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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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They are simulating an ENTIRE UNIVERSE. The janky physics are actually because they're correctly adjusting for the gravitational influence of billions of stars. Or something.
Is there even a need to simulate the physics of every single object? Sure it sounds super cool to do so, but Star Citizen is a videogame at the end of the day, not a Formula One simulator or Airbus A380 pilot simulator.. Even really expensive commercially available simulation games like iRacing and DCS don't simulate the physics of every single object. Doing so sounds like major feature creep, which has been the story of Star Citizen for as long as I've known about it.
I think those are supposed to be mobile cargo crates that can be moved around and packed onto ships? One of the things they were really hellbent on doing was physicalized cargo that had to actually go somewhere and take up space in cargo bays and that could be moved around on forklifts and shit.
Because they fundamentally do not understand that simulationism and the actual needs of gameplay and development are a balance that needs to be struck, that making gameplay mechanics is all about smoke and mirrors to capture a feel and that in a very real sense making something "feel" realistic means shooting more for the concept of it and how we think of it than it means trying to simulate exactly what something truly is, and then finding ways to paper over all the stuff you reasonably cannot get done in time so that people don't think about them.
Like "packing and moving physicalized cargo, in space!" is a pitch for a whole ass indie game about space trucking that dedicates all its resources and attention to doing that and making it feel good and satisfying despite the drawbacks, not for an omni-present minor aspect of a tacticool FPS simulation that will never get the sort of dedicated attention and resources it needs to not suck because it's less important than the shiny spaceships.
Kojima would disagree and think that the cargo is a great idea but then he also made Death Stranding.
I'm not against the cargo, the toolbags making it are bad at it though.
Death Stranding made that one of its core pillars and gamified it enough to work, while also constraining the design to basically human scale. That's the sort of thing I mean, that systems like that need attention and abstraction and have to not just be a neglected afterthought tacked on to an archetype that it clashes with.
An even more simulationist approach than that needs the sort of attention and priority that it could only get from a dedicated game that's like Hardspace: Shipbreaker but about being a space teamster/stevedore instead of a space wrecker.
Shipbreaker is an entire game purely about taking ships apart in exactly the fashion Star Citizen wants its infantry boarding to work, with running concerns about pressurization, gravity, radiation, and sensitive parts like power and fuel. It's a perfect example of that balance of gameplay and concept. I don't think star citizen could do it better even if they wanted to because it turns out that even a gamified simulation has parts that wouldnt be fun in any other context. Pop open a door with air behind it in Star Citizen with Shipbreaker gameplay? You're going flying, and in pitched space combat that means you, the player, get to spend fifteen to thirty minutes waiting for your air to run out, to be picked off by the enemy, or to be eventually scooped up by friendlies.
Exactly. Going really in depth and introducing gamified elements of realism for a single system can really only be done when it's either the focal point of a game or at the very least an actually high priority pillar of a broader game's mechanics.
Meanwhile Star Citizen wants to have all these in depth side systems each at a level of completion that would justify an entire game, but they can't even get their actual high-priority gameplay pillars like ship movement or FPS combat or even just the game itself being playable and stable to work good enough for a game despite having been hacking away at those issues for twice as long as even other notoriously long AAA projects took. They've had an infinite money fountain keeping them afloat and they just haven't done shit with it because their leadership is so incompetent that even though they could have hired a small army of devs for every single in-depth simulationist sub-game they wanted they have instead completely failed to outdo even a shitshow like Starfield in areas like actually having mechanics and gameplay and also an actual game.
Like how are Chris Roberts and his lackies less competent than Todd "vapid dipshit and notorious micromanager who has to personally sign off on literally everything" Howard?