July 21st Salty Rant
Salty Rant for week ending July 22nd. Because I was too lazy to do this when I typed the main report (link).
Rant in Review
This is more of a downer summary of watching the past few weeks of CIG shows than a proper rant.
So I’ve been spending the past few weeks watching Chris & Sandi talk about how amazing the game is and all the emergent gameplay happening so early in development.
It really is like watching someone congratulate themselves for achieving the bare minimum possible.
This week consisted of talking about how players organizing a FPS fight over meaningless location with rules to avoid using ships was a good demonstrator of the amazing emergent gameplay Star Citizen already has.
Personally I don’t really see it as a success, nor emergent gameplay, when you’re six years into development and players not only have to come up with reasons to fight but also have to avoid using major game mechanics because those would render the scenario they’re trying to preform largely irrelevant.
The second section reporting on, and making light of, the Arena Commander protests was a mixed bag.
CIG acknowledged what happened but then said they’d fix security so that they protesters wouldn’t be able to grief people anymore, sometime in the future of course because getting station turrets or NPC security ships working again/properly is too hard.
Talking about improvements in the flight model and encouraging players to fight for CryAstro is just a half assed response when the issue has gotten this far.
CIG just had their first Jita riot with players getting so pissed off with the state of the game that they’re trying to force attention to be brought to the issue and CIG just completely ignored the message.
The SC community seems to have completely enabled this by labelling the protesters as idiots for being frustrated that combat has been broken for years and CIG has stepped back from their commitments by suspending Arena Commander development.
On the balance front the future of the game grows more absurd; NPC crews are supposed to be fairly effective, ship modules are getting balanced on cost/upkeep, and core gameplay is being subverted to make someone’s fetishistic gameplay elements essential to the game.
Elite Dangerous has this same balance problem where if you’re not using A+ rated modules and get into a PvP situation then you’re just plain and outright fucked, balancing superior modules on cost when those modules will determine if you live or die isn’t balancing them at all.
The medical gameplay is being forced into relevancy in a way that seems to just shit on other sections of gameplay.
Now getting a limb too injured in some minor scrape while in the middle of buttfuck nowhere will see you forced to stop what you were doing and look for the nearest medical depot before you can resume what you actually wanted to do.
You’re literally bringing one players enjoyable gameplay to a grinding halt so that you can justify another section of gameplay, and that’s all the while assuming that players don’t just decide to sit on a grenade because that gets them back to enjoyable gameplay faster.
The respawn mechanics likewise sound just as fucked up, spawning with no equipment on some nearby ship and then having to somehow re-ship and re-equip sounds more pointless than just respawning further back at some major outpost where you can actually resume meaningful gameplay from quickly.
Anyways I don’t want to derail the thread too much but after weeks of watching these shows it’s grown too absurd not to say something.
This week watching CIG take shows meant to inform backers on ships that were paid for eons ago and instead using it to market a new ship and some effectively new and over-bloated new mechanics was too much to bear.
Survival mechanics are now in development before multicrew, we are well and truely off the rails here.