TheAgent posted:

hello

• after many, many assurances that the crytek lawsuit would not proceed, chris & co are scrambling (no elaboration)
  
• emails, contracts, recorded conversations and biz licences are being sent for review (legal review?)
  
• Erin "extremely nervous" about outcome, although showing a "carefree attitude" around the office
  
• "I know for a fact he doesn't want another Gizmondo on his hands. Once was enough."
  
• aegis backer event: "Our goal was to be totally positive. We nailed it."
  
• production on certain parts of the game are stopped completely until legal avenues are resolved
  
• mostly that means engine and server improvements
  
• this halt is scheduled to begin 9/3, but employees have known about it for some time
  
• engine switch most likely in the cards, deep discussions about stadia/UE4 ongoing
  
• "Anything made or built with CryEngine would be discarded and re-coded." including animations, models, maps, client and server side code, etc
  
• "We'd have to redo a lot of work. It'd be worth it, because it's the only way forward."
  

Mirificus posted:

AbstractNapper posted:

The project is an unsalvageable trash fire either way. Switch off of cryengine at *this* point and that will only kill the thing dead quicker (calling it!).

SabinBlitz posted:

Holy poo poo. You can invest in HomeWorld 3 stock

https://www.fig.co/campaigns/homeworld3

At $500! Come on Citizens this is a screaming deal!

Beet Wagon posted:

Ah, well now that nobody can post for six hours, time for a nap lol

TheAgent posted:

I'm not even going to "hello" this because its p sketch, but someone has been very, very, very, VERY adamant that parts of the latest citcon demos are done with a different engine other than lumberyard/cryengine

this person was right in the past about a few things (I know the criminal gameplay thing was one, I think the animation/AI problems were others) and I don't think they work there anymore but this is so loving hilarious to me that I can barely believe it

sorry to interrupt the thread flashbacks, please continue

TheAgent posted:

honestly, most of the work is just models at this point. they'd be loving stupid not to switch. UE4 can handle things far better than the branch of CE they are using

since their "procedural generation" tools amount to height map terrain scattering stuff found in games earlier than EQ1, nothing there is lost. 64 bit precision would be a lot easier too. same with their "physical grids" or whatever the gently caress they are calling them, that don't have actually any physics in them (like if you park your ship upside down, you still stand upside up, and if you open the cargo door you just do flips from upside down to right side up lol) would be loving easier

I mean, everything would be easier and have more "fidelity" in UE4. every goddamn thing

what won't ever be easier is solving the loving "lets have 500 players have a battle in low orbit, including ground, air and space vehicles loading with projectile weapons"

stadia could be a way for them to offload that for a time, because lol if you think loving AWS is going to handle that poo poo seamlessly

just loving lol

Daztek posted:

https://imgur.com/a/UE3dc

Dementropy posted:

I am full of awe.

Nellistos posted:

Anticheese posted:

Didn't their missile truck only have a range of 2km?

no_recall posted:

CIG could've gone more creative with the minelaying machine being a disposable 3D printer that prints out mines covering an area of space like a cynosural field in EVE.

3 Types of mines:
- Anti Citizen
- Anti Whale
- Anti Reddit

Wouldn't be that hard the come out with something like that would it?

Paladinus posted:

What's going on in this thread?

MrOzzy posted:

Can someone please TL;DR 6,5k pages? Thank you!

Sarsapariller posted:

Okay so I rented all the Anvil ships that I gave a poo poo about, flew back to Port O, and then cruised each one around. Here for your reading pleasure:

SARSAPARILLER'S SASSY SHIP SPERGING
A brief review of autism chariots

Ordered by cost:


Anvil Arrow
Cost: $75
Guns: 2 gimbal, 2 auto turret, no idea on size- S2's? Seemed like "Gladius plus one." Also, some missiles. All guns slaved to pilot, this is a good fighter for that reason alone.
Can It Do Anything But Fight: No.
Speed: Zippy
Reviewer's thoughts: So they basically said "What if Gladius, but 20 bucks cheaper and from a different company." It's kind of funny but most of the light and small fighters are actually the best combat ships in the game, because you don't have to rely on anyone else to run the terrible, terrible turret systems. This thing is ugly as poo poo but seems very effective. If it was priced sanely for a 6 year old MMO and combat was actually meaningful, I'd say "Sure, it's worth 12 bucks or whatever." But since combat means nothing in this game and the cost is seventy five of your hard earned dollars, stay the gently caress away.


Anvil Gladiator
Cost $164 worth of missiles that do not work
Guns: 2 gimbal, 2 in a separate turret that you can't control without another player. Lots of missiles.
Can It Do Anything But Fight: No.
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's thoughts: It's 164 loving dollars for a ship that can't do the primary thing it was meant for, because missiles are broken and have been broken for years. Basically for 90 bucks more than the Arrow, you get the same firepower only now you can't use it, and the ship is slower. I think it's actually kind of cool looking, and I like the concept of turreted bombers because I too have seen Star Wars. Unfortunately there's nothing to bomb in this game, and if there were you better loving believe that half the time the bombs would fall upwards or something. In another game, this would be a cool fighter and you'd have to defend a bunch of them as they bombed the mothership. In Star Citizen the mothership is a jpeg, the only ships worth bombing are effectively invincible, and you wasted 164 dollars.


Super Hornet
Cost $180
Guns: 2 nose gimbal, 2 wing gimbal, 2 auto turret. Some missiles.
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Well it can carry a passenger I guess
Speed: Zippy
Reviewer's thoughts: I could review all the other Hornet variants but the reviews would amount to "Not as good as the super hornet" so why bother? This is the combat dogfighter. It used to be even better but at some point CIG decided it was punching too far above its weight, probably when they sold a shitload of other fighters, and so the gun size seems to have been nerfed really hard from back when I owned it. Doesn't matter though- with six guns all slaved to the pilot, this is one of the few fighters in the game where one player actually has direct control of all the firepower. Unfortunately it costs as much as three brand new triple-A games put together because Star Citizen's pricing is out of loving control. Also unfortunately, there's like, one combat mission in the whole game and everything else is box retrieval or delivery. Since none of these ships allows you to store boxes... it kind of ruins the entire Anvil lineup, to be honest.


Anvil Hurricane
Cost 195 big ones
Guns: 2 nose gimbal, 4 in a separate turret. Bunch of missiles.
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Nope!
Speed: Some
Reviewer's thoughts: This ship that irritates me. At some point CIG got tired of making shitloads of cash on the super hornet and went "What if Hornet, but 10 dollars more and BETTER" so they nerfed the SH and slapped a bunch of size 3 guns on a similar sized fighter. But obviously that would make it too good, so 4 of the guns are in a turret, which means you will never get to use them. So it's a fighter that does exactly the same thing as the Hornet, but worse if you're a single pilot, and costs even more money because gently caress you. Also it looks like an electric razor.


Anvil Terrapin
Cost 220 goddamn dollars
Guns: 2 nose gimbal, nothing else
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Yes
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's Thoughts: I thought this was the starting ship in the anvil lineup but then I went and looked up the price and it's over two hundred motherfucking dollars! This thing has 2 guns and a big radar and some cargo space. Radar's pointless because nothing in the game loads into your client past about 10km, 2 guns are pretty much a joke, and the cargo space does make this the first Anvil ship capable of actually playing Star Citizen in its current, actual state, but the ship costs two hundred loving dollars Jesus H Christ what is wrong with you CIG. It doesn't even come with the decorative but useless missiles that all the other ships get! 2 guns and a worthless radar, that's it! Give us 200 bucks! gently caress you!


Anvil Valkyrie
Cost 375 smackers
Guns 2 nose gimabl, 1 regular turret, 2 remote turrets, 2 helicopter door guns
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Yes
Speed: Glacial
Reviewer's Thoughts: This ship exists because of the landing scene in Aliens. That's it. You could load marines in here, if there were such a thing as marines. You can load vehicles in here, sometimes, if they don't jank the gently caress out. But there's no mission in the game requiring vehicles, and there is no ground combat, and there's definitely nothing that would require a combat dropship, so why does this exist? It exists because Aliens. Because stupid fat gently caress nerdlings will pay 375 ludicrous dollars to sit in a cockpit and go "In the pipe, five by five" and then grin to themselves because they just made the funniest movie reference holy poo poo. It has door guns, because space Vietnam, I guess, so you can clear your space LZ before you drop your space crew. Nobody will ever do any of those things. This thing costs more than your car payment. I despair for the future of gaming.

Sarsapariller posted:

A discerning citizen prepares to enter the expo.


This gentleman was so excited, he got in line 4 times!


Day Two- Roberts Space Industries

Named for the breakout 2000's movie star Robert Pattinson, still beloved 1000 years later for his role as a creepy immortal pedophile, RSI's ships will carry you through the Twilight to the Breaking Dawn. RSI seems to be the manufacturer that just gets random poo poo with no particular aesthetic dropped into it- much like the CEO himself! Unlike the other manufacturers, RSI's lineup is still composed primarily of unimplemented jpegs, so I will actually be reviewing constellation variants today just to pad this out a bit. Once again, in price order:


RSI Aurora
Cost: $25
Guns: 2 and some missiles
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Surprisingly, yes
Speed: Moderate
Reviewer's thoughts: This is probably going to be my most positive review in the whole series. First up, the negative- this ship is ugly as sin. It looks like someone took a radioisotope thermoelectric generator and stuck a cockpit on it. It looks like an overpriced kitchen gadget. It looks like someone said "How many wings is too many? Let's find out." For all that, this is a very effective ship! It has great visibility, it is moderately fast, it can carry a small load of trade cargo, you can put a box inside the cockpit area for courier missions- it even has a bed, if they ever bother to fix the log-out functionality. It has a couple token size-1 guns on it, but this thing is essentially tissue paper so fighting with it will get you killed. And, as compared to every other ship in the game, it is cheap as poo poo. You could fly 10 of these for the price of one Constellation, if you found 10 people willing to put up with the game long enough to load them all. At one point this was the chariot of choice for ram-griefing, but that particular pastime has been nerfed to the point that it doesn't seem to work at all anymore. If you have to give money to Chris Roberts, and I really heartily recommend not doing so, this is probably the ship to get. There are like 5 variants of this thing but they are all exactly the same with slight loadout changes, and loadouts don't matter in Star Citizen, so gently caress you if you think I'm wasting half an hour taking pictures of all of them.


RSI Ursa
Cost: $50
Guns: 2 in a little auto turret
Can It Do Anything But Fight: It can't even fight
Speed: Ground based
Reviewer's thoughts: All of the vehicles in this game seem like art assets in search of a mechanic. Of the three I've tried- Tumbril, Dragonfly, and Ursa- the Ursa seems like the best. It can carry a bunch of people or a box, it has a little gun turret, it does not immediately explode on impact with rocks. But... there's nothing in the game that requires ground vehicles. There are no missions requiring ground combat. There are no deliveries where you'd need to get out of your ship in a rover and haul a box anywhere. There's nothing to discover while exploring. Even mining is done via a ship. So what use is it? I'll tell you- it's extremely good for cramming into your gaping, aching cargo hold. The ultimate measure of any ship in Star Citizen is how many Ursas and Merlins you can wedge in there. I mean it's still going to jitter around and clip through poo poo and probably explode, but... it's not like you have a choice, if you want to put stuff in your holes.

Picture not found
RSI Constellation Taurus
Cost: $150
Guns: No idea
Can It Do Anything But Fight: It doesn't exist
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's thoughts: This one is weird. It is the only variant I know of that costs less than the original ship. It is a stripped down Constellation for significantly cheaper, that I guess is supposed to be more trade oriented? It's so unpopular that I'm not even sure it exists in the game. It certainly didn't exist on the showroom floor, so I don't have a picture of it. Oh well. Buy this if you want a ship that does what the Constellation does, only worse in every single aspect, but I guess you can cram more trade goods into it, but trade doesn't work and bulk trading is completely broken. The frogurt is also cursed.


RSI Constellation Andromeda
Cost: $225
Guns: 4 gimbal, 2x2 manned turrets, 50+ missiles
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Yes
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's thoughts: This was my baby, when the game was first announced. It was billed as the Millenium Falcon of Star Citizen and was basically sold as the "top of the line" back when the "line" was like, 7 ships. It could carry a crew of 4 or 5, it could do cargo, it had a shitload of guns, it had lots of missiles, it had a little detachable fighter in the back. Of course, since then CIG has spent the last 6 years selling ship after ship, something like 100+ ships now, and obviously one of the earliest and cheapest of the big ships could not be allowed a dominant position in the pile. This ship has seen more nerfs and been outclassed by more ships that do exactly what it does, but better in every sense, than any other ship in the game. On top of that, the manned turrets turned out to be giant shitpiles that nobody wants to use, and they never even bothered to get the detachable fighter working. Today this ship is a two hundred dollar joke. It has four giant guns that can't hit anything because it turns like a shopping cart full of bricks. It has paper-thin shields and will die to any fighter in the game in a few shots. It still has 50 missiles, and you can fire all 50 and not do a single point of damage. There are ships that are literally just this ship but functional, and they all cost 300 or more dollars. This ship is the epitome of Star Citizen in my opinion- originally sold for a crazy amount, it was released as complete garbage, never updated or made effective, and has been completely overshadowed by stuff that costs twice as much in a game that just doesn't give a poo poo about your old money.


RSI Constellation Aquila
Cost: $310
Guns: 4 gimbal, 1x2 manned turrets, 50+ missiles
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Yes
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's thoughts: CIG was experimenting with variants when they made these, and didn't know what people would or wouldn't pay money for. They thought "Same ship with different loadouts" was a good model, so... it's the Constellation! Again! But for 100 dollars more, and they took one of the turrets out for a "Radar" that doesn't work, and also you get a rover I think if you buy this one, but the rover doesn't work in the cargo hold of the Constellation, and is only 50 bucks on its own, so why wouldn't you buy the regular ship and then the rover separately and save yourself 40 bucks? Because you're a loving idiot, that's why. This ship comes with a slightly different, rounded cockpit. Also it has a blue and orange paint job. It is effectively just the Constellation and it sucks just as bad, but for more money.


RSI Constellation Phoenix
Cost: $350
Guns: 4 gimbal, 1x2 manned turrets, missiles
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Yes
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's thoughts: The Phoenix was originally sold as an up-gunned Constellation for like, armored personnel transport and VIP limo duties, in a game where there aren't any VIP's or personnel to transport. But it was still an interesting concept, and the thought of "Constellation but more dakka" was appealing at the time because the Constellation hadn't been poo poo on from a great height at that point. Of course, years later the ship actually came out, and... well, look at the picture. It's a flying bar and lounge. None of the extra equipment ever materialized, and this thing is essentially worthless except as a way to flash your cash wad. You cannot transport VIP's, it fights as poorly as a regular Constellation, and costs 125 dollars more. Not because of any mechanics- because it is "Luxury." Chris literally prices poo poo in-game based on aesthetic priorities, regardless of mechanics, because he is completely detached from the concept of value. It is particularly galling how much time has clearly been put into poo poo like whiskey tumblers and the animated hot tub in this ship, when basic mechanics are completely broken and the game barely functions. It is extremely revealing of CIG's priorities- they are a used luxury car dealership first and foremost, and they have gradually self-selected an audience that thinks used luxury cars belong in spaceship game. Everyone who still owns one of these is an unbearable twat and I consider these and all other luxury vessels in the game kill-on-sight.

Sarsapariller posted:

Day Three- Origin Jumpworks

WOULD go here, but yesterday I tried twice and the expo floor was empty both times. Then a loving midwestern blizzard hit, and we lost internet for the entire day. I had to read the thread by mobile phone hotspot like a god drat caveman! So, no origin ship reviews. Instead, we move on to

Day Four- Aegis Dynamics
Named for the legendary shield wielded by Greece's most intelligent goddess, Aegis specializes in legendary jpegs sold to Germany's most gullible auditors. As opposed to "Anvil," a combat ship company, and "Origin," the luxury ship company, "Aegis" seems to make... just... all sorts of random poo poo. Salvage ships and combat frigates and little police fighters or something who cares. There is probably some 20 page corporate lore backstory but if there's one thing I have less time for than Chris Roberts' towering self-regard, it is Chris Roberts' corporate fanfiction. I am not at home to rent these so I'm just going to steal pictures from the wiki. gently caress you, Derek doesn't pay me enough to care about this.


Aegis Avenger
Cost 50-85 dollars
Guns 1 big nose gimbal, 2 puny wing guns
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Yes
Speed: Modest
Reviewer's Thoughts: CIG had this weird period where they started selling the A-10 warthog over and over again. The Avenger was the start of that trend. Basically they introduced this ship that looked like the space shuttle had sex with a Salavador Dali painting, and it had a big gently caress-off nose gatling, and every Citizen in the universe simultaneously orgasmed at the sight of it. Then they did it again with the Gladius. Then they did it again with the Vanguard. Then they... you get the picture. Ironically none of these ships are actually ground attack craft, and the big nose gun tends to be kind of useless. The Avenger is not useless though- it is a decent little ship by Star Citizen standards. It can fight and carry cargo or a box, and it has a ramp, so you won't be instantly murdered by the ladder bug if you try to use it. It also got a "Redesign" which is goddamn hilarious since they were so thorough and fidelitous that they left a giant gently caress-off hole in the interior geometry. Seriously you can sleep in the bed of this thing and look out the hole into space. Naturally this will never be fixed. Also this thing has like 5 variants with no theme that I am aware of. They all suck.


Aegis Gladius
Cost 90 dollars
Guns 1 big nose gimbal, 2 puny wing guns
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Nope
Speed: Zippy
Reviewer's Thoughts: Hey look it's a space A-10 again. I actually really like this ship, it is my favorite fighter in the game. It's not nearly as effective as the Super Hornet but it is a) way cheaper, and b) way more fun to fly. This thing will cause your pilot to black out from acceleration at the slightest twitch of your mouse. Using it in combat is literally a point-and-click adventure because it can turn faster than you can scroll. It will also explode if anything looks at it funny. Once upon a time this was the ship they used to demo "Damage 3.0" or some version number, so it actually comes apart really beautifully. Shots leave big holes in the skin, the wings and components tear off in satisfying ways, and the flight model adjusts to match the damage. Of course they didn't bother to move "Damage 3.0" to any of the other fighters or ships in the game, so it's just the gladius that is now unbelievably fragile, years later. That's okay though, you can pay money for one of the other fighters!


Aegis Sabre
Cost 170 dollars
Guns 2 big nose guns, 2 puny wing guns
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Nope
Speed: Dunno
Reviewer's Thoughts: This is like, the fourth "Space Superiority" fighter in the 170-200 dollar price range. Sure is funny how they keep putting those out, and each new one is better than the old ones. This thing strictly outmatches the Super Hornet in firepower, but I think it's all fixed-forward or something. It is "Stealthy" which in game translates to "You can see it at the same range as every other ship but please imagine that some day you will be an F-22." It has no missiles, so that stealth better be real fuckin' good or it'll be visible at the only range it can fight, regardless. They sold a variant of this, the "Sabre Raven" as some kind of add-on if you bought an Optane hard drive, because Star Citizen has product tie ins just like actual games. I'm pretty sure the Raven variant sucks or maybe nobody bought those HDD's because I've never seen one.


Aegis Vanguard
Cost 225-250 dollars
Guns 1 big nose gun, 4 puny nose guns, a manned turret and a bunch of missiles.
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Maybe?
Speed: Sluggish
Reviewer's Thoughts: Hey look it's an A-10/Space Superiority fighter again! It costs more than any of the others, and it has a shitload more firepower! This one is at least slightly imaginative- it's supposed to be a "Long Range Patrol" ship, for like flying the space border to keep out the space migrant caravans I guess. The promotional marketing was heavily based on the F-14 Tomcat which is a carrier based fleet defense ship. Of course all of this is undermined by the fact that in Star Citizen, big capital ships travel ~4 to 5 times faster than fighters. Why you'd ever "Screen" yourself with a ship that goes slower than you, I don't know. gently caress you, buy the Tomcat spaceship. This thing has a small compartment where crewmen can actually stand, so it can probably carry a box but I did not test that. It has the usual superfluous and useless turret. It is very expensive and, based on reports from people who own one, kind of sucks- I think it's too big for its shield size or something? Whatever, who loving cares- it is another fighter in a game with like 40 goddamn fighters, and it costs as much money as the 5-man Constellation while not really making any sense for its intended role. It is peak Star Citizen circa 2017.


Aegis Retaliator
Cost 275 big ol fuckin' dollars
Guns 5 manned turrets and a big fuckin load of useless missiles
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Maybe?
Speed: Glacial
Reviewer's Thoughts: Hey look it's the B-1 bomber in space except it sucks rear end and there's nothing to bomb! This ship is such a tragedy. I think the styling is absolutely beautiful, the intended role (cap-ship killer with torpedos) is kind of neat, and there are enough turrets that it seems credibly threatening to fighters. It was the first big goon buy-in ship, as well, when the hive mind thought that if we had enough of these we would be smoking idiots in their giant Idris ships. Alas for we sweet summer children, it was us who were the idiots, all along. This was also one of the first big ships to be released into the game, amusingly, since I don't think I've actually seen one in-game since about 2015. That's for a very important reason: missiles don't work. They literally do not work- you can't fire them, if you do fire them they don't hit the target, if they do hit the target they don't do damage. This thing is less threatening than a NERF gun. It is a giant loving "Kick Me" sign slapped onto the backs of every person who tried to buy into the Rock-Paper-Scissors power-creep fest that is Star Citizen. It sucks so hard that they never even bothered to sell variants of this turd.


Aegis Eclipse
Cost 275 stealthy dollars
Guns Probably something unrealistically stupid
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Probably?
Speed: Glacial
Reviewer's Thoughts: Does this actually exist in game? Their website says it does. Anyway hey look it's another bomber, and it costs the same as the last one, but this time it's STEALTH. Buy this one instead! I mean it still probably doesn't loving work worth a drat because missiles are complete garbage, but it's a new thing to spend your money on SPEND SPEND SPEND


Aegis Reclaimer
Cost 400 salvaged dollars
Guns I'm sure it's just covered with turrets in retarded places
Can It Do Anything But Fight: It can't even fight
Speed: Glaciers race by this guy
Reviewer's Thoughts: Hey it's the big salvage ship in the game where ships despawn immediately after playing their death animation! Haha, we'd probably fix that, but uh... the servers couldn't loving handle it if wrecks stayed around for more than a minute or two at some locations. Whoops we already sold this to you! Oh well coming soon, keep on waiting for the next patch where we implement the gameplay for this giant ship! Assuming we ever get salvaging in, we'll probably have to think of something to do with that salvage- haha j/k we will turn it into "Scrap" in your cargo hold which can be sold at one of the broken trade consoles in the game for next to nothing! Don't worry it's Tier 0, next time we get around to it this will be the ship of your dreams! Keep on pledging!

This ship is a giant pig and doesn't do anything worth talking about in-game.


Aegis Hammerhead
Cost 725 of your literal, actual US Dollars
Guns All of them. All of the guns.
Can It Do Anything But Fight: Sure, gently caress it
Speed: Basically stationary
Reviewer's Thoughts: Uh oh, it's an AEGIS combat ship that doesn't come with a giant gently caress-off nose cannon or STEALTH. That means you probably shouldn't buy it, because a better version will be released the next time their sales dip. So this is the "Gunship corvette" which means it is just covered in manned turrets. It is the first "True" combat capital ship in the game, which I love because it costs as much as my loving month's rent and needs a crew of 3 or more to actually do anything. The pilot doesn't get any guns. So everyone who bought one of these hangar queens is constantly trying in chat to entice any other spacemen onto his giant monument to bad financial planning, and if you see one flying around they're basically guaranteed to have like 1 guy on a turret somewhere and be easily shootable anywhere else. Unfortunately for the eager goon troll, CIG didn't want their brand new combat centerpiece to be TOO easy to destroy- so they made it completely impossible to destroy. This thing has shields for days. You can shoot them until your ammo runs out and not make a dent. Also every turret has the firepower of an entire Constellation. No poo poo- 4xsize 4 guns. That'll basically instagib any smaller ship in the game. If you can get 3 or 4 people on one of these things and put it somewhere with lots of traffic teleporting in, baby you got a grief stew going. If you try to use it for anything else, including other types of combat than ambush camping, you're wasting your loving time. It has a top speed measured in inches per minute, can't turn worth a drat, has zero visibility, appears on people's radars at thirty kilometers out, and has a load of useless missiles that don't do anything slaved to the pilot seat for some reason. It also has all the amenities of a CIG spaceship- bunk beds and showers and locker rooms and engineering stations and cargo hatches and a mess hall, all that good poo poo. None of that does anything, don't bother. It's not even a STEALTH mess-hall. Don't worry, I'm sure when the next most biggest bestest ship comes out, this one will get an emergency upgrade package for only 250 loving dollars or whatever. Just set your money on fire, god drat.

Sarsapariller posted:

Day Five- Drake Interplanetary

Named for Nathan Drake, discoverer of Cortez's last expedition, the legendary lost city of gold and also Shambala as well as a few other games I haven't played, Drake Interplanetary is also all about shooting native peoples and relieving them of their treasures. This is the pirate company, that makes illegal pirate ships, for pirating. It's like a company whose primary clientele was Somali pirates. Yeah I don't know how they make any sales either. Also, you cannot actually pirate in Star Citizen. On with the show!


Drake Dragonfly
Price: 40 loving actual dollars for a space bike
Guns: Surprisingly it has a shotgun mounted on it
Speed: Really slow actually
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Can't even fight
Reviewer's Thoughts: I was all prepared to praise CIG for at least having a kind-of-fun hoverbike that works in zero g or on a planet. Then I looked at the price- forty loving dollars! What the hell? This thing isn't a ship, it is like an accessory at best, and it costs as much as existing AAA games! gently caress you Star Citizen. Ugh. Anyway, this bike kind of sucks. For some reason it has shotguns mounted on it but there's nothing to shoot on the ground ever. Its top speed is 50 m/s which, for reference, is half the speed of the glacially slow Hammerhead capital ship. It is actually slower than the two wheeled vehicles in the game. It does have the actually-kind-of-nice feature that, when you're hover-biking, it will raise and lower to keep you just above obstacles like trees and rocks. If it were faster, this would make it far and away the best way to get around on the ground without constantly hitting poo poo. Unfortunately it's slow as poo poo. Oh also if you hit anything, it likes to spazz the gently caress out and just kind of rocket off into space, up up and away like a piece of poo poo. One final note- you cannot set waypoints for yourself while in ground vehicles. This makes getting around extremely challenging at best.


Drake Herald
Price: 85 dollars for a space missile with a chair strapped to it
Guns: Of course it has guns, everything has guns
Speed: Probably pretty fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: No
Reviewer's Thoughts: Citizens hate on this ship a lot. Not because, as you might expect, it is a "Data Runner" in a game with no data and no running of same, but because it was originally sold with a big weird asymmetric doodad on it and on release it doesn't have that. Citizens are very, very concerned about the visuals of their ships- they don't really give a poo poo if they don't function. Anyway this is another ship that sucks, the whole premise is that it moves poo poo around fast but hey guess what Chris Roberts in another surprise decision made all the small, cheap ships way loving slower than the big ships. So, if you want to move data, hope you bought an Idris cause it'd be faster to stick your extremely fast courier inside your frigate than to fly anywhere in it yourself. Other than that, this thing is crap and it costs 85 dollars. I'd call it robbery but we're just getting started.


Drake Cutlass
Price: 100 dollars
Guns: 4 gimbals, 1 manned turret
Speed: It's alright
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Sure
Reviewer's Thoughts: Ah, the Cutlass. Beer's favorite ship! This ship has a long and troubled history. When it was first launched it was kind of the poster child for what was wrong with Star Citizen. It was billed as a sleek dangerous pirate ship, and Citizens who were at the time terrified of being griefed demanded that it not be as good as their chariots. Ben Lesnick, master of ships, complied and the first version of the Cutlass was a fat tub that looked like crap and flew even worse. It was fragile and pointless and everyone who'd spent 100 bucks on one was incandescently furious. Then it became apparent that goons and pirates in general were not actually going to play Star Citizen, and the furor about being hunted like vermin by genetically superior space bullies died down. Eventually the Cutlass got like 8 reworks, and now in the year of our lord 2018 is actually one of the best ships in the game. It is extremely tough to the point of absurdity, it has good guns, it is fast, it has a nice sized cargo hold, it doesn't have all the frilly bullshit like sinks and espresso machines that clutter half the other ships in the game, and the overall look and feel is very sleek and cool. This'd probably be a 300 dollar ship these days, but it is grandfathered in at 100 dollars. Unfortunately it is still a ship in Star Citizen, which is like being one of the nicest turds in the 1000 foot tall mountain of horse manure.


Drake Buccaneer
Price: 110 dollars
Guns: 2 wings and a nose gun
Speed: Really fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: No
Reviewer's Thoughts: I don't get this ship. It is another small fighter, and sucks basically worse than any other fighter in the game. It is clearly the "NPC tie-fighter" ship that is designed to be destroyed in the dozens by the player. Yet here it is, for sale to you, at 110 actual dollars. That is right, this ship costs more than the tougher, more dangerous, more "Do-everything" Cutlass. It's... faster, I guess? I mean, only in regular space. The Cutlass is actually faster in QT. So yeah. Don't, uh, don't buy this. Or any other ship in the game.


Drake Caterpillar
Price: 295 dollars
Guns: Apparently this thing has some
Speed: Really slow
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: I guess
Reviewer's Thoughts: I love that CIG has set the real life prices and priorities for development based on the aesthetic value of the ships in game. See, luxury ships like the Constellation Phoenix cost 400 dollars and get multiple reworks because they are elite and only rich people get them. This, which is basically a capital ship sized transport? Ew, it's a pirate ship, cut 100 bucks off the price, kick it out the door, never touch it again. Chris reflecting on your stupidity has become like a daily meditation for me, and it hurts. It hurts me, Chris. Anyway the Caterpillar was sold as some kind of piratey pirate ship which never made a lick of goddamn sense because it is a huge unwieldy transport. I guess the idea was that your pirate fleet would disable the enemy and then ride off with the loot in this thing. Also a lot of fuss was made about this thing being able to transport smaller fighters in the cargo bays, which may actually have been the first recorded case of the "It's a POCKET CARRIER" sale. Naturally it can't actually do that- the only fighter that sort of fits is the Merlin and it jitters and explodes if you try it. Oh also this ship was sold with like bulkhead cutters and pirate docking collars for forced boarding actions and none of that ever materialized either because Chris has no idea what he's doing and just kind of makes poo poo up. Luckily, this is currently the best cargo ship in the game with almost double the capacity of the "Starfarer." Unluckily, trade in the game is completely hosed and you can't do bulk trades without running the risk of losing your entire credit balance in one shot. So it's a pirate ship that can't pirate, a trade ship that can't trade, and a pocket carrier that can't carry pockets. But it can sure reach into your pockets. Empty your wallets for Star Citizen and a one way ticket to second-class citizen status, you pirate scum.

Sarsapariller posted:

Day Six- Some Random Company But Actually We're Just Selling You Alien Ships

In the year 3000 the Arkansas-Oklahoma Port Operators Association evolved from a mere non-profit educational organization to encourage cooperation between ports, and became a premier manufacturer of weird-rear end alien spaceships. We may never know why. Probably because "Aopoa" sounded kind of alien and nobody bothered to google it before they used it. I guess they sell the ships of the mysterious and noble bird-men who are definitely not going to be a cheap yellowface stereotype, right Chris?

Also in the year 3000, a commune in the province of Frosinone in the Italian region Lazio, became home to a manufacturer of fine customized weird-rear end spaceships. "Esperia" which is definitely a weird alien name and not a place Chris visited on his yacht trip to Monaco, sells the evil icky Vanduul ships which are definitely not just reskinned Kilrathi fighters despite bearing the same names, because that would be theft of EA's intellectual property, right Chris? WINK.

Also also in the year 3000, CIG sold the Banu Merchantman, but they got fuckin' lazy with it and didn't bother to make a corporation with lore or anything. Just loving buy it, we know you don't give a poo poo.



Aopoa Nox
Price: 45 USD
Guns: More and better than the Dragonfly because that poo poo's 5 dollars cheaper
Speed: Really slow actually
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Can't even fight
Reviewer's Thoughts: So I haven't actually bothered to ride this thing around, but I'm told that the HUD obscures even more of the player's vision than the one on the Dragonfly. That doesn't surprise me- Chris comes from the era of Wing Commander HUDS, where it was really important to obscure as much of the screen as possible so you didn't actually have to animate a whole lot at once. He never really overcame that aesthetic and half the ships in the game have dashboards that are impossibly frustrating to see over. Anyway this thing is a racer but it's a bike and it's only 5 dollars more than the Dragonfly. In Star Citizen you can pretty much judge everything by price and aesthetic. So it is likely this thing is slightly faster than the Dragonfly, shoots slightly harder, and is still a useless piece of trash. Why do bird-men need a space bike anyway?


Cockpit:
Aopoa Khartu-Al
Price: 170 USD
Guns: Only 2, haha this loving thing costs as much as a super hornet
Speed: Completely uncontrollable
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can explode
Reviewer's Thoughts: So when CIG started selling alien ships, they introduced the concept of the "Alien Tax." You see, alien ships are more expensive for less performance. In actual dollar terms. Because... they are rare, and exotic. No, I'm not kidding, they actually said this and backers ate it up because they are loving stupid. So here's a ship for 170 dollars, the same price as a Super Hornet. It has two guns, flies so fast that you will black out if you try to maneuver, and explodes if it so much as glances against any surface. Somehow despite the cockpit being a giant glass ball, Chris managed to get some enormous vision-obscuring struts in there to really give it the full gently caress-you-this-is-Star-Citizen experience. Mysterious birdmen love struts. I've never seen anybody fly one of these.


Esperia Blade
Price: 275 dollars oh my loving lord
Guns: 4 nasty mongrel-race guns
Speed: Real fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Nope
Reviewer's Thoughts: Another victim of the alien tax, this ship costs as much as a Constellation Phoenix but it is a loving light fighter. I'm pretty sure CIG introduced this ship because they decided, at some point, that the Scythe was not fragile and small enough to be the cannon-fodder alien ship, and they needed something even more worthless. Even the lore for this thing describes it as obsolete and virtually worthless. Please give us your healthcare payment for the month if you wish to fly one.


The front is on the right
Oops no, it is on the left
Banu Merchantman
Price: 350 dollars
Guns: Who cares it's a trade ship
Speed: Slow
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It doesn't exist
Reviewer's Thoughts: So technically the Banu Merchantman doesn't exist in-game which would normally exclude it from my reviews, but the story here is so god drat hilarious that I had to bring it up. Alright first of all this ship was sold without a cut-out corporate entity for it, which amuses me- why drop the pretense, CIG? It was also sold without the "Alien Tax" because either they forgot or did not care at the time. But anyway it's a bulk trader, armed, crew of 3 or four- in CIG terms, 350 dollars was a steal. Also it looked kind of cool so people ate it right up. Then it became apparent that the concept artist, and the design team, did not actually know which end of the ship was the front. Sometimes it was depicted flying one way and sometimes the other. Oops! Eventually CIG settled on one way, the opposite way from the original concept and design, which pissed off half the purchasers who wanted it to be the other. I think CIG got frustrated and just shitcanned the whole design because nobody's heard a peep about it since the original sale in 2014. Four years on this thing and all people hear is once a year "Oh yeah still working on it." Suuuuuure you are. Meanwhile ships are being introduced and sold in-game today that clearly started dev less than a year ago. Obviously it's just a very complex design, lot of uh, ins and outs. Keep spending money on it. Godspeed, you backwards-flying Jew stereotype-race ship.


Esperia Scythe
Price: I'm actually not sure
Guns: Some red ones
Speed: Zippy
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Nope
Reviewer's Thoughts: So this thing was sold once upon a time, I think possibly as a kickstarter reward for like the ludicrous tiers, or maybe as a concierge thing? I never even priced it because as I recall it was insanely overpriced (ALIEN TAX) and also just... just real bad. Like all the other alien ships it's designed to get blowed up real good by the human ships and nothing else. But don't worry, CIG spent months of their artist and modeler's time making fully realized cockpits and alien HUDs for this and every other fighter. Your pledge dollars at work.


Esperia Glaive
Price: 350 dollars
Guns: Some red ones
Speed: Modest
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Nope
Reviewer's Thoughts: This ship is literally just the Scythe but with two wings and also it costs 350 loving dollars. Obviously this ship needed to be reserved for the elite of the elite. Somebody at CIG had the genius idea: "Hey what if we actually forced people to play the game in order to earn it." So they did! You had to win a match of Arena Commander in order to earn the right to purchase one of these. Note- not "Earn one of these." Earn the right... to pay money... for this. Anyway Arena Commander at the time was 18 or some-odd rounds of fairly tedious point and click combat and the main challenge was not crashing out of the game in the hour it took to finish. Citizens went apeshit. To think! A combat ship, locked away behind a game mode in the game they all loved but that none of them actually played! They were furious and the bitching and tears swiftly overflowed. Meanwhile, enterprising bastards such as myself went in, played an hour of Arena Commander, bought the ship and immediately turned around and sold it for a 50 buck markup. That's right- people would pay 50 extra bucks on the grey market, the day this thing was released, to not have to play the game it was made for. Explain that one to me. Anyway the ship itself kinda sucks, it's made to be a boss ship but that just means it's slightly harder to kill than the other Vanduul stuff. No missiles, couple of guns, generally pretty weak. If it were a human fighter it'd be like 100 bucks. Please pay me four times that much to not have to play your own game, Citizen.

Sarsapariller posted:

Day Seven- Musashi Industrial Starflight Concern

MISC is definitely not just the first acronym that popped into a hack writer's head when he was given the assignment "Come up with a corporation for all the random poo poo that doesn't belong anywhere else." In the year 3000 Space Japan will partner with the space Chinese Turtles to make a whole bunch of ships with space Chinese Turtle technology. Why didn't they partner with the space Japanese Birdmen? Don't be a loving racist, okay, that's why. Anyway some of these ships are getting to the core of what is wrong with Star Citizen so here we loving go.



MISC Reliant
Price: 65-85 USD
Guns: Probably, got to have guns on your news van
Speed: Fast? I don't know.
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Supposedly a lot of things, none of them in-game
Reviewer's Thoughts: So by the time the Reliant was "Concepted" CIG and Chris had gone well off the rails in terms of design. No longer just a space MMO with fighters and trading, Star Citizen was an everything simulator. Variants couldn't just be good at combat, they had to introduce whole unique lifestyles, each targeted at a weird subset of the dreaming fanbase. The Reliant was sold as, no poo poo, a News Van, a Mobile Science Platform, and a general Minivan. And of course it couldn't just be like "Oh it's got a yellow paintjob and we made a twitch deal." Chris had to promise an "Enhanced imaging sub-suite" and envision a whole range of news-reporter gameplay, none of which had previously been designed or integrated into the game. Scope creep began to turn into a rapid unplanned scope disassembly. There is no scope anymore- the scope is literally everything. This ship, of course, has only been released as the base variant because the extras make no sense and cannot be implemented in a sane universe to any degree of buyer's satisfaction, so they never will be. The base variant is another crappy low-cost starter ship. I'm sure it works fine for the purpose but it is functionally no different from the Avenger or Mustang or Aurora.


with strut:

without strut:

MISC Freelancer
Price: 110-165 USD
Guns: 4 very big guns
Speed: Moderate
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Yeah
Reviewer's Thoughts: Star Citizen's price-creep has given it a real problem. Namely, that most of the original ships are way more effective for their prices than ships these days. The Freelancer, for example, is a 3-man trade ship with 4 size 3, and 2 size 1 guns. It's reasonably maneuverable and has decent shields. This makes it an unbelievably effective combat ship, in many cases better than ships two to three times more expensive than it. If it were sold today it'd probably cost 250 dollars, but it is grandfathered in at the original price. I mean it's still insanely overpriced, don't get me wrong- but it is highly effective in that price range compared to poo poo like the news van. Anyway, they made a shitload of variants for this thing and they mostly make sense in that they all trade one aspect to enhance another- better cargo, better jump range, better combat- but they're all kind of boring and I won't talk about them here. This is a good ship and, alongside the Cutlass, probably would be my go-to for general purpose "loving around" ships if I could loving afford one. It can't be all good, though- CIG royally hosed up the interior design on this thing when they first released it. They decided that the canopy needed a strut literally right in the center of the pilot's vision. Naturally this got a ton of flak, and they eventually fixed it in one of the seven hundred inevitable redesigns that they seem to have to do on every ship.


MISC Razor
Price: 145 USD
Guns: Oh I'm sure it has some
Speed: Super duper fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can race!
Reviewer's Thoughts: Another example of scope explosion. So CIG introduced a race mode early on in the game's conception. I don't know why, nobody was really clamoring for Formula 1 in their fleet combat sim, but after coming back from Monaco Chris seemed to think it was very important to include for some reason. So they started selling race ships. First it was just a variant of the 300i, but faster! Then they sold a dedicated race-only ship, the M50. Naturally racing wouldn't be very exciting if there was only one ship, so they sold another- the Razor, and it is strictly faster than the M50 so I guess gently caress you if you bought the earlier ship. As for the races themselves- well, there's only one track, nobody plays that mode, and it has never been updated or changed in any meaningful way. It takes about 2 minutes to complete a race and mostly involves instantly rotating your ship at the next ring and just gunning it. To alleviate this tedium, CIG introduced "Scramble Races" in-game, but they are randomly mixed between space races and ground races, and hey guess what you can't haul ground vehicles in one of these, so pretty much guaranteed you will never get the race you want. Also the actual race itself is broken. It is pretty clearly the lowest possible priority. This is because racing in a fleet combat sim is stupid, and everybody on the dev team knows it except for Chris.


MISC Prospector
Price: 155 USD
Guns: It has rock guns
Speed: Surprisingly fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can mine!
Reviewer's Thoughts: Much like racing, mining in Star Citizen is a hosed up mess. Early on mining was introduced as a pillar of economic activity in the game's concept, because Eve has it, and other MMO's have it, and Elite has it, and it's just kind of a staple of spaceman space adventures in general. How else are you going to get minerals in the year 3000 if an intrepid commando doesn't pilot his faster-than-light ship up to a big asteroid and shoot some chunks off of it? Robots? Don't make me laugh. Anyway illogic of mining in a post-scarcity economy aside, Chris had grand plans for mining. You'd fly up to the rocks and scan them by planting sensors on them and detonating charges. One player would control the cutting lasers, another would handle the tractor beam, another would run the ore processor, because those all sound like exciting jobs that people will spend hundreds of hours doing. They sold a great big-rear end ship for like 500 dollars based on this concept. Then a couple years went by, and they sold (and immediately released) this one. It doesn't have sensors to place. It doesn't have explosives to detonate. It doesn't have a tractor beam or an ore processor. It has a single laser, and you mine by firing it into the rock, exactly like every other space game. Critically, though, this ship is the only thing in the game that can mine. And it costs 155 dollars. CIG took the whole mining mechanic, reduced it to the same laser-on-rock as every other game, and then sold it to backers for triple the price of a full and complete AAA game. loving... Star Citizen, man. Of course if you point out to backers that this ship is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of mining introduced and sold along with the great big frigate-sized ship, they will tell you that "It's tier 0! They will improve it!" They won't improve it. What they're going to do is come up with a completely different type of mining, that only the big ship can do, and the type of mining that the Prospector can do will always remain exactly as it is now. That's right- they are going to have to start implementing whole aspects of the game entirely for one ship or another, because they loving sold them already and didn't think about crossover.


MISC Hull-C
Price: 100-1000 USD depending on hull size
Guns: Oh I'm sure it has a turret
Speed: Doesn't exist
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can trade!
Reviewer's Thoughts: Here is another entirely single-serving ship design. It is the trader, it is made to trade. Chris watched the "Heavy Metal Queen" episode of cowboy bebop and decided he wanted space trucking. So they made and sold a space truck and, hilariously, copy-pasted it four more times. That's right, you can buy this thing in A, B, C, D, or E variants, scaling from a tiny little starter up to a carrier-sized monstrosity. It's just the same hull shape at different sizes. Naturally they didn't think this through at all, and the interiors and exteriors are going to have to be completely redesigned across all 5 ships because poo poo like windows and doors absolutely will not scale that way, but those are problems for future Chris! Also, the way this ship is designed makes it completely incompatible with every single landing pad in the game- you literally could not land this ship, if it gets loaded up with boxes the way that the concepts indicate. They have introduced no mechanic or landing pad that would fix this, to my knowledge. They also haven't released any of these ships! What a coincidence! If they ever do they will have to have some kind of like docking collar to docking collar spacedock implemented at every station, which... is never going to happen. Future Chris is gonna have a lot of scrambling to do.


MISC Starfarer
Price: 295 USD
Guns: Bunch of useless turrets
Speed: Slowest thing in the game
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can get shot
Reviewer's Thoughts: Boy I'm getting tired of reviewing all these single-mechanic ships that were sold without any thought being given to the mechanic that was attached to them. Time to kick back and review a... space fuel tanker, you say? For a game that doesn't... doesn't actually require fuel for general flight? And also has no refueling mechanics? Okay. Sure, gently caress it. So this is the Starfarer, the space refueling tanker that every aspiring fleet commander needs to have in his or her (but let's be real, his) hangar! Your fleet won't get anywhere (there's nowhere to go) without one of these to refuel (you can't refuel) it! Just the thought of running dry (there is no fuel) has left many fighter pilots (people who bought fighters) in a cold sweat (you can't sweat either). Buy a Starfarer and ensure you never run out of gas again! So yeah. There are two types of fuel in Star Citizen and neither is required for flight- there is boost fuel, which runs your afterburners, and there is quantum fuel, which lets you jump around. The Starfarer can refuel neither of these, because refueling isn't a thing that actually exists in game. Even if it could, it wouldn't be necessary because every station and landing platform in the game can refuel and they are all easily reachable. But the Starfarer sure does exist in game! What do you do with it? loving nothing! It is a slow fat pig with no mechanics attached to it, that exists only because they sold it at one point and can't back out of that deal. Behold the future of all of your single-mechanic spaceships.


MISC Endeavor
Price: 500-1000 USD
Guns: who cares
Speed: doesn't exist
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can destroy your game design
Reviewer's Thoughts: Ah the capstone. The MISC endeavor. At the point this was sold CIG had gone completely "gently caress It" and was just shoveling poo poo out the airlock and into backer's hands as fast as possible. This is a science ship! A farming ship! It's got a biodome! It's got a telescope array! It's got a supercollider! It's got a Research Pod and a Science Pod which are two distinct different things! It's got a medical bay! It's got a landing bay! We literally sold each of these modules on its own, for real cash, so we can't just drop them later- and we have no idea how we're going to implement any of them! It's a capital ship with like 8 distinct game mechanics tied to it, none of which we thought through in the slightest! Buy it NOW RIGHT NOW! We'll figure out how space farming works and why you'd even want to do it later. gently caress you, Future Chris! Eat all of my poo poo, presented in the form of this ship which could be three complete self-contained games in itself, signed Present Chris!

Did you think I was kidding about the telescope array?


Or the particle collider?


Surely the farm pods though right?


Huh. So, at this point anyone paying attention to CIG has to come to one of two inescapable conclusions. Either they have scope creeped themselves into an impossible situation, where there is no way they are going to release anything that even comes close to the promised gameplay, and what they actually put out will be like "Telescope array: Gives a +10% buff to your research speed!" Or, they never intended to actually implement any of the stuff I have mentioned in this line of ships: multi-crew mining, ship refueling, space science, news reporting- and are literally just selling ships based off a list they made at one point of "Things to do in space." MISC, more than any other company and ship set in the game, exemplifies why Star Citizen will never be a complete product. It can't be. No game could contain all of this and not just be reality plus spaceships. They aren't selling structured pieces of a fun design that they already have in their heads here. They're just throwing everything at the wall and, whether it sticks or not, oops they already sold it and now they have to deliver. They can't deliver. Do not buy these ships.

Sarsapariller posted:

Day Eight- The Final Day- Random rear end Ships And Stuff I Didn't Cover Before

Today's poo poo is a wholly uninteresting collection of ground vehicles and small ships. If you really want a review here it is: they all suck and there's no gameplay attached to them, don't buy them. Okay now that that's out of the way, I want to take this space to review some of the ships I haven't covered so far, because they aren't released. Included in this collection are some of the most outrageous fuckups that CIG has ever managed. Prepare yourself, for the grand finale of Sarsapariller's Sassy Ship Sperging!


Tumbril Nova
Price: 105 real dollars
Guns: Tanky gun
Speed: Ground Vehicle
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can serve as block housing for up to 6 families
Reviewer's Thoughts: As we're going to discuss, CIG got really into land and territory claims once they had procedural planets in the game. Like, way way into it. Like they kind of forgot that Star Citizen was a game about space for about a year, and it's not clear that they've remembered yet. They started selling land claim beacons and rovers and bikes and all kinds of happy horseshit that doesn't do anything because there is no persistence and you can't own anything for longer than one restart and none of it is in the game anyway. This is where the Tumbril Nova comes in. In any other game this would be the novelty tank that you encounter in a single level and pilot through the city, blowing up Covenant dropships and shouting OOO-RAH at the marines as you ride by. In Star Citizen this is a 105 dollar purchase. You are going to need these to protect your "Land investment" you see. From, uh, bandits. Why would anyone buy this when it would stand to reason that a landlocked vehicle is going to be extremely vulnerable to spaceships, the one thing everybody in the game has? Shut up, stop asking questions, buy the new thing. Anyway CIG hosed up, as is tradition, and all of the concept art for this thing depicts it as being roughly two to three times the size of a house. Seriously it is a tank that looks like it would not fit on any city street in the world. It is a tank with multiple stories on the interior. No ship in the game can carry this. Don't worry, though! CIG solved that problem by selling an entirely new ship just for carrying this loving tank. It is the H2 Hercules and I do not cover it here, because I just told you everything you need to know about it in one sentence.


Aegis Redeemer
Price: 250 imaginary dollars
Guns: This ship will never be released
Speed: Chris personally hates it
Reviewer's Thoughts: Before we delve into the final madness of CIG let's take a trip back to the Halcyon days of 2013-2014, and a little show called The Next Great Starship. See, at the time Chris's whims had turned to American reality television for some godforsaken reason, and obviously what he needed to do was host like 6 months of a show where a bunch of fans competed, for free, to make assets for his unreleased game that they had all already paid for. Their objective was to make a gunship and (and here was the critical mistake) Chris would let the "Community" vote on the final winners. Well it turned out there were some really talented people in his community, and also some less-talented ones, and some that were talented but only knew how to make anime ships, and also some pedophiles. The pedo posted on our very own forums briefly before he was arrested and that is all I will say about that. But long story short, the anime people narrowly won the contest, and the redeemer was the ship they delivered. It looks nothing like anything else in the Aegis lineup. Its engines are giant hair clippers and don't make any sense. It is loving loaded with enough guns, missiles, and turrets to make a Super Hornet blush. It has also not seen the light of day since the end of the show. They sold it, per their agreement with the community, then they buried it and will never discuss it again. CIG hates this ship. Presumably because it actually kind of cool, but (I suspect) because it is the one ship in the game that did not spring fully-formed from Chris's sweaty balding head. So it's safe to take giant shits on internally. But yeah this was basically it for community engagement- after this, CIG swore off any kind of public fan-input ever again.


Genesis Starliner
Price: More than an airline ticket, 400 dollars
Guns: All passenger liners should come with guns
Speed: LA to NY in 15 minutes
Reviewer's Thoughts: Okay back to the more fevered recent era. CIG decided to sell a space airliner. Okay, cool you say, not for me but I can see why passenger transport would be a thing in their universe and why not sell the model, it's not like it could expand gameplay enormously. Whoah there buckaroo. Holster that assumption cannon! They sold an entire novel of airline gameplay with this thing. See, it's not enough that you have a ship with NPC's on it. You need to keep them happy. You need to serve them drinks. You need to make sure your blade servers are set up with the latest entertainment so that they don't get upset! You think I'm kidding. Do I need to remind you of the space farm and particle collider? CIG had completely detached from reality at this point, waving hands and promising poo poo to make a quick buck was how they did. Lest you think I am loving kidding, here is the original pitch. Flight attendants! Medical diagnosis! Luxury seating and upgradeably liquors! THE MIXMASTER! Anyway I probably don't need to tell you, but this ship hasn't come out and it probably won't ever come out. CIG can't even get NPC's to stand still without t-posing and dying. Imagine trying to fill a moving ship with a hundred of them.


Pioneer
Price: 850 colony-founding dollars
Guns: Fuuuuuck I don't care
Speed: I'm sure it will take 2+ hours to get anywhere
Reviewer's Thoughts: Back to land claims. Here's the ship that literally can build outposts. Why would you need to do that? What function do outposts serve? Can you have more than one? Is it persistent after you log out? WHY DO YOU NEED OUTPOSTS SERIOUSLY? gently caress you, stop asking questions, Future Chris will handle all of this, don't worry so much. It's big and it looks like a homeworld ship and it can land on planets and leave little buildings! loving buy it! So with the Pioneer we've gone from "Spaceship game in space" to "Spaceship game with planets" to "Planet game, focused on the planets, with some spaceships enabling the planet-based gameplay." Why? Who was clamoring for the planet stuff? Nobody, but Chris had an engineer who was able to make procedural planets work in Cryengine, so that is what Star Citizen is now- a game about procedural planets and owning them, I guess. Hence all the content just released, and about to be released, and why it is all just planets planets planets. The pioneer cost 850 dollars and hasn't been seen since the initial sale. I don't think they even mentioned it during this expo. But the North remembers. Oh yes.


Origin 890 Jump
Price: 890 dollars haha get it that's the name of the ship it's a number we just loving made up and it coincides with the price what a coincidence
Guns: Not nearly enough
Speed: Not nearly enough
Reviewer's Thoughts: Citizens please buy one of these. It makes it so much easier to figure out which of you needs to be relentlessly griefed. So. Chris likes trains. He likes formula 1, he likes gritty space rebels, he likes car dealerships, he likes navies and saluting and admirals. You will find all of these things in Star Citizen. But the one thing Chris loving loves? More than anything else in the whole goddamn world? So much that it has infested Star Citizen with a bunch of useless cluttered poo poo? Luxury yachts. There is nothing in this world Chris loves more than a big rear end useless multi-million-dollar luxury yacht with all the fixin's. He has like 4 of these stupid loving things in the game, as well- pretty much the entire Origin lineup, plus the Constellation Phoenix, are all "Luxury." And they don't loving do anything! They're just white, and wood-panelled, in a game about grungy spacemen! But this thing- oh, this 890 jump- this is the crown jewel. For literally 900 of your dollars, you can own a frigate-sized monument to your limitless ego and inability to perceive value. What can it do? It can luxury. It's got big windows! It has, uh... it's white! It has wood paneling! It has virtually no defenses and is probably slow as poo poo! If I see you in this thing I will dedicate my evening to making you upset!

luxury


NO, MORE LUXURY


DID I loving STUTTER I SAID LUXURY I DON'T CARE IF IT SERVES NO GAMEPLAY PURPOSE



Idris P And M
Price: 1000-1750 can't-even-make-a-joke-about-it dollars
Guns: All the best guns
Speed: None
Reviewer's Thoughts: God I'm tired of writing about spaceships and it's only been 8 days. Imagine how the fuckers at CIG must feel after 6 years! Anyway we're in the home stretch now. The Idris M is the grand-daddy of the whale ships. It was originally sold as a ONE TIME ONLY MILITARY VERSION WE WILL NEVER SELL THIS AGAIN in a lot of 100, at 1000 dollars per ship. I don't know why. I guess Chris needed a hundred grand at the tables that day and cashing in some of this stuff was the best way to do it. Of course, it was never that exclusive. For the first two years, you could message the concierge service and they'd just straight-up sell you one of these eventually. This was what prompted the grey market in the first place. People were apeshit to buy this thing and too impatient to wait. You could turn around and sell it for 3-4x what you paid for it. I did this with one and made a cool 3k profit off of it. CIG wasn't having that, though- they wanted their cut of the idiot whale money and behind-the-scenes sales were not going to do it. So they made the Idris-P. It was the exact same ship, but worse- missing the railgun, missing a couple bigger guns- and for more money- 1,250 dollars. See it turns out there's some law in the EU that prevents you from exchanging digital goods over 1000 dollars in value. So the Idris M was "Giftable" between accounts, but the Idris P, at just slightly past the limit, was not! So sad backers, nothing we can do about it! Naturally the "Worse but for more money" ship sold like hotcakes. They eventually started locking the original behind high-level packages, so if you spent 10k or whatever on Star Citizen you could net yourself one, because why spend 1k when you could multiply that by 10? Anyway it's been 6 years and this ship isn't out because it's a flying skyscraper/aircraft carrier and nothing about their engine can handle it. This ship Expo was the first time that a static model was placed in the game alongside players. It's not coming out, it's never coming out, give Chris Roberts all your money etc.


Javelin
Price: 3000 dollars but that's just for starters
Guns: More guns than the loving Idris that's for sure, what a pleb ship
Speed: Actually negative
Reviewer's Thoughts: We need to go deeper. More P2W than a 1000 dollar capital ship. What about... a three thousand dollar ship that you have to pay 5,000 just to get the option to buy? Oh yes. I don't know if that's still the case, but originally the Javelin was only offered to super-duper megawhales. It is a destroyer, or something, who cares. It has all the guns and it's like two miles long and it takes more people to run it than CIG has ever demonstrated they can fit on a single server. It costs 5,000 just to look at the store page and 3,000 just to buy. You probably need to co-sign a loan with Chris just to sniff this thing's farts. It costs more than some people make in a year, it will never be released, and if it was it would serve no gameplay function except to just sit there because there is no game mechanic requiring this. What are you gonna loving do, fly it to an asteroid field and hunt bandits? Motherfucker this ship is bigger than Port Olisar. How do you even propose that players spawn this monstrosity? Nothing about this makes sense. Hundreds of artists are going to spend a year just to do the interior of this ship, that like 15 morons in the entire world will ever own, and you know every one of them is so repugnant they're never going to get a crew for it. But we're not loving done yet.


Anvil F8 Lightning
Price: Ten. Thousand. Dollars.
Guns: Lots of em
Speed: Faster than a wireless transaction between your bank and Chris's wallet
Reviewer's Thoughts: Deeper. This is it, this is as whale as it gets. The F8 Lightning was the final, gotta-have-it ultimate supership at the end of Squadron 42, the game of mocap and missed deadlines. In the old Wing Commander games there was always some ludicrously OP ship that the player got towards game's end that could kill like 100 other fighters without a scratch. Chris, understanding that this would be extremely poor game design to have in his multiplayer dog-fight MMO, committed publicly on camera in numerous places that players would not see or be able to buy this ship until they finished SQ42. Well, that lasted 3 of 4 years which is practically a record in Chris-land, but eventually a whole big pile of internal poo poo was leaked including models for this fighter, and CIG kind of gave up the fight. A year or so after that, surprise! There's a ten thousand dollar pack in the store, and if you buy it the big extra-special reward is.... this fighter! Don't worry, it's not P2W. I mean, you did pay. You paid so very much. And you're going to win- believe us, if you don't win we will alter the game until you do, at that kind of price. But it cannot be conclusively proven that you paid just to win. So, checkmate haters! Back in reality, it is kind of surprising that this is the final ship in the whale lineup, but I think they'd kind of run out of capital ships to overpromise and under-deliver on at the point that this was sold. This thing will, inevitably be the most ludicrously OP fighter in the game. Which means that once people can earn it in-game, it will be the only fighter anyone ever uses. Every other ship will have to be balanced around this piece of poo poo, or be rendered instantly irrelevant. This thing is the literal death knell of any kind of balance or gameplay ever existing in Star Citizen. The end game is just going to be this fighter, whichever trade ship can carry the most cargo, and whichever capital ship can shoot this fighter the best (or, if none of them can... just more of this fighter). That's it. Look upon your works, ye Future Chris's, and despair.

Sarsapariller posted:

To be a backer of CIG in the post-investor era is to be in a state of zen. It is to transcend shame, and humiliation, and fear, and exist in a sort of timeless absence of self-awareness that can only be described as divine. Your aura of pure and saintly cluelessness will become so heavy that people who have never even spoken to you are momentarily stricken as you walk by. "Holy poo poo," they will think, "I just met the biggest dumbass I'm ever going to meet, and I don't even know his name."

To give money to Chris in winter '18 is an act of total self-disregard, rivaled only by shooting heroin, or transcendental meditation. Unlike those pastimes, however, giving money to Chris fosters a much deeper sense of well being and satisfaction. God's in his heaven and all's right with the spaceships, they will think to themselves as they hit "YES GOD YES" on the purchase button. And the knowledge, the certain surefire knowledge, that the ship they have pledged for will come out, and it will be good, and by all that is holy on this earth it will punch above its weight- that is just the icing on the cake.

To talk about Star Citizen on the internet in this, the winter of our content, is to wade through a sea of FUD that can no longer touch backers. They've heard it all before- Star Citizen is out of money, the game is going to sell out to investors, the game is going to sell out to consoles, Squadron 42 isn't even being produced, you're throwing your money down a hole. And look! All of those things turned out to be true. How funny! But the very act of faith in the company itself has sustained it. By not believing the things that were clearly and plainly true, Citizens have managed to keep Chris going. By disregarding the six million waving red flags, they have uplifted him from his own incompetence and terrible management, and lo- all the bad things about Star Citizen are true and now, none of them matter. The 2018 backer finds that their faith in the game has not wavered even a millimeter. No matter how bad things actually are the game is still very real, and very very good, and so all the future FUD in the world finds no purchase on these purified souls.

It is a miracle of faith. It is a tiny man in a light-up christmas deer skull piloting a spaceship. Join me now, brother and sister goons.

Sarsapariller posted:

Alright, just for fun here's an old school write up. The server was back to being a loving headache today, crashes and hangs galore, so lots more frustration.

My self-imposed mission for the day: Do any one space combat mission successfully.

First attempt- Woke up in the wank pod, ran downstairs and spawned a constellation. Took a mission to go get a black box from a wrecked caterpillar. The missions seem to randomly generate from a set of about a dozen different scenarios and there's no guarantee that you'll get the same one if anything goes wrong. There's also no guarantee that you won't get assigned the same mission as someone else and end up shooting them over the black box that you both need. I kind of like that. If it weren't for the extremely low payouts (600 uec), that would be an awesome scenario. Anyway I took off and then the game crashed. When I logged back in I was in the wank pod again. With the NEW AND IMPROVED insurance timers, I'd only have to wait FOUR minutes to recover the ship that was lost due to no error on my part. But I didn't want to wait so I spawned my Gladius, even though I knew it had no cargo area to hold the black box. Took off, game crashed again.

Second attempt- Spawned a constellation since it had been 4+ minutes since the last time. Couldn't find the black box thing again so I took a new mission- go to beacon and defend ship. I fly my ship out there, there is of course no sign of anything until I get within 3km of the beacon, then a Starfarer (friendly) spawns that fills half my loving screen. Three enemy gladiuses spawned, and then a goddamn constellation. For a 1000 credit mission. Even in my own constellation I was hard pressed to finish it, and lost about half my ship. There is no payout for killing enemies, I should note- only for finishing the mission. The enemies were extremely glitched. Every time they took damage they'd come to a complete halt, but continue firing. So you'd get on a guy's tail and shoot him only to overshoot instantly as he just lost all momentum. When they died, they were no longer targetable but they didn't disappear from my radar or HUD. If I flew to one of the enemy icons I could see that it was now fixed on a random piece of the enemy ship. Eventually I got stuck just plowing shot after shot into the constellation which would. not. die. Then I got disconnected.

shooting enemy constellation


Third attempt: My constellation was lost in space due to the disconnect, again, which meant I had to reclaim again. Note that reclaiming is currently free. If it wasn't, I literally would not be able to play the game because my meager credits would be completely drained due to losing my ship on every single crash and disconnect. I am really glad that I only do this to myself once per year, because I'm already completely loving sick of spawning in the wank pod, spawning a ship, running through the airlocks etc. It is like groundhog day except instead of emotional fulfillment and enlightenment at the end of your reincarnation journey all you get is loving rage. Anyway I tabbed out to type this while performing one of the six unskippable cutscenes that have to play out every single time you go through this dance. I take the Gladius out to another emergency beacon. This time only a single enemy Gladius spawns so maybe it's done based off the weight of your ship? Kind of sucks though, if every time you take a 1000 cred mission you are going to face something that stands a good chance of killing you, even in super heavy gunships. I start to fight him, but he rams me, as seems to be standard protocol now. I bounce off the friendly Starfarer at 600 miles per hour and explode, dead instantly.

Fourth attempt: Well that's the gladius back on insurance timer. Wake up, wank pod, spawn constellation, unskippable cutscenes, etc. I take the Constellation out. Luckily little timmy starfarer keeps falling down the well, and this emergency beacon seems pretty drat consistent. I fly back out again. Sure enough it pops 4 enemies on me, so I guess it's based on the weight of your ship. This time none of them will die, though. My missiles are useless. Did I mention that? Missiles don't work in the PU, ever, so about 3/4ths of the armament on the constellation is out of action right from the start. I die, shot to pieces by the 4 spaceships. No 1000 credits for me.

Fifth attempt: Wake up, wank pod, spawn Gladius, unskippable cutscenes. Never one to shy away from a challenge, I go after the beacon again. Same old starfarer, single gladius spawns. I engage in glorious combat and actually win this time. I think I see what the problem is with the ramming, finally. Your guns are fixed-forward and you have a range of approximately 500m, at best, because this is world war 2 in space. But you are traveling at 250m/s, and your opponent who is also trying to shoot you is traveling towards you at 250 m/s. So you likely have about .1 seconds to fire before you literally just smack each other. The solution would be to engage in some kind of noclip strafing duel, but the AI opponents insist on flying directly towards you at all times, and there is no such thing as flying in reverse in Star Citizen unlike, for example, Elite. So you can, at best, fly solidly to the left while they just rush right in, and try to dodge them at the last second before they ram you. Anyway my opponent just kind of randomly explodes, I'm not sure why. He leaves half his parts and a target marker, again. I think that must be it, sweet victory must be mine! Then three more enemies spawn. Another gladius and two more auroras. loving SERIOUSLY? You don't just have to kill your own weight in ships for 1000 credits, you have to kill multiple times over? So I spend the next 60+ seconds plowing shots into the stationary Aurora which just won't loving die, for some goddamn reason, it is like it isn't even taking damage. If you're going to do WW2 in space the guns need to actually DO something, Chris. Then my Gladius just kind of explodes. I don't know why, I had full health and shields. I guess the enemy missiles work? Good for them, they get fully functioning ships.

A dead enemy, still targetable.


Anyway that has tapped out my rage-o-meter for the time being. Five attempts, five full ships lost, probably 10+ enemies killed in total, and I could not complete a single entry level, 1000 credit mission. Absolute dogshit.

Sarsapariller posted:

<Asked to explain the UI in previous posts's screenshot>
Sure.

1- This is your ship shield and damage indicator. It is displayed on a monitor in your cockpit. If you have time in battle you can hit F, mouse over it, and hit those little pie chart slices to direct shield power to different parts. I don't know if that works, it probably doesn't. The damage part flashes to show which parts of your ship are hit, or still exist. Note that my cockpit has not been damaged- it literally always looks like the front has fallen off. The two little graphs EM and IR on the side are supposed to indicate your ship's current heat and electromagnetic signatures. I guess higher is worse, because targeting? But there's no way to lower or manage them, and missiles don't work anyway, so gently caress it.

2- This is the same information as 1, but it is displayed on the inside of your helmet. There is no way to turn off this second display. It makes both 1 and 2 completely unreadable in combat.

3- None of these actually do anything. The first one is showing weapons, I think, but none of that information matters. I think you can turn them "Off" but why the gently caress would you ever do that. The second is the "Comms" display which may, some day, actually show people's faces. Right now it just constantly lights up like people are calling you but nothing ever displays and you don't hear anything. The third panel up here is another pointless set of graphs about thermal and heat signatures.

4/5- Similar to 1/2, except this time the display is for the enemy ship. The only useful part of this is the shield facing strength, which is displayed in a 3d format so it's basically impossible to loving read even if there weren't two of the same displays cluttering each other up. The graphs are for the enemy heat/electromagnetic signatures, which are useless.

6- This is your power distribution settings, and also 3 more graphs for your heat and electro signatures. Those things must be real goddamn important because they are on literally every display on the loving screen. Anyway the power triangle lets you distribute ship power to your various systems. I've tried it, it moves around but as far as I can tell doesn't do anything. The guns still overheat at the same speed, the shields still drop just as fast. I don't know. The usage/required poo poo at the top seems to be some kind of "Power output" management system, and you can slide those gauges around, but they also do nothing that I can determine.

7- Here's another visual indicator of your shields along with a bunch more useless garbage sliders that don't do anything.

8- Here's where the game constantly, constantly spams you with tooltips. Right now I'm fighting for my life and it is pretty sure I want to travel somewhere so it's going to put up a bunch of messages about quantum drives.

9- Back here, obscured by the helpful messages, is the loving ship's radar. The one useful item in this whole cavalcade of horseshit and it is the size of a postage stamp, and obscured by the tooltips. FIRE YOUR loving UI TEAM. Also you may note that the enemy ship I'm currently 10 feet away from, is not showing up on the radar. Guess they're pretty good at managing those power settings!

Sarsapariller posted:

My self-imposed mission is the same as the one I completely failed to do last time: complete any one quest successfully.

Attempt #1:
I wake up in the wank pod, but something is... different. The screen is black- but not the black of a disconnect. The only things I can see in the room are internally-lit objects like the door controls. Everything else is a foggy, nearly-pitch-black void. My flashlight kind of makes a blob in the middle of the screen but refuses to illuminate anything- like the surfaces refuse to be lit. I begin to recall The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing and wonder if perhaps, at last, I've stumbled on the true face of Star Citizen. Then I scare the poo poo out of myself when I exit the wankpod and come face to face with murky, shambling NPC's just standing there staring aimlessly. Well that's just good and horrifying.

Thankfully I have spawned-in-wankpod so many times I know the routes by heart at this point, so I make my way in the darkness downstairs to the ship spawner. Passing a window, the sunlight coming through illuminates the station and the areas where it touches look perfectly normal. So I guess there's some kind of ambient lighting and it's failing to render? It's really eerie. Other commandos are racing past and having no issues with sight so I assume this is something that only affects me locally. Ironically, my performance is great today- I am easily hitting 20+ fps even though I can't see anything. I did add more RAM between episodes, which may be making the difference. I make it to the spawner and suddenly the illumination snaps on throughout the station, just like that. Great? Not wanting to take this sudden visibility for granted, I decide to go shopping. They changed the PTU recently such that everyone starts with a million credits and no items, so if you want armor or guns you have to go buy them. I hadn't done it before so I figure why the hell not, how bad can it be. Clearly I'd forgotten that this is Star Citizen.

I walk into the first shop, some herp-derp armor pun I wasn't really paying attention. It's full of mannequins wearing what basically looks like recolors of the same suit over and over, and also 3 actual sets of armor. As I walk in, a commando walks up to one of the mannequins and teleports the suit onto his body. I know he didn't just equip a copy of the suit because it literally teleports, leaving the mannequin's head floating silently in the void. I kind of reflect for a minute that even with the lights on, Star Citizen isn't that much less of a horror show. Whatever, I want armor. I go over to the armor stand which is where I have my first encounter with CIG's un-loving-believably awful shop interface.

See, in Citizenland, you don't get to click a shopkeeper and see a list of merchandise. No. You have to go mouse over the physical piece of merchandise, somewhere in the store, and "Interact" with it. All this does is tell you the name and the price. Oh good I can get a Fuckstick 5000 for just 800 credits- but what is it and what does it do? No idea. They won't tell you. If you click "Purchase" your commando will enter the unskippable 2 second animation of bringing up his Moby-Glass, and then a little purchase screen will pop up with some bullshit flavor text that also doesn't tell you what the item is or what it does. Well. Sometimes it'll pop up the purchase screen. About half the time, the act of starting the animation pulls your cursor off of the item, and then the game forgets what you were looking at, and you end up looking at the regular Moby-Glass main menu instead. Then you have to close it, another 2 second animation, recenter on the item, and reopen. You have to do this for every item you want. You want to buy clips? Yeah have loving fun with that, you are going to have to FIND the proper weapon clip in a big pile of tiny box-shaped polygons, then hover on it to interact, then get your menu to loving open to the right thing. For every individual clip.

But it gets better. See you can't just hit "I" for inventory and drag this poo poo over to your character, oh no. You have to use the already-loathsome Moby-Glass some more! There's a loadout screen with expandable rows for stuff like "Armor" and "Utility" and "Undersuit" and "Weapons." Expand one and you will see approximately seven million loving slots, none of which are labelled. There are literally a dozen slots just for ammo clips and you bet your loving rear end Chris Roberts expects you to painstakingly fill each one with one of those clips you purchased individually. Are you thrilling at the gameplay yet? Every time you equip one, all of the menus collapse back to the start, and you get to hunt back through the tree to find where you were. And every time you "Save" your character vanishes into the ether and then reappears, now actually wearing all of the garbage you're hanging on him. That's right, everything in your inventory is rendered on your loving character. You might be saying "Now hold on, that sounds cool- you could see what other people are carrying!" But I remind you again that this is Star Citizen, so literally all of the clips are featureless grey boxes and all of the guns are indistinguishable grey lumps- some bigger than others. And they all have a million polygons so guess what happens when a bunch of commandos run on the screen, items jingling and jangling all over the loving place? Chris Roberts cums, I'm guessing, and your frames drop to zero. So anyway I buy armor. One piece at a time, head-chest-arms-legs-boots or whatever, then equip it laboriously. I go for the heaviest possible armor because why the hell not, if I'm going to all this trouble I might as well get something out of it.

That's when I discover that armor loving sucks. You think Star Citizen is garbage to play normally? Try playing the game with about 50% of your monitor occluded by the inside of your own goddamn helmet. HELMETS DON'T loving WORK LIKE THIS, CHRIS. Why in gently caress's sake would anyone wear a helmet that prevented them from seeing? On top of that, the weight of the armor actually slows your character down. So have fun moving at a crawl while completely loving blind, I guess! But don't worry because you won't be moving for long, since wearing armor causes your heart rate to shoot up. Did I mention that if your heart rate goes high enough, your screen starts to black out? So there's some more screen occlusion for you! I get about 20 feet down a hallway before my spaceman is wheezing like a geriatric, the tiny portion of the screen I can actually see fading in and out of blackness due to his exhaustion. Then I take the god drat armor off.

Dropping the idiotic sideshow that is inventory, I go and spawn the complimentary constellation that all PTU users get and fly it to Levski. I figure if the frames are good I will jitter my way down to the base, load up some cargo, and maybe meet Miles "Technicolor Dream Jacket" Eckhart while I'm there. Moving cargo isn't technically a mission but I will take what I can loving get in this piece of crap. I point the nose of the ship at Levski and immediately plow face-first into the loving planet. What?

No, really. Usually flying to planets takes 5+ minutes but I forgot that Levski is on this tiny little asteroid, that just so happens to have an atmosphere (what) and also just so happens to be covered in moon craters (WHAT) that just so happen to look exactly like actual normal-sized moon craters would when viewed from space, even though they're like 10 feet wide (WHAT). So I'd pointed my nose at the planet, boosted, and then turned away to pick up a book- reading material during trips being a common thing among commandos now. It couldn't even have been 30 seconds before my ship bounced off the planet at full speed. For a Constellation this is about 900 m/s which is about 2000 miles per hour so naturally this does literally no damage (WHAT) and my ship just spins a little bit before righting itself. Okay, I was mistaken- one of the little front-fan side finny things popped off. This does not noticeably impact the ship's performance in any way.

So I go skimming along the surface of Delamar at about 5 feet, with all of the details making it look like I'm 10 miles up, and eventually make it to the mining base Levski. This place is really hopping- there's like 5 commando ships here which for Star Citizen is the equivalent of the Stormwind auction house steps. Naturally my FPS takes a poo poo due to all of this activity and I end up in a kind of uncontrolled drift-crash into the main tower. Luckily my ship and the largely-glass tower come away completely unscathed from another 2000mph impact. Somehow I manage to hang onto my bandolier of clips and medpens as well. Fidelity! I request landing, one system which miraculously has not actually failed yet, and am directed to one of the big hangar pits with the door that slides open for me to lower my ship through.

I sail down in the shaft of sunlight from the overhead door, and safely touch down. Powering the ship off, I step down to the landing pad. That's odd, I can only see the areas that the sunlight is touch- oh no. The darkness. The narrow area of visibility shrinks, the door overhead sliding shut as I desperately scramble back to the ship, trying to lift off before it's too late. But I'm too slow. The light fades and I'm left in that black murk again. This time in an unfamiliar station with absolutely no illumination to guide me.

<to be continued>

Sarsapariller posted:

So there I was, in the Levski, the asteroid mining base. With an atmosphere. Atmosphsteroid mining base? The light glitch was back, meaning that literally all I could see was the running lights of my ship, a couple of illuminated deck lights, and the sign over the elevator into the base proper. I couldn't climb or fly back out- the overhead hangar doors had closed, and- as far as I know- they don't open again until you take the elevator back. Also, for some reason, there was a strong wind whipping through the completely sealed hangar and I could see that. I guess CIG decided that "Has atmosphere" means "has strong wind currents" and they didn't want to just play sounds, so they added some particle effects? But being CIG they hosed it up, so I'm sitting in a sealed underground room and seeing blue dust race past like I'm in the middle of a hurricane. Sure whatever.

My hands were inching towards the "Kill yourself" buttons which I really didn't want to do since it'd put me back in the wankpod on Olisar and force me to start the whole stupid trip over. Just before I hit it, I noticed something- light, precious light! But only in the top-left corner of my screen. I whipped my mouse around for a minute and yes, sure enough, the game was rendering correctly but only in a 2 inch by 3 inch rectangle on the top left of my monitor. In that little window, the hangar was well lit and welcoming- everywhere else it was a bleak unlit hellscape. Well, good enough- not that much worse than it would have been running around with that helmet on. I began making my way through the base, stopping every 3 or four feet to look down and to the right so I could use my little upper-left window as a sort of scope to map the path ahead. All I wanted to do was get to a terminal and load some cargo on my drat ship. Then I'd take it somewhere well lit and try to sell it, completing my first self-imposed mission at long last. I gave up on the prospect of meeting Miles "Male Fashion Advice" Eckhart as there was just no way I was going to wander the corridors of Levski like this. Or so I thought.

Using my unfucked-vision-o-scope I carefully navigated into the first elevator which televated me into the base proper. Once inside the gloom, while still stifling, was a little easier to manage as I could at least see the running lights in the halls. Unfortunately, I couldn't see any screens or signs except through my monitor corner, so I had zero clue where I needed to go to purchase cargo. I began to wander. First through some kind of baffling customs segment- I mean, this is a game where literal news vans are equipped with guns, it would be kind of unusual if someone wasn't packing- and then into what looked like the glass tower that I had so recently plowed my ship into at 2000mph. It seemed like nobody inside was really shaken by that incident- or, if they were, I couldn't see the looks on their faces through the murk. Basically everything looked like a black hallway with a fog machine running and people standing stock-still in various positions scattered throughout it. Just a normal Star Citizen Thursday at this point really.

I wandered through a series of doors- I assume they were doors because I could see the open/close mechanisms clearly, but nothing else- and eventually found myself in an odd place. Door after door, all the mechanisms locked, but stacked so closely together that it couldn't lead to any space bigger than a closet. What the hell was this? Then it hit me- wankpods! I guess CIG intended to allow players to spawn somewhere other than Port Olisar, at some point. This was clearly a wankpod chamber, and the locked rooms were player spawn points. Too bad it was completely useless as any death would result in a quick trip back to old PO. I shrugged and moved on.

A long and pointless interlude later, I found myself in front of a cargo screen. I guess even Chris realized that manually purchasing and placing every box of cargo would be a nightmare, because this interface was actually marginally sane. Just a standard panel, you walk up and select your ship, then select the cargo. For some reason the cargo was listed in credits per hundredth of a standard cargo unit, which I found out as I almost disastrously bought a hold full of cargo for 650,000 credits or more than two thirds of what CIG gives you overall. Not there's anything else to do with that money, but I'd hate to lose it if the ship blew up or something - I had no idea if the game would remember that I'd bought the cargo when a replacement spawned, or what. So I bought a full cargo hold of hydrogen, the cheapest item in there. Not... entirely sure why a technology base that produces ships capable of flying faster than light and strong enough to fly into the ground at 2000mph would really ever need people to haul the most abundant gas in the universe. Just scoop a star, right? Maybe that would make it too much like that other space game. But hey, cargo is cargo. I loaded up and navigated the dark maze back to my ship.

After verifying that, yep, I now had a hold full of highly flammable and explosive gas containers completely unsecured, I sat down and prepared to lift off. The ship didn't move. Why wouldn't it move? I checked my keyboard- still plugged in. Mouse, still working. Ship power worked- other buttons worked, I could retract and lower the landing gear, which lead to an amusing moment as I made the constellation do push-ups off of the hangar deck. But try as I might, it wouldn't take off. Maybe with the loss of that fin and the addition of all this weight, the dreaded fidelity had finally caught up to me? Nope, chat said that it was just a bug with the Cutlass and the Constellation now- sometimes they just won't fly at all! Great. I tried exiting/entering four or five times, no dice. Finally I decided to go back into the black maze of Levski and see if I could force the ship to respawn at a control panel.

Sadly for me, all of the up-down of the landing gear action must have moved me about two inches higher off the landing pad than normal. As I stepped off of the Constellation elevator, my commando's weak ankles shattered- instantly red on my HUD. I bled to death in seconds. My dying thought, as I scrambled desperately to equip a med pack, was "If only I hadn't taken that armor off..."

I woke up back at Port Olisar.

Sarsapariller posted:

It's like you sold a guy a plate of spaghetti and meatballs for 2000 dollars, then you called across town to ask another kitchen to make 3 strands of spaghetti while you had your cook make the other strands but he'd never seen spaghetti so you drew him a bunch of lines and told him to get to it, then you went back to the customer and told him you were almost done and it was so good but maybe he'd like to wait a little longer and give you another 200 bucks and you'd add cheese, meanwhile the other kitchen had delivered the 3 strands but you didn't like the length so you threw them in the trash and refused to pay, and your cook had gone outside and collected a pile of sticks which he was insisting matched your drawing, so you fired him and cut out some pictures from a recipe book which you took back out to the customer and told him "Look I took some photos of the spaghetti, mmmm look how good, going to need another 100 bucks tho" and at this point it had been 7 hours but this was the stupidest, richest, most patient customer who'd ever lived so he said sure and to keep him interested you fished out one of the garbage spaghetti strands and sent that out on a plate, and then he asked about sauce and oh poo poo you forgot you were supposed to make that, so you told him actually the sauce is in your mind and you need to really savor that single strand and you hired a guy to come in off the street and eat another strand next to him while making orgasm noises and then you told him the meal was over and the strand he'd just eaten was the whole dish and he left you a 5 star review on Yelp.

Pixelate posted:

I'm not buying PM powers just because the SCAM is falling apart. (Spent too much on avatar jpegs recently...)

Here's a great earlier one for your files:

colonelwest posted:

WAIT ONE loving MINUTE!

You're telling me that every single item in my spaceman's inventory will not be physicalized and rendered in game at all times?! And I can't get dozens of hours of enjoyment from rummaging through my spaceman's backpack and looking at all if the fidelitous objects that it contains!?