Had one yesterday, time to talk about the sequel.
Not gonna lie, today left a much stronger impression than day 1. I'm one of the weirdos who's fully onboard with all the sim and on foot stuff so I got a lot of interesting updates. Enough to get my hopes a little. Just a little.
Few notes from the stream:
- really like the frontier fashion as I prefer more modern looking clothing compared to (some of the) futuristic designs we have now
- clothes modularity is an amazing addition, another feature from my childhood dream game will be a thing
- love the hair improvements, one of the things I really waited for
- new character editor looks great, we'll finally be able to make really distinct characters
- FPS updates seem good, all but ping anyway - not a fan of such mechanic. I'd rather have it tied to a usable device if it has to be in the game rather than just a helmet.
- not fully sold on the slide but I don't hate it either
- space combat improvements look good, that's about all of my feelings on that as I'm not particularly interested in this part of the game
- still not sold on master modes, should probably try AC implementation
- I'm really curious how my ~~brick~~ Aurora handles atmo flight in the future
- new settlements look pretty impressive, I especially like the homey feeling of independent type tileset
- Pyro presentation made me change my mind about trying out Pyro when it's out
- mhmmm, yummy slugs
- personal hangars look great
- same with base building even though I'll most likely stick to a rentable apartment mentioned earlier this year
- I'm not really invested in S42 but I'd be lying if the cinematic didn't change that a bit
Despite my overall careful curiosity towards the project I'd say it was a pretty good Citzen Con. We got a lot of good updates, some features that seem to be pretty advance development wise which might mean they'll indeed come to PU within next year and brought back some hope in the progress.
That said I do have one major gripe - for a project that's suppose to be run as "open development" limiting news through the year and hiding all of this behind S42 anti spoiler policy sucks.
They should either act truthfully and share more meaningful info with us on regular basis or stop pretending this is the "most open development ever" and stick to hoarding all the important stuff for big events. Don't treat us like the idiots we are.
I get where you're coming from but I feel like there's a bit of a divide within the community - some want SC to be "space game about space ships" with everything else being unnecessary and some want it to be a immersive sim with all that it entails in and out of your space ship (including CIG).
As for this slowing down the release... Considering they're still finishing main features of the game (flight mechanics, damage system etc) I don't think having few people improve hair tech has much effect on release date. Skipping that wouldn't make those features any more done unfortunately.
Yeah I get the criticism as well and I'm sure it's frustrating to folks who maybe backed years ago and only care about spaceship stuff. That said, there are other games that focus on spaceship stuff so those are always an option. There's only one game doing what StarCitizen is doing though.
I'm one of the people who wants the on-foot parts as much as spaceship stuff so those updates were targeted directly at me. I'm starved for fully immersive first person gameplay in general.
At the same time I get the frustration. For years it looked like they focused on side stuff (cloth physics, bartender AI etc) while basics like flight model, damage system etc weren't even close to being ready which was all you needed to know to realize S42 is nowhere near release.
CIG's approach wasn't perfect (and I'm far from being happy with many things) but at the end of the day it does make SC stand out, even in it's incomplete form.