Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
imagine paying pcgamer for an advertisement like this to shout about dynamic crosshairs and backpack reloading like its fucking 1998.
Worse than all that, it’s a fucking space sim. Why are all these space sims wanting to add FPS?
Because you can get out of your ship?
You’re right, getting out and moving around and hoping into the pilots seat of your ship is cool and I love to see that stuff. However, I don’t know why it always has to tip toward violent encounters instead of just having the ability to feel immersed in a space ship or station.
This is what killed Starfield for me. My character is a down on his luck diplomat who cares for his retiring parents and has to take up a mining job…
Nope, murder hobo. Literally in the tutorial.
I have to agree. Games tend to resort to violence immediately now, no need for justification. I didn’t imagine Starfield would be a shooter at all in fact. Ultimately it was almost exclusively shooting
And a terrible one!
I get the desire to compare the two games but Starfield tried too hard to color inside the lines by giving a story and lore while simultaneously trying to make an open ended sandbox which gave us neither. There’s a LARPing town of cowboys with dirt roads existing a few minutes from a hyper advanced planet with platinum roads and somehow they haven’t made contact? The cowboys haven’t progressed their dirt and wood town despite being in spitting distance of a planet of machines that could fabricate advanced tools in seconds?
Star Citizen seems to take the Dark Souls approach of light narrative, heavy world building, “go learn the world by experiencing it.”
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted here…
But I would honestly say that the only things I liked about Starfield are the things you’re kind of dismissing. The story and ambiance pieces worked really well, and I ONLY wanted that part.
Every time I had to do anything space travel, combat, space combat, or inventory management, I died inside.
I also felt like the cities and locations were tiny and didn’t feel lived in or real. Basically the immersiveness of the game which thrives on immersion was not handled well so I was left with a terrible shooter.
Well the story held the game back because the game wanted to be more open than than the story allowed and vice versa where the game held the story back because a lot of areas were underdeveloped or don’t make sense with where they are for the sake of the story they wanted to tell. It felt like two conflicting ideas at the core which ended up with what we have.
Why are cowboys within trading distance of a future tech planet? How have they not interacted to a point where they don’t need dirt roads? The only answer seems to be for the sake of being neat and is baffling. Empty planets being explained as being on purpose to ‘get more joy out of discovering ones with things on it’ and just… it was astoundingly average and competes for the worst Bethesda game against 76.
Bethesda excels at world building and it was disastrous to watch them fail at that.
Yup. I agree with all of that. It was very disjointed at every stage.
Because an FPS avatar is the body many people are most used to inhabiting in game worlds.
If you want people to feel immersed in an environment, you have to give them the virtual body they’re used to.
Like imagine you’re playing Battlefield 5, and then UFOs land and you go on a big space adventure. If you’re not still able to pull out that tommy gun and fire rounds the same way, your body feels different. It doesn’t feel like you’re there.
FPS is the biggest genre with the most resources in it. That makes it a standard for virtual environments everywhere.
That’s the entire thing they’re doing. The violent encounters are being planned for, obviously, but they’re not a requirement.
Star Citizen’s approach seems to be to add the ability to do as many things as possible while giving you the option to define how you want to interact with them. Of course, you’re probably going to have to defend yourself from the stray pirate or bandit with whatever you end up doing but that’s par for the course.
You should be able to avoid violent encounters but yeah you would be limiting where you can go.
That’s the ultimate goal though. Just last night I flew from a mining outpost on a moon to find resources, scanned a whole bunch, pulled out of my ship with a mining buggy, mined a bunch, and then logged out from my bed within the ship. 0 combat. That’s a life they want to have possible and I’m all for it! lol
I think it’s just that fps stuff sells and all the COD kiddies wouldn’t look at SC at all if they didn’t focus on pewpew everything. Hell they have a cargo ship that has an advertisement of it shooting its guns …lol ffs why? It’s just marketing bs.
It’s not a space sim.
It’s a life sim set in space.
Chris won’t stop until ShowerTech™ is in the game with realistic health debuffs so there’s a consequence when you don’t do the maintenance gameplay loop on your ship’s bathroom.
I wish that was entirely a joke.
But Star citizen has always had FPS missions as a core gameplay aspect, and it’s really one of their main selling points. In no other game can you walk out of a mission, into a ship, hop in the pilot seat and go from the ground to orbit with no cutscene and all of it under player control. The amount of crazy shit you can do just because your character can leave the pilot seat is ridiculous. A month ago I teamed up with some dude who did bounty hunting. He EMPd the other player, had me EVA over to their ship, shoot open the airlock, and gun down the target, all so his buddy could come over and harvest the ship for resources to sell. The emergent gameplay, even though the game can still be very rough, is a really cool aspect of what they’ve made.
I admit, I was a backer of the original campaign for Star Citizen. However, with the dev cycle what it is, I think I’ll be a grandparent before the game releases from early access. Last time I played it, it was a buggy mess, with only combat, and was not fun to me. I also admit, a lot of my angst comes from the way Elite: Dangerous tried to make FPS combat, etc., a thing. As someone who plays that game to explore, that entire DLC, as well as the alien shit they added, was part of system I had no interest in and, in my opinion, has further led to the downfall of E:D, a game that has been waiting for atmospheric landing, etc., but still, years later, barely has non-atmospheric landing.
I get the desire to walk about your ship, have carrier ships you can walk around with other players, and space stations you can visit actual NPCs in. However, if I wanted to shoot stuff, I’d play an FPS. I play E:D to explore and get that fear/anxiety/dread I only ever feel watching American politics. Just not my game play when I wanna just chill and narrowly avoid crashing my ship while exploring!
I think some of them want players to be “pirates,” so they give them the tools to do so.
I’m only speaking from experience in other space games I’ve played.
That’s a cool aspect of it, no doubt, I just wish it took a backseat to the core game play. We have so many FPS games, but not many great new-gen space sims.
And if this space sim can create perfect FPS experience, now you’ve got all the FPS money funding the development of a space sim.
See how that works? Markets create synergies and non-zero-sum games. In this case, putting the limited resources for the space sim into FPS elements makes new resources available.
But that’s never how these things go. They put so many resources into FPS aspects that they almost entirely abandon the space sim. Just look at E:D for an example. They dedicated a whole DLC to walking around your ships and then threw ground assault missions into it.
The immersion from being a part of the world, walking around and experiencing stuff is neat and immersive. If the focus was on that stuff first and FPS second, cool, but that feels rarely the case.
Thanks for the comment!
Yeah, whenever I get in contact with another vessel my instincts tell me to board and start blasting
LOL. I totally thought these were internal names for novel features from the headline🤣