Star Citizen's first-person shooting is getting backpack-reloading, dynamic crosshairs, procedural recoil, and other improvements to 'bring the FPS combat to AAA standard'
Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I'm no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
Lawsuits for what? They never promised any customer that they would immediately deliver a working end product. As far as I can make out, they offer early access to an in-development product, with your purchase going toward funding development. It’s more akin to a donation with strings (access to the product).
Chris won’t stop until ShowerTech(tm) is in the game with realistic health debuffs so there’s a consequence when you don’t do the maintenance gameplay loop on your ship’s bathroom.
I wish that was entirely a joke.
But Star citizen has always had FPS missions as a core gameplay aspect, and it’s really one of their main selling points. In no other game can you walk out of a mission, into a ship, hop in the pilot seat and go from the ground to orbit with no cutscene and all of it under player control. The amount of crazy shit you can do just because your character can leave the pilot seat is ridiculous. A month ago I teamed up with some dude who did bounty hunting. He EMPd the other player, had me EVA over to their ship, shoot open the airlock, and gun down the target, all so his buddy could come over and harvest the ship for resources to sell. The emergent gameplay, even though the game can still be very rough, is a really cool aspect of what they’ve made.
Yeah you just had to ignore every piece of information from the founder and developers that it would be a highly ambitious game and that they were unsure themselves where it is they wanted to stop.
Cool, too bad it's one of the worst pay to win games. Last time I checked you had to pay real money to buy in-game stuff and the prices were by no means pocket change.
Chris Roberts has always had the ambition for a space sim where you could truly do anything, but never had the resources to actually create it.
So what is Star Citizen supposed to be?
An open world sandbox where you, a citizen of the stars, can choose to be Whst you want. A space trucker? A pirate? A bounty hunter? A smuggler? These aren't new things in the space sim genre, but Star Citizen wants to make these aspect less like a game and more like a life sim.
So instead of clicking a few buttons to fly your spaceship, your character wakes up in bed, has to manually walk over to the ship hangar (maybe take the train there, if you're on the city planet. Yes, the train runs on a schedule), manually access the hangar via elevator, climb into the ship, activate the ship, request take-off from control, wait for the hangar doors to open, and then you fly your spaceship.
This level of granular detail is meant for every aspect of the game and is the reason why Star Citizen will never get done!
Yeah it's "released". Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it's so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken ("early access") to save face.
for the record I paid for this and am watching with hopeful eyes, but please stop pretending that being able to launch the game and walk around is playing
Playable in very loose terms.
I booted it on a decent rig (13700k/32gbRAM/3080ti), after ~10min of loading screens I finally got my ship onto the pad and tried to take off from the planet; half way into the burn out of the atmosphere, I clip out of the pilot seat, through the whole ship and start free falling back to the planet while my ships continues to burn away from me…. I alt+f4’d and uninstalled that hot garbage.
I "bought" this game when I was in high school. I've graduated high school, college, and I've been in the workforce for 7 years. Still no game.
So yes, they should figure out this game is going to be, set a launch date, and work towards that schedule. This forever-in-development thing they have going on is ridiculous.
Edit:
Alright, it's not fair to say "still no game." There is a game you can download and play, but the question I have is does it have all the bells and whistles you expect from a complete game, or is it a technical demo with some game features? See my other comment in this comment chain for why my opinion is what it is.
The phrase "AAA game/developer" has lost all meaning for me over the years. I just can't drop the clichéd $60+ on these titles anymore, especially with quality and support waning. I don't see this game being any different; the writing's on the wall.
Well, see, with Star Citizen, you buy it to have an unreleased game that will allow you to buy a ship for 8000 dollars that you can.. stand around inside of and look at.
Seriously, This is peak gaming.. how can you losers not understand how great this is?! /s
This game is 45 dollars. It always has been. Support for it has only increased over time.
Also I really don't look at CIG as a AAA dev, whomever said that forgot what a Kickstarter/self funded game is.
For those wondering about why such basic features are mentioned here it's because work on Squadron 42 (single player part of the project) moved to the polishing stage and everything created for it is being ported back to Star Citizen (multi player part).
Is it worth an article? It is if you're interested in the game, I guess?
Is SC a perfect project? Of course not, far from it. I do find it interesting however how... angry it makes people and how much they want it to fail. Yeah, I know $1000+ packages and so forth (not needed if you just want to play the game btw).
For those interested in actually checking for themselves whether it's a scam or not, there are free flight events multiple times a year - you get to see the current state of the game with everything good and bad it entails. Surprisingly enough, they tend to bring in more players every single time.
Just because the product they are making is quality does not mean it isn't a scam. The game was supposed to be released a decade ago now. They said they had the entire single player finished and ready in 2014. The things they have made are impressive, sure. But after that amount of time its looking more and more like they lied about how ready things were to get more funding, and have been doing that for a decade now.
It's not that they lied about it being complete, it's that they entirely changed the scope of the game around 2014ish. If I remember correctly they even had a poll asking the community if they'd rather wait for planetary landing which was originally not meant to be in the game.
The original game was freelancer 2.0. you don't land on a planet, you get into a cutscene and then appear in "New Atlantis" (yes I'm referring to star field, that's not a city in SC) then as the story goes a developer made a tech demonstration they called "pupil to planet" showing the ability to continually zoom out from, you guessed it, looking at a pupil and going all the way to space with no loading screen so the had to essentially rework the game from the ground up. The story and a lot of the assets/voice work, etc was all done and "ready" for what that game would have been, but since the change they now had to rebuild a lot of the systems and make new systems for the way the game works now. That's just squadron 42 (the single player game) star citizen the MMO has always been a bit on the "back burner" waiting for SQ42 to complete.
Now that we're past all that, and just this last weekend SC had a majorly important tech test that seemed to go very well, they're putting the last foundational pieces together so they can actually complete the game.
If anyone wants to say it took too long, I'm with you. I backed in 2014 and thought "damn, answer the call 2016? That's a long ass time." but to say it's a scam? They're the dumbest bunch of scammers in the entire history of scamming, Nigerian princes and all, if this is supposed to be a scam.
I absolutely agree with this point. I think CIG's inability to openly communicate when things go bad is a big reason for the scam allegation (that and loooooots of issues with planning, especially early on). I see it's as a serious problem for a project that presents itself as "open development" (which it is, don't take me wrong, but not as much as it should be).
I think both CIG and players underestimated how long it takes to build a company, tech and two big budget games at the same time. It's 100% on the devs to realize and communicate that, which they failed to do.
For better or worse, S42 is officially in its final stretch. Is it really? Transfer of people towards SC seems to confirm that but we'll see when the game finally releases. When that happens we'll also see whether game taking this long was worth it.
If SC simply showed their original roadmap and timeline, it would speak to itself if it is a scam or or not.
As someone who bought in from the start (when everything was bundled), the argument of “not a scam” fell through when they started to hide their original roadmap.
Just to clarify, which roadmap are we talking about?
The changes to the release view from last year or so?
One from CitizenCon after addition of full planet exploration?
One from the early days where SC was suppose to be a prettier Freelancer with planets separated by a loading screen and consisting of a small hub for activities?
I'd like to make sure which one we're talking about.
Edit: I'd also like to add, how far are we going with people being scammed?
I can understand this view for early backers (I'm one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?
Yeah it's honestly pretty fun, but there were juuuust enough performance and stability bugs that I gave up and returned it. I think it has potential and I'm glad someone is doing this.
Which is why I appreciate them doing free flight events. They don't present the game in the best light a lot of the time but it's a great way to test if the game is for you in it's current form (or even in general). They are also a good way to prevent new players from feeling scammed so there's that.
I feel like a lot of us backed and stayed with this project despite all of the issues exactly because they're trying to do something no one else is willing to risk. It's a rough road, full of mistakes and delays but they're sticking with it, which is more than many people expected.
Eh, let's not act like CIG is completely blameless in all of this. They made a lot of mistakes along the way and SC is still far from what they promised it to be.
But if I shot that raynof sunshine in auch a way that it killed someone I would be okay with assuming there would be more force than just a standard ray
Okay I did some math. If the gun shot a single photon with all the energy of a .50BMG from an M2 heavy machine gun, it would have about 1.2e-4 Ns of momentum. For reference, the bullet it's compared to would have 38.3 Ns. So the photon has about 32000 times less momentum than a bullet. Do with that what you will.
The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something's mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.
Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.
Well, procedural when applied to generation of scenery/galaxies etc means to create the exact same thing using random values that are the same random for everyone. It just saves on storage.
But, I cannot tell you how this would apply to recoil. It would only make sense if there were an absolutely huge number of possible weapons.
This would have been so exciting like 9 years ago when they first released the FPS thing. I would also be excited if they said the game is fun now, instead of some random superficial animation thing that probably doesn’t add much to the gameplay.
I love the idea of this game, but even after a few years I lost hope. I can’t believe it’s still in development like 10 years later. Does anyone know if it’s more playable now? They had some ship racing and the FPS thing before, why haven’t they just thrown together a basic world yet?
Edit: it sounds like they have thrown together a basic world. Maybe it’s worth another try now? Can you have fun for more than a few hours and actually accomplish meaningful stuff?
They've had a "basic world" for a long time at this point, unfortunately it still doesn't go beyond "tech demo" levels of development.
Squadron 42, their single player game set in this universe, is supposedly nearly completely finished and coming "SOON™".
If Squadron 42 actually releases it would mean Chris Roberts has finally managed to start and finish a project without a parent company ordering him or taking away the project from him.
I check this game out once or maybe twice a year which is more than enough imo. There are plenty of people playing this daily though who apparently can cope with all the bugs and crashes.
This is all just stuff they're porting over from Squadron 42 now that they were able to move those devs back to SC. I have no idea why this deserves it's own article.
They should be bragging about the 400 player single shard test they just finished.
400 on a single shard (server) that actually quite a lot. It is far far easier to just throw a bajillion different servers at the problem and only have a relatively small player count per server. Having 400 running smoothly on a single server is a very impressive optimization achievement
Oh shit. I think it was literally 10 years ago I 'pledged' the base game (Aurora Mr). It still has less hours than Microsoft minesweeper, which let's face it is a banging game.
I liked the game, when it was advertised as a moddable singleplayer game with drop-in drop-out co-op. As well as moddable multiplayer you can host yourself.
Now, I don't have any interest it whatever that cluster fuck has become.
It never ceases to amazing me how angry people get when a game isn't perfect and bug free. We want more and more content and graphics with the same amount or less resources, all the while refusing to pay any more for it.
I miss the days when people were happy with n64 and ps1 graphics. You didn't need a team of 200 people to put out hyper realistic graphic open world games that people would still shit on.
I'm on the other side of the fence here, amazed that people still bat for a company that can't deliver a product after what, 10 years past the first estimate release date?
I'm not on any side of the fence. I just see these posts shitting on games all the time, and get tired of seeing them. If you don't like a game fine, don't play it. But making games is hella difficult. I make indie games in my spare time, and I can honestly say, just making a single player game is hard, let alone a multi-player game, or anything realistic. Like Jesus, if you have such a huge problem with these games, go make a better one yourself.
Homie you've been able to fucking play it for a decade. If you haven't figured that out yet, you're the problem. If they said they released it years ago and called these all "updates" you'd have nothing to bitch about and that's why I fucking loathe people like you. It's not "officially released" so it's a scam, it's disappointing, it's whatever the fuck else you can dredge up to downplay the fact they're still fucking developing it like any other active game. Even Elite Dangerous still drops updates and it predates Star Citizen. You people are impossible to please and it's exhausting. Move the fuck on.
Fucking why? You can buy a ship for $20, go download the game, and play it this very second. The fuck does the "1.0 release!" title do differently? Give you full license to shit on how it's now out and xyz isn't done?
The people concerned about it releasing are the same ones who will bitch about it releasing 'too soon'. Fuck em.
Y'all have been burned too much, so when you see someone creating something bright and exciting, all you see is fire. Stop reading clickbait headlines, stop taking the word of tinfoil hat loonies just because it satisfies your irrationalinal desire to hate this game. They get so much wrong and manipulate the rest you'll feel like a fool when you see for yourself. Try the next ree fly, face the cognitive dissonance and make up your own mind. Then get frustrated with the manufactured outrage that tricked you from having fun with us this whole time.
Gaming journalism is about generating clicks for shareholders, full stop, but you'll believe them over an independent studio run by a guy whose career is full of beloved, well made space games. You have fallen into an enshittification trap and are missing out because of it.
People don't make fun of starcitizen because "games journalism". They laugh because it's development hell is funny. Even if a satisfactory product come out the other end, it'll still be an internet legend.
Star citizen exploits its userbase with a never-ending drip feed of bite-sized consumables, just as long as you keep feeding the machine.
This is not some poor little indie dev. They have taken over 600 million from they're users, and have nothing finished to show for it. I treat them with the same distain that I do companies that trive on lootboxes and live services, as they all work from the same base template. At least the live service people made a game before squeezing every penny out of people.
Look at the number of comments on posts about hating star citizen. If you were an unscrupulous gaming news company, generating Star Citizen drama equals clicks and money. Go watch the weekly Inside Star Citizen episodes or dev livestreams, read the massive monthly reports, use the dev tracker to communicate with one of their thousand employees on the forums. This is a game being made in good faith. How is a constantly growing playerbase and financial success somehow considered a sign this game is bad? How does spending that money on development , pushing out massive quarterly updates and inventing new gaming tech mean this project is dead? How does the most openly developed game out there mean they are clandestine fraudsters? It's the shareholders of gaming news who are trustworthy here? Think critically, don't just feed your initial reaction.