Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

Games
10432

IANAMLE (I am not a money laundering expert) but I’m also curious.

The most obvious implementation I wrap my head around is some scheme in which “whales” are actually part of a criminal enterprise, working with CIG – who are the folks running the enterprise itself. So the whales buy expensive ship JPGs to transfer ill-gotten monies into the CIG coffers.

But that doesn’t make sense on multiple levels. For starters, CIG has a ton of overhead, so it wouldn’t be a very efficient money laundering front at all. And then there’s also the issue of how buying ships online likely means that whatever currency you’re trying to launder has already been into the financial institution sphere, so it may already have been successfully laundered…or generated a ton of SARs which are setting off investigatory flags all over the place.

10433

It would appear the people still putting money into Star citizen are doing so because they’re part of a cult. It’s like people who keep sending fundamentalist preachers money to cure their ailments which never end.

10434

Interesting video. 100 Star systems? I didn’t know that. Are people seriously expecting that? That doesn’t seem like a reasonable expectation, no matter how many times it was promised.

I’m only going by earlier videos Derek posted in this thread, but the game looked fairly functional in those videos. Full of bugs, yes, but people were already walking around on a planet, and then getting into a space ship, launching from the starport, flying into space, etc.

10435

The game is technically “playable”. there are ships you can get into, there are places you can go, there are some minor gameplay elements in the game. But there are no true gameplay loops, most of the missions are like the first implementation of missions (fly here, kill 3 pirates with incredibly simple ai, collect money). It’s not exactly gameplay. There is some pvp combat and you can do hauling to earn money, but again, hauling is wholly uninteresting. you fill up your ship, haul it to somewhere else, go to terminal, sell, repeat. There is no changing economy, no reason to change where youi sell, no reason to sell anything other than the highest value material. The vast majority of the game is just dead time either waiting for trains and traveling between sell points on planets, or sitting watching hyperspace

it’s also incredibly buggy. Server crashes are frequent. Planets are extremely laggy and 100% optimized. Players disappear and reappear. Getting into a group can be difficult. Bugs galore.

By contrast, a large scope game like escape from tarkov has been in dev for 5 years and is basically 100% playable as a full game even if it isn’t near completion yet. Star Citizen is just a dumpster fire.

you also have to take into consideration that a lot of ships were sold based on mechanics that aren’t even close to being in the game

10436

That isn’t a game, that’s a tech demo. Or an early alpha. Parts may even be beta worthy, but as a package, there’s none of the connective tissue and cohesion you would need to call it a game, at leas tin my book. YMMV.

I mean, clearly there are some talented people working on this project. And clearly there are some cool ideas in this project. And there are even some actual finished segments in this project. None of this is gelling though, and probably can’t at this point.

10437

Fixed it for you.

10438

Seems like they got the realism of a trucker’s life nailed down.

10439

Exactly! Which is the problem with the realism trap. So much of what people weirdly view as “realism” in games is exactly the stuff most real people want to avoid in real life.

10440

Which makes perfect sense. Why the fuck would I want a simulation of me spilling my burrito over my shirt and going home to change? Games are just another version of fairy tales, folk legends or even cave paintings. They should generally reflect the extraordinary, not the mundane.

10441

Yeah, I cannot fly a space ship, be a space pirate, visit distant galaxies, and fire space lasers at home. I can, however, walk to the bathroom, open doors, brush my teeth, and all of that. Clearly, the priority of a game should be to first get the door opening and teeth maintenance part down, before the fluff of I dunno being a space cowboy!

10442

And much easier to mo-cap.

Surprised CR hasn’t boarded a trip to the ISS yet, so they can do video capture in near zero gravity.

10443

He tried to but he got stuck in the floor trying to get to the capsule door. When he flailed around trying to get free, he hit someone and ended up in space jail, where he still languishes.

10444

On realism: No one really wants realism in a sim. I covered flight sims for years for CGW and other mags, and watched the Usenet rivet counter wars: Oh, I can’t possible live with this sim, the REAL P-51 has phillips head screws holding the auxiliary fuel tank switch in place, this one has flat head screws! They killed much of the market and drove some amazing developers, like Andy Hollis, away from sim development.

Realism means, let’s take a WWII sim for an example, that you are freezing cold for hours, for those hours you either hold it or pee in a tube, no pausing, and absolutely nothing going on for a couple of hours or more. Maybe some entire missions of hours length in those conditions with absolutely no enemy contact. During a battle, if you get wounded, you take a large caliber weapon and shoot yourself in the shoulder, if that’s where you got hit. Oh, if you want realism, if you get killed in the game, the game ends and deletes itself from the HD and you never get to play it again.

Now, I always pushed for the sim world to give me an illusion of the world in which that combat pilot lived, without the boring parts. What type of screw is in a gauge is a boring part. But I really disliked linear, canned campaigns because they felt like arcade games to me. No matter how realistic the flight model, the actual world in which you used that aircraft is unrealistic if you have to fly the same mission over and over (and know each time what’s going to happen) until you “win” it. RB23D, Falcon 4, etc. gave you a wonderful, dynamic world in which you were not the entire world; there was a war going on all around you no matter what you did.

The absolute best designers understood no one REALLY wants realism. Even the guys buying and flying the great DCS world aircraft, who really seek the most high fidelity simulations you can purchase, who do want to, as much as possible in their virtual cockpits, experience flying those aircraft, don’t want the negative and boring aspects. (Most of them, anyway. ;) )

As for the money laundering aspect of Star Citizen, I kinda take an occum’s razor approach. I don’t think people incapable of straightforward project management and apparently incompetent in so many ways are sophisticated enough to pull off a criminal enterprise. Chris Roberts is far more Barney Fife than Vito Corleone.

10446

Sounds like WWII Online immediately post-launch.

10447

I can’t say I agree, but only because the statement is too general. For airplane sims, I don’t think many would want perfect realism in combat (maybe this is what you meant), but flying is a different story. Civ sims are a thing. DCS Hornet startup procedures can be fun. Airplanes in real life aren’t that hard to fly.

What gets me about this discussion though, is how can you have realism like that in a spaceship game? I mean, it’s all fantasy to begin with. Sure, there are food and drink mechanics in some RPGs…

Who knows, maybe it’s an untapped marked.

10448

The whole idea of realism in a space game? OK, first of all, weapons make no sound in space. Secondly, no dogfighting. Hell, you really don’t have dogfighting in modern air combat due to the advances in detection and targeting technology and missile technology, most is BVR. The idea of close range dogfighting with ships designed to move across galaxies is not exactly “realistic.”

10449

Realism in flight sims: yeah, that was an extreme statement, a reaction based on years of hearing kids talking about wanting “realism” in their air combat sims and it being defined by them as really ridiculous things. I recall a real F-15 pilot debating gamers on a Usenet thread about the handling and capabilities of the F-15, and they basically were telling him they knew better based on what they had read.

There are some people who do want the extremes. I learned how to do the full walk around and startup procedures in Falcon 4. But I didn’t do that for 99% of my gameplay in that sim. But very very few people want the option to pause the game removed, or want to go hours with nothing happening, etc. etc. However, I do remember the MS Flight Sim organizations where pilots signed up to fly transatlantic airliner flights where they literally would fly for hours on end over the ocean. Mainly on autopilot for hours.

10450

(although I think the weapons still make sounds)

10451

Heh, so true. I remember wandering for what, forty, fifty minutes to even get to the fighting, only to either be shot dead immediately or have the game glitch or the servers go down. I remember trying to hook up an AT gun to a truck, having to back up and connect with the hitch and everything. Having to shift gears in the take as you drove. Etc. None of which in the end helped make the game anything but a bizarre if sometimes intriguing experiment in design weirdness.

10452

Heh, definitely a thing. There was a post on Mudspike about some guy making this huge long flight accurately by celestial navigation only. Honestly pretty darn cool. I think he was accurate enough to hit an airport.