Good Morning Oddysee!
I took a small hiatus with the SOD report last month, but promise this one double-sized to make up for it. So how about the 600i? Yea… meh… not much of a combat ship. Still, it looks like it’ll serve as a high class explorer. I’m sure cainsrebel will take them under consideration in Pathfinders, but I don’t see Strategic Operations having much use for the things, as pretty as they are.
The Tumbril Cyclone is pretty exciting though! Ground assaults are looking more involved than just sending some guys in, and the way some of those buggies are armed poses some interesting ideas for gameplay. Will planetside operations be something like Arma with ground and vehicle operations? Vehicles with anti-infantry and anti-air capability? Time will tell. The Cyclone is only a single vehicle, and while the Dragonfly, Nox and Ursa can do some light combat, their roles are more defined as general transportation and exploration than a combat role. I’m sure Varrus, our Marine Officer, will be formulating some plans when we can finally go planetside in 3.0.
The burn down to 3.0 continues and with Gamescon comes… a lot more bugs. Fear not, these were things that if left undiscovered would have ended up un the final build, so it’s nice to see they uncovered a bunch. While the playthough was really cool (crash, bad acting, and flaky Idris cargo ramp aside), it’s cool to see that the vision is coming together and they’re focusing on gameplay elements. This is a huge advantage over games like Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky which launched without much in the way of mission content.
What impressed me the most about Gamescon though, was the demo lines. I’m talking about the 3.0 build that they had available for people to queue up and after an hour or so wait, get to play for 15 minutes at a time… and when most of them got done, they would re-queue! This tells me two things.
First, the 3.0 builds are getting very stable, because while bugs were found, they weren’t crashing servers for forcing resets and reloads. They were able to keep the lines moving and the demo playable with minimal effort on their part.
Second, if the game wasn’t fun as hell, people wouldn’t we re-queuing. It takes a lot of convincing for someone like me to stand in line for an hour and a half, just to play an alpha demo for 15 minutes and that game needs to REALLY damned good and blow me away, for me to go BACK to the end of that line and wait another hour and a half to do it AGAIN.
The evidence that Star Citizen is shaping into a killer game is becoming more and more apparent as they are homing in on the finalized form. My guess? We may see it at CitizenCon. Then again, as a programmer, it’s hard to say. The burn-down though reminds me about some large programming projects I’ve been involved in. You track, you fix, you log, you test repeat. This is a very good thing as well. It’s looking like things are in good hands.
Anyways, till next time!
Demonseed out.
