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[Lyn Farel]

Fans gonna fan, haters gonna hate.

Why would viability even come to mind when it comes to groupies and their deification of Chris Roberts ? Is there any of those here ?

I also hope they will add many things, especially planets and locations, but also various and diverse ships, detailed and rich, unlike what Eve has to offer.

Here's the current ship lineup...

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/ship-specs

That's a good number for me. They are adding some more every few months. It all depends on the way they prove to be diverse and all.

[Silas Vitalia]

Star Citizen concept artists got some 'splainin to do!!

Looks like some of them took a few, uh, 'influences' from pappa sansha's Nightmare battleships

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14045-Galactic-Guide-Rihlah-System

[Silas Vitalia]

PERMADEATH.

I forgot to bring up this discussion point.  Star Citizen will feature permadeath for player characters, and all named NPCs as well.  Basically if you see Jamyl Sarum in space and you can actually kill them, they are dead in the player universe forever.  They are going to use this as a mechanic to build players reputations and infamy since things like this will be one time occurrences.

Gameplay wise each character will have a certain number of 'lives' if you don't eject in time or make it back to a medical bay after being shot during a boarding action combat, etc.  You'll be incapacitated and be picked up by say an npc medical crew to be revived planetside somewhere, using one of your 'lives.'  After a limited number of these should you do something risky and again fail to avoid injury, your player character will be dead forever.  You can visit certain facilities and underworld contacts to regenerate some of your 'lives' with cybernetic enhancements and repairs, but they will be costly.

After permadeath the account holder will then have to make a new character that will be an offspring/family member of the previous character, who inherits all of their property, etc.    So after S. Vitalia gets exploded one too many times, she's gone forever and S. Vitalia the II is the next one you can control.

This has some major RP implications of course.  Those who will be PVPing or doing dangerous activity might have a difficult time spending much time character building and RP if the character might be gone forever soon.   

I haven't decided yet how this will impact me, I might perhaps make a more 'generic' character that's part of a larger clan of criminals like the Corleone family, so if you shoot and kill Vito then you'll still have Michael to deal with tomorrow.

What say you?

[Tiberious Thessalonia]

There is no way this will be abused.

[Shiori]

After permadeath the account holder will then have to make a new character that will be an offspring/family member of the previous character, who inherits all of their property, etc.   [...]

This has some major RP implications of course.  Those who will be PVPing or doing dangerous activity might have a difficult time spending much time character building and RP if the character might be gone forever soon.   

"I am a scion of a long, long, long, loooong line of space pirates.."

[Dessau]

Permadeath. Having played a fair amount of CP2020 in my youth, the idea of disposable grindhouse characters (a la pirates) in the SC setting is not unappealing. I concede the point that, based on that experience, there is little to no room for development or narrative parallel to those characters.

Moving the possessions of the decedent to their beneficiary does seem to lessen the 'consequence' of a nasty, brutish, and short life of privateering.

[Ché Biko]

I haven't decided yet how this will impact me, I might perhaps make a more 'generic' character that's part of a larger clan of criminals like the Corleone family, so if you shoot and kill Vito then you'll still have Michael to deal with tomorrow.

What say you?

First thing that comes to mind is The Metabarons.

[Esna Pitoojee]

The idea is not without merit. I'll hold off on a more final response until I can see how long the margin for 'saving yourself' is - i.e., is it like EVE where you have a fraction of a second to warp your pod away, or is escape a reasonably simple effort for all but the most daring risk-takers? That difference will have deep implications for how people react to this.

It seems that escape will have to be reasonably easy unless you take enormous risks; otherwise, the 'reputation' and 'notoriety' that they want players and characters to accrue will quickly become meaningless as character turnover increases.

Roleplaywise, again, if escape is hard enough that your character simply won't survive long I foresee people rapidly creating excuses to continue using their roleplayed characters under different names ("Oh, I did survive; I'm just using a false license to get around the silly paperwork of having to get myself declared not-dead").

Game mechanics wise - well, the transfer of materials makes me raise an eyebrow. Again, it suggests to me that permadeath will be rare enough to make people seriously upset if they loose their long-accrued hoards. I have to ask, though - are they intending SC to have any kind of levelling or skill-training system? Even if you get your shinies back, will you loose some sort of progress?

[Lyn Farel]

I found it a really good thing to do a few months ago when I saw the vid about it I linked somewhere above. It was more or less how I would have done it myself, but I also would think that a more logical/rational way of dealing with it instead of lives would prove better : if you are killed and your side dominates the field, then they can rescue you in space (or just be dicks and leave you to your death), but if you happen to be on the losing side, then if they start looking for your pod/dude in spacesuit then you might be screwed if you can hide behind that asteroid.

It could be even funnier if you were actually asked to create a dynasty/family/corporation/entity of people and then the ebil twirling mustache piwates that shot you down could ransom your current pilot to your dynasty/whatever.

[Silas Vitalia]

Game mechanics:

Fly your ship, pew pew/ whatever.   If you eject, much like eve ejecting. You will be EVA in a space suit and can be shot.   If you fail to eject or are shot while EVA, you lose one of your 'lives' let's pretend you have 5.  Lose all 5 and permadeath.  Spend credits/black market to replenish your 'lives'.

There is no skill training or leveling up.  Its up to your equipment and crew. NPC crew can be hired and they will improve over time.  Equipment for ships makes you better like in eve. You can also buy things like g suits to pull more gs before blacking out.

There is also going to be a lot of 'black market' gameplay. Info running, identity faking, hacking, etc

Well. In theory.

[Esna Pitoojee]

That's pretty much what I was figuring. I guess my question was more, when you eject, are you instantly targetable by people like in EVE? If so, then yeah - people are going to be roleplaying around this mechanic from day 1.

[Silas Vitalia]

I'm not sure if EVA people will show up on your radar (or if it has to be tuned or kitted to detect non-ships).  The information suites available in cockpit are a work in progress, very different from the eve overview where you can instantly see how many ships on grid and what type/distance/speed/whatever.  Eve has its own flavor because every ship on grid basically has the same information on every other ship on grid, every eve pilot is their own information center.
 Right now in SC it's more like, well, wing commander.  You kind of see someone on your visual screen, scan them to 'dock' them in your computer to keep track of, and then after they've been scanned you can quickly change targets.  Non scanned ships show up on the radar but you don't get rich info on their status.

I think they are aiming more for only certain specific electronics packages and ships to be catered to high end informational/grid awareness.   IE Fighters fight, scouts scout, and the command and control ships get the overall strategy picture.  First person flying makes it very very difficult to have situation awareness, and imo the current radar sphere on the cockpit is crappy and generally useless.

Anyway if you are running a command and control ship you'll likely have the full scanning package and dedicated software to direct people to doing things.  On the larger capital ships they will have full holo tables in first person view that you can use to give orders to wings/fleet members, etc, with ship stations that will have gameplay directed at managing these things. 

What they are going for is to split up the main ship functions to different stations to give all the crew something to do.  You can technically run the ship from a single seat but you'll be spending all your time switching between information screens and managing power levels, etc that you will be much less efficient at it than just flying your ship and having your buddy manage the power grid.

They've got a (probably over)complicated heat and data system for all the ship parts and weapons, basically like a heat/info pipe for each subsystem (dozens of thrusters, weapons, main engines, etc), and they have actual routes through the ship, so if x part gets blown off then things can get screwed up.

My problem with the game right now is that combat is way, way, way too fast in my opinion.  IE damage is too high and hit points are too low.  In my opinion it's dumb to have all these different ship systems and ability to shape your energy output if you die in a handful of shots.

They only have the smallest and fastest ships available now but it's more like frigate combat in eve if each frigate was shooting like a destroyer's worth of damage and accuracy.  You go down in a volley or two, or maybe one missile and change.

[Silas Vitalia]

Battle Report:

So after some new patch issues I've finally been admitted into the multiplayer test arenas -

The game is much, much more smooth and continues to add polish to everything.

I'm currently using a HOTAS Joystick along with my keyboard, they have not implemented user keybinding just yet without jumping through a lot of hoops.

So, multiplayer right now is FFA, Team deathmatch, and 'captuer the flag,' most of my time spent in team deathmatch.  No pre-made teams yet so you get random people.


The goods:

-It's mostly super fun, they've really tightened up the joystick inputs so you aren't constantly oversteering, it was atrocious before.

-I feel like they've increased ship HP, you do have enough time/HP to take a few shots before dying so you can adjust/evade. This was one of my primary earlier criticisms that you basically exploded after a few well placed shots. Weapons have been re-balanced.  It's more 'oh im being shot, let me try and not die' instead of the old version 'oh im being sho- *explode*

-Dogfighting is pretty fun. The flight mechanics are very complicated, as you can switch between 'fly by wire' like an airplane, where you point the nose in a direction and you go in that direction, all the way to pure newtonian, where you fly in a vector and can rotate 360 on that vector until you apply thrust in a new direction.   Think 'star wars' fighters vs babylon 5 Starfuries.   You have settings in-between that make you more like a 'drifter' which is a nice sweet spot for me personally so far.  Let's you 'strafe' around asteroids and turn 180 and shoot people before your main engine kicks in and you shoot off on a new direction.

Balance will be a huge issue because the tougher ships can do a 'sit and spin' turret in space sometimes with the more fragile ships and there's not much you can do about it vs better pilots.   I'm in the super fast/lightly armored ship, so if I'm chasing a big heavy fighter I can blast him for quite a while before he explodes...so he can flip his axis and keep flying away from me and just blast me to shreds before I can get away.

Right now it looks like all things being equal if you have a lot of speed you want to spread the map out.  You can use the agility/speed of the faster ships to run away, pick a good vector, zoom in and blast them, and then keep speeding right by if you can.  I think in the open world game the faster ships will do very, very well blasting at range and staying away from the big gunboats.

Negatives
-Game is still unstable/crashy

-Respawn distance is infuriating.  Like rage-inducing infuriating.  Currently more often than not they will respawn you right in the middle of the enemy team, directly in front of their guns.  Basically donating free kills to the other team.  I almost rage quit a few times because it happened like 10 times in a row. 

If you are in a more fragile ship it's even more rage because you are being shot literally 2 seconds after respawning, before your HUD is even finished loading.  They need to 3x or 4x the spawn distance from any enemies.


Anyway right now they only have 3 single-seater ships everyone is using, the entry level do-it-all (poorly), the fast/light fighter and the slow/heavy fighter.  Soon they'll be adding all the different flavors of lots of ships.  I don't own any of the current lineup so they give you a loaner for the current multiplayer.  I own the multi-crew 'pirate' gunboat which will be very interesting once it gets going.


Anyway overall I've found myself with the same level of excitement/adrenaline as a good eve PVP fight which is fantastic for me.  I think combat in the MMO universe will be very tense and tactical, and I can't wait.

[Lyn Farel]

So it's all random for now, but can you still group up with people and find random matches as well ?

[Silas Vitalia]

So it's all random for now, but can you still group up with people and find random matches as well ?

Not yet, they are still coding a lobby system for grouping up before matches.  First to team up before matches, and then for the 'first person' hangar lobby to get all your friends on your ship (gunner, etc) before matchmaking

100% random now, private matches soon though