CONTENTSPrologueThe Insomnia Best Game of All Time Award: Star CitizenThank you God"There has never been anything like it"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the WipeThe Chow Hall DramaToo Good to be TrueThe Most Released Game of All TimeThe Year of Chris RobertsThe Coolest Thing You'll Ever OwnStar Race, or The Whitest Game EverGo On, Play Some More SteamCitizen Annihilation
The Birth of Quantum GamingThe Project Game In Your GarageThe Greatest Screenshot EverThe Sum of All GenresCitizen AnnihilationNow that the first draft of the persistent hangar mechanics has been revealed [
> ], and the implementation is even upon us (2-3 weeks max!), it's time to delve in some depth into
Star Citizen's strategic dimension. This dimension, due to the full-loot PVP MMO basis of the game, is already enormous. It wouldn't have been if this was a theme-park MMORPG type of game, since those limit player interaction so that clan size and alliances are meaningless. But full-loot PVP MMOs (which is really a convoluted way of saying that the game works like reality, with full interactivity between players instead of invisible walls everywhere so you can't even touch the other players, so that the only reason others are in your server is to populate a glorified chatroom) come with a massive strategic dimension right off the bat, because the players who want to reach the heights that only this type of game can offer must build entire armies from the ground up AND negotiate alliances with others. And since we're talking about actual human beings here and not artificial stupidity (AS) algorithms, the complexity of these endeavors is enormous. Not even full-strategy games like 4X games can boast this level of complexity, not even when you're playing those in multiplayer. Because in 4X all your soldiers and citizens are run by AS routines, so no true leadership qualities are required to build those: any spergy nerd who would have been laughed at in real life as a leader can build these armies up just fine. You won't find these nerds leading clans in survival-builders and FP4X games though, you'll hardly even see them playing them, since they can only play solo, and will of course be swept away by real leaders and their armies. And then on top of that, instead of a 4X's 15 or so human leaders in multiplayer, games like
Rust,
Atlas,
Life is Feudal and
Starbase boast thousands of leaders and their factions, for orders of magnitude more diplomatic complexity. And that's before we've added any combat, building and crafting mechanics into the mix.
The incredible thing about
Star Citizen though is that, while games like
Atlas and
Life is Feudal are basically first-person Age of Empires,
Star Citizen is so much more advanced than that that it could in all fairness be called first-person
Planetary Annihilation, and even, if you will believe me, Planetary Annihilation 2. Let's try to understand this wild claim.
What are the main features that a Planetary Annihilation 2 should possess?
1. Real space battles, anywhere in space, not merely orbital ones
2. Larger and more complex planets
3. Deeper base-building
And that's it! Put those 3 key aspects in a PA sequel, and you'll have earned the right to call it a sequel (a spiritual sequel at any rate, because a full sequel would require also the same lore).
And that's precisely what
Star Citizen is! Let's take them one by one:
1. What game has better and more complex space battles than
SC lol? Have you SEEN the capital ship vids? You can recreate the entire boarding scene at the start of
Halo 1, but for real.
2. What game has larger and more complex planets than
SC lol? They're so large and so complex that people are asking for them to be SMALLER so they can manage them!
3. We're talking bases of such complexity that you're able to place
potted plans on your desk for christsake. It trounces even dedicated building games in terms of the sheer number and variety of unique items that can be found, bought and crafted.
So not only does
SC possess all the crucial features for a PA2, it possesses them to a degree that a PA2 never would have, so it'd be more accurate to call it PA3, if not PA4, or 5, or 6 or some shit. And since there's no plan to stop development basically ever, I'd call it PA Infinite if it was me, and here the infinite moniker WOULD have been apropos, unlike other games which have recently used it like Halo et al. where it's a cruel joke, since those games are not only pathetically finite, but worse than their predecessors.
It's very important here to note that PA's OFFICIAL successor, the upcoming
Industrial Annihilation [
> ] won't offer space battles, won't even have space at all, not even planets, so it utterly fails in the top 2 criteria for a PA sequel. And though its base-building WILL be more complex than PA's, it of course won't be anywhere as complex as
SC's. I mean it will be complex logistically in the
Factorio direction, which is great, don't get me wrong, but not in the full-3D
Satisfactory direction as
SC, which is of course massively superior, prettier, more immersive, you name it. So it'll be a decade behind even in its base-building, which is the only new thing it brings to the table all the while neutering the very essence of its predecessor, which were the planets and space.
By this point you might have noted that, while
SC does indeed offer absolutely everything a PA2 should offer, and in spades, it doesn't really offer what PA1 offered? Like massive battles with thousands of units for example? Or factories churning out thousands of robots, tanks and aircraft? How is a mere action game after all to compete with the king of real-time strategy that PA was, and still is?
But you see, clans have already fought 33v33v33v33 clan wars in
SC... That's 100+ players in a game, whereas the most I was ever able to attain in my
Cosmic War PA events without the server choking was about 30 players in all. Even today, several years and CPU architectures later, I doubt I could reach more than 40-50, all the while
SC is about to raise its server limit to the 300-player range in the summer, and then beyond. 300 players fighting in a single war is like the early phases of a PA war where the players have built SOME stuff, and have expanded across a few moons and planets, and are lightly skirmishing on them, all the while scouting each other and trying to figure out strategies for massive hardware buildups and an eventual major push. So
SC, as it stands right now, can perfectly reproduce the PA EARLYGAME, and we can see on the horizon the day when it'll reach the midgame. After all,
Rust servers are running 1000 players right now! You can launch PA right now, and get yourself into random matches for hours and maybe even days WITHOUT any of these matches reaching 1000 units. Sure, in my Cosmic War we routinely reached 5000, 6000, and even 7000 units and beyond, but these were the apex events of the genre (icycalm legit ran for years the biggest wars in all of real-time stategy, a totally unrecognized achievement in the genre, but which some day will be recognized; the best players like Diskraip and Nosebreaker already recognize it, it's just a question of the legend filtering out to the masses). But to reach 1000 units in a random lobby game, let alone in the 1v1 ranked matches which tend to be played on single small planets, is quite unusual. So the tech more or less exists RIGHT NOW to play PA-level battles across
SC's metaverse-level planets, it's just a question of waiting until CIG enables this tech in their game. And until then, we can still play earlygame-PA-level wars and battles, which is another way of saying PlanetSide-level wars and battles, which we HAVE been playing to a small extent in the
Jumptown Global Event above all. And I say "to a small extent" because we only have about a dozen players in my org, not the dozens we would need to max out
SC's current tactical and strategic possibilities. But I am working on it, I am actively recruiting and evaluating new recruits, and integrating them into my org policies all the while building up these policies, and that's a huge part of what strategy is about that PA and other traditional strategy games almost entirely lack.
And that's the point I've been laboring towards in the last few paragraphs: that though we only have PA's earlygame so far in
SC, that earlygame has been zoomed in and blown up to VIRTUAL-REALITY-LEVEL FIDELITY. So it's true, we can only bring along a few ships and ground vehicles to the battles, as opposed to PA's hundreds or thousands, BUT HAVE YOU SEEN THESE SHIPS AND GROUND VEHICLES? They're so astonishingly detailed that PEOPLE WANT TO LIVE IN THEM. I even know one guy who's living in a tent and doesn't mind it because his head is in the verse most of the day anyway to the point where he barely notices his irl surroundings anymore. And that's BEFORE we've got official VR support in the game (unofficial has been available for some years).
So
SC already trounces PA's earlygame (like for example the scouting phase, where I send out a Cult Ranger half an hour ahead of the main force to scout in first-person: no way PA can match this, it's utterly outclassed), and will eventually be trouncing its midgame too. As for the endgame... I don't think Chris will let us blow up his planets anytime soon, at least not outside his scripted singleplayer campaigns, but he's a fast learner, and just as he is learning about PlanetSide and
Rust right now, I can see the day in the far future when he gets around to learning about PA, and then maybe he will whip up a few empty systems in the far reaches of his galaxy—or even in a galaxy beyond?—where he can let us loose to bring the destruction without messing with his metaplot. After all, he WAS on a panel with Chris Taylor at one point, he knows these games exist even if he doesn't play them. But he doesn't play PlanetSide or
Rust either, yet his game is in the process of demolishing these two masterpieces and their entire genres, just simply because
SC's scope BEGS for those mechanics, and sooner or later some employee or fan mentions them to Chris, and Chris cyborg-like scans the games and integrates them into his brain and then spits out commands to his staff to put them in the game. So I think he'll get to PA sooner or later, and maybe this essay will help speed up that process. I mean, he is a massive Star Wars fan, and the Death Star is the inspiration for PA's Annihilazer! You think Chris will never put a Death Star in his game? My guess is we'll see it in Squadron 44 (the last of the trilogy), and shortly after in the store for $9,999 Warbond with LTI. I'll take two.