Yeah i'd reckon interdicting a herald to not be a very fruitful effort. Unless interdiction leaves one ship disabled, a herald can just go "lolnope" and fly away at nearly 1000m/s
I really hope moments show up that allow the game to shine. My first thought was running from a deal that goes tits up through the city and paving your way to the docks and escaping to your ship. Frantically pushing all the buttons for the startup sequence before jetting away as light arms pelt your ship.
You think you're safe but as you start to relax smaller cruisers are perusing you through the city and you engage in a low altitude chase as you dodge buildings and so forth at high speeds, frantically trying to escape. The police also get involved, things just spiral into a high speed action pursuit.
That's what I'd love from this game, but I might have too high expectations?
However, it looks phenomenal and the tech behind it is absurd.
[QUOTE=ZombieDawgs;52857195]I really hope moments show up that allow the game to shine. My first thought was running from a deal that goes tits up through the city and paving your way to the docks and escaping to your ship. Frantically pushing all the buttons for the startup sequence before jetting away as light arms pelt your ship.
You think you're safe but as you start to relax smaller cruisers are perusing you through the city and you engage in a low altitude chase as you dodge buildings and so forth at high speeds, frantically trying to escape. The police also get involved, things just spiral into a high speed action pursuit.
That's what I'd love from this game, but I might have too high expectations?
However, it looks phenomenal and the tech behind it is absurd.[/QUOTE]
You bundled a [I]lot[/I] of things into a few tight sentences, so this is going to be long to unpack.
There are two answers to this, because Star Citizen is technically two different games: The online MMO-ish component that is the focus of all the videos and demos in this thread and others like it, and the Squadron 42 single-player campaign with A-list celebrity mocap for the main cast.
SQ42 is the first of a trilogy of titles, in fact, similar to Wing Commander 1-3, and once they finish the three, if there's still money in the budget to make more they intend to put out campaigns exploring new stories and career roles other than military pilot. In basically any of these single-player stories, such a situation could totally happen if the plot justified it. You would, of course, be going up against AI. It's pretty easy to see how this could be done in a SP situation.
For online Star Citizen itself, nnnnnno, at least not the aerial chase through the city. The ground scenario where a shady deal in a shady bar in a shady back alley goes bad, that's more plausible but with conditions that I'll get to a little further down. On most populated planets, you won't get to fly around low between the buildings as shown in the demo. Chris acknowledges that they probably won't let us fly close to buildings, but since it was a controlled demo and they're showing off the tech, why not! They don't want people 9/11'ing buildings, and they don't want griefers ramming landing pads and ramming into people just as they're taking off and all that lovely stuff people enjoy doing online.
In the game, taking off from a landing zone like Area 18, on a densely-populated planet like ArcCorp, is likely to have you taking off in player-controlled flight but restricted to a corridor until you're above a certain safety altitude--deviation from this path is either autopilot that throws you back on course or potentially retaliation by defense systems that consider you a threat, depending on the planet. A small colony on a frontier planet may not have such a restrictive flight situation, since outside of the immediate batch of buildings there's nothing to hit, so the designers have no reason to limit your flight.
As a little note about jumping into your ship in a hurry, there are a few different entry animation speeds, for the leisurely "okay I'm getting into my ship now" pilot and the "OH JESUS FUCK GET IN GET IN GET IN" unlucky fuck under high pressure. In 3.0 there will be a single keybind for cold-starting your ship into full flight-ready on so you don't [I]have[/I] to turn the systems on one by one with the dynamic interaction system.
When it comes to the ground action, sooooome of what you mention is planned, and you will probably be able to get a reasonable facsimile with a bit of squinting from emergent gameplay, but expecting a scenario to play out [I]exactly[/I] as you're suggesting in your post is perhaps high expectations by a little. I'll break it down in a bit more detail.
Planets will have varying levels of security and criminality depending on the system and conditions at the time. A planet like ArcCorp enforces weapons checks and will not let you through Customs (the small building the demo player passes through on the way out to the landing pad before taking off to fly around the city for a while) with a pistol unless you have a license for it (e.g. registered bounty hunter). A lawless independent frontier planet is unlikely to have such restrictions so you can pack a sidearm or a big old energy shotgun right into the general store.
Planets in 3.0 rotate and have a day/night cycle (likely accelerated compared to realtime) and when night falls certain areas on some planets will become less safe. For most planets, you should be able to enter the main square and visit the main shops, if they're still open, in safety, but when you start going down back alleys where any black market shops are, you're inviting trouble. The devs described this with a scenario where you might be jumped by an AI mugger in a dark, unpatrolled alley in the innards of a planetside area if you go at night.
Would you see all of these individual components coalesce into a coherent linear action sequence in which your ass is chased through a city and off the planet under withering gunfire the whole time? If it was a scripted mission outcome or something, suuuure, but I don't think the AI is necessarily intended to be [I]that[/I] sophisticated unless you listen to Chris Roberts daydreaming of what he wants the game to be and fuck how it's supposed to be coded. On the other hand, player deals could happen in such a setting, too, since you'd have to meet somewhere that could allow transfer of goods or information and you may not want to trade contraband in the open, and emergent gameplay on a more-lawless planet could certainly look something like your scenario in ideal conditions.
TL;DR yes you have high expectations but the game's goals are definitely trying to meet you halfway
Thank you for the detailed breakdown. You definitely helped explain the type of scope I should expect :)
I hope they don't restrict flight in cities, it would be a silly thing to do with such glorious tech, perhaps restrict landing but not flying.
If players start crashing into other players on the landing pad, punish them for it, take their ship away or make them pay loads of cash to get it back. People will think twice.
[QUOTE=Faunze;52858325]I hope they don't restrict flight in cities, it would be a silly thing to do with such glorious tech, perhaps restrict landing but not flying.
If players start crashing into other players on the landing pad, punish them for it, take their ship away or make them pay loads of cash to get it back. People will think twice.[/QUOTE]
Players crashing into landing pads and griefing other players who're trying to take off, especially new players who may not be fluent with the controls of their ship and unable to dodge a threatening ship, is already a thing that happens constantly in the live alpha builds. It's 100% going to happen 24/7 unless the devs do something about it. And what they've previously said they'll do about it is prevent it from being possible on civilized, controlled planets. And that's a very important conditional because a poor backwater colony won't necessarily have instant-kill laser turrets guarding the landing pads and pad griefing is suddenly a different story there.
I'm sure you'll be able to fly over cities, but like real life, there is a minimum altitude you must stay over. You can't just fly a Cessna between skyscrapers in Manhattan and you can't buzz office buildings on ArcCorp in a fuel tanker ship. Doing so will have consequences.
As for punishments for griefing, well, as I said that's going to depend on the planet, but anything that takes someone's ship away for violations (i.e. by blowing it up when it's on a collision course with an occupied pad) will carry automatic consequences: ship replacement in SC is no longer free or instant, because the insurance system is starting to come online and make ship loss more meaningful.
Just a note, insurance fees in-game are paid with in-game credits. There's no plan, that I'm aware of, to let you bypass the insurance timers with real cash. As of now, no matter what you do after 24 hours the state of your ship instance resets for test purposes, so even if you're broke and you crashed everything you have, you're back to normal the next day.
Maybe it's me, but this whole video felt horribly scripted.
Like, I can't get hyped up about this because I can't shake the feeling the game is going to be No Man's Sky 2.
[QUOTE=V12US;52858777]Maybe it's me, but this whole video felt horribly scripted.
Like, I can't get hyped up about this because I can't shake the feeling the game is going to be No Man's Sky 2.[/QUOTE]
The only comparisons is they're set in space. NMS was an indie team of around 15 people without much to back them up.
SC is a team of hundreds across several studios with millions in backing. The scale and scope should hopefully demolish NMS.
[QUOTE=V12US;52858777]Maybe it's me, but this whole video felt horribly scripted.
Like, I can't get hyped up about this because I can't shake the feeling the game is going to be No Man's Sky 2.[/QUOTE]
It is scripted, well not automated but they planned the route and all that beforehand. Common practice for showcases.
In the end there wasn't really much they could have done different anyways, the rest of the planet is "empty" as in only the same city landscape without any "highlights" like the dockable places.
So they focus on the eyecandy.
In a sense it is actually exactly like NMS, got all the nice procedural things with some manual or half procedurally made highlights. The generated landscape looks nice but has little to no use in gameplay.
That is the nature of game making, at least on that scale, I very much doubt they have the possibility to fully, procedurally create those points of interest (on the level of already made handcrafted places).
Unlike NMS though you will have a lot more of handcrafted places to visit and it it already looks more interesting then NMS ever was to be honest.
Personally I'm not hyped by this either but I appreciate the work that goes into the tools to create them and the eye candy is also nice.
(Also in case this post sounds too negative, this is meant to be relatively neutral, not NSM bad, but also not hugely game impacting in my opinion.)
[QUOTE=Mitsuma;52858831]That is the nature of game making, at least on that scale, I very much doubt they have the possibility to fully, procedurally create those points of interest (on the level of already made handcrafted places).[/QUOTE]
Actually, as shown in the tool demos while the ship is in warp travel between planets for ~8 real minutes, they kind of can poop out entire building interiors, with NPCs, lighting, particle effects, and all with three clicks. It may not look quite as good as the hero locations, but it should generate perfectly serviceable buildings with interiors.
But they're [I]not[/I] going to be fully building out planet-covering procedural cities with fully-traversible zones and interiors, because, like NMS, 99.9% of the content would never be seen or used by anyone and it'd be a giant samey sprawl. It'd also be more work than it's worth making something that'll only serve to get people lost in empty nowhere. Instead, they'll build out tool-assisted handmade zones in key areas and work on the illusion of a truly seamless world.
Now, there exists the potential for CIG to generate spontaneous locations within the sprawl for mission purposes, and that would deepen the illusion because they'd only have to generate a very tiny segment of stuff within the sprawl and they could apply templates to the various building sets. However, they have not directly confirmed that they intend to do that yet, so this is speculation.
[QUOTE=Mitsuma;52858831]It is scripted, well not automated but they planned the route and all that beforehand. Common practice for showcases.[/QUOTE]
Almost all vertical slices of new functionality like this for any given game are "scripted" in the sense that the people you see playing are actually there, playing it. But they need to stick to a script as the build is likely nowhere near stable yet and the assets only retain quality control in the vertical slice itself.
Going off script can break interactions, the game itself could just fall over, or just show some really shitty asset work off. The real game likely wont differ vastly from a given vertical slice as it's going to be using mechanics developed already. But it's also not the finished product so do keep some scepticism about things that "just work"™.
I recall a video from a while back showing off the vertical slice of a E3 Ghost Recon demo. The demo itself works perfectly fine as long as you follow the script. Going off script even once breaks the interactions for an entire segment of the demo, going off script in the wrong place locks the game up. SC isn't at that point in development where going off script would break everything. But it's good to have a script as your demo then can be confirmed to work and show off what you need.
Obviously there's no gameplay in that city, but the fact they were even able to pull that off is incredible in its own right. If they found a way to make it "bigger" or at least more space for ships to fly recklessly through the city, that would be great.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
