The Latest From Star Citizen (2.6, Star Marine, and More!)

@maxpowerz what do you regret exactly?

Networking was a pain in earlier builds but from personal experience it's fine now...

I regret the time wasted,

If you mean what didn't i like about the game that made me regret downloading 25gb and wasting said 9ish hours, It was "The feel" of how the ship handled in arena commander, or maybe it was the visuals not really showing how much drift you can put into a ship when attempting to circle strafe and do combat, it sorta feels more like playing chicken and just doing head on runs at each other.

I'd like to see massive improvements on strafing and strafing thrust effects, giving small nimble ships more options to dodge incoming fire.

@cdrkf ,
I think the easiest way to explain it is..
I was hoping the ship physic's and gameplay would feel more like freelancer when flying out in space, it sorta feels more like Edge of chaos: independence war 2,
Both are great games but i prefer the feel of how freelancer plays over edge of chaos which has almost full sim physic's.

Ah yeah, I remember freelancer, and yeah the ships don't handle like that.

That said, strafing is definitely the way to dog fight- set match speed and hold down strafe and you'll keep your target in sight

The other thing I discovered which made my competitive play instantly 10x better.... Your hud has zoom! The distances and ship sizes are realistic meaning without your always aiming at a tiny target (with an accurate hit box). However zoom in on it and you've got a far greater chance of hitting your target, at the expense of seeing half of your hud (i guess idea is keep zoomed out until you've got your target in sight).

I'm not sure when you last played, but they have made a few good changes that move the combat back towards wing commander- all ships have double health and shields so fights last a while. Also speeds have been increased, as has how 'slidey' ships are, so faster more agile ships do have an edge, I've seen skilled pilots top the kills chart with the m50, despite it only having 2 fixed s1 guns and going up against vastly better armed ships like the hornet.

To be honest I think the hornet itself is vastly overrated, it's slow and cumbersome. Personally I've got a gladius now (thanks to the upgrade ship option combined with my free mustang amd gave me with my gpu), it's a nice balance imo between speed and fire power...

I guess down side for you though is the download is even bigger now (40gb), although if you did back, the new patcher supports incremental updates from now on (finall!)...

Edit: one other thing, I've discovered that the best way to fly in sc is to roll your ship so any tight turns are left or right, as fast pitching up / down causes black / red out respectively but the pilot is more resilient to left / right movement apparently (dunno if that's correct or not but it sure makes fast flying like racing easier).

Who uses back pockets? Back pockets SUCK.

Ok not too new but fairly recent and AWESOME:

Ermagherd!

Aww I haven't had a PTU invite yet :'(

The vids I've seen though look amazing... Local physics grid- Check! Multi-crew stations on larger ships, Check!, Massive seamless area of space, Check!, First person combat, check.....

a lot of those 'It's impossible' things appear to be possible after all

Also... the cast for SQ42....

I have. But I don't think I'll be able to fix my HDD in time .

Star Citizen still has to beat Elite's immersive flying experience imho. Everything I've seen and heard says they are a step behind :/

You've been looking at the alpha 2 vids? You know they've totally redone the fight mechanics (now 4 modes- precision, scm, cruise and quantum). They've also changed the thrust control to a 3rd order motion scheme that greatly smoothes it out....

Also, why does star citizen have to 'beat' elite at anything? They are two conceptually different games. Elite is a classic open sandbox focused on the flying, massive scale and procedural generation. SC is designed to be massively immersive with everything working in first person, massively detailed ships, seamless transition between flying and on foot, and hand crafted environments. That detail does come with it a more limited scope in terms of scale however. I personally think sc has proven its core goals with alpha 2- however that goal was never 'beat elite'

They're both games with a heavy focus on immersion.

However, I'm not trying to compare them in a general sense here. Looking at the depth and complexity of the systems behind Elite's immersion and gameplay, it feels and looks superior to SC's current showing. Basically, Elite has set a high standard and SC needs to stay competitive. I'm just not seeing it.

I don't see it. At all. I have no idea what you're talking about. Exploring is pointing at things at scanning them, I know they updated mining recently but I'm pretty sure it's still just pointing at rocks and collecting smaller rocks only now little drones sometimes collect it for you, smuggling involves nothing but moving really fast, and that's kinda it.

Star Citizen has so much more though put into everything, on paper at least there's so much more to everything than Elite. The combat has more to it due to the different signatures and inclusion of electronic warfare, the mining is has several different aspects to it including avoiding volatile rocks, guiding the ore into the ship, refining it, etc, it has actual salvage operations instead of picking up little canisters floating in debris, exploring involves actually navigating wormholes, the ships are FAR more diverse with mechanics to complement them. I mean, you can become flupping Space Qantas and it's genuinely different from cargo because cargo doesn't give you a shitty review and lower your reputation just because you accidentally misjudged the landing and knocked over a lamp-post. Yes yes, very little of this actually exists and if it never does I'll eat my own words but right now it looks like Star Citizen is putting a lot of effort into making any single career one that could carry a $40 spinoff game.

Did you know, that in Elite, they recently added "Occupied escape pods" to the game? Know what you can do with them? Flupping nothing! All you can do is pick them up and sell them into slavery in the black market for a few thousand credits. The only way to set them "free" is to dump the pod from your cargo hold when you're sitting on the landing pad and make up a little story in your head that maintenance let him go.

Anyway this perfectly segues into a new piece of news: The new repair ship and how repairs work:



https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/engineering/15062-Ship-Repair-And-Maintenance

I haven't currently got a copy of Elite (I'm thinking of getting one though), do you currently play it?

I mean Elite is a launched game and SC is still building out core functionality (the majority of which 2.0 demonstraits). I don't really know how much depth Elite goes into in honesty so I'm not going to attack it. Still SC has more depth than any of the older large space games I've played already and we're still quite early.

I mean you say Elite is more immersive, although I'm pretty sure you can't:
- Start as a person on a station
- Walk to your ship on a landing pad and physically get in
- Walk around inside your ship as a person whilst it's flying and stuff is going on around it (this requires a ship with an interior and ideally at least 1 other player, although the cheapest ship in the game the Aurora does have an interior and you *can* get up whilst it's flying if you really want although don't expect to live all that long if you do ).
- Land or EVA out at a new location to go and do something, whilst your ship exists as an independent entity.

I mean as far as I'm aware those things are currently unique to SC. That allows for many scenarios that you simply can't do in any other game. A good example is the vid they released (from a player) where the guy get's cocky and decides to 'speed run' one of the coms sat missions. He parks up his hornet heavy fighter and *get's out* in the middle of a fire fight with a load of pirates. He escapes unscathed but just as he gets out of his ship a pirate shoots it, sending it spinning off into the distance (didn't kill it up you can't move very quick in EVA so he'd never catch it).

He completes the mission and calls for help in chat. A player with an aurora offers to come rescue him (whilst not official a multi crew ship as I mentioned the Aurora does have a hatch and interior to it's possible to ferry 1, maybe 2 other players in it). The aurora pilot finds the guy, but just as he's (slowly) making his EVA jump from the station to the ship, more pirates spawn in and *bam* blow up the rescue ship. What game has ever allowed that to happen?

I mean currently missions in SC are pretty simple. The com sats for example only require you to go to a console (although you physically have to get out your ship and go there to do it). That is because the mechanics for this haven't been fleshed out yet, I mean the engineering / ship repair systems for example have been (promised at least) to have specific repair mechanics for hull and separate mechanics for components. Once that is in place, then the comms sat mission will probably require you to get a specific replacement part for it, find the correct access panel, replace broken component and *then* reboot the system. That single additional requirement will also undoubtedly spawn a sub mission of *need to get component X* (e.g. cooling rod, power regulator etc). Fine if you have one with you but if not you'll have to leave, get the part, then return.

For that matter trading- in SC the plan is to be physically moving crates / objects around. All previous space games you simply ordered bits from a console which then were added to a text inventory and you then through the same menu system 'sold' them later. In SC, whilst ordering goods will probably be the same, they will by physical items that have to be loaded (which takes time- leaving possibilities for attack / pirate activity). They will physically exist inside your ships hold (again opportunities for theft / piracy and so on). You will have to unload them the other end, and as I say these are all in game 3D assets rather than just numbers meaning when replacing a spare part on the comms sat you'll actually put the asset in there.

I mean a lot of that ins't in yet (I'm personally really looking forward to trading mechanics and will probably switch my dedicated fighter to a multi purpose ship like the Reliant with a CCU- given that's a less expensive ship won't actually cost me anything either which is nice). I mean it's possible they won't realize all of that, you can never be *sure* about any early access project, however even if they didn't whats already in 2.0 represents never before seen mechanics and allows for all kinds of shenanigans like boarding actions and so on. Having said all of that- I really hope Elite can match them too. Why have 1 great game to 'rule them all' when we can have 2? Elite looks damned good and as I said they've gone a different route to the goal focusing on a simpler 'tried and tested' core game and then building out.

Btw if you haven't seen it, this is the video I was on about:

I'm talking about the one thing Elite does well:

Flying a spaceship and docking it to a station.

That's it. And Elite does it very, very well. They aren't perfect by any means, but it's damn good.

I'm looking for a similar standard of quality from SC, but I'm still not sure it will happen. Elite went the route of making one thing very deep and neglecting a lot of other side projects. Star Citizen seems to be going for the broad sweep, but with enough money to (maybe) go to the same depth as Elite's gameplay.

Star Citizen IS offering a larger experience. Absolutely. And if they can pull it off, it will be an experience unlike any other. Elite won't hold a candle to it. That's a big IF, though.

You see all the new ships as well... the Starfarer, it's turned into a corvette!

I personally want either a reliant or freelancer once the trading mechanics are in (can probably swap my current ship for next to nothing- thanks to the fact the free Mustang I got with my gpu is worth $55 ).

dang you guys !!!

that's really impressive. I don't know what kind of monster of a computer they used but still!

There's actually a *second* vid (from the live stream) that shows the guy *playing* that sequence properly (starting on the space station from 2.0 and landing his ship in the hanger). It's actually working, in the current engine astonishingly.

I'm thinking they'll get a basic form of this in sooner rather than later (note that the planet shown is in the Levski system, which happens to be the next landing zone on the hit list to get out to people)...