Out of Pod Experience

I was probably going to buy the $20 package SC had around Thanksgiving but by the time I read about it, it was "Out of Stock". Not gonna spend more than that on the game at this point. I'm not excited enough about it to be an enthusiastic backer. I watch all the development videos they put on Youtube though.

The fidelity of the ships is pretty impressive. But SC's design sense is awful. All their ships are completely uninspiring. A bunch of boring jets and race cars. It's like they hired a bunch of dudebros with no imagination to design this stuff, instead of proper artsy fartsy scifi nerds. EVE's spaceships have always impressed me. Lots of great designs here. Must be some proper artsy fartsy nerds working at CCP. Also they have at least one Frenchman on the art team and Frenchmen have an unfair natural in-born advantage at artsyness. SC should probably replace one of their dudebros with a Frenchie. Just my professional opinion.

I probably don't have time for two spaceship MMOish things. So if SC turns out to be awesome... dun dun duuuuuuun! It's impossible to know what SC will play like at the moment though. So far my opinion is 'MEH'.




I had this game but it wouldn't run on the family computer. I guess we didn't have a video card. Anyway, I would look through the manual constantly. Looking at the drawings of the ships and reading their descriptions, dreaming about flying them...

The Journeyman Project would run on our computer so I played that. I just died all the time and never got anywhere with it.

Here is my very personal input.

It is never the mere content, large numbers, or aesthetic properties that explain Eve's success, or any other game's success. It is the feel it generates. It is the deep sensation of being immersed within a unique experience. One that has a very personal taste, feel, sound and vibe. Just like reading a new book from a new writer, this is reading and breathing the work of many people. Many minds and many purposes dedicated to creating this sensation.

That's not something you can explain or anticipate before trying it.

Star Citizen might turn out to be New Eden's demise. The perfect successor to Eve's legacy. The prodigal son who slays the father.

But it might also turn out to be another scifi shooter with amazing next generation graphics like dozens have spawned in their era, and yet with less soul than a bank Atm machine and less coherence than so many overachieving projects we've seen break their dreams and budgets over cold rocks of endless indifference, never to be echoed again.

Geeze. People are nuts.



Yeah it is very dated looking design. Pre-Star Wars spaceship aesthetic. The Cutlass isn't so bad, its one of the few small ships that breaks away from looking like a jet. To a degree anyway. Still has a bit of an airplane feel to it. Even the concept art for the alien and organic Xi'An ship managed to look ridiculously dated. The big glass bridges of the larger ships are kind of cool though. But generally, SC ships bore me. They could have kept all the glass jet/heli cockpits, air intakes, wings and whatnot, and still used more imaginative shapes, like this guy's stuff: pic1 .. pic2

FYI, not bad at all:


Hi fellow Citizens. Are you as hyped as I am? Andy Serkis company Imaginarium studios is partnering with CIG for motion capture on Star Citizen. In 10 For the Chairman Episode 48. December 15th, 2014 Chris Roberts announces Andy Serkis is partnering .This is a huge deal people he is well known for his mo-cap rolls in Lord of the Rings series and many others check out his imdb- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0785227/


Remember folks, it's just a regular game setup for real disappointment once it's all done....

I have the impression that CCP is running in 110% mode. It is amazign what they're doing... for as long as they can keep this pace, as eventually the slow, lumbering elephant in the room will catch up with them.

The new release cycle lends itself well to keeping the pace.

Panic mode has that effect indeed....

At this rate, either SC gets stuck in development hell trying to chase others or releases - but by the time it does, all actually cool spaceship games have stolen the thunder and the market shifted to something else.

That or they ship out a "snipped" version of it and do the old "Overpromise and underderliver" thing CCP used to roll with for a while. That did not end well for them.

That's different in that those games took 10 years and changed game engines twice at least as far as DNF goes ( from Quake 3 to the unreal engine if i'm not mistaken)......Star citizen is only in it's 2nd full year of production and has only recently hit 300 people working for it.


Seems there talk of a sixth studio in berlin joining the effort, so we have Texas, California, Quebec, England and Germany represented....The logistics of managing this and still having CR have the final word on every aspect is pretty daunting when you think about it.


There is no publisher to worry about unlike the other games, including the 2 examples your mentioned, and there is the addition of PBR rendering which only now is CCP also considering it for EVE, and the move to 64 bit run times for every CPU process and not just memory access, so there's no tricks needed to simulate large environments anymore and the conversion should be done by February 2015....It's all precise down to the millimeter....Maps are possible right up to 8 million km in millimeter precision.


Here's an example that we see in eve pretty much always......You approach an acceleration gate leading to somewhere, your ship isn't touching the gate at all, but when you activate it, your ship has to move a few hundred meters away to properly align itself and warp.....Rough calculations at 64 bit precision will never happen, it's that precise in SC.


Here's the latest design for a breaching pod:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/213616/vanduul-boarding-pod-atv-sneak-peak/p1


Spikes look like they attach anywhere on the target hull and lasers cut right thru it, with soldiers exiting thru the center section...It looks awesome visually and brutal in gameplay terms since boarding parties can enter ships from any point, making ship defense particularly hard to organize.....


Aspects that we only see in EVE in pre rendered videos are the objective in SC in real world gameplay, but CIG has made no bones about it that it will challenge even the highest end PC setups right from the start, something that never fly if it had to go thru a publisher as it's interested in selling copies above all else, and if it means making the game easier to run and not as visually appealing, so be it.


The rules are different in SC...They're aiming to build the best possible game, and release date be damned in the process, publishers are a non issue, will need monster systems to really run and allows the development team to create the best possible art with much less constraints, something that many other talented developers would kill to be in and allow to them to make the best possible content that current technology allows.

It's not going to be EVE's competitor or killer. Even in 'completed' state, it clearly and obviously fills a very different niche and design that is unlikely to pull away most, or even very many of EVE's players. It's smaller scale, CR has shown again and again that he's going for looks over substance in several key areas of the game and going for 'immersiveness' over fun, or even interesting. And, it's on a much tinier and impermanent scale in many ways. Elite: Dangerous has a much better chance of competing with EVE than it.

It'll be a lot of things when it's done. Interesting, innovative in some ways, a game that finally links ground, space, and other areas. Well, maybe. If CR can pull it off. But a competitor with EVE? No, not really.

But anything that lights a fire under CCP is good for business. And a mighty big fire it's been.