Star Citizen (2015)
dereksmart.com
dereksmart.com
How it compares to No Man's Sky (initial release: 2016, last update: late 2021, on its fifth anniversary) is anyone's guess, it's Windows-only and I'm a Mac girl, and even if I had something to play it on I'm not too interested in spending $45 on what is likely to be disaster tourism. (Edit: apparently it is pretty good for people who enjoy pretending to be a long-haul space pilot, so my “disaster tourism” projection was completely wrong. Yay!)
Also this made me curious what Mr. Smart's up to right now and, sigh, the latest article on his blog is him declaring the inevitability of blockchain gaming; he's even repeating the line about how NFTs will let you move stuff between different games.
I have 100+ hours, and yes it fracking sucks when you spend half an hour going to some desolate moon, to do the equivalent of some USPS worker, just to stub your toe on the stairs and die. Be spawned back Lorville, wait for the wrecking crew get your ship, only to realize you og ship has dsynced and every was a waste. But it is funny, or at least maybe I enoji that masochism of it all. Besides that the game is actually really beautiful and weird, and vast, and lonely, all in one.
When did the internet or HN in general become the gatekeepers on what people are allowed to enoji or spend their money on. We all do stuff than anyone else can call out as wasteful.
If they got rid of the forced slow play where you have to trek from apartment (or hospital) to the ship request terminal I'd be a lot happier. Or at least they could let you request a new ship using your mobiglas wherever you are.
I see a lot of people only showing the albeit awesome footage of space battles. The game also comes with a FPS, and even some missions in the main game where you need to inspect some derelict ship or space station are missing.
NMS has done a good job addressing their shortcomings in the last years, but it still is no where compared to the detail and fidelity of SC.
And then I wanna mention the other weird fun tech they have. They have face point tracking for your avatar. That have done crazy stuff with spatial audio. Im not trying to stan them, but theres way more under the surface of than the game.
I am glad people who enjoy pretending to be a space pilot are enjoying this one, all I know about it is it’s long-standing status as one of the biggest Kickstarter vaporware stories, which I guess is a list it can finally come out of after about a decade of development!
Why did you word it like that?
> all I know about it is it’s long-standing status as one of the biggest Kickstarter vaporware stories
They've had playable modules for a long while, development is transparent and active. Not really the definition of vaporware.
I ain’t judging you, dude.
The latter half of my post was the substance of my response, feel free to reply to that if you want.
It's a fantastic game if you have friends to play with, or are interested in joining online groups. There's thousands of planets out there and I still get excited when I'm in a random galaxy and find something awesome I can share with the community.
The single player in NMS is less fun than Multiplayer, but if you are down for what is basically space minecraft I still would say it's worth it!
And for anyone wondering, it works great on Proton and the devs are maintaining support for Proton as well (thanks, Steam Deck!)
The dogfighting module is pretty polished, it's fun to run on the flight simulator and VR headset. It's my go to space sim as there's nothing that compares even though it's not done.
The persistence module is fun to dick around with, the seamless landing on a planet and exploring is cool as shit.
I don't have a rig to power the FPS module very well so I can't give a fair review, but the mechanics and controls seem fine.
Love the immersion and I follow it asynchronously. They're still going at it and I applaud the effort. Would rather have a great game eventually than a shit dead game a year ago.
Recently Jackfrags who I watch cover FPS games on youtube played it and my reaction was similar.
Consider this: We need something new - there is absolutely no need for another rehashed clone of Privateer/Freelancer/Whatever. We played hundreds of such games. Nobody has been able to bring a new paradigm into this game genre since 1980s. Its the same old thing.
With the hardware power that our computers attained since 1980s, we should be playing games that are much bigger in scope and much more immersive right now. We are not. We are playing the same rehashed games with better graphics. The gameplay is almost the same and cheap. Every major company that consolidated the gaming space is just rehashing this genre like all the other genres for profit, without bringing in anything new.
Star Citizen is trying to change that. Its trying to create an entire universe in which you can make your space coffee, eat your space breakfast and move into whatever adventure you want in a living, breathing universe. Its trying to put is in something that is worth our time and attention today, instead of a rehashed copy/paste of whatever successful simplicity that was invented in the earlier decades.
Its going to be difficult. Even making one living, breathing space-city for people to experience is like making a singular, major MMO game. Making a planet - even bigger. An universe? Phenomenal work.
It was obvious that there would be needed gigantic funding on an ongoing basis and A LOT of work. It was obvious that a lot of developers would burn out on the way. It was certain that it would take a lot of time.
STILL, its worth it. We need SOMETHING NEW now. Since 1970s, we got CPU power increase a TRILLION FOLD, but the games we play today STILL have the gameplay of 1970s' successful games despite all the new potential that immense CPU (and accompanying GPU) power provides. We need something that will make us immerse thoroughly in games, universes in ways we never did before. Star Citizen is trying that. And its a major step in the right direction.
A game with 10x the level of interactivity does not take 10x as long to create. It takes 10^10.
Star Citizen is the exact opposite of every lesson we've learned about successful project management and software development in the last 75 years.
In the end making a game is like any other complex engineering project. The hard part isn't conceiving of something awesome worth doing, concepting a world, the dreaming part. The hard part is wrapping your collective head around the magnitude of work required, managing and putting limits on that, and successfully dividing up and doling out the work so that it's done in close to the promised time frame.
There is a famous saying I'm forgetting, something about anyone can work on something forever, successful teams ship product.
Which seems like an incredibly reasonable way to approach doing something complicated...
Current games also take 10^10 as long to create compared to the games of 1970s. The effort was put into making these games. They materialized. The next generation of games wont materialize without someone putting in the effort and the money.
AAA projects are playing it safe, precisely because they're so big that failing would be catastrophic.
Meanwhile, smaller games are redefining the medium. Disco Elysium has impressive writing and an interesting perspective on politics. FromSoftware games look technically worse but are teeming with creativity. Echo VR showed me the value of social presence in multiplayer games. And Outer Wilds... oh, Outer Wilds.
Also your assumption that "bigger == better", reminds me of how some people used to think that realism and realistic graphics where the ultimate goal.
I came back to it in ~2019, but again it felt like a high barrier, requiring the kind of esoteric knowledge you'd get if you'd been consistently tracking all the updates to really enjoy. (And there was a LOT of email updates about the project.)
Also what felt like heavy selling on new spacecraft and addons, while I remained confused about what you're actually meant to do in the game, frustrated by the sandbox mechanics & limitations, bewildered by how resilient my ship was and what happened if it was destroyed (pricing was mostly around buying ships, I believe).
I now suspect persistent MMOG universes just aren't my thing.
And if your expertise is building engines perhaps you should build an engine instead of a game?
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GraciousMintyGrasshopper-mobile.mp...
Brief clip of a moment from this game, being played by a highly skilled "pilot".
Too, as the linked video helps demonstrate, it makes attacking capships a lot more feasible and a lot more fun - most games' capships are extremely hard targets for fighters because of their defensive armament and because a fighter operating as if aerodynamically constrained has a hard time making a strafing pass count. Freespace 2 gives bombers shipkiller missiles to help with this, but it's still a real problem with ships that mount a lot of point defense - as it is, those are so good at swatting fighters that you don't really have any way to answer them. Lifting the aerodynamic maneuvering limitation rebalances the engagement in a way that gives attacking fighters a lot more tactical flexibility, and gives a good deal of added salience and complexity to the escort role besides.
While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience.
The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today!
I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet!
There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :)
In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations.
Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.
what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?
The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet!
Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship.
The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before.
Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.
I ask because player count is how I'd measure scale. Not fidelity.
They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.
Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.
(If you look at the actual progress report that was talking about bedsheets, you’ll note it was from the AI team—in other words, how to make the AI enter/exit beds while interacting properly with the physics engine. Pretty normal stuff.)
But that does not make Derek Smart right—space sims are within humanity’s grasp.
(famous quote from the author about how long CIG had left before bankruptcy)
Anyhow. Here's something from the good days of Something Awful
I first read about it on Hackernews years ago - and ended up doing a deep dive on starcitizen_refunds. I watched a bunch of those videos about what a big failure it was. I kept wondering why people still supported it. My fundamental takeaway was that people didn't actually want their money back.
For whatever reason, I didn't realize the game was actually playable. The way people describe it makes it sound like it doesn't exist. Once I read about the vision for it, I decided to try it.
I was blown away. I'm not really into space or space games, but getting into a ship and flying it into space was insane. Probably one of the most interesting things I've seen in video games in the past 20 years. I stopped playing it but decided to subscribe to the $10 per month tier to support it.
The game itself is playable and fun (they need to tweak a bunch of economic parameters once they're ready to leave alpha, because right now it's too easy), the MMO part is lacking (and it's an unsolvable problem based on their current vision). There are tons of bugs. Some of the simplest things don't work at all, like the overworld map, or even the game downloader. In spite of all that, it's fascinating. You don't get worldwide meetups, videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU or other Beatlemania fanaticism for other games for a reason.
The biggest thing is that Star Citizen is meant to be a high-fidelity simulator first and a game second. There are tons of people in the community who don't realize this and just want another pew-pew, instant-gratification space shooter game (of which there are many) with good graphics. Those are the loudest people with the least understanding of the vision.
Here's what I think needs to happen:
1) Put out the single-player version. This could realistically be done in a couple years and will surpass every space game ever made
2) Get rid of "sharding" completely, add caps to number of online players.
3) Change the mechanics for the MMO in a way that makes server meshing make sense. Develop some game mechanism similar to Asheron's Call portal storm that prevents mass gatherings of more than the server max.
AND/OR
3) Something crazy like create a city-based MMO. Make Star Citizen ISP in NYC, pilot the MMO there. Would solve some of the networking issues.
A lot of what Raph Koster has talked about in the past 20 years is being created in Star Citizen. It's the only thing that comes close to the vision of a "world" rather than a "game", that UO was able to capture.