The Good, the bad, and the ugly
10 years in !
Seems just like yesterday. I struggled to move around in a make shift hangar using my 2nd generation Intel hardware. But by spinning my helmet – I got to sit in the cockpit of my very own spaceship! This was Star Citizen. Truth be told, today this alpha release(3.17) is hands down the best damn space game I ever played.
The pandemic drained much of the pageantry from CitizenCon. That, and we no longer need to see the game, we can play it. In addition, this year it appears a good chunk of the budget went into creating a new spaceship office, for Lando!
Too bad the boss sat in his chair!
The good
The summaries of the images of Pyro and the various feature sets whizzed by. The Resource Management System stole the show. Can’t wait to blow my first space pirates out of the hatch! Seems my engineering background may actually come in handy, not. So just when it appears that this year’s event was to be short and sweet, the main act took the stage, or rather took a chair. If anyone can double the length of a presentation, it was Chris Roberts.
A great deal of care was taken to frame the Squadron focus (dev) teams have taken into a plus for the PU. Many citizens have been concerned with the development effort for the PU. What CR outlined was that developing a true cloud-native application the size and scope of Star Citizen, requires an end to the various Tier level feature sets and their quarterly release goals.
The Squadron umbrella allows a greater focus to fully flesh out features and eliminate the repeated re-factoring that has been occurring.
Thus CIG hopes to shift from developing features, to developing a game. So CR is showcasing more features and spent the next few hours teasing us with splashing new ways to traverse the sandbox and some new AI initiatives that hopefully will put and end to the nonsense we have come to know as NPC AI.
All cool stuff, but no way Squadron gets released in 2023!
The bad
Of course the paradigm shift means that various improvements to the PU like the building blocks HUDs, updates to the weapons systems and flight model, and a whole list of other improvements that have been teased to us over the years, well, those system will come to us at a much slower pace. The show was headlined as “Journey to 4.0” and they really meant “Journey to 4.X”.
The move should prove timely as the major updates that will have the biggest impacts on the PU, namely PES and server meshing will surely consume CIG well into next year.
The ugly
The new FM, the Master Mode was finally introduced. We have all known it was coming, the lack of progress on weapon balance meant that CIG had not come up with a solution to the HitReg problem unless they limited combat speeds. So rather than own up to the issue we were forced to listen to two false justifications.
Speed results in endless jousting. Orbital attacks occur outside of turret ranges.
I find this type of gaslighting insulting and the resulting animosity clouds any meaningful discussion of the real advantages of slower combat speeds. Those folks at CIG that continued to repeat that nonsense have forever earned the red-eye laser beam thingy Lando was talking about.
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