If Falcon Heavy’s launch costs are as advertised, Chris Roberts could have put himself into orbit with one of those Bigelow inflatable habitats and a lifetime supply of food for significantly less than the cost of Star Citizen so far.
I wish he’d spent more on that door, it takes a good 5 seconds to open. 5 seconds.
They a published a general concept for mining gameplay alongside the Orion, a mining ship sold on February 21, 2015.
The Prospector is a much smaller mining ship for people who don’t want to bring a crew. We know that it will function differently than the Orion in its ability to mine in atmospheric conditions, it remains to be seen if the two will function differently when mining asteroids.
2 things.
- so they described in general terms how mining would work more than one year ago, and still there’s not even a basic implementation of it in the PU (or is it?);
- I glanced over that feature set and it’s heavily based on multiple operators doing different things. So…
…a single seat mining ship doesn’t fit the description they gave for mining with the Orion, so no one knows yet how single seat mining will work…
…which means that “the feature set for that particular area is still open at this point”.
It’s complete pie in the sky dreaming. Eight+ different roles required for an efficient and engaging mining experience? And each will have full time, engaging game-play mechanics of some sort? And then there is still a ship/style available for solo players to not miss out, which may be a completely different system? If a solo guy can do it with a bunch of presumably automated systems, why the hell are eight dudes doing it manually? How on earth is that going to be balanced? I’d guess eight crew members on the job is going to have to be way more than eight times more efficient than solo? But half these roles are just going to be filled with NPCs most of the time, so how will that effect efficiency and at what point does not grouping then make more sense?
I’d get it if this was a game entirely about space mining (as niche as that may be), but this is just one small portion of SC! I can’t help but all this time and energy is going into shit that sounds awesome on paper, but will just never be played by more than the tiniest fraction of hardcore RP types. When push comes to shove all this crap is just going to be scrapped in favour of simpler and more mundane systems, assuming the whole thing does not implode.
Miramon
2928
Everything about this game (games) makes less and less sense the more I read about it.
I hope RSI are just focusing on SQ42 at this point and leaving all the nutters to dream up their fantasy Space Game on their backer forums with their 10.000$ investments looking pretty in the hangars.
Soon they’ll probably be selling virtual assets such as Bars, Brothels and whatnot that you can buy on your select planet. So when you’re not flying your 40 crew Carrier in the 5 planet galaxy that they could afford to create, you’ll be able to do downtime on one of several -RARE-LIMITED-BUY-NOW- shops on the ground, where you can take a % cut to yourself from everything other players buy/sell there.
Then you can for example have a ‘underground’ market where you can buy/sell slaves, drugs, weapons etc. And use your slaves are workers in your bars/brothels, and possibly take a cut from them.
Then the expansion will include human trafficking, so you can for example get paid 50k ISK from a family on Pluto to bring their children to Vega 1 in the Clusterfuck system, having to dodge the 3 Ps - Pirates, Press & Police. But ofcourse, since they paid up front, you take them to Nebula 76V-SK instead, where your guild has a Mining Station with a lot of workers with spare coin and some free time…
I remember when I was just a kid, reading SF novels and watching the great SF movies of the 70’s and the 80’s, dreaming of the day I could operate the Exothermic Reaction Detector on a pretend mining ship. Now, the realization of that dream is finally within reach.
If only I had 7 friends to crew up with.
Timex
2931
But half these roles are just going to be filled with NPCs most of the time, so how will that effect efficiency and at what point does not grouping then make more sense?
Well, you’d have to pay the NPC’s, and they’d be less efficient than actual players.
I’d get it if this was a game entirely about space mining (as niche as that may be), but this is just one small portion of SC!
This is pretty much what the skeptics say about virtually every aspect of the entire game. If you have reservations about it, which is totally reasonable, then just wait.
In terms of crap like space mining, and investing time to make it useful, I think that such a thing is a critical enough aspect of the vision of Star Citizen that it is more than a niche aspect. A major aspect of SC’s vision is a game where you can do what you want, and play it as you want. You don’t have to be a hotshot pilot who flies around killing everyone. But in order to do that, I would think that you’d need to make those non-combat roles at least somewhat engaging. Although, honestly, there are infinite people who play games like EvE and just mine crap all day… and doing that involves essentially no engagement at all. EvE was actually the first game I ever bothered trying to play a miner/crafter, and I found it about as mindless as every other MMO. Oh, I had the added benefit of perfectly timing my first purchase of a Hulk with the Goons starting up Hulkageddon, so that was fun too.\
Ultimately though, skepticism of things like multicrew ships, with different people doing stuff and having it be fun is totally reasonable, because I don’t think anyone’s ever manage to actually do it before. But at the same time, it’s something that tons of folks have wanted for a long time.
Just hold your money. Roberts has plenty at this point, so it’s not like he needs more to do something. If you’re skeptical, just wait and see whether they do something you want to play.
And Chris Roberts goes on record saying that, 1. not all features/stretch goals will be present on the commercial release (v1.0) of Star Citizen, and 2. he even uses the technical term “minimal viable product feature list” to speak of v1.0 (though such list is not yet public AFAIK). I wonder if mining will be in that list or not.
With the increasing frequency of “free fly weeks” and concept ship sales, I wonder if that’s really the case. I certainly hope so.
JonRowe
2934
I would join a space mining crew. But of course, I would bungle up repairing a restrictor plate that would send radiation through the entire ship killing all of the crew, except for a person in holostasis for bringing a cat onboard, and the cat, who was hidden in the cargo hold, safe from radiation.
I had these pie in the sky gaming dreams during Star Wars Galaxies build up, and that flopped hard.
I really hope this can be the space sandbox I have always wanted. I guess we will see.
I have to imagine that there are two possible versions of mining ship crew gameplay. In one version, each crewmember has compelling, varied gameplay that is important to the overall team effort while remaining unique to each task station. In the other version, each crewmember gets to stare at a boring minigame like planetray probes in Mass Effect 2/3 or priming bilge pumps in Puzzle Pirates.
Guess which one I expect?
Ninyu
2936
I can just picture it:
The crewman that picks through the rocks on the conveyor belt locks up. The rocks keep piling up and up until the conveyor belt breaks which blows a fuse board that runs the engines also. The ship is now stranded in space because the guy responsible for buying the spare parts for the ship was playing Diablo 4 and forgot to. So, the pilot calls for a repairship and is told they can come by in three hours since he has to water his in game hydroponics farm. He finally arrives, and looks at the damage and says he can’t fix it since he hasn’t spent the 100 hours of mini games to learn how to fix that part. He’s the only repair guy in the galaxy, since everyone else keeps getting ganked trying to do any type of training at the space university. He can call out for the part, but it is on back order since there is only one person that can manufacture that part and he is busy filling orders for everyone else that is stranded in space …
and so on and so on and so on …
Miramon
2937
Second Life, the space combat sim.
There are no artificial skill requirements in Star Citizen.
I’m more interested in the Persistent Universe, personally. I hope they carry on with their plan to make non-combat roles as engaging as possible, because there are a lot of people who are interested in them. I too tried my hand at mining in EVE Online, mainly for role playing purposes I suppose. It consisted of pressing F1 and then waiting until your cargo hold was full. There has to be a better way.
Also, you guys write up these long humor posts that essentially amount to “emergent interconnected cog-in-a-machine gameplay is stupid”. A game I adore, Space Station 13, is completely built around that concept, and I think there needs to be more like it. If you don’t like that sort of gameplay, why are you posting in this thread?
This is a discussion forum and we like to discuss games, even if we think the game may not be our cup of tea.
Seriously, what else is anyone going to do about this game, and the space mining concept in general, other than joke around and discuss it?
I paid 270$ for a RSI Constellation and I’ve pretty much forgotten what else, but I hope that we get a great SQ42 before the whole thing implodes - or at least 5-6 hours of cutscenes I can watch and pretend I paid 270$ for a very expensive snuff movie…
Having said that; I really do not “hope” for anything with regards to Star Citizen at this point - The shiny metal badge you got for some of the higher tier backers has so far had higher production value than the “tech demo”.
Obviously, a mix of ELITE Dangerous, Freelancer, Wing Commander, Minecraft and X3TC would be sweet, but RSI seem to be more interested in moving the goalpost further and further away than trying to reach it. – Which is a bad analogy, so lets try this one:
RSI Signed up to run the 3km, but before they had run 100m they figured they’d rather compete in the 10km… and by the time they hit 1km they had signed up for a half marathon, then they figured, why not run a full marathon instead… and heck, lets compete in an ironman challenge 100km run, in a blizzard, uphill.
I just want them to reach ONE finish line, collect the medals THEN they can run the next race.
With the pace they are ‘adding new imaginary content’ to the game we’ll be lucky they release it quicker than Duke Nukem Forever.
But perhaps their pyramid scheme has to work that way:
“Wouldn’t it be great if…” -> Money -> Work on Idea #1 -> Post a new “wouldn’t it be great if” -> More Money -> Still work on idea #1.
So, maybe we will get SQ42 and some time later PU before they start working on Hydroponics in space (or slave trade…).
Well, there’s a silver lining in Chris Roberts talking about commercial release and a “minimal viable product”, because it’s clear that releasing the game sooner than later is a concern in his mind now. A minimal viable product also means you have a well defined feature list to be met, which could be great for CGI to give them some proper focus and prevent (or diminish) the risks of feature creep.
So it could be a good thing, unless it’s too little too late. We’ll have to wait and see, I suppose.
