Will star-citizen ever be great

[Admin]

Here we are going to focus on the MMO since there are plenty of people who bought virtual items for over 1000$ in it.

Are they ever actually going to see a great game out of it or will it remain as a messy alpha where things never quite work as it should?

Will the gameplay actually be great despite pay/grind to win player vs player combat?

Will the game ever be particularly great as a spaceflight sim?

 

[Admin]

Undersized planets
Planets in star citizen are only around 1/10 of their proper size. At first this seemed ok but then when they tried to add clouds it wasn't pretty.

This was very noticeable during their star-engine demo, it very much didn't look alright. Didn't have the scale you expect from actual planets.

Note that while loading screens are obviously very bad (especially when not disguised) having games without them (after you started) isn't exactly something new, it's basically the standard we should expect all space-games to live up to.

btw: star-citizen actually has loading after you die or go to/from prison.

 

[Admin]

Speed caps
A proper spaceflight sim will not artificially cap how fast you can go. The only thing that should limit your speed is air resistance and how much fuel you have. Being prevented from going fast very much makes spaceflight worse in pretty much everyway. Not only does it prevent you from traveling quickly around planets but it also prevents things like orbital mechanics.

You very much want this in a spaceflight game:

It is worth noting that great combat does not require ship speeds to be capped globally relative to planets.

In thick atmosphere speeds would still be effectively capped due to air resistance. This would allow for more traditional combat lower in the atmosphere while it would be something very difference in space where you can reach much higher speeds.

You could for example have 2 ships in orbit fighting against each other. You might first have to intercept their orbit and then maybe have some tool (like a ractor beep) to prevent them from escaping. You could also have people fighting for space-stations in space and then it would maybe be important to stay close to the station all the time. You could also have a force-field around the space-station preventing people from leaving until it has been disabled.

 

[Admin]

Pay/grind to win combat
Star-citizen is very focused on player vs player combat but that whole focus is very problematic in games that has permanent progression or maybe even worse allow people to simply pay for better items.

For player vs player to be good there has to be very regular resets where you get to start over, this can be when a match ends or having people regularly die and having to start over. In PUBG and fortnite you can get better items for each match but that does not carry over to the next match.

Of course you can still have people gain permanent cosmetic items and achievements from playing the game (or being paying money) but in a good competetive game that will not grant you any advantage in player vs player competition.

Alternatively you could have a game not focused on player vs player but instead have players work together to progress in the universe. In that case however it would make more sense to focus on things like proper orbital mechanics (especially around planets and moons) and a good flight-model.

 

[Admin]

Bugs and performance issues
Despite having been in development for over 10 years the performance delivered in the "persistent universe" is still awful. The game is also full of bugs.

From my experience you need to have frametimes below 10ms fairly consistently to have a good experience when you control the camera with a mouse. You can look at 1% low figure to get a fairly good idea regarding the performance, you want it at 100fps or higher (not an ideal measure obviously), you can look at frametime graphics to get a better picture.

But regardless of which methodology you use it doesn't look good for star-citizen, you cannot even get 60fps fairly consistently even with the best hardware on the market.

The developers of course claim that they are working on fixing this but it has been over 10 years now, how much more time do they need?

 

[Admin]

Servers currently limited to 100 people per instance
They are still working on what they call "server meshing" which they claim will allow a lot more people to properly play together. They recently claimed to have made a breakthrough but they have still not demonstrated that it will actually work for their actual game, they only demonstrated it in a much simpler scenario.

It is worth noting that there are games which can handle way more than 100 players at once on a single server. Maybe they simply opted for the wrong engine (cryengine) and now they are kinda stuck trying to improve it (while crytek and later amazon both abandoned it after crytek sued CIG).

 

[Admin]

Contradictory design goals
People want different things from the game so it will be impossible to satisfy everyone, many people are going to be left disappointed because the game did not turn out as they hoped, this remains true regardless of what cig decides to eventually do with the game.

parkway_parkway wrote:

I think one issue with SC is that there's contradictory design goals.

So some people want to be run and gun soldiers who solo storm a bunker ... but others want to be medics who do long and complex operations on wounded people.

Some people want to set off into the deep dark unknown and find new planets, jump points and ancient mysteries ... others want a small number of hand crafted systems which are all accessible from the start.

Some people want to solo the big ships they've bought ... whereas others want to be an essential engineering and damage control team that does engineering gameplay.

Some players feel like the idea of permanently losing a ship they paid real money for is completely wrong ... however if you can't lose your ships then combat kind of means nothing and has no stakes.

You can't have all these things at the same time. They've sold everyone their own dreams back to them without ever really grappling with the contradictions in it.

 

[Admin]

How star-citizen without pay to win could look like
All weapons and chips would be rather quick to acquire but would also be easy to destroy.

Ships would get constantly created and destroyed.

Rather than playing with your favorite ship all the time you would sometimes have to try some other ship because the old one got destroyed.

People would fight over various cosmetic items.

Backers could get compensated by being able to get the ship they pledged 100 times which would eventually run out if they play regularly. Then they would have to buy 100 more. This would still give an advantage to paying players which is hard to completely eliminate since otherwise people could just buy stuff from other players with real money in a black market.

Another comprimise is to have ships be restored after they have been destroyed but if it get taken by someone else you will need to take it back. Maybe also add a time-period of maybe 7 days until a ship is restored after it has been destroyed so wales will start buying multiples.

 

[Creamer]

I'm not feeling this game. it's mostly just free roaming.
star ocean 2nd story has more game ability and is a better purchase.

 

[Admin]

He spent 300$ and still cannot access the mining gameplay
One very unappealing aspect with star-citizen is how they paywall away things all the time, it can be mining but it can also be other things.

XLN_underwhelming wrote:

I backed for exploration gameplay. Specifically the ability to name something you find, although the longer this takes, the more it seems like that won't happen. Beyond that, I like the idea of exploring cave systems and finding resources/etc and then returning to a major system and selling that data to an interested party.

Based on the CitCon last week it seems at least the latter half is still in the forecast. My goal isn't necessarily to buy larger and larger ships, but to explore what the designers have put into the game. For people who bought the bigger ships right from the start, I imagine that it's similar for them. It's not necessarily about getting to the next ship, it's about playing captain, or engineer, etc.

I don't know though, that's just my speculation. After 11 years in development I have 2 midsized ships and the starter I bought in 2014. I would have upgraded my starter instead of buying the second midsized outright, but I wanted a ship with LTI and I didn't already have one. While I've definitely put a couple bucks in over the years (~$300USD), I wouldn't consider myself a whale by any stretch (at least in this game).

I'm also a decade older and while I still look forward to exploration gameplay, I think even if it was free, it's highly likely that anything I had the chance to explore would quickly be discovered by orgs that spent $10,000+ plus on the biggest ships with the biggest scanners and whatever else. I think I'll enjoy getting to play as a surveyor who does run of the mill scanning/surveying to save up so I can do long haul exploration every once in a while when they do a big patch.

My biggest regret is that the main thing I want requires the game to be complete, or at least at a point where they can prioritize adding content. I don't really have an interest in Mining or Salvaging (none of my ships can do it anyway). If they get tier 0 of base building done, I'll try it, but that's not why I want to explore. If I can use my ship to find places for other people to build bases that would be fun for me.