Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]

[Albuquerque]

Some day, in the far off future when Star Citizen is closer to finished, I do want to try playing it for a long weekend or something. It seems like so much continually changes that I'd be concerned about continuity of what I learned versus what it's now doing.

To a small degree, I feel like No Man's Sky did this to me... I started playing when it was new, got tired of it after a few hundred hours, came back maybe a year later, some parts of my ship and my suit didn't work and had to do some grind to get some of it back. And then after another 50-100 hours I got tired of it and didn't come back for another two or so years... And it's just nuts how much basically everything changed. I put another few dozen hours into it and simply felt lost, and I'm sure part of it is I'm picking up my several-hundred-hours save each time and it's the game somewhat assumes I should know what I'm doing by that point (and I don't.)

I keep thinking I should pick it up again and just start fresh, see it with new eyes, and hopefully it captures my imagination again. I have the same lingering sensation of Star Citizen players, even if I really haven't heard such things just yet.

 

[Jupiter]

1 hour of Squadron 42 Prologue:

Release date 2026.


I will edit this post...


EDIT

Squadron 42 is supposed to last 40-50 hours. They have shown the beginning of the game.

The presentation was good and the fans are satisfied. The battle was gigantic and that was just the start. Movies like Star Trek seem tiny in comparison. And that was just the prologue of Squadron 42. I dare to doubt that such an effort is financially worthwhile for a single-player game. It only works for very few exceptions.

There was also a lot of gameplay but also a lot of cutscenes. Cutscenes are anti-game. Cyberpunk 2077 showed how it's best done in an interactive game. Some cutscenes in the demo were unnecessary and could easily have been shown in the first perspective.

Assets, effects, orchestration, animations, HUD and production values were very good but some of the lighting dragged the visuals down. There were flickering raster shadows. Raytrcing GI and reflections are coming in any case. It would be desirable if SC got something like RTXDI, MegaLights or even Pathtracing.

I enjoyed the Zero-G section the most (starts at 1:00:45). I also really like the turret gameplay. The HUD, the sound effects, the reloading, the enemies' weak points and the explosions were all very good. I don't see any room for necessary improvement here.

They also showed fire extinguisher gameplay and other interactive stuff.

Firefights on foot could still be improved. See, for example, the AI of the companion at the end.

Also at the end Danny Huston can be very briefly seen in the trailer. It was not previously known that he was involved. Let's see what other surprises there are with the actors.

 

[techuse]

The quality of the rendering looks very good from a technical standpoint. Everything else looks pretty poor and half baked.

 

[cheapchips]

I will edit this post...

...in 2026 with the new release date?

 

[Karamazov]

graphics look like old CG movies like FF spirits within, technically the scale is impressive in space, but overall graphics look dated now for character models and facial expressions.

 

[Jupiter]

Dated? I see it differently. Skin shader could be a bit better but the rest? Apart from some Unreal MetaHuman stuff not much can keep up. Especially since MetaHuman was created from 3Lateral in co-operation with CIG.

See 3:12:30:

I play a lot of games. But I don't see what's supposed to look much better with the characters.

Spiderman 2?

Death Stranding 2 is no better than Squadron 42 either. And that only has a fraction of the size and small number of characters in comparison.

Ray tracing is coming and the level of detail in the Squadron 42 prologue is enormous. I've never seen so many technical animations for objects. When the spaceships fly out, turret drives out. There are countless moving parts that require a lot of animation work.

 

[Karamazov]

they are not bad by any mean, just that old CG movie look and stiff facial animations, like, they may have move polygon details than Callisto protocol for example, but to me look less believable/realistic due to other aspects.
But that's just my feeling.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Curiously I feel the same. The animation looks really stiff and to me, last gen. But then I went looking up other games and they look even worse. Even some flagship animation is looking fake to me. So perhaps mine and other's sensitivity has increased?

Still, compared to what's actually possible as shown through the likes of Hellblade 2 or of course Metahuman, this isn't a strong showing.

 

[Jupiter]

Hellblade 2, like Callisto Protocol, cost a lot of money and has one or two handful of characters that speak more than a line. Callisto Ptotocol cost 161.5 million USD. There were more animations in the Squadron 42 Prologue video than there are in the whole of Hellblade 2 or Callisto Protocol.

Squadron 42 is 10 times longer and has hundreds of speaking primary and secondary characters. There are also many more characters at the screen at the same time. In addition, the plot in Squadron 42 can be influenced. The conversations are more dynamic. Squadron 42 is more in the direction of Cyberpunk 2077/Detroit/Heavy Rain etc.

 

[Jupiter]

Base building will be massive

See 41:30:

Now I can imagine that some players will never leave planets.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Looks pretty comparable too NMS. Are there any clear differences?

 

[hughJ]

NMS and Starfield both have similar levels of base building and crafting where they're superfluous to the point of feeling like a creative-mode game, so exceeding what they do is pretty much a given. The major missing piece of those games is the lack of an economy with resource scarcity -- there's no limit to how much stuff you generate, no time component to transporting it, no limit to what you can sell, and ultimately nothing to spend your money on. If players in Star Citizen aren't freely handing out billions of credits worth of resources at the hub stations it will already be ahead of NMS. I'd imagine this would be more like Elite Dangerous where the economy is somewhat tethered by the fact that resources need to be manually ferried from place to place and you can't just fast travel with gigatons of personal inventory.

 

[Jupiter]

New planet tech, Soil type and soil depth are taken into account. Slope inclination too. This means a significant improvement in the automatic positioning of assets. The density of objects is increased many times. Better cloud technology with weather simulation. Seasons,swamps, jungles. A much higher density of POI which come in clusters.

They have also defined what Star Citizen 1.0 will be. There will be 5 star systems. Namely Stanton, Pyro, Nyx, Castra and Terra. They will also make something like a single player campaign in multiplayer to introduce players. Playing the campaign will give player citizenship in the universe -> No more civilian. The warrenty/insurance system will be changed.





End game - building space stations.

They'll include lots of creatures. The worm will come in different sizes from small to huge and different species. Swamp worm, cave worm etc. There will also be other creatures.

 

[MfA]

The warrenty/insurance system will be changed.

They can't really change too much, people with LTI expect massive pay to win rewards even more so than hangar queen buyers. LTI more than anything else limits the design space they have to make this a proper instanced MMO.

 

[techuse]

Curiously I feel the same. The animation looks really stiff and to me, last gen. But then I went looking up other games and they look even worse. Even some flagship animation is looking fake to me. So perhaps mine and other's sensitivity has increased?

Still, compared to what's actually possible as shown through the likes of Hellblade 2 or of course Metahuman, this isn't a strong showing.

I disagree that other games animate worse. TLOU, Uncharted 4, Call of Duty for many iterations now, the various videos linked on this page, and many others all are noticeably better outside of technical rendering quality.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Disagreeing to what? "The animation looks really stiff and to me, last gen. But then I went looking up other games and they look even worse."

 

[Daozang]

Did anyone see a single minute of good gameplay in that vertical slice of a demo?
That first person shooting was bellow fallout 3 Bethesda levels atrocious...

 

[Bludd]

Did anyone see a single minute of good gameplay in that vertical slice of a demo?
That first person shooting was bellow fallout 3 Bethesda levels atrocious...

my theory is that they are stuck in the same hole Duke Nukem Forever was in: its taken so long and they constantly feel they have to redo work for it to stay as cutting edge as they want it to be. and because its so much work to keep redoing and restarting its just a forever spiral of doom. also the focus on systems does not make a good game, you need to focus on gameplay
and a third thing: the amount of complex systems interacting with each other results in B U G S out the wazoo

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Did anyone see a single minute of good gameplay in that vertical slice of a demo?
That first person shooting was bellow fallout 3 Bethesda levels atrocious...

The whole thing strikes me as very confused. The shooting with destruction on Earth-like biomes...that's a different game. They really should have gone with a bunch of different standalone titles, developed their technologies, and then brought them together for an all-in-one vision.

my theory is that they are stuck in the same hole Duke Nukem Forever was in: its taken so long and they constantly feel they have to redo work for it to stay as cutting edge as they want it to be. and because its so much work to keep redoing and restarting its just a forever spiral of doom. also the focus on systems does not make a good game, you need to focus on gameplay
and a third thing: the amount of complex systems interacting with each other results in B U G S out the wazoo

Very much so. You have some concepts designed for space. Then you need ground-level gameplay where those concepts potentially clash. So you refactor to support more features. Then you add vehicles and base building, and those design concepts no longer work and you have to refactor again.

Whereas if you create a space simulator, and a shooter, and a base builder, you'll learn the requirements of each of these and then be able to craft an all-in-one that consolidates all the requirements.

It's a golden rule of gamedev that you start small and build up. If you're new to gamedev, don't start attempting to create your dream online arena shooter. SC hasn't stopped at a realistic target and that leads to massive inefficiencies and slow progress. Each aspect of this game has been superseded by another smaller team on a smaller budget. Trying to do it all, all at the same time, goes completely against all the logic and experience of decades of the gaming industry. Divide CIG into five studios each working on a different game, there'd be five games released by now and a solid base of experience and design requirements to attempt a > GTA-scale project. But they've jumped in to 'bigger than GTA' without the numerous precursors that built up to GTA.

 

[tuna]

But they've jumped in to 'bigger than GTA' without the numerous precursors that built up to GTA.

Since the are almost making GTA money it seems the market responds really well to this.