As I see it, variety, detail and realism (or at least verisimilitude) in what the game is actually about is good.
A cooking simulator would benefit from food spatters flying occasionally, each dish looking slightly different each time you make it. It wouldn’t benefit from you having to clean up each one of those food spatters by hand or you get a nasty letter from the hygeine inspectors because that’s not in service of the gameplay.
The beauty of fiction is that we get to set our own boundaries. I can invent a story about an unbelievable thing in a believable world, and as long as they aren’t in direct conflict with each other, that can work, and I can add fidelity to those things within the boundaries I’ve set.
It’s totally fair if you find that tedious though. I just think it sounds pretty cool. I totally wanna suffocate in an airlock!
That’s a good point, but I also love being surprised by what games can do, so at least for my tastes, developers often tend to focus more narrowly than I would like them to.
They can obviously have a lot of good reasons for that. Maybe I’m just a weird guy who shouldn’t be catered to by any reasonable game developer, or maybe they just want to be able to finish their game in less than 12 years :)
But I still think it’s kind of inspiring that Star Citizen is really going for it, as I said ages ago in this thread.
I also think it’s a moonshot though. Their chances of ending up with a game that is feature complete according to their ambitions seem very slim indeed.
Still, I think it would be nice if the idea of simulating just a little bit more (whether by fudge or by math) found its way into more games.
You should reserve the word “moonshot” for situations where there is an objective moon to unequivocally reach.
I would be more inspired by it if the apparent progress tracked with the amount of money and time, and if the people in charge weren’t living in multimillion dollar homes and selling promissory notes for ships that cost as much as a real car.
The idea of a space game that simulates everything down to the last rivet sounds great and tickles my nerdy gamer brain. But the part of my brain where the actual neurons are then recognizes that there’s a reason no one makes that game - because it just becomes an explosion of infinite feature creep and wasted time on things that have fuck all to do with the actual experience.
That’s because they knew to carry around a pocket full of Oxy-pens!
But seriously, yes, that did actually sound pretty cool.
There was someone else in this very thread who once told cool stories like that, but I can’t remember who it was. But his stories very nearly had me convinced to buy a copy. Or at least try one of the free weekends or whatever. I think my lack of hard drive space stopped me. And possibly the learning curve.
I agree those stories sound cool. I’m not so sure I’d actually enjoy playing them out, as my patience for even basic stuff like eating and drinking in survival type games is almost nil these days.
Actually, I’d probably play a game that had those features. As long as those features were in a cooking simulator.
You put those same features in an all-encompassing space simulator, where I’m a chef operating that cooking simulator, when I could instead be a space pirate flying around shooting shit, and you’ve crossed the line into “too much sim” territory.
Anything that slows down my progress from starting the game to getting to the good stuff is going to be wasted effort, IMO.
As much as I admire the tech, I really don’t like the business model. But then I also say that as someone who bought a 50 euro F-16 for DCS. Let he who does not fly an imaginary Viper cast the first stone!
I think it would be a very good thing if they could explain to people how they’re gonna take all of these components and turn them into one big, huge, complete game in the end.*
Do they actually know how they’re gonna do that? I’m not convinced they do.
*Persistent Universe is supposed to be way bigger, right?
Yeah, my aging rig does not stand a chance in hell. I’m running into the same problem as you with DCS. I have to clean out most of a 500GB SSD to squeeze it in.
Definitely time for a new build!
The problem is a simple one, and that’s priorities. You don’t spend 6 months working on fluid dynamics for drink animations, when the core of game is bad/broken/not there. This is like trying to build a house, and spending 6 months working on window trim before the roof is on.
At least DCS actually exists.
It is strange to focus on the realism of having to remember to grab a helmet, since it seems like if these were real ships they’d have a helmet and suit rack inside and there would probably be helmets and suits for sale or pickup all over the station and dock. Its like they only focused on the most annoying aspect of “realism” lol
They’ve got to focus on that annoying aspect of “realism” to pad out the “gameplay”. How else can you expect your players to waste hours of time in-universe?
Where did everyone go?
Oh, they’re off to milk the Chinese whales now.
I will never understand how this project is still a thing. Is it the black hole of sunk cost fallacy where it’s accumulated so much mass that nothing can escape?
They are off playing that space game that actually shipped unlike Star Citizen :)
Well that explains it. Meanwhile, over at the Reddit watercooler, citizens are having a collective meltdown because Bethesda took 10 yrs + $400K and actually shipped an all-encompassing space RPG.
Well, to be fair. Starfield isn’t even trying to do what Star Citizen does right now. I’m not saying Star Citizen is particularly good, but Starfield’s space travel is just a series of fast travel menus and non-interactive cutscenes.
Yeah technologically Star Citizen even in its unfinished state is lightyears ahead of Starfield (and I prefer Starfield and wish Star Citizen was a singleplayer RPG like Starfield, just with its own tech).
Star Citizen is unequivocally the best space game tech demo out there.