Out of Pod Experience

You know, if I went back in time and told myself - preferably at the moment of standing in a queue with a boxed copy of some game - that in the future you won't just be able to buy a game on-line without having to buy a copy (and DRM won't be just 'type this word from that page in the manual') but also people will be able to buy an unfinished game to live out their dreams of being a beta-tester...

I'd probably hear the younger me telling me I'm drunk and should go home instead of traveling in time.

I actually get the whole early access thing with small titles from independent studios, but when it becomes a massive advertising campaign (Pay for giving us the opportunity to cut back on the testers. And cough up extra for having a ship you'd get in-game anyway) it starts to spiral into the "that's so wrong" territory.

It's going even further than just paying for a beta. Betas have a tendency to be mostly done. Projects like Star Citizen don't even have all of the gameplay nailed down and implemented - pretty graphics is one thing but a solid game core is pretty much required for a game to succeed.

Case in point, EVE online. Graphics? Improving, but let's face it - a lot of the time you don't even see your spaceship. You zoom out to get a better battlefield awareness, overview gives you all the info you need. In a fight, most of your attention tends to be focused on keeping yourself alive and not marveling at the pretty lasers. They are pretty by the way.

Sound? Um... it has sound, I guess. I'd say damn you CCP for removing the jukebox, but "Below the Asteroids" lives on anyway. And now has a symphonic version too.

Core gameplay? Driving the game for all those years, focused on very clear ideas - nothing is safe. Your choices matter. Throw in brutal PvP with consequences, a bit of territorial control and you've got a mixture that just keeps on going.

We've seen a pretty light show from Star Citizen. Time will tell if we'll be hearing tales of players shutting down major lanes like m0o did, or epic stories of conflict, intrigue and espionage that bring this damn blob-filled, always-dying trainwreck to the news time and time again.

Yay, losing your ship doesn't matters at all, specially if it blows so hard that you're permakilled in the process.

TiDi as something totally new, so that's going to be about three years?

It was a major change - not only it allowed giant battles to happen (and, let's face it, what other game lets over a thousand people fight at once) - it shifted the entire in-game battlefield.

TiDi made reps more effective in fleet combat, shifting emphasis from high-alpha doctrines to more DPS-driven ones. Bombing runs became effective (sometimes too effective), forcing either agile doctrines that can run off before bombs hit or very tanky ones, with high buffer that can soak up the damage.

(That, or outright disposable. Cue the Rupture.)

Tiericide from major changes. Tiericide made many ships effective again - before it, there was pretty much one T1 frigate on the field and that was the Rifter. Nowadays, T1 frigates see a lot of action - so do T1 cruisers. Now a new player can look through ships and pick something he can actually fight in and enjoy the game without being constantly told "This ship sucks, train for T2 instead."

There's still a lot to fix and develop in space before thinking about WiS, and CCP is on the right track at the moment - revamping crucial systems like POSes and soon going for a module tiericide.

Developing the new at the expense of fixing the unfinished/broken is what led to the Summer of Rage.

I second this, The summer of rage was a trifecta of crap hitting at once. You had Incarina, which was nothing like The Ambulation Project, being incomplete and breaking video cards hitting, then you had the NES hitting with the $70 monical but nothing really cheap, this was also not what ccp said was going to happen, followed lastly by the greed is good memo, which was an idea to nichle and dime the players even more and move eve towards P2W. Any one of thouse alone, might not have garnered the reactions that happened, the greed is good memo, though bad, would not of brought on huge unsubs at once. But all three combined, and then you had the explosive mix that made the summer of rage, and the now 'fix broken things first' mentality of CCP.

except it's not really a perm death as it doesn't matter. You have no SP's according to chris, no training, just pilots skill. If the lifetime insurance transfers, then why would you give a crap is DaReaper poped and you are now on DaReaper XI you still have all his stuff, and you will keep getting his ship. Perma death is a neat idea, but if you lose nothing and get everything, then it makes no sense. And won't deter people from doing stuff. In eve if I have a 10b isk ship, and I know if I die i'll be out 10b isk, it might make me stop and go 'gee jumping into this gatecamp with no support might not be a good idea' however, the same ship, but all I risk is becoming DaReaper II then screw the support i'm going in.

Some of it has to do with it was not broken until it hit TQ. Others is that it was working fine until more players used it, or people started figuring out other ways to use things. Another is that what you see was about 1/4 of what we were suppose to get. I'll give you a small example:

PI was suppose to be this grand thing that enabled us to work with planets, build colonies, then hire Dust mercs to defend them. We were suppose to build what the mercs would be fighting in and for and over. For some reason this got scrapped. But they gave us basic functionality, as part of the expantion, and said 'oh well will come back for another pass a few months later' The problem is, that other pass would not of fit into the next expantion or would of taken away too many resources from the next jesus feature, so it went onto the 'to fix later' pile.

PoS's we deisgned to be the things that gave us sov as as temp holes to to help build up empires. It was not until a lot of people started using them everyday that we say how crappy and buggy and annoying they are. Plus how much of a PITA sov warfare was back in the day. The problem with PoS's is that the code tied into a lot of things, and when they came back for a second pass a few years later they went 'oh dear god we don't have time...' As more people use them, more glaring 'these things ar so messed up' started to show. CCP was finally able to make a few simple passes, but the code was still tangled. hats why we have domino sov now, but they need to get corp and alliance standings away from pos' to fix them.

Some things was due to time constraint, some due to technical limitiations at the time, and others because we players as a collective are smarter then the devs and can do crap they can't always think of.

Instead of replying individually to all the posts, I'll just resume it that there is indeed a death penalty in star Citizen, even if the pilot in question has an LT1 ship since the off the lot version of said ship has fairly low quality equipment fitted onboard, which is seem varies from a scale of 1 to 10, and those on the ship are quality 2 at most.


So one can imagine what happens if a fully decked out ship fitted with much higher quality gear gets blown up......Yup you get a ship back after a certain amount of time( the bigger the ship the longer it takes to build one), and fitted with stock equipment.


Insurance?..... Forget insuring said ship with high quality gear and flying it into low security systems where the chance for combat is much higher, as the insurance company will not insure the ship, period......Kind of dumb that eve allows this no matter where you take your ship, but just me.


Large fights?.... Impossible since the graphics are so intense, that having a 40~50 ship fight is making sure your PC has a heart attack rendering all that in high quality, and since flight is in first person view, you can't pull back until ships become tiny dots.....It's all in your face and close range fights, and gangs/ fleets small enough that load out's and role for each one participating matter a lot more.....Similar to the alliance tournaments in eve with 6 ships on either side but perhaps slightly more and in first person.


Yes, walking inside ships and each person in multi crew ship can be an NPC, or an actual person occupying that position be it gunnery, sensors, engineering or flying the ship and being subject to it's own gravity since there will be an outer physics engine for all ships, and both the outer and internal physics engine for multi crew ships, which on single seat fighters on the A/C right now, has been shown to cause blackouts and red outs in extreme maneuvers, not to mention the full 6 degrees of freedom control to do 2 maneuvers at the same time, or in decoupled mode so the ship can slide left while going up at the same time....



Add the Oculus VR support and support for track IR too, and full hotas support( X55 rhino user here), and we got something that while in space and involving space ships, is a far different game than EVE....Even the economy is run by NPC's 90% of the time, so there won't be the kind of market manipulation we see in EVE.

Half a million SC pilots shiver in horror to know that you won't be among them.

I hope Star Citizen is actually good.

But then again it would be funny to see it flop after all this talk.

That you can't blob to win a fight?.....Check.
That you can't do market manipulation?...Check.
That 90% of the market is run by NPC's, so no super inflation problems?....Check.


The overall mechanics for the public server are still being designed at this stage, but do keep in mind they are building almost 4 games rolled into 1 since there's the arena commander module, which is a sort of simulator to test out setups with both NPC's and real players, then there's the Fps portion similar to Dust, then there's the single player campaign with 50 missions, and finally comes the multiplayer MMO portion at the very end.


There is even a racing portion coming out with the v0.9 patch next week, so it's a lot of game being delivered for a team that started out 2 years ago and now has 270 people working for them.