Limit Theory – Single Player, Epic Scale, No Limits, Space Sim

I'm a huge fan of space sims, as are a lot of people. While Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen look cool, you're limited to flying just one space ships. Wouldn't it be cool to own and operate an entire fleet of space ships? Sit in your carrier giving orders to your fighters and battle cruisers while they engage an enemy fleet as large as yours? Or heck, since there's no limit to Limit Theory, why don't you own an entire fleet of capital ships with squadrons and squadrons of fighters and dozens of support ships, battle cruisers, dreadnaughts, and the like?

Look no further. Limit Theory has you covered.

EVERYTHING is procedurally generated.

Here's the latest development update:



Here's a demo of fleet command gameplay. It looks terrible compared to the latest updates, but that's because it was from almost a year and a half ago. I include it because this game feature is what I'm most excited about – commanding an entire fleet.



I am so incredibly excited about this game.

I'd highly recommend subscribing to the YouTube channel.

hm, looks quite interesting. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this!

You can own multiple ships in Star Citizen. Including bigass corvettes.

You can own them, but you can only fly them one at a time.

In Limit Theory you can command an entire fleet – telling them what to do, what to blow up and stuff. You can also hire minions to mine and pirate and make money for you.

You can also own capital ships in Limit Theory.

You can have AI wingmen, and since it's an MMO you can just roll with an Organization and say "Attack Pattern Delta. Go now!"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEcsfJHXB4w

Nifty.

But wingmen ≠ fleet.

But you can be part of a fleet in the multiplayer part.

Still not the same at all.

Limit Theory and Star Citizen are simply two different games in a similar genre.

For me, Limit Theory's features are much more appealing.

For others, Star Citizen is more appealing.

Nothing wrong with that, simply two rather different games.

Limit Theory is definitely one that's high on my radar, as I mentioned in my Elite Dangerous thread. It will definitely play differently than ED, which is more focused on the microcosm of the individual pilot, whereas LT will focus on more of a large, corporate scope, like the X series. Each one scratches a different gameplay itch, and while ED is my most anticipated space sim, LT is very close behind. (Followed by Rogue System, which seems like it has a lot of interesting potential as a pure study-sim, like Falcon 4.0 in space.)

Plus Josh is a freaking beast, putting together this game all by himself in a bit over 1 year now. (Pay attention Star Citizen devs. This is how to do development planning PROPERLY.) And he's doing all his build work on Linux, as is right and proper. Dude is my hero.

I haven't supported it yet, because I want to make sure that it's a game I'll really enjoy (when I see more finalized gameplay), but you can bet I'm keeping it in mind!

Yeah. I'm really looking forward to the large corporate scope. I want to lead my own fleet and have my own army of workers. Essentially I want to rule an empire and organize massive fleet invasions with giant epic battles.

Well. We can't support it yet, I wanted to. He got a lot of money in the original kickstarter. Enough for him to work for over a year or two on it. I vaguely remember him talking about specifically not allowing other pre-orders due to all of the issues that arrive with it.

I'm not following the development of Star Citizen very much, but given how long it's been since their kickstarter, and how much funding they've been given, I'm appalled at how slowly they seem to be working at what their priorities are for development. They're trying to make stuff look super pretty before it's even working.

A character in Star Citizen has 100,000 polygons.
The Hornet spacefighter has 300,000 polygons.
The kilometre-long carrier has 7 million polygons.

On top of that:
The other stuff that's in space besides spaceships
A complete physics system with Newtonian flight
An advanced damage system which physically affects spacecraft performance (lost all your left manoeuvring thrusters? Guess you're not strafing right! Lost a wing? You're centre of mass is different now)
Motion capture for the characters
Procedural generation in addition to the 100 star systems that will ship on launch
60(?) single player missions
Fully functioning economy system
AI that is actually I
FPS component including space stations, landing areas on planets etc

I'd much rather they take their time doing all that rather than pull a Bethesda and give us a game with 50 bugs for every cool feature.

We get it, you love star citizen, no need to nerd rage because we don't agree that it is the greatest game in existence.

That's certainly a lot of work to be done! What order do you do it in? How about NOT the graphics first! Start by having a definite plan for how the game will work. ED did this, having a huge amount of gameplay concepts in place before they even Kickstarted. Josh did as well. Even Uber had a very firm idea of what Planetary Annihilation would be before they went to KS, and Mavor wasn't afraid to say "No, this is not the scope of our game" to some of the wilder suggestions posted on the boards during development.

From there, you build the game from the bottom up. Don't focus on graphics or sound, when your graphics and sound teams can use the extra time to make things look even more pretty. Work on the basics, like Newtonian flight (such as it is), control and movement, transitions between fps and space sim, etc. Add stuff on, like the damage model, as you get more familiar with how you want it to be done. This means that your working results WON'T end up crashing for stupid reasons (half of these Critical bugs they've listed in their recent updates have me wondering how the heck they coded this thing).

Here's a wonderful video Uber did on the development of Outland Games last year:

It shows you how to develop a game from the ground up. Notice there aren't any sexy (dat Sin ***) graphics until very late in the development phase. At that time, the game is perfectly playable with the rudimentary graphics!

Even better (and more on topic) is Josh's dev blogs for LT. He goes through a very similar process, and you'll notice that he is always working from the ground up. (He does have graphics in place early, but it's always placeholder, and his development focus is more on the engine, the UI, basic gameplay concepts, etc.)

Geers, I like you. You are a gentleman on the forums and seem decent enough. But don't fall into the same trap that so many other SC fans are falling into, where CIG can do no wrong and SC is the greatest game since the original Spacewar. I can tell you right now, it won't live up to your expectations. No game ever does. Temper your expectations, and you may end up pleasantly surprised in the end. In fact, you are in a unique position as a backer. You, and other SC backers, can take the opportunity to keep CIG in line, and ensure that they focus on the correct things to get the game done.

To finish with, a little story. My favorite game of all time is the original Deus Ex. When I heard of the development of its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, me and a whole lot of other people were VERY excited. To us, the game would be the ultimate in all games ever. The greatest game since the original Spacewar. There was enough information being released about the raw gameplay that should have given us a healthy dose of skepticism, but we ignored it. I remember there was even a guy on the forums who kept telling us to temper our expectations. And then another guy who played the alpha and gave the brutal truth: DX:IW was NOT the game we were expecting and would be a disappointment. We ignored them, and when the game was released, we were pretty crushed to see that it was true. Since then, I've maintained low expectations for games, and as a result, I've been pleasantly surprised on occasion (SupCom, HL2, PA), while not being extremely disappointed on others (Supcom 2, Duke Nukem Forever . . . wait, actually, I'm still in tears over that one . . .)

You may do well to do the same.

You seem a little hostile.

Maybe it wasn't the best idea to have such a heavy emphasis on graphics in the beginning, maybe it was. But that's the way they're doing it and we have to model off that. Otherwise you could end up saying "Planetary Annihilation would be so much less bug-prone if it was a text adventure".

I just don't think people know just how complex it's planned to be. It annoys me that people are so cavalier about it and compare it to so many other games. This is very big, very ambitious, very technical. I have realistic expectations and I'm not expecting "the bestest game ever" (there's no such thing). But this game represents everything every space combat game wanted to be. Many of Star Citizen's aspects were actually supposed to be in Freelancer but were cut back.

The latest bug report looks good so hopefully we'll see the alpha released by Tuesday. Make your judgements then, but also keep in mind it is alpha.

Not hostile. Just annoyed. We're trying to talk about a cool upcoming video game and you're just hijacking the conversation to say "This game won't be good, go look at Star Citizen."

Not true at all. Not every space game should be exactly what Star Citizen is going to be.

Star Citizen looks like it is going to be a great game. But there are many features that Star Citizen is lacking that Limit Theory will have. Features that I care more about.

The thing I am looking forward most to is the fleet combat. Being able to command an entire fleet of ships and wage war against another ship?

Star Citizen is not the end all best of all video game that you're playing it up to be.

The point is, I'd expect them to have a sort of white-box simulation made up first of their flight and physics model so that the important stuff like that was nailed first, then have some AI built up - dogfighting should have been implemented long before now. It's a HUGE waste of resources for them to be making all these incredibly complex ships and art assets, and what happens if stuff breaks? Or if the game hits some HUGE flaws and needs a do-over? You've wasted so much time and money on looking pretty that it's going to severely hurt you.

I feel like the reasons - and the ONLY reason - Star Citizen became the huge Kickstarter success is that it's PC Focussed, pulling on nostalgia for space sims, and looks DAMN pretty. Compared to other Space sims from KS, it's shown a lot less gameplay implementation and been less straight forward about what the game actually involves.

Anyways, I'm not saying the game is going to be a failure: but if you really like something you have to be able to be critical of it, like I had to painstakingly tell someone earlier today about Mario Kart 8.

A thing about game development is that people who make the art and people who do the code are rarely the same people, especially if you have the budget (which they do). If anything the art and gameplay for Star Citizen should be coming along at the same rate, or at least comparably so. the art team usually finishes first, sure, but with SC it seems as if the art is going to be far and done before the game is even playable, and then what? Make more ships they can sell to people and milk it?

It feels like poor planning, really. They hired too many artist for the project and not enough coders. Maybe Chris is so focused on getting everything right this time that he's micromanaging to the point of severely delaying production. Who knows? What we do know is that the game looks disproportionately focused on graphics than gameplay right now, and that's cause to worry.

No I'm not, you're the one who brought it up in the first place.

Should? where did I say should? Where did I say it'll be the greatest game ever? When did I ever say it'll be anything more than amazing? Where are you getting all of this?

I mentioned it in passing. You repeatedly drove the conversation towards Star Citizen.

"But this game represents everything every space combat game wanted to be."

You're saying that every space game wants to be Star Citizen. So if every game wants to be Star Citizen, every game should strive to be Star Citizen.