrive at is perfectly identical to the one I departed from. Did I take too long and go round trip? I have a moment of confusion. But no, this is actually a new place, except they made it by just copy-pasting the assets from the last place. Everything in Star Citizen looks the god drat same. Every station, every planet, every hallway. It's all grey corroded metal and glowing ads and military numbers on doors. It becomes extremely disorienting.

Stepping into the hall, I am greeted by the first actual portion of the convention and what I see shouldn't surprise me, shouldn't shock me in the least, but somehow it does. It's merch. Digital merch. The front room of the convention is an in-game t-shirt and hat store because of course it is. There are t-shirts for every brand of ship manufacturer, as well as special t-shirts for the ship expo itself (they are pink). The booths are shockingly unmanned, and it is unclear if the NPC's here are simply very trusting with their merchandise in the presence of strangers or if they all wandered off to a bathroom and clipped through a floor, never to be seen again. In any case, their many, many shirts are free for the taking.

I should note here of course that wearing anything other than a space suit and helmet in the game will get you killed instantly by invisible pockets of vacuum, and that anything you buy here will be reset by the next patch, presumably released in the next couple of weeks. So it's really all just extra-double super spectacularly pointless with a side of loving fudge, but that's Star Citizen.

I struggle with another Wonkavator but finally, after this 20-plus minute journey, I disembark and find myself at the convention center. Lo and behold, it is the exact same featureless grey room as last year's convention on Hurston. It is RSI day, named for the Chairman Himself, and much like its namesake it is very clear that Roberts Space Industries hasn't done gently caress-all in the last year. It is exactly the same layout with the same ships and vehicles- not one element has changed, except the new "Mantis" ship. Except they built the convention displays last year when it didn't exist, so rather than move everything they've just kind of awkwardly plonked it in the center of the pile of ships. NPC's move around the same paths from the year before- many of their paths taken them directly through the nacelles of this new ship. That's fine, this is fine. I see my second other actual human being of the day, and realize that the server lag is even worse than I thought. He skitters around the convention center like the world's biggest cockroach, often moonwalking at 50 mph as he rockets from one place to another, head constantly inclined upwards at the slumbering polygonal behemoths around us. Just think, I say to him, one day you might own one of these! One day some of them might even be flight worthy! But actually I don't say anything to him because chat is broken and won't come up on my visor. I kill myself to leave the convention center.

Verdict: I'm a year older and probably not much wiser from the last time I did these convention reports, but things feel different this time. The game feels tired. The assets are being copy-pasted in ways that are obvious. The constant, constant shilling and hocking of wares in-game feels perfunctory, tired even. The new tram-ride to the convention center was as by-the-numbers as it gets. The wank pods were sterile and generic. I did not feel the Chairman's special obsessive touch on any aspect of the game that I played today. Which isn't to say that things are looking up for Star Citizen. It is as ragged and broken as I've ever seen it. There is no fun to be found, and barely any gameplay. One wonders why a new player would even buy spaceships at this point- there's nothing in the 40+ minute experience I just went through that even gestures at this being a space game. Indeed, it seems to be a laggy-pedestrian-shopping-simulator. The actual spaceport, and the wider adventures of the game beyond, are hidden behind an entirely different and unlabeled series of elevators and trains and consoles.

The game doesn't just have tech debt, though it does have that in spades. It has design debt. So many half-systems, so many assumptions about what the player knows already or needs to be told- they pile up around me as I play, in great heaps and drifts like accumulating ash from some monstrous design Vesuvius, already erupting and soon to sweep over and consume this entire landscape. No game could survive this. Even if this village weren't on fire, it would be choked beneath the thick clouds of Chris's rank incompetence. I fear that we will never truly know the extent of the disaster that's taken place inside Cloud Imperium until decades from now, when crack teams of archaeologists chisel the bones out of the hardened remains of this ultimate disaster. Look for me there- I'll be the guy who went out jerkin' it.

Your report made me curious, so I had to do one too. Warning: it's much shorter.

Mission Report: 11/26/2019

I haven't launched the game for a year. So this is with self-contained (lack of) excitement that I launch the RSI launcher, which updates itself. Patching is straightfoward, but takes half an hour. Seems like I didn't have the previous version installed.

I launch the game and let it load. The first thing that strikes me is.. why the hell do I have a black screen ? It's been 10 minutes, I hear the background music, but the screen is black. It couldn't have crashed, has it ? Turns out that nope, it hadn't crashed, it simply needed an alt-tab. After I alt-tab, the menu magically appears. This is starting well.

I enter the PU, create my character (or more, like, skip it, since it always resets, there's no point in spending time carefully designing a character right now ), and let the game load. Another 10 minutes elapses, and the screen appears. I'm lying in my bed, ready to rock. I want to see all these new assets and the fantastic city, this time for sure ! There's only one problem: one slight, small problem: I cannot stand up. I have no idea what key to use to stand up in my bed. Wasn't it R ? or was it F ? I press forward, I hold these keys, nothing happens. I can turn my head and look around, but I feel like I'm in an hospital bed, paralized. Meanwhile the framerate goes to a frame per minute, because apparently CIG still hasn't learned how to stream assets asynchronously ? I thought that had been fixed years ago, all games I usually play stream assets in without affecting the framerate, but here I have to patiently wait 5 minutes until all assets are loaded, before I get back my framerate and try again to hit all keys at random on my keyboard.

Good news ! My character stands up. I have no idea which key I hit, it certainly wasn't any of the obvious ones. Or maybe standing didn't work because of the assets loading / framerate issue, who knows. In any case, I stand up and start walking in my small room. There's a table with some items, I try to grab a cup but it doesn't seem to work well, the contextual menus jump all over the place and 90% of the menu options don't seem to do anything. I'm not sure if I'm having server issues or if the game really is like that, all I can say is that every single time I've loaded the game in the past few years I had a similar experience.

All the little items are glitchy and seem to have seizures. Oh, no, they're not jumping around like crazy, it's not that bad. Just seizures of a pixel. It definitely feels off. There is flickering in many places. I see a door in a corner of my room, I bring up the contextual menu but it's empty. It's weird because the door is highlihted and clearly interactable. I try again, and for some reason it works now, an "open" item appears, I click on it and.. it's the bathroom. I notice there's a mirror on the wall, the visual effect does look nice ( but why is a mirror frosted ? it's basically unusable. Are people in the future using mirrors that are centuries old ? ), but it strikes me that I can't see my own character's reflection. I'm a ghost, literally. So much for immer-shion.

I exit the bathroom and head over the main room's entrance. I can't wait to see all these copy/pasted assets and neon ads. Unfortunately, the gods at CIG decided that that would be the end of my experience, as I get a "server disconnected" message and get back to the main menu. I'm tempted to try again, but the CIG-gods are definitely against me: the PU entry menu now displays a "bad token" text and I cannot click it anymore. Meanwhile, I get flooded by "Person X has left the party", despite the fact that I haven't been in a party. I suspect it shows that message for every person that was on the server, so I'm spammed by 50 of these messages as I helplessly try to find a way to enter the PU again. Nope, nothing works, and I ragequit the game while facepalming. Who knows, maybe next year my experience will be different ? ( yeah, right ! )

Machine specs: i7 6700k, 32 GB ram, Nvidia 1070 GTX.

Verdict: An hour of "play" and I haven't been able to leave my room.

Nyast fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Nov 26, 2019

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:28

Sandepande: Aug 19, 2018

GOTY.

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:36

mjotto: Nov 8, 2017

Early days, Citizen, early days...

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:37

Colostomy Bag: Jan 11, 2016; C-Bangin' it

lol

# ? Nov 26, 2019 14:38

MedicineHut: Feb 25, 2016

Nyast posted:

Your report made me curious, so I had to do one too. Warning: it's much shorter.

Mission Report: 11/26/2019

I haven't launched the game for a year. So this is with self-contained (lack of) excitement that I launch the RSI launcher, which updates itself. Patching is straightfoward, but takes half an hour. Seems like I didn't have the previous version installed.

I launch the game and let it load. The first thing that strikes me is.. why the hell do I have a black screen ? It's been 10 minutes, I hear the background music, but the screen is black. It couldn't have crashed, has it ? Turns out that nope, it hadn't crashed, it simply needed an alt-tab. After I alt-tab, the menu magically appears. This is starting well.

I enter the PU, create my character (or more, like, skip it, since it always resets, there's no point in spending time carefully designing a character right now ), and let the game load. Another 10 minutes elapses, and the screen appears. I'm lying in my bed, ready to rock. I want to see all these new assets and the fantastic city, this time for sure ! There's only one problem: one slight, small problem: I cannot stand up. I have no idea what key to use to stand up in my bed. Wasn't it R ? or was it F ? I press forward, I hold these keys, nothing happens. I can turn my head and look around, but I feel like I'm in an hospital bed, paralized. Meanwhile the framerate goes to a frame per minute, because apparently CIG still hasn't learned how to stream assets asynchronously ? I thought that had been fixed years ago, all games I usually play stream assets in without affecting the framerate, but here I have to patiently wait 5 minutes until all assets are loaded, before I get back my framerate and try again to hit all keys at random on my keyboard.

Good news ! My character stands up. I have no idea which key I hit, it certainly wasn't any of the obvious ones. Or maybe standing didn't work because of the assets loading / framerate issue, who knows. In any case, I stand up and start walking in my small room. There's a table with some items, I try to grab a cup but it doesn't seem to work well, the contextual menus jump all over the place and 90% of the menu options don't seem to do anything. I'm not sure if I'm having server issues or if the game really is like that, all I can say is that every single time I've loaded the game in the past few years I had a similar experience.

All the little items are glitchy and seem to have seizures. Oh, no, they're not jumping around like crazy, it's not that bad. Just seizures of a pixel. It definitely feels off. There is flickering in many places. I see a door in a corner of my room, I bring up the contextual menu but it's empty. It's weird because the door is highlihted and clearly interactable. I try again, and for some reason it works now, an "open" item appears, I click on it and.. it's the bathroom. I notice there's a mirror on the wall, the visual effect does look nice ( but why is a mirror frosted ? it's basically unusable. Are people in the future using mirrors that are centuries old ? ), but it strikes me that I can't see my own character's reflection. I'm a ghost, literally. So much for immer-shion.

I exit the bathroom and head over the main room's entrance. I can't wait to see all these copy/pasted assets and neon ads. Unfortunately, the gods at CIG decided that that would be the end of my experience, as I get a "server disconnected" message and get back to the main menu. I'm tempted to try again, but the CIG-gods are definitely against me: the PU entry menu now displays a "bad token" text and I cannot click it anymore. Meanwhile, I get flooded by "Person X has left the party", despite the fact that I haven't been in a party. I suspect it shows that message for every person that was on the server, so I'm spammed by 50 of these messages as I helplessly try to find a way to enter the PU again. Nope, nothing works, and I ragequit the game while facepalming. Who knows, maybe next year my experience will be different ? ( yeah, right ! )

Machine specs: i7 6700k, 32 GB ram, Nvidia 1070 GTX.

Verdict: An hour of "play" and I haven't been able to leave my room.