peter gabriel posted:

Hell yeah!

Sarsapariller posted:

Very short Squadrons trip report:

This is very much an arcade shooter, not a sim, and that's completely okay. With multiple ships and 2-3 "Powers" that you can customize between missions, I feel like there's enough mechanical depth to keep this fun for quite a while. I think real mastery of the game's flight system will center around correct use of the "Drift" button which has so far not been explained and may not even be bound right in my current setup. Most of the gameplay so far has been target thing, turn towards thing, shoot thing. The cockpit interiors are neat and intuitive to the point that I was naturally just referencing the instruments before the end of the Prologue. I do wish the radars were a little easier to interpret though.

This is definitely not the game that Star Citizen is trying to be. However, it might be the ideal version of the game that Squadron 42 is trying to be, which is hilarious.

quote:

just play star citizen if you want space combat

quote:

I am an early Star Citizen backer and I have already had more fun in this game in 3 hours than the entirety of the open beta of Star Citizen.

The Titanic posted:

No spiders. Black ferrets please.

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

Is there a space game that hasn't thrown shade at CIG at this point? EA literally named their game "Squadrons", NMS has sandworms, ED had the bartender (AND space legs), Rebel Galaxy had some overt references I can't remember ATM. Starfield is the only one that hasn't- then again they haven't really shown anything about their game yet, so they have time.

Every year that goes by, Star Citizen becomes more and more of a joke.

Zaphod42 posted:

Fun thing. You know world of warcraft? Well, the engine they made only had a couple very very specific triggers for quests, mostly "kill this specific mob" or "kill X of these types of mobs".

But the people designing quests wanted to do more creative things with the game! Someone came up with a clever hack. Create an invisible bunny rabbit npc, one that cannot be seen or interacted with in any way by any player. Then have a script that when you do some quest thing, it kills the rabbit. Now the quest just has to be told "kill X rabbit and quest is done" and it all works! You do something like digging for treasure, when you find the treasure, the invisible bunny dies, and the quest says "you did the thing, good job finding the treasure" and the player is none the wiser about the back-end invisible bunny.

Well... these things have consequences. A few years later and the WoW engine is constantly managing like 5,000 invisible bunny NPCs just to handle triggers and its causing strain on the servers.

I don't think it was until like, Cataclysm that they actually moved past the invisible bunnies

Mirificus posted:

Viscous Soda posted:

It's amazing to think that someone thought this comic was such a good idea they drew it, posted it to the internet, and then told people about it.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Ever had any impersonal inner thoughts?

Asking for a friend

ErrEff posted:

I've certainly seen my share of stupid workarounds to fix simple problems, and putting an invisible flag on something you only occasionally use that doesn't waste a lot of resources isn't the worst fix imaginable (as opposed to spawning/despawning where appropriate).... but I'm now imagining every single unique interactive asset in the game having a fully rigged physics-enabled invisible human model attached to it.

Mirificus posted:

September 2013: I'm quite excited for Star Citizen and Chris Roberts coming back to video games (COMIC)

Breetai posted:

As much as people like to justifiably grouse about how overfocussing on visual fidelity can at best be neutral and at worst can bring a video game down, there's definitely something to be said about excessive amounts of mechanical fidelity as well.

As a very simple example, look at unit and structure placement in the Command and Conquer series of games.

In the early iterations everything was very clearly and evidently (even to the player) grid-based. Non-infantry units took up exactly one grid space, buildings took up multiple grid spaces, and building placement was restricted to an integer number of grid spaces between buildings. Buildings also had a set orientation on the map and could not be rotated.

C&C 3, however, decided to buck that trend. Buildings were placeable any distance from one another, and could be rotated a full 360 degrees from their original orientation. Rather than being arranged to a grid, units could be instructed to go to a point and could navigate to any arbitrary distance from any other point on the map.

The result? Bases were very hard to set up in any kind of ordered fashion as it was not immediately clear where the footprint of a building went, and rotating a building a fraction of a degree would greatly increase the distance around it that any building without the exact same orientation could be placed. This led to cluttered, chaotic, messy bases. Ordering units around was difficult as well, because if you ordered a unit to move near another unit, rather than being able to align them gridlike as in previous games, you would direct them to a point near the other unit, and then you'd find that there's an invisible bumper car fun zone surrounding each and every vehicle that defines the distance that another vehicle is allowed to be from it, that again wildly differs according to orientation. This zone was also massive in relation to the size of the vehicle - up to about 3 vehicle lengths. The result of this is that if you told a tank to go to where a group of other tanks were, it would start to navigate, and then every tank in your main blob would frantically move around as the destination for the move order was suddenly a massive no-go zone, meaning that a chain reaction of repositioning of every vehicle around it would occur. This could lead to situations where vehicles parked carefully outside of the range of other enemies would jostle into range and get killed. I'm sure that the people who devised this system were very proud that their game didn't have such restricted placement rules anymore and was more realistic, but it stunk out loud.

Then Red Alert 3 came along, and they went right back to the grid-based system (with the added ability to rotate buildings, but only in 90 degree increments). Was it gamier? Yes. Was it more engaging? Also yes, because despite the fact that it was not 'realistic', the player spent more of their time actually focusing on tactical combat against their opponent rather than wrestling against the game's systems. Arguably, it was more immersive despite being more obviously restricted by game rules.

Basically, the upside of video game is just that: they are computerized games. They allow us to harness computing power to create games which follow rulesets and simulate causal relationships between player actions and outcomes that are many orders of magnitude more complicated than what can be done by hand, but the focus needs to be on the player experience of those mechanics, and losing sight of that makes for a bad time. You shouldn't be attempting to simulate reality, but instead create an abstraction of a scenario for gameplay purposes that engages the player rather than flexing your programming chops and sacrificing fun at the alter of fidelity.

Viscous Soda posted:

It's amazing to think that someone thought this comic was such a good idea they drew it, posted it to the internet, and then told people about it.

G0RF posted:

Random stream check: (52:00 or so)

SaltEMike: “I tell you what — this poo poo looks so good, dude... It’s The Coil! They made The Coil before Star Citizen did. Ha-ha-haaah. This is great! I love it — I’m fuckin’ loving every minute of it.”

G0RF posted:

TWITCH (LIVE): Disco plays Squadrons

You have to be a subscriber to watch archives of his streams, so if you’re curious, catch it while it’s live.

It’s gotta be a little unnerving, jumping into another excellent EA-produced Squadron 42 competitor, knowing that once again, the game you’ve been paid to flack for 6 years will never live up to the stuff evil publishers put out. It isn’t a lack of funds (you’ve had multiples of what these cost to make) and it isn’t a lack of time (you’ve had 3x as long as others take.)

It’s a failure of talent and leadership. And there’s no fixing it. There’s just muddle ahead, as there was muddle behind, and if you’re lucky, the process eventually spits out an inferior piece of crap and the debate that’s raged for ages is finally settled.

Zaphod42 posted:

Lol now he's directly talking about the concept of "Evil EA" and trying to reconcile both his love of CIG and his love of Squadrons

G0RF posted:

Rewatch it and savor his newfound passion for EA...

Around the Verse - Episode 1.42

Pixelate posted:

https://v.redd.it/v0mfiglu4qq51/DASH_480.mp4

Zaphod42 posted:

Yeah I feel like that has to be a goon comic

Lol at criticizing other games for "pay 2 win" when you're star citizen

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

Here you go for RGO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjlDDZOGWvo

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

Though to be fair, I think they made that back in 2013. It was a different time, a more innocent time. Back when the whales were only being gently milked, not completely fracked like now-a-days.


Also nice to see they put Ben in the comic:

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

Though to be fair, I think they made that back in 2013. It was a different time, a more innocent time. Back when the whales were only being gently milked, not completely fracked like now-a-days.


Also nice to see they put Ben in the comic:

Bootcha posted:

The thing about Lando's rant (in his stream) about the rising cost of entertainment, is that there's no self-examination. Everything is because of outside forces: The customers, the industry, the technology, the market demand...

Everything else, except self-examination.

"What are we doing, or not doing, that's causing our budgets to rise?"

It's a kind of dissonance to assume that the act of managing and making a game is so blameless for the problem of cost. A thought process borne out of the era from whence Roberts comes from.

Beet Wagon posted:

Had a few minutes to try out the new Star Wars game. It’s not Star Citizen by any means, in that it doesn’t have detailed eating and drinking and making GBS threads animations, and it doesn’t have 50,00 stupid mouse clicks to make in your cockpit to make your ship go. But it’s also not Star Citizen in that it is fun, easy to pick up, and constantly invites you to do “just one more mission.”

Sure, this game is arcadey as hell and I can see why that might make some people mad, but it’s fun and the one thing it does really well is feel like how I remember the old X-wing games feeling. I say “remember” because I almost certainly have a skewed memory of those games based on nostalgia, to the point that if I tried replaying them I’d probably be miserable. But Squadrons does a good enough job tricking my brain into thinking I am while bringing things up to modern standards that I’d rather play it than some fiddly bullshit that accurately simulates every button and fuse in the ship.

Squadrons is simple, nowhere near as complex as Star Citizen aims to be (or Elite Dangerous is, for that matter) but on the other hand every time I start to type “The flight model is simple compared to SCs” I have to remind myself that the flight model in Squadrons exists and SC’s doesn’t. I think Sarsa mentioned that Squadrons is what Sq42 should be aiming to be and I think that’s dead on lol.

PC Gamer review (83/100) posted:

If Squadrons is a success, I hope the sequel has the budget to be more ambitious with its singleplayer. I want more to do between missions than listen to monologues.

In the cockpit, though, this is probably the best a Star Wars flight game has ever felt, and that's a real feat for the spiritual successor to some truly beloved games. It deserves to be the start of a new era of Star Wars flight sims with at least a big enough budget to fit a B-Wing into the next one.

Der Shovel posted:

Yeah I read that and did a serious double-take. Boy they're not asking for much, are they?


Which is also the main reason I super don't want to get COVID. I would probably be fine even if it could suck, but I have an elderly cat who almost definitely would not be fine if I passed it on to him.