So, after the CitCon presentation, I was left with several concerns about how the game will be able to have hundreds and potentially thousands of players.
1 - With each ship being parked on its own landing pad, how will this be when there are limited number of pads on a station and hundreds or thousands of players? Will it all be instanced?
2 - The walking and talking inside the station with the quest/mission NPCs was quite entertaining, but what about when there are hundreds of other people doing the same mission/story? Will it all be instanced?
3 - The map dimensions were said to be in the billions of kilometers altogether, so will it have thousands of space stations to spread out the population? Will those space stations also have huge amounts of landing pads and instanced NPCs so you can do your mission content without someone else having to wait the NPC coming back to their spot and do YOUR mission?
4 - How will those big ships be flown alone, having to need people to man the guns, the controls and other parts of the deck? Are they warning people in advance about this? Because this is a very important factor that might leave a lot of players frustrated when they realise that all their friends will have to be online with them at the same time and spending their precious game time just helping the main friend control his ship...
I hope someone can clear up this for me
Thanks.
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I think your under the impression that SC will be a mmo.. this is simply not the case.. it will be hub multyplayer game.. so yes except heavy instancing.. they are currently supporting 20 players per zone they wanne have 40 i believe
So it will be instanced zones? What happens when we want to play with friends, will people have to select an area and zone in?
A huge space in the billions of kilometers and the ability of playing with 20 or 40 people at a time... whoa, it will feel empty!
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What they have to combat this is the "streaming" technology. I believe it was already available in the Citizencon demo. You make a jump to lightspeed and as you fly towards your destination, it unloads what you left and loads what you are going towards.
This means that the 40 player limit potentially applies only to small areas. In the demo, we saw around 6 of these areas? This means you could potentially have 40 players in each.
There was talk a while back about having a "matchmaking" system that picks who you are in an instance with. You could choose to be more of a PvE person, meaning it would more likely put you in instances with less people and more NPCs. It would also let you play with friends (or friends of friends).
This was only a design, not something they already have working. But the process of matchmaking is generally the easiest thing to solve.
Just noticed you had other questions.
2 - what you saw with the talking in space stations was Squadron 42 (singleplayer only). The multiplayer version will have less of missions that are highly story driven. What you'll likely see instead is people around the galaxy having requests. Their economy system is quite complex, I'll try to be brief.
The galaxy simulation (danger, economy, wealth, etc.) runs on a separate server. It is basically just numbers and dots, it isn't what you see ingame. When the game server loads up, it asks the galaxy simulation for data. If you approach a new planet, it asks "Is it dangerous?", if it is, the game will likely spawn pirates. When you defeat the pirates, they disappear in your game (obviously), and then your game talks to the galaxy simulation "Hey, I killed the pirates, perhaps it should be less dangerous for the next player?"
What this allows you to do is instance things out quite a bit, letting multiple players do similar missions, while still having an impact on the whole system.
They said some NPCs that are highly story driven (e.g. the prime target of a story mission) will be only one of a kind and will disappear once you kill them. I don't see why they couldn't procedurally generate many of these (Pirate Bob, Pirate Tom, Pirate ....) to make more missions.
3 - The dimensions are huge because a lot of it is empty. In the real world, a lot of space is just nothing. This is somewhat similar. In most space games, they don't create the "nothing". You jump from one space station to another, the game simply teleports you from one populated level to another populated level.
In Star Citizen, the game actually warps you through the "nothingness", which I think is really cool.
The plan is to have many space stations (or other areas of interest). These will also be instanced, so if a station has 10 landing pads and can handle 40 people, with 10 000 players playing in the same area, it will simply make more instances to fit the 10 000 into 40. In terms of 10 landing pads for 40 people, I suppose they will have to fiddle with it and see what is right.
4 - you will be able to hire NPC crew. Not with this next release you saw, but it is a core part of the gameplay. This will let you fly your big ship on your own. Hiring NPCs costs money though (and I suspect players are generally better at everything). It should be enough to do PvE content though.
1 ... limited number of pads, but instanced (so .. unlimited number of players)
2 ... in Squadron 42 your are playing solo, so no problem. In Persistent Universe ... instances of XX people (at the moment a few tens of people, Chris Roberts hopes for up to 100 people in one instance... i would personally expect 50-60)
3... there will be a limited number of persistent stations and POI (a few tens per system) ... but the mission system will create temporary POI's (a bit like its done in EVE Online). Station landing pads ... see (1). Mission NPC's will be instanced. POI NPC's (like bartenders) will be fixed (e.g. like in SWTOR).
4 .... you can hire NPC crew of varying quality for your multi-player and capital ships. Your friends can temporarily jump "Agent Smith" style into one of the NPCs from anywhere in the universe to play with you. Or they really can stay in (Avatar) person on your ship. Warning - flying solo with a multi-player/capital ship in a high risk (PvP) zone with only NPC crew will most likely get you boarded and killed by players.
People on your friend list are preferably put into the same instance as you do.
Enemies on your enemy list can (if you choose) be put into the same instance as you are (assuming you have your PvP-PvE slider fully on the PvP side and doing this in a high risk minimal police area).
Have fun
I am not a backer, nor I plan to become one before the final release (let's hope it does release) but I am keeping an eye on this project and all the news concerning it, though I must admit that if it does succeed and completes, it might well be the greatest space game ever made.
I just hope it can be as fun as Freelancer, I put hundreds of hours into that game and it was fun as hell!
"ALPHA ONE DASH ONE" :chuffed:
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When I backed the game, i backed next generation WingCommander/Freelancer game in shared universe.
What I am seeing now is Extremely clunky try to push all technologies that sound good on paper but are proven to be 1. Fail , 2.Unreasonably expensive.
A story driven game where they blown half of budget to get star actors paychecks , and than digitize their faces with super expensive technology. Make player avatar with realistic movement in FPS, interacting with huge size realistic environments.
All this is proven not to work and unreasonably expensive, by previous games that tried it (if C.R would only play some games for last 20 years he would know)
And in same time , no word on gameplay. Its totally back seat for them.
And on the official website you find A TON of information on gameplay. Thousands of dev answers. Dozens of answers by Chris Roberts himself. Personally i recommend the in depth articles by Tony Zurovec, who is responsible for the Persistent Universe.
You just have to .... read .... or watch ... or listen.
Have fun
For me, gameplay means how does it feel to move? How fast does the game respond to my mouse movement or button smashing? How does combat feel? What is it like to look around corners or up and down cliffs. How does working with my inventory look and feel? How long does it take to progress? How hard is it to get the gear, equipment or ships you really want?
gameplay = How it feels to play the game.
I hate to be a naysayer here but it really seems like this game is not doing well at all. I really really hope I am wrong, I would love to play the game that they are trying to make but until alpha, or pre alpha, starts and they allow the backers to go in and play the game, I will never be convinced that this game will be half as good as they are making it sound.
You can post all kinds of great information and videos about a game but if the game feels bad, the game is bad.
Look at Crowfall, that game started its funding 6 months ago and its already in pre aplha, at this rate the backers will be in there playing in another 6 months or so, maybe sooner! They will be giving their feedback and if the developers are smart they will respond well and change the game according to the players wishes. That is how a player backed game should be, allowing the backers in to see it as soon as possible. Even if all you see is pixelated characters running and jumping around, who cares!? As a backer you deserve the right to see the progress of the game every step of the way. If you dump hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of dollars into a game you deserve to see every little detail of the game, you deserve to be able to download the code and look around inside of it.
I am not seeing any kind of openness with Star Citizen. They open the door wide enough for you to slip your hand in and give them your money and then they slam the door so you can't see what is going on.
You can check out the planetside social module for the last 2 months (not much to do yet, but for movement testing its sufficient ... soon there will be Buggy Races ;-)
FPS module should come (my guestimate) this year.
I am seeing a lot of openness from Star Citzen. More than in ANY other game develoment i have encountered so far. But you have to read the extremely detailed reports, watch the vblogs, participate in playtesting, give feedback to the developers ... some people do not want to do that it seems.
Have fun
Those are very valid concerns. because of CitizenCon, CIG, is giving a free fly demo until the 25th of this month. You can create an account on the RSI website then use CITCONFLIGHT2K15 code to download and play for free.
Give it a try, if you like, it may help answer some of your concerns.
Thank you!
edit:
For gameplay, there is plenty of it right now if you are a backer.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
The MMO framework for Star Citizen will be different from other games, although some specifics are familiar:
1) All players, planets, stations are part of a single Galaxy Server with no instancing. The server will be available for download so people can run their private universes amongst friends (or just themselves) if they choose.
2) Combat areas are instanced. Chris Roberts has stated a goal of 50-100 ships flying around together in combat. We haven't seen it in action yet, so we still don't know if it will reach that full capacity before the MMO is published.
3) Space is mind-bogglingly big. That's how they can get away with instancing only the combat areas. Fly around empty space in your home star system, and you're unlikely to bump directly into anything else. Fly around busy areas, and odds are higher that the Galaxy Server will arrange your combat instance. The transition to an instance should be seemless, so the player doesn't know when it's been mapped onto their location.
Here's a good video explaining the process, although it's currently 1.5 years old.
Squadron 42 is the single-player pc game that will be published first. Within that gameplay, you earn your citizenship within the United Earth Empire. Later, the MMO portion (Star Citizen persistent universe) will be released so that players/citizens can interact with each other in the larger universe.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Arena Commander is the space dogfight and racing part. Heavily used for testing and balancing.
Social Module is the buying stuff and interact with beer ... errr... other people part. Including trade, crafting and getting missions.
Over all this - but less visible - is the Persistent Universe framework .. economy, security, NPCs at work etc.
SQ42 uses parts from all modules, but focuses on a solo single player experience.
Have fun
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12770-Chris-Roberts-On-Multiplayer-Single-Player-And-Instancing
http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions
Have fun
Is there going to be crafting of any kind and housing, or I would guess your ship would be your house with storage. Or am I going to far with this thinking?
Star Citizen – The Extinction Level Event
4/13/15 > ELE has been updated look for 16-04-13.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2016/04/star-citizen-the-ele/
Enjoy and know the truth always comes to light!
Follow the links on all things about economy and crafting.
We already have a sort of housing with our hangars. We already have quite a bit of stuff in there, especially when you are a subscriber that receives monthly flair items.
Our ships will also be one of our housing options, kinda like the ships in SWG. It will not be a system like in SWG where you can fully move around anything (and create all kinds of new things with them ... loved it). It will be more a system like in SWTOR or LOTRO where you have some specific locations to drop things in (and rotate them a bit).
In the future it is planned that we can conquer and hold and manage space stations.
Have fun