Cult Citizen

[icycalm]

I have more SC news to share. Looking up info on this game is more fun than most actual games. So first off, take a look at some of the best most recent stuff added to the game:

The Best Features of Star Citizen Update 3.10!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDkfTOsT6YY



No complaints at all, everything looks incredible.

And then take a load of this shit:

Star Citizen's Prisons Explained - Good or Bad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L0sctbREKw



The prison system is yet another area in which Chris Roberts is breaking new ground, proving how his teams are willing and able to think up fresh new solutions to old problems. The end result seems to be a Chronicles of Riddick/Mirror's Edge hybrid slotted into the game to massively expand its possibilities. Just absolutely incredible stuff, sheer genius.

Btw, there's enough content in the game already to justify us getting into it. However, we have a number of other, far more complete space games to get through first, so I am keeping this on the backburner until we've cleared our slate of them. This will probably be happening in early 2021, so draw up a hardware upgrade plan for yourselves if you need it because this game is heavy, and if funds are tight consider placing an order for a Shadow (they are backordered for months, so do it asap if you think you'll need it). I hear even 12 GB of RAM is not quite enough for this game, so aim for at least 16 (i.e. the mid-tier of Shadow, not the low tier). And we'll explore flight stick options in the Hardware forum too, for this and for that Star Wars game that's coming in October and so on.

[icycalm]

Wipe Incoming and Why it's GOOD for Star Citizen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCmlkqPde_w



Watched a bit of this video. Some pretty cool details inside like heavy injuries needing to be treated at a hospital, worldwide item persistence, etc. The game is coming along VERY nicely.

I am not thinking about touching it at all until I am done with Starbase. The longer we delay getting into SC, the better. In the meantime, save money for cool multi-display equipment, flight sticks etc. Why not play this game with a 4090 and triple-TVs?

[icycalm]

Letter from the Chairman
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... e-Chairman

For all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance… that becomes another planet, that you can enter it’s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.

Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.

Many that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.

THANK YOU!

More than half a billion in funding by now.

We will have to try this soon.

Ready your flight sticks (or place your orders for them).

Star Citizen's Future Is Almost Here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edU4jRjHUHA

Loving the game right now I have been coming and going for 2 years but this year man future after future is being added and a lot of things are coming down this year. Enjoying my Hotas setup flying with any kind of joystick setup really takes this game to another level.

2023 is gonna be interesting for new players as pyro will be very hardcore, I certainly suggest new people start now to learn the basics so they can go there and play the game to its fullest. I know many people are waiting for a full release but I don’t suggest that because millions of people will have a major head start as the game has a real experience based progression system and not a character stat based progression system so there will be people who are great at the game from years of flying, and etc. people are also very helpful rn because nothing matters but when the game is out their progression will matter and they might not want a noob to be the reason they die if we only have 5 lives, just food for thought.

[icycalm]

We played today and I will have impressions up as soon as the videos are exported to YT. Until then, check this out. It looks fantastic even though it's not a full solution and will be improved when EAC whitelists something something. It still looks great though, and I guess I'll be looking to get a VR headset and flight stick setup. A buttkicker [ > ] wouldn't be a bad idea either. This is definitely the most hardware-demanding videogame/artwork ever. You will need a $5,000 PC with 4090 Ti for the ultimate experience. Let's hope the crypto bear market ends!

Star Citizen VR - Quick How To Play in VR Guide (works with EAC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gQA566PVpw

Quick how-to guide in getting Star Citizen working with VR in Alpha 3.16 patch with Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). This method does NOT provide stereoscopic 3D experience, which currently cannot be obtained due to VorpX being blocked by EAC. Reshade method is supposed to provide 3D, however based on my measurements, it does not do it either, so we are stuck with this until EAC whitelists VorpX.

NOTE: ONE ITEM I FORGOT TO MENTION - WHEN VIRTUAL DESKTOP LAUNCHES IN YOUR HEADSET, GO TO SETTINGS AND SELECT THE LAST OPTION TO "REMOVE HEADLOCK DELAY"

Install the following tools:
Virtual Desktop: https://www.vrdesktop.net
opentrack: https://github.com/opentrack/opentrack
SteamVR: https://store.steampowered.com/app/250820/SteamVR

For a wider field of view you will need to add the 2400x1000 resolution to your USER file in the LIVE folder of Star Citizen and then use the 2080x1960 resolution when playing, the field of view limits are based on the resolution at launch.

[icycalm]

Everything I Wish I Knew Before Playing Star Citizen - New Player Guide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBa8m2GJKv4



Everyone who wants to play this game should watch this. We basically made all the mistakes it is possible to make in our first session.

But this video is more than an instructional one. It shows stunning scenes from the game. It's eye-wateringly gorgeous. WATCH THIS VIDEO IF YOU HAVE ANY INTEREST AT ALL IN THE GAME.

[icycalm]

Everyone who played with us in the inaugural session will be lmaoing at this: https://twitter.com/XeroState/status/15 ... 1297014785

Mercilessly stolen from Facebook via Paul Manuguerra. #StarCitizen

Magnificent.

[icycalm]

The first video is 47 minutes of us dicking around with settings and getting into the "verse". The second video is two and a half hours of us playing the game. Note that Exiled joined us too at the beginning, but he had trouble installing the game so he dropped out (he's since installed it and will be joining us later).

Star Citizen with ysignal, icycalm, Some guy and Jameson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M6RL54NFTI



Star Citizen with ysignal, icycalm, Some guy and Jameson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHhKH1AuiY



So here are my impressions.

I woke up on my bed in my highrise apartment, and took the elevator down to the lobby where I met my friends. We then walked out of the building and to the shuttle station which after two stops brought us to the spaceport. There ysignal tapped on a terminal to get his ship brought out, and we walked down to the hangars to find his ship there (he'd bought the largest ship, so we thought we'd try that one first). We opened up the ramp in the back and walked in, then closed the ramp behind us. Then I sat in the cockpit and powered the ship up while ysignal asked for permission to fly and the bay door to open up. Permission was granted and the bay doors were opened so I somehow made the ship levitate and was fumbling for the forward thrust to get out of there, but I took too long and the ship was impounded and we were fined for blocking parking. By that point we'd be playing for about four hours overall and people had to leave, so we called it a day.

There is no other game with such a seamless expansive world, and we haven't even been in space yet where the seamlessness continues as you fly out of the starport and into space and down to other planets, and inside caves, or new cities and so on. And not only there's no other such game, but none are being planned either. If you want the complete universe seamless experience—which is the apex of videogames and art—Star Citizen is it. My Battlegrounds also deliver this experience BUT NOT IN REAL-TIME. This is the catch, you see. On the other hand, my Battlegrounds has full-on roleplaying with tens of thousands of characters and epic dramas across galaxies and even time itself, so yeah. These are the two greatest games of all time, and if you aren't playing them you aren't playing anything.

That's my impressions. More in the upcoming VGART essay.

In the meantime realize that early next year, an entire new solar system is being added to Star Citizen that's double the size of the current one, with an entire different look and even mechanics. It has six planets instead of four, and double the amount of moons. It's a lawless system fought over by three factions and you can choose which one to join. It's like an entire new game is added to the game, and there will even be missions that span both systems. And then a third system is being worked on, and the one which Squadron 42 takes place in is a FOURTH system. AND THEY WILL NEVER STOP ADDING SYSTEMS. But already when the second hits the game will explode. It already has 4 million players, and my estimation is that this number will quickly double when the second system is added. This means that the game's lifetime earnings will go from half a billion to one billion, and it will only blow up from there. Bottom line is that a few years from now everyone will be playing Star Citizen. Everyone who isn't stupid, that is. For all the rest there's plastic non-interactive Battlefield and Tetris or whatever.

I will post videos up soon showcasing all this stuff. I think the above should suffice as first impressions, and I have now made an entire new subforum for the game, and moved all relevant threads there, so head there for news and updates on the game plus the clan's activities: https://culture.vg/forum/forum?f=39



There's also a new Star Citizen Discord channel, and it's located in the Cult War Journal category along with other ubergames like Rust, Starbase, etc.



P.S. The level of detail in everything is insane. People are mocking the developers for wanting to add realistic bedsheet physics, but believe it or not this sort of thing MATTERS. Wait until you see how everyone around you realistically bends down to pick up things from the floor, or the insane detail in the models and faces to the point where you can use a videocamera so that whatever facial expressions you make in your real face are reflected on your characters including full lip-syncing! Whatever you think about this game, it's wrong. You aren't prepared for this game. Watch this and have your mind blown: https://twitter.com/lizaledwards/status ... 7440086016

[icycalm]

Snake Pit Vertical Racing
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... cal_racing

This must be seen to be believed. Four-wheelers racing up the sides of massive vertical structures.

[icycalm]

When 6 Players Fly 1 Ship! - Star Citizen Hammerhead Multicrew Combat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoM_tpNdDMY



He says there is already a developed economy of people with bigger ships posting notices looking for co-pilots, gunners, etc. There are missions designed specifically for multicrew ships, and more mechanics are being added such as engineering (meaning you run around the ship in the middle of the fight fixing things), electronics jamming etc., and other loops.

[icycalm]

ALPHA 3.17.2 INCOMING HOTFIX - New Caves, Nyx & Botany | Star Citizen This Week
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7L-DzMj-l8

Absolutely insane alien planet shots. You have never seen such a realistic alien planet in a MOVIE, let alone a game.

INFORMATION OVERLOAD - Drones, Ranger Bike, 600i, Polaris & BIG 3.18 CHANGES | Star Citizen Sunday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UNLc3Y3ncU

Skip to 13:56 to see several minutes of explanations on how you'll be able to fully customize the interior of your ships and habitats. Full interior decoration is coming, basically.

Skip to 19:29 to see the motorcycles.

DYNAMIC POPULATIONS - New Vehicle, SPACE MINES, Work Finishing July | Star Citizen Progress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cish0ipY2dY

Skip to 1:22 to see the dynamic populations work. It looks fantastic. 90% of the people in the game will be NPCs, and they will have realistic routines and lives.

Lots more in these videos, I didn't even watch them all lmao, I just skimmed around, so probably the stuff I picked out for you isn't even the coolest content. By all means if you catch cool stuff I didn't, let us know here, because this game releases countless hours of devlogs every month and it's a full-time job for one person to see everything. Wouldn't leave any time to play the game lol.

[icycalm]

Videogame Art: Star Citizen (2013-) (Prologue)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/71169625

Sometimes words just aren't enough, and this is one of those times.

[icycalm]

The Insomnia Best Game of All Time Award: Star Citizen (2013-)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/71521820

Star Citizen is not just another videogame, it is a downright ALTERNATE REALITY that its creators have no plans to stop expanding and complexifying.

[icycalm]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQwH29Q ... fj0nxMHuaN

Problem is its hard to write missions until the tech is ready, but it will eventually be a matter of spawning points of interest dynamically everywhere
When 42 is out, and we have Pyro and Nyx they will have 1400 staff with nothing to do but make content. Still a little wait, but when it takes off there's no turning back

Don't know where he got the 1400 figure, as far as I know CIG has about 800, though they are hiring 100+ at the moment. That's still a long way off 1400 though. Maybe he read somewhere that they're planning to ramp up to that? Or he means that currently 500 are working on Squadron 42? But those would be part of CIG too...

Either way, the sentiment he expresses is widely shared. The game is about to explode over the next few months, and it should go parabolic in a year or two when SQ42 is released. According to the devs, currently most of CIG is working on SQ42, and yet we're still getting tons of SC content. Once they finish it, we should be getting a full game's worth of content every three months.

One thing the community isn't talking about, however, is that when the SQ42 team is done, they'll probably start work on Squadron 43.

[icycalm]

Some things we realized on Discord:

CULT|ChevRage
It's probably that once you buy these ships there's no way to lose them currently

CULT|icycalm
Btw there will never be a way to lose ships
I was just thinking about it
It really is the game’s biggest issue. Almost its only issue
Because they sold ships for money

CULT|ChevRage
Well, when you buy a ship, you get a certain length of insurance for it as well. Maybe they changed that

CULT|icycalm
What is the insurance?

CULT|ChevRage
My starting ship came with 3 months of insurance
I think it's when you claim your ship at the terminal if it's destroyed or on another planet
But this apparently only kicks in once the game launches

CULT|icycalm
So the guy who paid 1,400 for a ship will lose it after three months if it gets destroyed???
Unless he keeps paying a fee???
That’s kind of genius!

CULT|ChevRage
Maybe lol

CULT|icycalm
Jesus Christ in heaven let’s hope this is how it works!!!
At that point we might crowdfund the $3,000 Javelin between us
Chris Roberts will always have the option of simply never “releasing” the game, if he deems the alpha scheme is more profitable then the “release” scheme. But the release scheme sounds way more profitable. Even I would buy ships at that point
I wonder if you can pay for insurance WITH CREDITS

CULT|ChevRage
Whenever you claim a ship, it takes some time to arrive in your hangar, and there's an option to expedite the delivery with credits depending on how long is left
Usually nobody takes that because the process is only 40 seconds but there's 4 digits for the time there, which suggests it can take hours

CULT|icycalm
It’s all very promising. The fact that so many people have already accepted the insurance scheme—whether they understand or not what it is—is very good news. Insurance will be a powerful design tool to try to bridge the Rust full-vehicle-destruction system to Star Citizen’s necessarily less hardcore system

[icycalm]

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... nt/hg7rtei

Ironically, I think overall, Star Citizen's average agebase will prevent this. According to CIG's own stats (not like public backer data, just general polling and blah blah), we all bring the average player up to 34, and this is more because of the fifty plus year olds, along wig the children that are family "backers", and maybe even regular backers themselves.

44er here.

The kiddos haven't heard of the game yet because SCAM. But they will, don't worry about it. Oh, how they will.

[icycalm]

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... ts_current

How much content does Star Citizen in its current state have compared to Elite Dangerous?

I know Star Citizen has been in a state of alpha for many years. But i've been seeing lots of complex and comprehensive missions and gameplay mechanics on Youtube. I'm curious how much playable content it has amassed in those many years in development compared to Elite Dangerous in its latest iteration of Odyssey. Regardless of its roadmap, does Star Citizen currently come close or even surpass the amount of content that Elite Dangerous Odyssey offers? (I'm referring to Star Citizen only, not including Squadron 42).

That depends on exactly how you consider Elite's content.

Elite has hundreds of billions of star systems and Star Citizen currently has one. There is an immense difference on immediate face value. Some people will consider this content and there is a clear winner.

But on the other hand, those hundreds of billions of systems are procedurally-generated and the activities in them are almost entirely interchangeable and one system is basically as good as any other unless you are dealing with specific types of content (there is only one system with a Salvation superweapon accident anomaly, which is basically just a graphical effect considering it's attached to a permit-locked planet you are prohibited from getting anywhere near; Powerplay exists only in the bubble for the ten people who care about Powerplay). There's a lack of meaningful variety and people who value variety will not put much weight into the ten millionth M-class star with the same texture as the previous 9,999,999 they might've seen.

Star Citizen, by comparison, is rich with meaningful content in its one system, with four highly-detailed walkable landing zones on Earthlike-atmosphere-bearing planets with on-foot NPCs, shops, interactive mission NPCs, and even dance clubs and bars that exist just to be social hangout places and flesh out the world as a place people exist in. Missions often require you to leave your ship on-foot/in EVA, whether it's to deliver/pick up a mission container, to explore the exterior and interior of wrecked derelicts to search for and ID bodies, to clean out a bunker's underground interior of criminals in FPS combat, and so on.

Exploration in Elite means scanning planets and tagging them with your name, and in rare cases looking for an unannounced/uncharted anomaly such as how the "stargoid" was supposedly not meant to be visible at first and was supposed to be found by coincidentally pointing your FSS at the right location to hear anomalous noises. Exploration in Star Citizen, before any formal exploration gameplay has been implemented, involves searching for interesting points of interest that're built at the human scale, such as the river on microTech (which is a prototype testbench for the river generation tool that'll allow a dev to click a few times and blammo now a planet has hundreds of fairly-realistic terrain-following rivers that empty from or into basins) or finding the crashed Javelin wreck on the moon Daymar. There are also easter eggs, such as the holiday campfire under the Aspire Grand residential tower at the center of New Babbage or Bennyhenge (a stonehenge-like location on a seemingly-random asteroid in Yela's asteroid belt built out of Big Benny Noodles vending machines).

TL;DR if you consider infinite procedural generation to be "content" Elite wins hands-down, but if your standards are higher then SC has the edge despite only having one star system currently. And I don't mean "standards are higher" to be an insult, but not everyone will be satisfied by doing the same base defense mission on a slightly-different base layout for the two hundredth time to grind on-foot engineering mats; I'm not throwing shade at the people who DO, just pointing out that that's not a universal opinion.

TL;DR -

Elite Dangerous: A mile wide, and an inch deep.

Star Citizen: An inch wide, and a mile deep.

Clocked 1k hours in Elite, and nearing 1,500 (rough guess).

I found elites content to be miserable, the quest boards that you just endlessly grind.

When I finally checked out star citizen it felt like I got out of an abusive relationship with elite lol I just didn't realize how little elite respected me as a player.

Things like ship interiors that the elite devs swore up and down were a waste, are not a waste. They have no clue what they're talking about.

I've yet to find myself bored in star citizen so if you get the $45 pack and play as much as me you'll make out great. Find some friends though, unlike in elite, star citizen is very multiplayer heavy.

Things like ship interiors that the elite devs swore up and down were a waste, are not a waste. They have no clue what they're talking about.

Frontier: "You will get bored walking through your ship for the hundredth time and will want an instant teleport, you don't want ship interiors."

Also Frontier: "In Odyssey, every time you disembark from your ship to go to a station concourse and come back, which you have to do every time you want to get an on-foot mission (which will be often if you're doing on-foot engineering materials grinding), you have to run through a completely empty hangar bay to the teleport-elevator against the wall."

If I hadn't already walked away from Elite in 2019 because I gave up on any hope that it would change the fact that it consistently disrespected my time, that would've been the breaking point for me.

Agreed. I have 1000 hours on Elite, and that abused feeling is real. It weird you want to go back but know you shouldn’t. Elite could have been great. That comment about the Deva saying that no one wanted interiors? Made me laugh derisively. Elite could have had it all, could have been so much more. Poor decisions, poor design, poor coding, poor execution and copy paste mentality combined with the worst grind (apart from Destiny) I have ever seen make it a poor comparison. Star Citizen as incomplete as it is still outmatches it. The only thing I think is a redeeming quality is the space combat. Space trucking is also a bit better.

I have played elite, and the gameplay is extremely repetitive. Repetitive enough that unless you changed how you are making money, the play sessions blur together.

Not so in Star Citizen. No game session is the same. You have to work a lot harder grinding before it feels grindy, imo.

The Elite devs sound like douchebags, which sounds about right when you consider their uninspired copy-pasted game. And btw, they're kinda right that ship interiors would get boring fast WITH ELITE'S ART DIRECTION. If your art looks boring, of course players will get tired of going through it. But if your art is genius, they'll be looking forward to going through it for the 10,000th time.

[icycalm]

https://twitter.com/Wiborg1978/status/1 ... 3375322112

How it started - how it's going.

#StarCitizen is the largest single amount ever raised via crowdfunding.
$500,000,000
Congratulations @RobertsSpaceInd @croberts68 @SandiRoberts42 @OrtwinFreyermuth
The community believes in your dream

https://twitter.com/IPaMu71/status/1571951865629388800




Today is the day that filthy casuals make fun of games they don't play and their brains can't comprehend.

[icycalm]

Thank you God
https://www.patreon.com/posts/72278201

For allowing me to live long enough to see this.

[icycalm]

https://twitter.com/discolando/status/1 ... 1281815552



This is Star Citizen's Creative Lead and host of Inside Star Citizen and Star Citizen Live.

Not only did they make the best game ever, they even educated millions on game development.

GTA6 will still suck tho. Nothing to do with the leak.

[icycalm]

If you want to see hundreds of claims of upcoming features made by CIG over the years, check this out: https://starcitizentracker.github.io

It seems grossly out of date, as plenty of things they say haven't been delivered have now been delivered, plus more things have been promised than what's on the list, but there're still tons of things on the list I hadn't heard of before. The list seems to stop at about January 2020. Here are the features that haven't yet been mentioned on Insomnia:

Trains
Pooping
Cash sales only for new concept ships and top tier capital ships
Sandworms
Farming and agriculture
Autopilot while player walks around ship's interior
Vaulting, sliding, mantling, cover
UEC purchasable with real money (which basically makes it a real currency)
Manage space stations (!)
Pirate insurance for questionably obtained ships
DirectX 12 graphic engine support (crazy that the current game is only DX11 and still beats practically everything)
Passenger space transportation
Prepare and deliver drinks on passenger flights
Contagions and epidemics
Ship naming
Towel
Pets
Sleeping (sleeping simulator!)
Showering (showering simulator!)
Fake hull IDs
Visual limb damage (cripple simulator!)
Alien languages (actual languages developed by professional linguists)
Organization headquarters
Escalating downtime between ship replacement by insurance if abused
Ship aging
Wear and tear on all equipment
Varied laws and rules for different environments
Designated planet-side combat areas with brawling
Loaning out your ship to other players
Spying and changing appearance
Black holes
Accurate skybox (Constellations)
Ships models that change over the years and classic ships
Jump point discovery
Player named jump points
Plastic surgery
No sound in space preference setting
Magnetic boots
Customizable AI voices for different aspects of your ship
Damage any item
Cargo damage becomes item damage
Cybernetic repair facilities
Shared organization hangars
Organization reputation system
Character collaboration with Warhorse Studios (yes the Kingdom Come devs; not sure what this means)
Player generated missions (this is already in to an extent, with revive and transport missions, but maybe they plan to make it deeper)
Nothing in-game you can only buy with real money
Immersive in-game discovery of new alien race
Artifact hunting
User generated content
Team reporting player driven events as in-fiction news (already in to an extent)
Player run broadcasts (sounds like MMO GTA radio stations!)
Player designed ships (Starbase Citizen?)
Unregulated border worlds
Player to player trading
Player or organization run medical facilities
Cyborg characters (cybernetic techno-Overmen!)
Ship Trade-in and buying used ships
Give orders to NPCs
Decals to decorate hull
Combined arms missions
Ship cleanliness and deterioration
Highlight camera
Bribe NPCs
Trade tariffs
Taxes within Organizations
Landing fees
Detailed procedural ship destruction for large ships
In depth non-FTL communication
Hireable NPCs
Character aging (I'd been wondering about this with a universe whose metaplot continues for centuries!)
Character histories and ancestral trees
Retired characters persist as NPCs (Chris' Roberts' Stargrounds!)
Command and Control Center
Booby traps and trackers for cargo and their pirate countermeasures
Organization infiltration
Reporter career path
Player owned factories (Starsatisfactory!)
Data transport career path
Commercial pilot career path
Wreckage as a navigational hazard
Player designed outfits
NPCs gain experience (Starfinder!)
Benefits for ejecting from a ship about to explode
Player influenced politics
Vote for in game politicians (Make Stanton Great Again! Build the space wall! Eject aliens!)
Engine Tuning Kit
Organization shared Assets
NPCs prevent organization conflict in safe zones (the police squads we've been hearing about)
Keep a failed boarders ship (basically steps towards full Rust-style vehicle jacking)
Inertia on objects not anchored down
Beam weapons for larger ships (Death Stars!)
Player owned business
Stock Market
Stellar cartography room
Organization bank accounts
Level restrictions masked by licences and real world barriers
Immersive haggling with NPCs
Immersive buying of ships
3D Starmap inside ships
Playing as another alien race
Shuttles for larger ships to interact with stations and planets
Ship specific Manuals
Hired NPCs can fly in your wing (we could be flying in 30+ craft wings in that case)
Angle penetration damage
Jane's Fighting Ships style manual
Hull breaches
No Pay to Win
Using inertia for flight rather than burning fuel all the time
Tablet companion application
Fly from space to planet as a cinematic
Cockpit decorations - bobbleheads, photographs, dinosaurs, fuzzy dice, nose art, posters
Private real estate
Crafting
Capture derelict bases
Capture bigger ships
Capture asteroid bases

[icycalm]

"There has never been anything like it"
https://www.patreon.com/posts/72356190

No other game feels like this. Even in its limited content buggy state nothing else even comes close.

[icycalm]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V6Kr0j ... DIB4AaABAg

But when you, Execute, and Paul talked about 100 vehicles, plus what will have to be at least 200 ships, my mind was blown all over again by what the goal is. To have a legitimate living, breathing universe, with so many different vehicles and ships that you hardly see the same one twice, with logistical vehicles and haulers being the exception.
It really is amazing.

Whenever somebody ever says Star Citizen has too many ships, I ask them, "How many different types of vehicles do we have for the same function IRL?" The number of vehicles, when NPCs can do the same things as players next few patches, it's going to be a transformative experience. I seriously don't believe there HAS been a truly living breathing world, just yet, in any video game. But, there is another thing that casually cropped up that CR was mentioning back in the 2013 days. With the new event, graffiti is a thing. Part of the dynamic sim was also more trash piling up, gangs possibly moving in... that's starting to be realised right now.

[icycalm]

How The Planets Are Made | Planet Tech Overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMJwKgKSVsA&lc

Great video if you're interested in the planet tech. It's the most exciting thing to happen to level design since GTA3's "open world" 20 years ago, so you should be interested.

I miss the excitement everyone had when the Dev's first landed and walked on a planet. It's crazy how fast we get used to amazing innovations and move on to irritation and criticism.

I've been working with procedural generation for twenty years, and seeing procedural generation utilised the way Star Citizen and No Man's Sky do it, it floored me. Terragen, was the software I used. I was absolutely delighted when I learned that some of the scenes in G.I. Joe were rendered using Terragen! Once I learned that, I said, if that ever made it to a video game, I would spend all of my (reasonable amounts) gaming moneys to make that project REAAAAAALLLL. Oh hey, 2012, new kickstarter, who dis? Procedural generation in a space game?! Besides Elite? Sign me up! .....45 dollars? Are you...for real? I'm spending 60. Wait, what do you mean I can actually WALK AROUND IN THE SHIP?!

The only thing I would have added was something at the beginning explaining that in 2016 the hiring of the former Crytech employees and resultant ability to have planets and planet tech was a huge adjustment for the whole project and almost a test of the development clock!

"What do you mean we can create a planet in six months now? It took us 4 years for the first one!" "CryTekEmployees Son."

[icycalm]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comment ... &context=3

The non-predatory alternative that started at the same time was Elite Dangerous, which I still play today. Graphics aren’t quite on this level, at least on my system; but the fighter-to-cruiser style combat is similar, and it’s set in a realistic reproduction of the whole Milky Way instead of a smaller, handcrafted set of systems.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comment ... &context=3

idk if i'd call elite necessarily non predatory. they charged hundreds of quid for alpha testing that was testing the tutorial for a few weeks prior to launch, reneged on several key sales pitches last minute, and their full game price DLCs are pretty much rehashes of the previous grind tracks except for the fps dlc which has pretty much zero integration with the rest of the game and saw elite dangerous players fleeing the game to SC and fdev's stock value plummet it was so poor.

elite tends to get by on the "doesn't sell ships and is launched" memes but what's there is so mediocre at best with questionable monetization and a studio that has signaled a number of times their lack of interest in further developing the game to even the previously set standards of their own design.

which is not surprising because fdev's business model is generally to produce shovelware mainly for consoles and mobile.

[icycalm]

If you had a chance to ask Chris Roberts one question about Star Citizen. What would it be?
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/co ... oberts_one

What is the actual status of SQ42?

Well fuck, where do I begin? We've been genuinely trying to get a product out, unlike Star Citizen we'll only make money when it's out. The problem is we never locked a scope so for the first half with more money rolling in things constantly changed meaning little progress and rewriting entire portions.

Around 2016 early 2017 things changed because while more money rolled in the percentage change was far smaller so scope fixed. A $2m/year game will be very different to a $10m/year game but $60m to $100m are pretty similar. Great. With that matter settled we hoped to get down to some real progress. Hoped. The engine constantly changed under our feet due to the PU and looking back they should have been different codes it'd have saved so much time.

We went through a couple leads as deadlines got missed and they burned out, I don't blame them, the entire project became poison with no one wanting to step up to lead knowing they'd have unrealistic deadlines placed on them so eventually I got out into the role.

Now our final hurdle, the engine is getting there, the scope solid but the expectations changed games like God of War, TLOU2, RDR2 meant gamers wanted more and our (by now) 5 year old design was falling far short so we took the difficult decision to reboot, ground up, engine, voice, mocap stayed but everything else got changed which made if very difficult when we had to show this for the Briefing Room. To be honest as I'm writing this optimistically 2025 is the release and we've completely forgotten about part 2 and 3 and we hope our backers have as well.

The above is a fanfiction answer, but it sounds plausible, apart from the comparisons to those midwit popular games. Even the 5-year-old SQ42 design was clearly far superior to any of that stuff. Far more complex, more ambitious etc., let alone what's being prepared now.

I think I would ask him if he is happy with how this game is coming together.

At Bar Citizen LA, I got to do exactly this. He didn't offer a lot of new information but did offer a lot of insight into how he sees the game now, a lot more interesting than the Letter to the Chairman imo. I'm struggling to remember exactly what we talked about but I remember feeling more optimistic about both Star Citizen and Sq42 afterwards.

I asked him your exact question actually and he said he was very proud of the project so far and where it was going in the short and long term. He understood the complaints about mismanagement and scope creep, and does read a lot of the community feedback. He's been working to address those and says he thinks CIG has improved on this front. No more showing off far future ideas, no more solid dates for things. He said the funding model gives CIG a lot more freedom than pretty much any other game development studio and much of the work is being done behind closed doors for Squadron and future gameplay systems and features. I remember he mentioned river tech as an example.

He was still very passionate and optimistic about the game, still the pretty goofy dude with the wild hand gestures and big ideas. I remember him speaking about 3.17 and most people had fairly uninteresting, uninspired questions. "What's progress on this ship? Will this feature be soon?" much like you see in this comment section.

Overall, I think he was happy with the game :)