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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Funny to see this here, I actually played this last night for the first time in a year. I have a friend who is a diehard and wanted to play so I finally gave in as he's played helldiver's with me a number of times recently.
Anywho, the game is still unoptimized and buggy as shit. We did some new mission where you fly to the same base you've seen 5k times and take an elevator underground then you attempt to upload data while servers are overheating for some reason, and NPCs randomly spawn in elevators. Glitched out getting on the elevator and fell through the floor, adds spawning in elevators would just sit there and do nothing staring at the wall until you shot them. Got killed once, did not respawn in the ship as I had tied my identity to the bed - instead spawned back at my origin base - later found my dead body under the med bed in the ship. Enemy NPCs rubber banging all over the place, so we're my buddy and I the net code clearly has major issues. Tried to pickup a container at one point and for some reason that injured me. The inventory system to loot guys is difficult to use / buggy as all hell. The same terrible interaction system where you hold F and use mouse to interact with things is ridiculously janky. The star navigation system is the same broke crap I remember from years ago, you can never smoothly set destination or even find the destination you want to go for. They've changed the flight controls for the 578th time for no reason. NPCs in my home spawn were walking into walls and glitching on stairs. I could go on.
Still no news on Squadron 42, still no firm release date, no new significant content in years (except ship sales!!!!), pyro still not playable for non bootlickers, no jump gates, all the ground bases look exactly the same, no compelling gameplay loops you shoot shit in space jousting or you go to one of 700 identical basses on the ground to pickup boxes or shoot laggy NPCs. There is no "game" here it drives like crap for a project over a decade in the making with that much money wasted. I have no idea why people are still "playing" it, and no idea why so many continue to throw money at it.
This perfectly summarizes my experience every time I hop into the game after a year.
You're saying that physics based coffee in mugs and new cape physics didn't fix all the major issues when they implemented those two years ago? I swear they prioritize the dumbest work possible.
Just wait for server meshing bro /s
Oh there's a good reason for the flight controls change. Because the fucking neck beards who spend $10k on a "realistic flight sim" setup demand that their loud whining be accommodated or they will never stop whining on the official forums because their idiotic controllers couldn't beat people flying with a keyboard and mouse. Because, you know their Cheeto stained fingers obviously know more about how futuristic space combat will work than actual engineers designing a space combat sim.
This is basically why I stopped playing. The willingness to let idiots dictate game design and balance made the meta insufferable and impossible to follow.
Back in the late '90s, there were a lot of PC flightstick-based flight sims, as well as space combat games. The Wing Commander series, from whence the lead on Star Citizen comes, was among these, and it was the idea of a new Wing Commander that was part of the appeal.
I think that it's probably reasonable for a lot of people who put money into the game to want a viable flightstick-based game, given where they're coming from, since that's presumably what they were hoping for.
'course, given the huge amount of money Star Citizen's taken in, it's gotta have significant mainstream appeal, and not everyone is going to want to get a flightstick, much less other pieces of hardware.
I'm a little sad that there isn't much when it comes to open-source combat flight sims, because I think that that'd be fertile ground for people putting together all sorts of neat control setups. FlightGear really focuses on non-combat flight (not to mention not being in space).
The point is that flight sticks designed for aerodynamic flight are a dumb way to control a spaceship, and this has unambiguously harmed the development. The fact that they are trying to "balance" clearly superior flight mechanics for these dumber control schemes says a lot.
There was a whole genre of fighter-based space combat movies -- and probably comic books and such, then later video games -- that did take inspiration from atmospheric fighter combat. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc. And there's a whole genre of conventions that were developed and came with them that weren't hard-realism in terms of space combat, but were intended to be exciting and fun. I don't think that's really specific to any one game, but to the genre.
Some examples:
Craft don't follow Newtonian physics; instead, they act like they're atmospheric fighters, flying in a sort of fluid, where inertia can be redirected by turning the craft.
Dogfighting is a thing (whereas in real life, it was on its last legs even for atmospheric fighters when the genre was created).
Combat normally occurs at relatively-short ranges.
Weapons have finite ranges.
Lasers or some sort of energy weapon often follow a Star Wars-style convention of being a colored pulse moving slowly-enough to see, and making a noise.
Sound propagates through space.
Missiles and torpedoes are often a thing.
Explosive warheads exist, though presumably the kinetic energy of weapons in space would be much greater.
Armor is often a thing, though the practical viability of armor on a spacecraft is limited.
Some form of energy shield often exists.
Fighters are manned.
Fighters have glass cockpits, and someone physically looking through them rather than at computer displays.
There are beautiful, human-visible nebulas based on false-color NASA images.
Arguably, most of these don't make a lot of sense in a hard realism space war simulation. If I had to guess, a lot of it is basically derived from the American naval war in the Pacific theater in WW2 or the early Cold War. It's probably pretty appealing to an American audience; it's directly analogous to fights that we fought, just in a more-futuristic setting.
But...that doesn't mean that it's a bad set of genre conventions, at least in my eyes. I think that the people who developed the genre came up with a pretty good set of rules to appeal to the consumer. Like, it's not a real universe, no. But neither are vampire conventions or swords-and-sorcery conventions. Hollywood action movies have plenty of gunplay, but the vast majority of shot people don't spend time rolling around noisily dying. All those genres are fictional too, but they're optimized to be enjoyable. I can't rip on them for that -- they've made a lot of content that a lot of people really enjoy, though sometimes it's also nice to delve into harder realism.
Sure, but the original iteration of the flight mechanics in Arena Commander was legitimately very fun. I played the shit out of it, and the ability to basically fling yourself across the map while strafing around asteroids in dog fights, launching missiles and dodging while you are in a three or four way fight with several players at once is still one of the best times I've ever had doing PvP in any game. The controls were intuitive but complex enough to require a decent amount of skill, and would have made for a really cool multiplayer experience.
The only people not having fun were the flight stick crowd, because they couldn't fly and shoot at the same time. God forbid they put a mouse down next to their stick. Mind you, this was in small fighters - the whole meta at the time was that the mechanics for larger ships would be different and favor pure flying more over this mixed combat. But that wasn't enough. They absolutely had to have their way. Suddenly realism was super important and these people spent all day making super serious posts on the forums twisting themselves in circles to justify why a flight stick was really the most scientific method for 6dof flight. So the devs started nerfing combat. First they killed the missiles, then they stared introducing stupid aim mechanics and before you knew it, what was once a very fun space combat sim was just boring.