You should probably check out some of the current gameplay videos, of folks playing the actual game at this point.
Do you feel like Elite had more going on when it came out? Does Elite have more going on NOW? I honestly don’t know, as I haven’t followed it in months.
Sure, can you link me some lengthy gameplay videos of Squadron 42 and I’ll give them a watch.
I feel like, with Elite, they had at least the basic foundation and a few rooms built, at the very least, and they’ve been building upon it since then. Say what you want about the game, they’ve handled the expectations game far, far better.
No. Therefore, the gameplay on offer now is obviously only jpgs of ships. Can’t argue with your logic there.
Ignore all the more freeform SC 2.5 (and, soon, 3.0) gameplay, as that has no value.
On another note, one thing they mentioned at Citizen Con is that they will finally release a version of the launcher that doesn’t need to download gigabytes for every patch. Once that happens, trying out the game over a period of time will become a much more reasonable prospect. No date though. Once can only hope it happens soon.
(Edited because spelling on a phone is hard)
Wendelius
I don’t think 3.0 will come out in December. I know that’s the plan, but you know how well CIG/RSI deals with plans and dates.
I sometimes forget how sensitive this topic is. Apologies.
He. No worries. I missed your “teasing” reading on the phone (old eyes and all that) and it’s been a long day at work. So I answered more directly than I should have. So apologies back at you. :)
That joke is getting a bit long in the tooth though.
Wendelius
I agree and I admit it is a low-effort cheap shot. I’ll try and leave that at the door in the future.
Though one should consider that if you only lay the foundation for a Elite-like game it’s very, very hard to then create a triple AAA game based on that.
That’s the main difference here, they are selling a big vision/game and that simply doesn’t work if all you try to release is just a solid foundation, it has to be more for their whole business model to work.
I think people still underestimate the scale of this whole project and how far they have already come in terms of technology. If a AAA-game company would try something similar you can be sure they would have needed at least 5-6 years too (probably with additional time spent on just the tech).
Imo this whole thing just goes to show how much patience is often needed by publishers and that gamers aren’t used to follow a project of this size from the very beginning.
Well then you end up with Elite. And I don’t think Elite, as good as it is, will ever match scope of SC and push as many envelopes as SC.
This is fair, I honestly thought they’d be further along by now.
Rumor has it that they’re having major technical issues with their modified CryEngine. I have no doubt in my mind that they want 3.0 out by the end of the year, but messing with the innards of the CryEngine can create a lot of difficult-to-find-and-fix bugs.
No kidding.
I don’t seven know if the engine that will end up powering the final game can be called Cryengine at all.
For all I know, only the renderer is left (and probably even that has been tweaked).
In all seriousness, can you link what would be a good example? I have looked a bit out of curiosity and frankly the ones I have looked at seem really crappy. Frame rates are horrible, guns don’t actually fire bullets or have effects, collision boxes don’t seem to work, geometry is just janky as could be, the ‘missions’ I have seen make the original Privateer seem advanced. My legitimate search to get to see some of these cool things I keep hearing about seem to end up with either clearly heavily scripted tech demos of future versions or some person playing what seems like an absolutely sterile and honestly generations old environments. Running around that hub doesn’t hold up to Borderlands 1. But at the same time I could just be catching people intentionally making it look awful because I know that’s a thing too.
What would you say is a representative video of a mission that I could watch?
On a side note my 22 year old has been playing the test version and liked the sense of flying around and decided to try to learn how to fly a plane. He then learned that it costs 9k to take the full course for a private license. : )
He went ahead and paid about 200 dollars to take the first lesson to see what it was like. I thought it was neat that this progressed from playing a space sim.
It’s an alpha. It’s going to be janky, specially with this ambition. If anything, I’m surprised at how stable it is so early in development. I do agree it’s really bare, though, although I think the quality of environments is really far ahead from any Borderlands. I loved the flight model when I played, but that’s as much on a positive opinion I have on the quality of gameplay yet.
And as for framerates, it’s a AAA game that is at least 4 years away. I would expect a $1k tower to run something like that at 30fps average on medium-low settings. And that’s the final game, with more systems, but also optimizations. I do think performance is alright given the tech behind it.
The missions in Alpha 2.x are very bare-bones. I find that the best experience you can currently have is at Outpost Kareah, because it naturally provides a combination of spaceship and FPS gameplay in a PvP environment.
Here’s a gameplay clip from the latest patch, warts and all:
It’s an excerpt from a stream, so you have to deal with the added crap on the guy’s screen as well as video compression. It also contains multiple glitches and bugs, which is representative of the game’s current state.
It’s worth mentioning that Alpha 2.6 is going to provide major overhauls to both FPS and dogfighting, but the above video shows how the game currently plays.
For those who want to try out ships they don’t own:
It’s somewhat futile, seeing as how all of them are going to fly differently once 2.6 hits.
PC Gamer interviews some of the most hardcore fans.
[quote]
Ben Rathbun, who runs the YouTube channel Rawcritics, started to get emotional during his reaction video to the 3.0 demo. “The guys and I are going to be playing this forever,” he says, with a wide-open grin and his dog on his lap. “We’re the type of gamers that just want a couple go-to games in our lives, and we haven’t had those steady relationships in our lives in a long time. Star Wars: Galaxies was in my life for years. World of Warcraft has been in my friend’s life for eight years. And this has taken so long, but… look at it! Look at this!”[/quote]
[quote]
“Doesn’t everyone want Star Citizen to be great? Even if you don’t like certain people, respect what is trying to be accomplished here,” says Rathbun. “This is a new approach in the industry, so I’m not sure if the change is scaring folks or if they just don’t like space games. For a lot of people this is at the very least a positive step in the right direction for games and how they should be made. If nothing else, I mean, did they not see the alpha 3.0 demo like I did? Did their jaw not drop at the possibilities? C’mon!”[/quote]
[quote]
“We threw money at this thing hand over fist, ultimately, because Chris Roberts promised to do something batshit insane,” says Peter Brunton, who posts on the Star Citizen subreddit as Voroxpete. “There’s this general feeling that this isn’t about just buying a videogame. I’m going to be a little grandiose here, but I feel like I’m expressing the sentiment of a lot of people in the community when I say this is about buying back our hobby. If I was characterizing the core Star Citizen backers, especially in the early days when the game had nothing to show for itself, there is the feeling that this was reclaiming gaming. People are sick to fucking death of Activision declaring that Call of Duty is a yearly franchise… I’m sitting here playing Destiny which is just a broken fucking mess that Bungie threw together, and it’s still one of the most imaginative games on the market. They shot for the moon, they tried something big and bold, and they missed, but they still ended with a more interesting, and original game than anything else. That’s what we wanted.”[/quote]