|
Chrysophylax posted:Hot take but I don't think anything in games that starts resembling "waiting for things to happen" should take more than seconds Counterpoint: Desert Bus E: Desert sand cat taxxe 
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 14:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
Chrysophylax posted:Hot take but I don't think anything in games that starts resembling "waiting for things to happen" should take more than seconds I'm sure that's what the backers will accuse you and others of, but it's all smoke and mirrors. The reason travel times are what they are in this "game" has nothing to do with vision or design. They're an artifact of the fact that the engine, the space maps, and the ships that travel them are build 110% wrong in every single way, and will never be right or functional no matter how much time or money CIG gets. Everything in this debacle is broken from foundation to peak. You can rest assured that everything that appears to be a mechanic or game design decision (like travel times) is actually a hack put into place to minimize (but never eliminate) server crashes, bugs, and general instability. People are still clipping through everything all the time, 8 years into this pre-alpha tech demo. That's a fundamental failure at the most basic level, and yet they continue to build on it, as if one day they'll fix "the bug" that's causing it. Good money after bad: that's the CIG, and backer, motto.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 14:40
|
|
|
         
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:01
|
|
|
Is JoeBlobers one of Chris Robert's sock puppets?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:09
|
|
|
skeletors_condom posted:Is JoeBlobers one of Chris Robert's sock puppets? Chris isn't that coherent. Joe's just a garden-variety moron who phrases his dumbass quips as a series of "gotcha" statements. He's one of many I can think of that fully deserve to lose every cent he gave to Master Thief.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:12
|
|
|
I wonder how much time it takes to respond to every critical comment under every article about SC (even if it's just copypaste of same tired apologisms) and whether he has time to play the game?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:17
|
|
|
Scruffpuff posted:Chris isn't that coherent. Joe's just a garden-variety moron who phrases his dumbass quips as a series of "gotcha" statements. He's one of many I can think of that fully deserve to lose every cent he gave to Master Thief. He has already lost every single cent tho, willingly, with a huge smile on his face, and he's most likely looking forward to lose more.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:21
|
|
|
Dwesa posted:I wonder how much time it takes to respond to every critical comment under every article about SC (even if it's just copypaste of same tired apologisms) and whether he has time to play the game? Well he basically responds when he tries to launch the game so he has plenty of time. Here's a question for those that are able to "play" this tire fire, what happens when you alt-tab out of it? I can't imagine that being pretty.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:23
|
|
C-Bangin' it 
|
Ah yes, excellent way to ignore the completely hosed physics of this game. Early days friends!
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:31
|
|
|
Something ... something ... emergent gameplay ... 
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:36
|
|
|
Colostomy Bag posted:Well he basically responds when he tries to launch the game so he has plenty of time. Last I tried, which was years ago, alt-tab didn't do anything at all. Then again the same could be said for the main game as well, so who knows. Did you know the launcher used to play music? It doesn't any more because they couldn't figure out how to make the launcher play music AND not crash. Early days!
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:38
|
|
|
skeletors_condom posted:Something ... something ... emergent gameplay ... Ah, right, the luxurious cart. So luxurious everyone active on the server has it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:42
|
|
|
Scruffpuff posted:Last I tried, which was years ago, alt-tab didn't do anything at all. Then again the same could be said for the main game as well, so who knows. Did you know the launcher used to play music? It doesn't any more because they couldn't figure out how to make the launcher play music AND not crash. Early days! Here's a blast from the past...remember the "tutorial"?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:48
|
|
|
skeletors_condom posted:Something ... something ... emergent gameplay ...
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:49
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 16:55
|
|
|
Dwesa posted:A herd is also a proper name for a group of whales. Also: gam, mob or pod. Cheese wheel is more fitting.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:04
|
|
|
Nalin posted:Well, I know the cargo slot is an actual hardpoint on the Hornet and can be swapped out for a turret, but you are saying that they actually spawn a box inside an unreachable space inside that hardpoint? Because you can't open that up at all. I guess it would be completely like CIG to do that. Ah, I misread the discussion at first I think. I thought we were talking about if they had ever implemented the 'cargo box' on the Hornet, not whether or not they actually spawned the crates inside that cargo box. Right now I don't think there's any way to check, I've never been able to open the cargo box on either my Mustang or the loaner Aurora. I do know that every ship that has any SCU capacity does have at least some physical space blocked out as [cargo area] or whatever, including the Hornet. I'd like to assume they don't actually spawn unreachable SCU crates inside those boxes, but I know at one point they showed the Hornet cargo box as being open-able, so who the hell knows. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:07
|
|
|
Chris Roberts Star Citizen dream: the "multi-crew" module that's not Wing Commander. Star Citizen director Chris Roberts went to unusual lengths to explain this idea. Roberts showed off a simulation of that system in the 2012 Kickstater video, but to this day, there's no way to purchase the module and have it play itself. There was also the attitude that Roberts didn't believe in the product, and he was planning on kicking the KS back and forth until everyone lost interest in it. Maybe, he just didn't want you to have a receipt.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:10
|
|
|
Roberts promised us a coffee cup left in the woods like a Hustler magazine would be persistent.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:11
|
|
|
Colostomy Bag posted:Here's a blast from the past...remember the "tutorial"? Oh yeah - I thought the tutorial was actually pretty cool. Started you on foot FPS style, then had you get in the cockpit, minimal immersion animations but no cutscene, the ship you were in was the model you walked up to. Guy gets into another ship, takes off, you take off, exit through a ceiling hatch, and realize you were in a base station in one tiny asteroid in a giant field of asteroids. The illusion was, at least to me at the time, incredible. I distinctly remember thinking this:  So fast-forward to the rushed release of the PTU so they could claim the progress that would pave the way for a legal denial of refunds and a way to keep their stolen cash. The nanosecond I logged into the PTU proper my own stupidity was revealed to me in a series of memory montages, and I realized the tutorial that impressed me so much represented 100% of the work CIG was able to do, and not one iota more. They'd hit a wall and started over with the shitfest that is the PTU - the "Swamp Castle" version of the game that would just keep getting rebuilt on top of itself, except the fourth one will not stay up. None of them will.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:12
|
|
|
Chrysophylax posted:Hot take but I don't think anything in games that starts resembling "waiting for things to happen" should take more than seconds All space games have some sort of travel built into them. In fact, most games do. Even in non-space games with fast travel systems, you will still have to travel from the fast travel node to your destination. The main difference is that most of those games either have shorter travel times or their traversal system is more interesting. In Freelancer, you have to travel around a star system using sort of a spider web of travel lanes connecting POIs. Once you reach one POI, you choose the next thread to travel along. The individual jumps aren't that long so it helps keep you engaged as you are exploring all the areas in the system. Elite: Dangerous does have some long travel times, but they are still far less than Star Citizen ones. The worst offenders in Elite: Dangerous are places with a 10 minute supercruise. Those places are really, really far out there. Your average in-system travel times are much lower and much more interesting as you can fly anywhere you want in supercruise (and there are supercruise related gameplay mechanics). It is really going to suck in Star Citizen once they add multiple systems as we saw that those jump points are on the edges of the star system. If you have to navigate a colon every jump point, then spend 15 minutes traveling to the next wormhole, travel is going to be so tedious. CIG needs to ditch all the size 1 quantum drives and most of the size 2 ones. Anything less than 80,000,000 m/s needs to go.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:19
|
|
|
Where can I bet that the guy who made that tutorial has left the company. Hell, the lack of creativity in CitizenCon in all areas kinda speaks of it. At least the Sandworm demo, and last year's demo had some nice tempo, and actual direction on how to entice viewers. In this year's demo there's some semblance of last year's, but it felt like it was following the same script to the point where it seems like they forgot to delete the part where you get a cup of coffee after you wake up.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:22
|
|
|
Nalin posted:All space games have some sort of travel built into them. In fact, most games do. Even in non-space games with fast travel systems, you will still have to travel from the fast travel node to your destination. The main difference is that most of those games either have shorter travel times or their traversal system is more interesting. Star Citizen: you have to navigate a colon every jump point
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:26
|
|
|
Quavers posted:Chris Roberts Star Citizen dream: the "multi-crew" module that's not Wing Commander. Star Citizen director Chris Roberts went to unusual lengths to explain this idea. Roberts showed off a simulation of that system in the 2012 Kickstater video, but to this day, there's no way to purchase the module and have it play itself. There was also the attitude that Roberts didn't believe in the product, and he was planning on kicking the KS back and forth until everyone lost interest in it. Maybe, he just didn't want you to have a receipt. There was also the attitude that Roberts didn't believe in the product, and he was planning on kicking the KS back and forth until everyone lost interest in it. Maybe, he just didn't want you to have a receipt for it or to know exactly how many copies he made, as with the original campaign. Maybe, he just wanted to see how much money he could take in by making a lovely game. Some backers have since said that not only was Roberts' actions very rude, he was downright racist toward the backers that backed the project in the first place. This really astounds
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:36
|
|
|
Quavers posted:Star Citizen: you have to navigate a colon every jump point I don't.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:37
|
|
|
Worst one yet? YOU decide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plzdu0rR0eA
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:46
|
|
|
Nalin posted:It is really going to suck in Star Citizen once they add multiple systems as we saw that those jump points are on the edges of the star system. If you have to navigate a colon every jump point, then spend 15 minutes traveling to the next wormhole, travel is going to be so tedious. CIG needs to ditch all the size 1 quantum drives and most of the size 2 ones. Anything less than 80,000,000 m/s needs to go. After spending a couple months playing wow classic I feel like my position on travel has shifted. Long travel times are fine- good, even- as long as there's stuff to do. It turns out that the world being really massive and hard to traverse makes it more interesting, if you're running across things on your trip from point A to point B. But wow classic does it right. Quests might make you run halfway across the world, but you're going to run into a dozen other story beats and interesting places on your way there. When you get there, you'll probably find a quest hub with a half-dozen things you can do locally before making your way back. You're also given a number of shortcuts and checkpoint systems, like the hearthstone and the flight points. These make getting back to a place you've been before much, much easier. Then you have mages with portals and warlocks with summons, giving groups an easy way to get together. In short the travel time is more of a flavor- it makes the world feel huge when you're alone and going somewhere new, but it doesn't get in the way (much) when you're just trying to get back to town or meet up for a dungeon. This is good design. Star Citizen's kind of the anti-design in this respect. There are no checkpoints, there are no teleports, and every single mission is going to require that you traverse some or all of the system to deliver that box from point A to point B. There's no such thing as a quest hub, in the sense that missions are available on a local basis but they'll send you pretty much anywhere. On top of that, travel is constantly consuming a limited resource, fuel, so you have to make five to ten minute side trips to go land on platforms and fuel up with great regularity just to make sure you don't end up basically stuck forever in deep space, an instant-loss situation. Just the act of flying around in the game is constantly draining your limited funds. Meeting up with friends is an exercise in frustration as everyone spends half an hour trying to get to the same point, only for half the party to die or get interdicted or crash and have to start over. When you fly to a new port, you don't have the option to bind there- you are automatically assigned there, whether you want to be or not. The only public and automatic transport is local buses that have added to travel time rather than reduced. Things I would do to fix SC travel without making travel times shorter: * Public flights to any major hub you've been to before. Doesn't even have to be animated- just make it a terminal interaction that ports your character to the new spaceport. * More localized missions. poo poo should not be sending you more than 10 minutes out of your way unless it's deliberately taking you to a new hub. * Warp-to-mission. For any kind of ground FPS or whatever, just let the player skip straight there. * Warp-to-friend, same deal as the other teleports but maybe on a timer. Maybe just let people hop into their friend's turret without losing their original position in the world when they leave. * Remove QT fuel as a thing. It's aggravating and pointless. * Put a bunch of interesting poo poo in deep space that can only be discovered through flying and scanning. Secret cargo caches, pirate bases, whatever. Just give people doing the flying a reason to look around. Sarsapariller fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Dec 2, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:53
|
|
|
I was watching Jim Sterling's video on Shenmue 3 today, and it struck me how similar the whole debacle is to Star Citizen. In fact, Shenmue's $7 million in crowdfunding seems downright quaint in comparison to SC's now $250+ million. It's also another omen of why SC can will probably never present a finished product - then they'd have the spotlight of critics like Jim on them instead of being able to coast pretty much under the radar and suck money in from their dedicated whales. It'll be very interesting to see what happens if they're actually forced to release SQ42
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 17:58
|
|
|
Scruffpuff posted:Oh yeah - I thought the tutorial was actually pretty cool. Started you on foot FPS style, then had you get in the cockpit, minimal immersion animations but no cutscene, the ship you were in was the model you walked up to. Guy gets into another ship, takes off, you take off, exit through a ceiling hatch, and realize you were in a base station in one tiny asteroid in a giant field of asteroids. The illusion was, at least to me at the time, incredible. I couldn't make it off the steps when the admiral or whatever was giving me orders to find the ship in the hangar. It started stuttering, sound was clipping in and out. It had to be < .5 FPS experience. I was vindicated when citizens voted to remove the tutorial. Funny thing was if it worked how much relevance would it have now? Like was said, one would have to assign some labor to keep updated with all the changes (har har) to the game.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 18:12
|
|
|
Rotten Red Rod posted:I was watching Jim Sterling's video on Shenmue 3 today, and it struck me how similar the whole debacle is to Star Citizen. In fact, Shenmue's $7 million in crowdfunding seems downright quaint in comparison to SC's now $250+ million. Shemmue is the waterworld of videogames...Kevin Costner was in waterworld... Chris Roberts was sued into near Oblivion by Kevin Costner. There has to be a link Fargin Icehole fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Dec 2, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 18:14
|
|
|
Scruffpuff posted:Chris isn't that coherent. Joe's just a garden-variety moron who phrases his dumbass quips as a series of "gotcha" statements. He's one of many I can think of that fully deserve to lose every cent he gave to Master Thief. I have a question. How do you mistranslate 'Shocking' as 'Chocking'? Nalin posted:It is really going to suck in Star Citizen once they add multiple systems as we saw that those jump points are on the edges of the star system. If you have to navigate a colon every jump point, then spend 15 minutes traveling to the next wormhole, travel is going to be so tedious. CIG needs to ditch all the size 1 quantum drives and most of the size 2 ones. Anything less than 80,000,000 m/s needs to go. They'll rebalance the travel times once they actually have something to travel to. This just gives them enough time while people are travelling to give the illusion of content. Their current MVP is actually very small compared with the scope that they wanted to achieve, because they very publically have eschewed the concept of 'cheating' and instead lean towards a very fluid idea of 'simulation' and 'fidelity' that they're eventually going to have to back down on. I fully expect a series of wistful mea-culpas and how they reached for the stars; then we'll see who was merely funding the idea of the BDSSE and who was attempting to give themselves an advantage over a perceived underclass. X4 Foundations does it by the usual cheating, BTW. You have these areas that you 'gate' into, but they're kinda eve bubble-esque in terms that they will expand to encompass more space. You have your normal speeds (~200 m/s), then a travel mode (~2000 m/s) and finally a bunch of highways that you can hop onto. Sure, it's janky, but it actually exists.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 18:54
|
|
|
And that's a kind of delivering. Buy an Idris.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 18:55
|
|
|
Hav posted:Their current MVP is actually very small compared with the scope that they wanted to achieve, because they very publically have eschewed the concept of 'cheating' and instead lean towards a very fluid idea of 'simulation' and 'fidelity' that they're eventually going to have to back down on.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 18:56
|
|
|
have cig ever admitted that one of their gameplay design decisions wasn't absolutely perfect and great?
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:04
|
|
|
sure! there was that time they decided that letting people get off the Whale Tour was a mistake and stopped issuing refunds.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:05
|
|
|
Inacio posted:have cig ever admitted that one of their gameplay design decisions wasn't absolutely perfect and great? They tend to just memory-hole stuff that is clearly unfeasible like the Endeavor or the colony-building ship. I can't think of a time that they've publicly walked back anything that was actually announced by Chris- usually the closest they get is to acknowledge that the stuff they've actually released isn't perfect, but promise that it's a placeholder implementation. You see this a lot with the flight model. They don't really acknowledge problems with the current model until they're ready to roll out the next version, and then it becomes "Oh well everyone knew that the last version sucked horribly. Also keep in mind this new version is tier 0 and will probably suck horribly." That's usually enough to let the fanbase get back to dreaming. It's handy to not have any kind of stated design goals or deadlines because you can never be fully wrong- just in the process of getting it 100% right!
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:13
|
|
|
Fargin Icehole posted:Shemmue is the waterworld of videogames...Kevin Costner was in waterworld... And Oblivion came before Skyrim, and you can fit Skyrim in a crater in Star Citizen. We're definitely down the rabbit hole on this one.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:18
|
|
|
History Comes Inside! posted:Depends on how long they think the scam will continue. Even if they took every single cent the tracker claims CIG were bringing in they'd be looking at a year and a half just to break even, but CIG need all of that that to keep the dream furnaces burning. I've wondered what the gently caress the pitch Chris made to make the Calders invest in the 1st place, Investing in any company requires a not Sandi stupid sales projections and profits of your next few years. It took previous iterations of this thread what little info was public to determine, CI haven't been making money for years They also didn't invest at the start of the project hoping to have a successful game that could be made into a movie or whatever, although now thinking about it, that might have been how Chris pitched it. But $40 million for a mere 10% of CI, when Vivendi paid $180 million for just under 30% of ubisoft 4 years ago. Something is going on, either hidden assets or a nuke button the Calders have if goals are not met.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:20
|
|
|
stingtwo posted:I've wondered what the gently caress the pitch Chris made to make the Calders invest in the 1st place, Investing in any company requires a not Sandi stupid sales projections and profits of your next few years. My understanding is that the "10%" is a meaningless, and ultimately misleading figure. The $400 million "valuation" of CIG is pure pie-in-the-sky thinking, based on nothing more than what people are saying will happen, rather than what is happening. It has to do with how much money Chris thinks Squadron 42 will make, and that this IP has an inherent value, like Star Wars. This is untrue - the company simply took free money and spent it. They didn't take $400 million of backer money and turn it into $400 million in other value - they just burned the money to ash and have something so bad in its place that it's actually worth spending money to destroy it. Now, leaving that aside, a valuation is required so the investor knows what their "percentage ownership" is. This is also misleading, because regardless of whether they own 10% of the company or not, their $40 million is what's keeping CIG solvent. That means they call the shots. If CIG tries to pull some "you're only 10% so your wishes are outvoted LOL" crap as some backers have claimed (such as the common defense that Chris Roberts still controls the shares or whatever) then Calders can just take their ball and go home, causing instant financial collapse at CIG and overnight insolvency unless additional investment can be obtained instantly. For some people, $40 million is in fact play money, and this could be a "why the gently caress not" long-shot call by some people who figure gently caress it, we're not using the money, if this takes off we'll be sitting pretty, if not then oh well not everything works out. Really the only hope for CIG is exactly that - a completely disinterested investor who threw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at tons of projects and isn't concerned with each of them individually but that they provide an overall return in aggregate. I personally think they are watching, and are taking some of the reins, due to the incredibly subdued behavior on Chris's part - the moron with the gargantuan ego who single-handedly drove this project into the ground. His chastened performance at Citizencon speaks volumes.
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 4, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
stingtwo posted:I've wondered what the gently caress the pitch Chris made to make the Calders invest in the 1st place, Investing in any company requires a not Sandi stupid sales projections and profits of your next few years. Dude who made Fyre Fest got some pretty rich investors on board. Think it's easy to promote Star Citizen to someone who doesnt really know about the gaming industry when you can show them pictures and cheers from citizencon, the amount of money the Kickstarter got, and the stupid amount of cash that was pledged after. You can spin the 250 million crowdfunding easily by going "We managed to get 250 million worth of pledges, with 1.5 million paying users, which average at about 160 dollars that is spent by users on the game!'
|
|
#
?
Dec 2, 2019 19:42
|
|