Shockingly, everything you just said, summed up my comment in this latest YT personality who is also a backer of Star Citizen. He did a video a few days ago, saying the game isn’t scam. Problem is, everything he stated would lead any normal gamer to conclude otherwise. :) And he wasted no time praising Christ Roberts.
LOL!!
This is the current state of ships in the game, for those who want an updated jpg to flight ready ratio:
Found in a recent Reddit thread.
More spaceships flight ready than I would have expected.
So for somebody who spent 80 dollars on early access for DCS Hornet and who is LOVING it, is it worth throwing a few dollars to tool around in some of these ships (less than 50 say)? Are they fun to fly?
There’s an easy answer for that, a lot of the ‘Flight Ready’ ones aren’t actually done because the various modules and functionality that they are supposed to have don’t exist as game concepts.
For example:
The Starfarer differs from traditional bulk freighters in one key way: it is a dedicated fuel platform. The Starfarer is designed not only to load, store and protect fuel stasis units, it is designed to take in spaceborne gases and refine them for use without landing.
There’s no spaceborne gases or special fuel stasis units.
Wow, that is cool. If all I’d ever seen about Star Citizen was that image I would purchase in a heartbeat.
It is pretty cool. Though it doesn’t change the current performance of the game or the lack of content / features. Still, it’s an awesome fleet to aspire to own. I see those ships and I want to fly them for sure.
@Anklebiter I’m a backer. But with an aging computer and, as such, quite happy to give the game plenty of time before I really get into it. If I had an extra $50 to spend, I’d spend it on a currently finished space game and leave Star Citizen to bake a while longer. Either Derek will be proved right, or he won’t. But despite wanting to try quite a few of those ships, I wouldn’t add more money into the project right now.
That said, I’m still quite happy to have a little stake in it and to see what’s to come.
You are saying in jest, right? I mean, did you not read the hundreds of posts up above yours? 🙄
Not at all. As stated, I’m quite happy with early access DCS Hornet. I don’t necessarily need a complete game to have fun, and honestly, some of the pie in the sky stuff that has been promised and ridiculed, I wouldn’t want anyway.
If there are solid ships with interesting systems and a good flight model where I can tool around and dogfight, it might be worth a few dollars, assuming the production level is as high as they say.
The weird thing is I bought a Warthog Hotas to go with DCS. I’m one of those who obsessively researches everything I buy, especially after it’s on the way. I landed on just a ton of threads and forums where people were using this thing with Star Citizen. That’s really where the question came from. What are they doing with it?
From what I gather, that’s quite a big ‘if’… ;)
Surely someone here who is, er, less invested has tried the current offering? Any impressions leaving the funding bullshit, and bullshit bullshit aside?
For the record, all that bullshit might deter me, even with a positive review. One consideration at a time.
Sure, but it’s still a big ass ship that had a bunch of guns that can be flown with multiple people and haul a ton of cargo.
It was cool to fly around for a while when i hijacked that one a dude was driving and crashed it into a planet because the physics if flying a gigantic behemoth is a hell of a lot different than the tiny fighter i was used to.
(I think i posted a video of it here, and you can see me then the thing around and try to break the momentum, while a mountain range starts flying past the cockpit windows).
My only regret was that it didn’t let me sell all the stuff he had loaded his cargo hold up with… Although, in retrospect, i apparently could have destroyed the ship and it’s cargo would have spilled out… And crushed the server performance.
I wouldn’t buy one, but it was fun to steal.
@Juan_Raigada tried a version a couple of iterations ago, he may have an up to date impression.
Still, the funding debacle should be enough to deter anyone from jumping on this now. Seriously, ask @BrianRubin where your money could go right now on an actual released game that can give you a run with that HOTAS. There are developers actually releasing complete content that deserve your money more than CIG needs anything on top of their 180M.
Would DCS be a good correlation to this? Crowdfunding aside, it seems to share many of the same traits; lofty promises, taking forever to get anything done, incomplete ‘alpha’ state releases, somewhat sterile as a game…
Or Peter Molyneux.
Nah, I haven’t tested it since then. While at the time I liked what I played, the rate of development on this is glacial and nothing seems to indicate there’s a game in there yet. There seems to be some uptick on features added, but still at this “accelerated” rythm we can be talking about 2025 or so until there’s anything somewhat complete (and I doubt funding will last for so long, even though it’s proving resilient and it might reach 200 million this year O_o).
The analogy, within the parameters you set, is quite compelling. It is kind of the same way that companies in “niche” genres operate (but with varying degrees of overpromising and vagueness in timelines). Those are typically small outfits or they have other actual business than selling games or are just working on very finicky stuff.
The difference between DCS and SC as I see is that the former at least totally delivers as a study sim, with very high fidelity, that attracts praise from pros that have flown the real deal. DCS fails to those who want some sort of dynamic campaign system to give context and a sense of purpose to the flying.
Is actually SC delivering anything just yet? Not to me… I saw that the Freelancer I “bought” 5 years ago will come out and be flyable at some point over the next 12 months? Not sure that the “compelling exploration gameplay” pitch that sold me that 3d model I can walk through in the Hangar will be in the “game”.
Not really, considering parts of DCS has existed as code since around 20 years ago as the Flanker games, which evolved into Lock On: Modern Air Combat, which was then expanded with Flaming Cliffs, Black Shark and finally followed by DCS: A-10C around which DCS World grew into what it is now. The Eagle Dynamics flight sims have always had the same strengths and weaknesses, and they always played to their strengths with different iterations. With Star Citizen on the other hand, we just have holes in a new game, and it currently looks similar to DCS on a superficial level because the ships are the priority for development - they bring in money, they dictate design and they are testbeds for new technology and gameplay. The rest of the game is still a mystery.
Anyway, I feel Star Citizen plays better with mouse and keyboard, and I still wouldn’t recommend it yet. Compared to DCS switchology it’s both relatively simple and unintuitive. There is some interesting content, but not enough of it and you should take your time to see if they actually manage to work any meaningful gameplay systems within the game. There are some good signs, like the recent addition of mining which looks somewhat more elabourate than other games with mining. Having said that, it may be too late to correct some fundamental issues caused by the overall philosophy and the marketing drive of ships which has challenged sensible game design during the first few years of development.
If you want DCS in space, with loads of working switches, and you don’t mind early access, Michael Juliano’s Rogue System is worth a shot. You’ll even get good use of your HOTAS. Since it’s mostly a one man project, production values may not be as high as you might like.
I’ve never been a fan of HOTAS, but what I’ve used in SC is a combination of a gaming mouse and a G13 gameboard, which gives me a joystick on my left thumb. This tends to work well in the control scheme that SC has, where you are flying around, controlling gun turrets, and also need to be able to exert thrust in directions other than your main line of travel, either in decoupled mode or just while flying.
I would not recommend folks spend any significant amount of money on the title at this point though. If you really want to just see what it’s like, you could throw in something like 30 bucks and get a small ship, but I wouldn’t recommend buying a big one. I think in the next drop coming in september, you’ll actually be able to buy ships with in-game currency, so you could theoretically buy other ships, although it’ll likely take a long time to grind up that much cash.
A lot of folks in the game will let you fly with them though, so you can just play with other folks for a minimum investment.
Really though, at this point while there are actually things to do in the world, the servers are buggy to the extent that you need to actually want to just kind of play for testing’s sake still. There are amusing things to do, but bugs will interrupt you before you can really get into a long multi-hour session. It’s better than it was, and my system seems to be able to run at a reasonably consistent 30 fps most of the time, and the limitations all seem to be serverside. Until the update where they start limiting the simulations of objects based on proximity, they’re making performance improvements but not tackling the hugest problem (like when a ship gets destroyed and dumps thousands of individual crates of cargo, and now every client needs to know about exactly where they are, despite being a hundred thousand km away).
So, if you are super interested, maybe dump $30 on it… but I’d not spend more. If you want to play with bigger ships, just hook up with folks in the game. Unfortunately, you can’t do the glitches I was doing in the earlier videos, as ships are more locked down now… so even if you manage to get on board of a ship to hijack it, you can kill the crew but you can’t actually control the ship. (which is sad)
I gave money way back in the early stages, because I wanted to see the game get made, and it wasn’t that much money so I don’t regret it even though it’s so late… but at this point, they got plenty of money, so it’s not like your funding is gonna make or break the project. Unless you are interested in playing a buggy thing, just wait.