6156

Yeah, but I wonder how many of those potential customers will have enough money left to buy another game. I’m sort of kidding, in that of course there’s a huge difference between spending a part of your life savings funding Star Citizen, and waiting a couple years to plop down a measly $60 on a good space game. But I think a good chunk of those devoted whales are going to be emotionally (and possibly financially) drained at the end of this ride, provided it ends in failure.

Has anyone done an in-depth article on the psychology of whales? I don’t know any personally, and I’m wondering what makes them tick. Besides sunk-cost fallacy that is. There has to be more to it than that. I’m just having a very hard time imagining that there are that many folks out there that want this game so badly that they keep tossing money at it. The numbers I’m seeing seem to indicate that there must be a lot of them. I mean, even @BrianRubin stopped sending money at some point, IIRC. And who is out there that could possibly love space games more than he does? Are there really a couple thousand people out there that are just as passionate as he is? The thought boggles my mind.

6157

I honestly doubt anyone is more passionate about space games than our Brain Rubin.

6158

Played it quite a bit more today, along with some other buddies… Had all kinds of craziness, and it was fun again.

One buddy had a fairly old rig, and was not able to get a real consistent framerate, which was sad. However, my other buddy had a decent rig, and we were able to run a number of missions together, engage in space combat, etc.

We were able to fly separately, as well as in the same ship… Framerates seemed stable at around 30, dipping way low and then crashing at one point. It seems like framerate problems are generally due to server problems, rather than client ones? But it seemed like things were running ok most of the time. No issues doing stuff like jumping between locations or anything, and was able to navigate through the system easily.

Managed to get into a patrol with two of us, as well as some other random folks who were there… engaged 3-4 sets of two enemies in space combat, with the framerate holding steady through the fight. At some point, accidentally either shot or ran into a friendly, and got a crime rating… the crime rating doesn’t really do anything, although it has turrets on Port Olisar shoot at you a little. I know this because at one point earlier I had gotten into a guy’s ship while he boarded and didn’t close the door… then I waited until he left the armistice zone… and the I shot him in the head and took his ship… at which point I was like 4-star rating. I was kind of a jerk for killing that dude, but there’s really no penalty when you die. You can file an insurance claim for free, and expedite the claim for free.

The crime stat seems to drop over time, because later, when I was with my buddy, I didn’t have a rating until I had clipped someone during the patrol.

However, I then saw that I had an email in my journal saying that I could go to some station that was still under construction, hack the security terminal there, and clear my rating. So we headed over there, and landed at some deserted space station. It was essentially the same as port olisar, but with no people. Found some random tablet talking about the problem that prevented from making the station operational, blah blah blah… whatever, hacked some terminal, and cleared our crime stats, cool.

Other interesting stuff… My one buddy has a ship that he didn’t buy… and he doesn’t know how he got it. But it’s some HUGE ship. Called like a gemini or something? The thing was totally crazy, in that at one point I was literally crawling through jeffries tubes in the ship and stuff. Also, there were a number of different terminals, and while only the pilot could steer the ship, the other ones could do everything else… which included things like disabling ship systems, which I did accidentally.

The delivery missions seemed wonky… I managed to get some cargo, get it back to a location… but then the guy I was supposed to deliver it to just stood there like a jackass. I dropped the box on his head, and crushed him down into the floor.

In terms of server populations, the time I was playing with my buddy, it was 42/50, apparently. I don’t know how to see this when you’re playing with yourself, but when you are in a party, you can choose to join a party member.

This kind of highlights a deficiency currently, in that there’s really no good way to see where your party members are. Even if they walk right in front of you, there’s no indication of who anyone is, that I could tell. You can figure it out, but it’s still weird. I think if they add in some kind of in-game comms, this could fix that… Hell, maybe they have in-game comms, but I don’t know how.

Anyway, still an amusing thing to play with. I dunno how LONG it’s gonna be fun, unless they fix some of the stuff like delivery missions. That being said, the combat missions seem to work pretty well, and you can earn money with them… and you can buy stuff in the game with that money.

6159

You guys are so sweet.

6160

So, nothing will change? Honestly, I don’t expect them to touch the genre anytime soon anyway.

6161

That would require the use of logic, which we all know is an ability AAA game companies don’t have.

I only played for about a week years ago, but from what I’ve read, EQ had a lot more emergent gameplay than the typical modern MMO. Or UO for that matter. :gasp:

6162

A big part of this was that older MMO’s had less restrictions on what players could do… Without those restrictions, you could do stuff that harmed the experience of other players, but you could also do stuff that was interesting.

Right now, SC feels similar to that… in that you can totally just fly around and kill/rob/pillage. But that in itself opens up the ability to NOT do that… or to help other folks.

It’s more interesting to me than most pure sandbox games, in that there is some actual structure already… the existing missions and merchant stuff provides just enough stuff that you have something to do without thinking… but if you want, you can just say, “Hey… let’s go fly over there and see what those guys are doing.”

There are some interesting aspects in the game too, that I don’t fully understand yet.

Doing stuff in your ship generates heat and EM signatures… due partially to what equipment you have (some equipment is stealth rated, for instance), as well as due to what you are doing. (Firing your guns, or going full speed, or using quantum drive, etc.)

A few console screens in the ships do stuff with this… You can watch your heat and EM signatures spike, for instance. You can also “suppress” these signatures? I don’t actually know what it does, although it does seem to have an affect on the graph of your signature. Similarly, in your power control, there is a level marked as “stealth”, and hitting a button will drop your power production to that level. This has measurable effects on your ship, where shields won’t recharge fast, your maneuverability is sluggish, etc. You can also manually move your power production down, or even to some place in between.

Based on what I’ve seen with OTHER ships getting detected by me, this either currently, or at some point in the future, will affect whether you are detected on radar. Which is a pretty cool thing, especially how they’ve implemented it on the pilot side. I think I’m gonna work with a buddy and see whether these signature things are actually doing anything in terms of detections.

I know there are already keybindings for various scan modes, as well as things like active pings and crap… but I don’t know how much of it DOES anything yet.

6163

Yeah, I guess I’m a hypocrite by criticizing modern MMO publishers for the direction they’ve taken, since I’ve only played two games (Fallout Online and Lineage) with unrestricted PvP, and I did not play either for very long. It got too frustrating.

6164

One upside of the open PvP in star citizen, is that unlike a lot of MMO’s, you can’t just win because you played more or are higher level. It comes down to whether you can fly and shoot better.

Certainly, you can spend money and get bigger ships, but from what I’ve seen, they aren’t necessarily better in combat, since they are slow, and HUGE targets… Now, if you man them up all the way, and get a bunch of turrets going? Then you’ve got a lot of firepower… but then again, you could just have all those folks in small cheap ships and probably be just as effective.

Right now, in space combat, it seems like the one thing that can make a ship more effective, is having weapons on gimbals, since it makes aiming easier.

6165

Heh, I just had my most “stressful” moment of Star Citizen… running food.

I decided to go and transport some food. I checked to see what stuff was selling for in port olisar, then ran off to some hydroponics farm on one of the moons, and grabbed a bunch of processed food. Was able to sell it for about twice what I bought it for.

Just when I was landing at port olisar, I engaged the auto-land, and I guess I wasn’t paying attention because afterwards I must have been pulling on the stick, so after I landed the ship kind of started listing off the pad.

Normally, death is not a big deal… but I had just loaded the ship will as much food as I could carry, which cost me all the money I had… so if I blew it up on the landing pad, I’d lose all my money, since insurance doesn’t cover cargo.

Luckilly, I recovered, got out, and sold it all… effectively doubled my money, so it seems like earning money by ferrying goods around is pretty easy.

6166

I still have fun playing privateer gold

6167

You’re going to convince me to dig up my Star Citizen account, which I’m sure is a pain since I haven’t done anything since the Kickstarter.

I love messing around in raw universes full of bugs… (no joke)

6168

Right now, when the game is stable, the core flight mechanics are very good, and you can fly around the system and do basic missions, as well as as much space combat as you like.

Also, simply flying down to planets from orbit is cool… It’s kind of what I expected from No Man’s Sky, but which totally failed to deliver in that regard. Bear in mind, doing this is probably one of the “slowest” parts of the game… and really the only time gate to making money via commodity trading. Travel via quantum jumping is very fast… but you can only jump to pretty high up from planets/moons. At that point, you can use QT to jump between orbital “nodes”, which I didn’t realize at first, but which give you a way to kind of quickly jump around a planet (like if you need to get to a place on the opposite side). But going from one of these nodes to the surface is still going to be a few hundred km, and moving at around 1km/s with your afterburner going full blast, you’re talking a few minutes of travel.

But… it’s kind of cool? I mean, you’re coming down from orbit, watching the surface of the moon spread out in front of you… and unlike NMS, it actually has terrain features, canyons, craters, etc. that don’t just disappear as you get closer. You can go check them out if you want. You can fly wherever you want. It’s cool.

If you already got a ship, then it’s worth checking out, if you don’t mind bugginess.

I ran some more merchant runs, and made a good deal of cash (around 5k) and then bought myself some new armor. So that was cool. There is a shop which sells ship parts too, although I dunno if it really matters to upgrade or not… also, I dunno if it will keep your upgrades when you file an insurance claim.

If you buy guns and armor and stuff, you retain all that after death… not sure about ship parts.

If you do play, I suggest saving at least 1k from your starter money to buy commodities, since you can then make money back pretty quick. If you need to make money from missions, the amounts are much smaller, around 100-500 uec, with 500 being long patrol missions (go here, kill bad guys, go here, kill more bad guys, etc.)

Like I said, I got no idea how long it will hold my interest. At this point, being able to fly a spaceship around like this is extremely novel, and enough to put up with the bugs. But the novelty may wear off unless they fix some of the bugs.

Oh, like I hit one where apparently, if you take off your helmet (or in my case, buy new armor), your flashlight doesn’t work any more. It’s in their tracker, as other folks have reported it recently. But it’s kind of annoying, as there are a lot of places in this game that are DARK AS SHIT. Like a wrecked ship that happens to be in an asteroid’s shadow? DARK. So we’ll see how long until they fix that.

Oh, one thing… the music is good. Like, really good. Some of it, like the music in Port Olisar, is reminicent of old games and movies… that music sounds a lot like music from the Last Starfighter, which is straight up awesome.

6169

Yeah. The original Kickstarter game.

I would never embark on making the game that it evolved to because I have already gone down that route. I started BC3K in 1989. Released in 1996 (incomplete). I evolved it to Universal Combat which was first released in 2004. And I still didn’t get to do fps inside ships & stations. By the time I got around to doing that, back in 2010 with Line Of Defense, I was making a different kind of game because I knew better. And as luck would have it, Havok bailed on the Vision Engine, forcing us to switch back in 2016.

6170

Yeah, he’s a gamer and a fan. The difference between @Timex and those guys parked on Reddit, is that he’s not making stuff up in order to promote a narrative. Pretty much what he posted about 3.0 yesterday and today, is accurate.

The main issue here is, not that they’re making a game, but that they’re making a different kind of game. The game that was pitched, and which croberts bloated beyond tech & abilities, can never be made. So the only hope is that at whatever point it all goes tits up, that there is something that the backers can be playing down the road - regardless of condition.

6171

That… sounds great! Still holding out hope this might turn into something worth playing one day, although my expectations are very low.

6172

EQ was fairly restricted/“linear” compared to UO pre-trammel, don’t even see how the comparison can be done.

6173

And there lies the rub.

6174

I dunno if I’m just lucking out, or if they’ve improved the stability on the serverside, but for the most part the only times I’m experience crashes now are when I’m just starting the game, or when I’m exiting it. I played for a few hours this morning with no issue, and again, generally stable framerates in the 20’s.

The servers were definitely not empty either. Here’s a screenshot of Port Olisar, and this population was fairly consistent every time I visited it.

Star Citizen 12_29_2017 10_01_13 AM
Star Citizen 12_29_2017 10_01_13 AM.jpg1920×1080 837 KB

So you’ve got like 15 ships in frame right then… so that’s just folks who happen to be at Port Olisar right now, and have spawned ships on landing pads (or have just come in for a landing).

In terms of actual other players, there are a reasonable number of them flying around. Not so many that you’re ramming into them all over like Jita in EvE, but enough that you’ll encounter other players in your normal flying around.

Interestingly, space feels pretty well populated. It’s the actual bases/colonies which feel empty right now. There are sometimes a handful of NPC’s there, but they seem to have their AI disabled. They don’t really do anything or interact with you at all. You can still buy stuff, since purchasing stuff generally involves actually picking up the items from shelves or clothing racks… you don’t really interact with the people much, beyond them saying stuff when you’re in their store and talking to you. And commodity sales are all done through a terminal. So the lack of NPC interactions doesn’t prevent buying stuff, but it still gives the feeling that the environments are only half done.

And this is kind of sad, because a bunch of these locations are meticulously crafted. They look like pretty real places. I went to some mining colony that was built into an asteroid, called Grim Hex, and there was all kinds of cool stuff inside… Some part of it had been damaged, and was depressurized with no gravity, so you could float around through it in your space suit… I went to some mining colony to get minerals, and there were multiple buildings with drilling computers and crap in them. I suspect this stuff was made for a reason, to support missions and stuff that just isn’t in the game yet… But they look really good. They look more realistic than the habitats in a game like, Mass Effect Andromeda, for instance.

There are also a lot of things which are unexplained, but then kind of cool once you understand what they are.

As an example… If you are flying down into low orbit, your radar turns into this big whitish ball… it looks like a graphical glitch. That’s what I thought it was.

But I later realized that what it’s doing, is actually showing you the surface of the planet… kind of giving you a downward facing camera to see the surface of the planet… which, to be clear, can be quite useful. Especially when you’re nosing up out of the atmosphere, as this lets you see where the horizon line is.

However, since it’s fairly low resolution (much lower than what you can see out the windows), it’s not immediately apparent what you’re seeing. There were bug reports in their system about this, because folks just didn’t know what it was… it was like, “This thing is blocking my radar!”

Another issue is also that generally radar itself is pretty wonky and useless much of the time. Certainly not useful enough to assist in combat, at least not that I’ve seen. And on foot, a lack of maps… or in general, a lack of any kind of ability to see where your party members are. Those things are annoying.

6175

I got a chill.