Wowzers - Star "give me all your money" Citizen

GARY FUCKING OLDMAN at 1:40.

I totally should go check Star Citizen out again. I was a backer of it during the kickstarter. Never really bothered checking it out, though. The first video definitely looks great, though, although I fear I might have to buy a new PC to properly enjoy it.

And yes, if MindArk hadn't been so shit at what they do, they could have achieved something perhaps remotely resembling SC. Of course the funding is completely different. And the SC team has talent. And creativity. And not an entire useless layer of management.

 

Very recent very interesting article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2019/05/01/exclusive-the-saga-of-star-citizen-a-video-game-that-raised-300-millionbut-may-never-be-ready-to-play/

 

So what are you doing playing EU? :D

The article did look massively shady. And I am somewhat annoyed that SC still has not been officially released yet. However, looking at that first video, it looks fucking amazing. I was a backer way back in 2014, so I should actually be able to log in and explore. I won't be buying any spaceships, though. Maybe when it finally does launch.

Fingers crossed.

 

That looks fantastic.

What really sold it to me was in one of the videos you posted, where they mentioned that even though the entire planet(s) are/will be procedurally generated, the city looks and feels alive. There's people going about their business, buildings serve a purpose, and most locations will contain objects you can interact with.

There's been NPCs in games for quite some time. Sometimes they were just there to provide a bit of Arcade fun in an adventure (like Police Quest 1), but other games had them going about their daily lives, and your actions directly influenced their behaviour (Hill Street Blues comes to mind. It's filled with NPCs going about their daily lives. If you set up too many roadblocks in order to block off a murder suspect, they get angry. Similarly, they will not be very impressed with you if bodies stay lying on the streets for too long.

Those games are both decades old, though. Most MMOs nowadays offer NPCs, but they cannot all be interacted with. I hope that at some point, games will become so 'realistic' that you could pretty much interact with hundreds if not thousands of AI controlled beings (randomly/procedurally generated). Red Dead Redemption 2 already took us a step in that direction, giving us the ability to greet pretty much anyone. Or rob them, for that matter.

What I'm hoping for is something similar to Westworld. But perhaps in VR. NPCs with life stories. Personalities. People who could turn violent towards you at any time. Or people you could romance, if you were so inclined. NPCs you could befriend, perhaps?

Part of me loves that I was born in a day and age where we shifted from TVs you had to walk over to to change the channel to smart TVs that connect to services in the cloud in order to present you with a movie or series of your choice from your chair/sofa. Where computers evolved being able to offer us pixellated characters to characters that we have trouble distinguishing from real people. Shit, the Lord of the Rings movies will soon be 20 years old, and shit's only evolved since those.

20-25 years ago, I read an article in a magazine about VR. It was so close, it promised. Soon, we would be able to move around virtual worlds, and instruct computers with our faces and/or minds. It took until a few years ago for computers to get powerful enough to actually show VR (I still do not consider EU to be VR, regardless of what our president or MindArk say).

Part of me would love to see what'll be next. Will my daughter actually get to control a computer to do her biding by moving her head, or thinking of the colour blue? Will we ever see a game that mimics real life in its' complexity?

I like to believe Star Citizen is somehow going to take us a step closer to that. Yes, they are delayed. Yes, they need ever-more money. But there seems to be some sort of chaotic vision behind it all. And slowly, but surely, they are making progress. On an ongoing basis. Undoubtedly people will tell me MindArk is doing the same thing. Maybe they were, 15 years ago. The RCE aspect of EU was a unique and visionary aspect of it. But most of the things we have seen since then have hardly been innovative. The Debit card? Dead in the water. The planet system? It's been a number of years since it was released, and I think calling it a success would be a stretch. Arkadia might be doing okay, but C RD never happened, ROCKtropia was massively scaled down, NI was reclaimed, SEE withdrew, Theryon Wars didn't materialize, Cyrene is still awaiting MindArk to pull their finger out of their ass, and countless other ideas never even came close to happening (Hi Skippie!).

Landplots were never finished. Taming sucks. Space is just annoying. Missions and/or achievements are hardly unique to EU. Neither are loot pills, boiosts, buffs, annd what not. EU is just constantly catching up with gaming industry. Mobile games? Too little, too late. Blockchain? Too little, too shady, too late.

Personally, my bet is on whoever is behind SC for creating some innovative game mechanisms. MindArk won't. And in fact, I'd still be highly surprised if EU is going to be around a few years after SC would properly launch. MA's finances aren't exactly hopeful. And the playerbase seems to be in a perpetually stale state. The 500k USD for Crystal Palace are (in my opinion, at least) triggered more by greed than by hope.

I actually put in a withdrawal today. With a bit of luck, more will follow soon :) Who knows? They might buy me a ship in a more exciting universe.