The HUD would take some getting used to. More than a couple times, I was looking for telemetry data and either didn't find it or found it in a sub-optimal position. Then again, I'm not a UI designer. Maybe that layout is super-realistic or something.
Right, the 3d-radar and a lot of the combat HUD has been sort of terrible for a long time now. The good news is that they run pretty different HUDs based on ship manufacturer, and there's 7 or 8 different main ship companies in game with different HUD layouts. I'm partial to the Drake Interplanetary HUD, which is a bit more 'no frills.' They all have different AI voices and 'feels', it's neat.
Here's the current ship matrix, which I hadn't checked in a while and is getting pretty damn huge.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/ship-matrix but the problem as I see it is publishers have moved to the games-as-service model and so they expect consumers to give up the $60 'complete experience', instead counting on whales to spend hundreds or many thousands of dollars on a video game. To me, that's insanity, but it isn't my money to spend.
SC has sort of a 'hybrid' model; you can pay $45 or whatever and just purchase the separate single player game (Squadron 42), think of it as a new single player Wing Commander game. Separately from this you can purchase entry to the MMO "Star Citizen" which is not going to have a monthly subscription. One-time entry fee with the ship package of your choice (and budget). You could buy the smallest intro ship and you get full access to the same MMO that the whales spending $500 are getting.
This is where it gets similar to EVE in that theoretically all items are available for ownership in game with in game currency. You can start small and work (or steal) your way up to the larger ships. This is where 'balancing' and ship prices will sink or swim all this though. The larger ships do not equal 'better' we should say, but much like EVE different ships for different tasks. Similar to EVE they have a size limit on certain wormholes (like eve FW plexes) between systems, and they use fuel for the fast-travel, so you might have a small ship that is superior for short range dogfighting but won't have the legs to chase after another ship across two systems, or you might have a ship that isn't as nimble in a fight but can travel for days without refueling, etc etc.
Likely the market has space for the RSI model to work. Seems plausible. I hope that it succeeds for the people who've invested. What I've watched looks very-well made, though I can't speak to the quality of gameplay. As with Elite, it's probably a lot more fun to play than watch, but maybe I'll catch a twitch stream one of these days.
This is where I'm not sold yet on everything, the sort of emergent MMO gameplay that this engine and game system promises is heavily, heavily dependent on smart people balancing ships, weapons, etc so that it's not a total mess. It's all good to theoretically be able to disable larger ships and board them for FPS piracy but if they don't get the balance right for ship HP and speed etc it's a disaster.
They haven't had time for balancing so it's sort of like this in the test servers right now, some large ships move too quickly or die too fast to make any of that gameplay even worth attempting. The 'emergent' sort of gameplay right now is just nuts though with the release of the planetary surface gameplay and landspeeders and cargo hauling etc in 3.0.
So we'll see!
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Topic: Star Citizen - from the producer of Wing Commander (Read 131055 times)