******Official Star Citizen / Squadron 42 Thread******
- Thread starter Raumarik
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Soldato
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I bloody hope so 
Cheers all, that was a great laugh!
I've got a clip of the bounty hunters becoming the hunted that I'll sort out.
Some pics from our escapades
Captains Quarters with added 'this is fine' effect!
The game looks great in Ultra Wide, very cinematic.
When you list the steps, its pretty straight forward, but i'd still be more inclined to agree with Troezar simply because i think the whole experience is rather overwhelming and maybe faux-hardcore (?), like you're expected to know a lot in order for the experience to be easily enjoyable as a casual player checking out the game because its free for a week etc.
It doesnt help that CIG are expecting a lot. They dont want to waste time constantly updating a tutorial for an unfinished game that'll keep breaking tutorial aspects, which is understandable, but they also regularly try to encourage new players into a game thats often overwhelming, complex, and has broken or problematic UI and such.
They bring that audience in, and we cant be surprised when the games industry has spend over a decade trying to spoon feed players for mass-market appeal. They're COD people trying to play ARMA and many arent prepared to figure things out.
It just is what it is. People are justified for getting frustrated and struggling to make sense of things, but it also wouldnt harm them to take a moment to know what you're getting into, rather than expecting another choo choo train to enter their tunnel.
Caporegime
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Roadmap Roundup - June 8, 2022 - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42
Roberts Space Industries is the official go-to website for all news about Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It also hosts the online store for game items and merch, as well as all the community tools used by our fans.
robertsspaceindustries.com
Ends in October
Actually not a bad video from this guy.
www.youtube.com
Starfield - "Just not that important" ?!
Starfield Doesn’t Let You Fly Seamlessly from Space to Planet: ‘That’s Really Just Not that Important’.This quote from IGN interview with Bethesda's Todd How...
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Honestly I would agree but the requirements to do the steps I listed are, read the key binds in the options and that is it. There is nothing hard or overwhelming in my view.
- Use F interaction throughout the world. When on foot you scroll mouse wheel for speeds and hold shift to sprint.
- Press I for inventory and work your way through with some drop and drag for basic inventory use
- use mobiglass to select and accept a mission of whatever variety.
- Go to a store to purchase weapons, armours and tools.
- Mining, go to rock, scan with one click (again read the key binds to know which) and then scroll mouse wheel up and down for a min or two to figure out how it works and you can mine basic just fine. Yeah nuances come with it but the gameplay is so basic it is just a slight variation on the dozens of other games that do mining. And nothing like they suggested it would be in their design document.
I am just not seeing this overwhelming or complex issue that people are facing at the start. It is pretty much as arcade as you could get to the point that it and NMS is just as simple to fly in as example. If it was DCS flight mechanics requiring correct start procedure, check list and such then yeah 100% would get it but there is literally nothing that is of complex. My first play through took about 15 mins to get from hab to space and QT to a moon (started in lorville) and land.
The one thing I think that is a mess and difficult is the UI for the starmap. It just not good and we all know and that is something I feel could be issue but honestly, check out a quickstart video on YT for SC as there are dozens of them.
But this game become more and more arcade at each release is generally the biggest complaint I see in the general community because there is no depth to anything. Mile wide, inch deep gameplay is the jist of SC. I enjoy it with friends and it is fun doing silly things but it isn't a good 'game' at moment in all honesty.
I would say someone is missing something if new players report issues and players who've played for years think it's fine. As you say it seems to scope of the game is very broad and the depth is to yet be added. I would have gone about differently, keep it very small is size and scope and develop the depth and detail, once that is working then roll it out across new planets, cities, ships etc. but what do I know I'm not a developer 
I have had friends jump in and had a great time with it though and had no issue in terms of understanding during free-fly. Massive issues with bugs and crashing but the actual gameplay not a problem. One asked for a little help with the QT but two others just got in and started playing having come from NMS as their previous space game.I would say someone is missing something if new players report issues and players who've played for years think it's fine. As you say it seems to scope of the game is very broad and the depth is to yet be added. I would have gone about differently, keep it very small is size and scope and develop the depth and detail, once that is working then roll it out across new planets, cities, ships etc. but what do I know I'm not a developer
Again though not seeing a huge number of new players reporting this. There only ever a couple of threads about it during freefly events and most of that is more salty about how broken it all is (which it is).
I've been a backer for 8 years, I dont need the advice on basic stuff, but ive experienced enough of the game to understand why someone would give up when games have been dialled in for the casual audience needing to press just a couple of buttons when prompted, and gets somewhat lost looking at the keybind pages for flying, walking, and some keys having 2-3 actions via modifiers or in specific seats etc.
I dont play SC on my own, so i always jump on when i can when a mate pesters me to come play, and 95% of the time im flying. It took a dozen or so hours before we realised that for some unknown reason, if im flying his ship, he has to radio in for landing & opening the hangar doors. Same story with landing his ship at a station, if i land his ship it'll get impounded. I remember there being similar issues with rentals during freefly, and because we hadnt really played the game in years (we'd just gone to the expo events to look at new ships, thats about it) we didnt know what the deal was. Was it excessive server load due to the free fly, was it something we were doing wrong, or just something incomplete in SC.
Personally, im someone who's far more likely to have watched a dozen or so hours of someone else playing a game (a straight playthrough, rather than clips of entertaining moments) than i am to go into a game with limited knowledge, certainly if im the person paying for the game. But i know very few people are likely to do that, and are used to be able to download a game, and pick it up quickly. They're designed to be that way, even with early access titles, very few lack a tutorial after a couple of months or just throw you into an rich experience and ask you to figure it out for yourself. They all ease you in and introduce new gameplay once you've completed the previous step.
I dont think its unreasonable that players be dumped into the game, and are left to figure things out for themselves. However i understand people arent going to make the required effort needed, and are just going to give up and whine about it, as i have with my mate as we both struggle to understand why we're locked inside a hangar and ATC respond but dont open the hangar doors, or wont show me where to land, but they'll show my mate who's not the one flying. We knew the steps, but couldnt understand the actions, whether they're bugged, unintended, or an early limited solution etc, and ive watched every 10FTC, ATV, ISC etc pretty much everything except the Friday live eps, i've done the UK studio tour (2016), and the 2015 Citizencon, so im completely sold on the game, i dont need convincing, but i look at the state of the game and can only sympathise with people who know very little about the game, see pretty graphics and hear what it can do, and then find its rather overwhelming and expects new players to have patience and a level of clairvoyance as to whats poorly implemented and what isnt, all the little quirks you come across. When you know what to avoid, its fairly straight forward and intuitive, but for a while it isnt.
I dont expect CIG to do anything about, but i understand the new player experience is pretty harsh, and it really doesnt help that CIG seem to target the free-fly events with in-game events like expo's, which give backers added reasons to log in and play daily (or every other). So the experience during a free-fly is about as bad as it ever gets.
It's that combination of the game's bugs alongside the areas that are a little unclear that just make it less friendly to newbies. If new players weren't experiencing these regular bugs - it would likely be a lot less frustrating for them to try and learn their way around the game.
Put yourself in the shoes of a new player, you decide to spawn at New Babbage. Perhaps the first time you get out of bed the game bugs and you climb out the bed the wrong way and fall to your death (think they have fixed that now?) and then spawn in a hospital. You've then got to find your way to the spaceport, only to fall through a floor as you walk into an elevator that's now spawned in correctly. It then takes you 10 minutes or so to get over to the Spaceport on the monorail as you've not memorised the route. All this whilst getting ~20fps and notable stuttering, are you really surprised why a player would be pretty annoyed at this point and give up at how unfriendly the experience is?
Put yourself in the shoes of a new player, you decide to spawn at New Babbage. Perhaps the first time you get out of bed the game bugs and you climb out the bed the wrong way and fall to your death (think they have fixed that now?) and then spawn in a hospital. You've then got to find your way to the spaceport, only to fall through a floor as you walk into an elevator that's now spawned in correctly. It then takes you 10 minutes or so to get over to the Spaceport on the monorail as you've not memorised the route. All this whilst getting ~20fps and notable stuttering, are you really surprised why a player would be pretty annoyed at this point and give up at how unfriendly the experience is?
Exactly, good game design makes things intuitive and has a learning curve. Make things easy and doable right from the off, increasing the complexity as new players are introduced to the world. Just polish that very first part and at least new people will give it a go. If they try it for free what's the chance they will stay if they get no-where right from the off? Looks to have great potential but you won't realise that by just selling overpriced pixels to veterans. It's basic stuff they seem to have forgotten.
Yep indeed. I 100% get the bugs issue. The thing is that is not something CIG can just flick a switch. There is a reasonably basic learning curve with even tooltip elements are there although a little limited and dated. Hopefully that side will get better come 4.0 but I can't see that changing for at least 12 months.
As you mention though, possibly just having a free-fly that has no other event going on when player count is low at time would help with the server load to really give starting players a go.
Good grief, found this in my Youtube history, Star Citizen April 2016, what a blast from the past, this is ###### awesome, that arcade audio man....
Also with bugs
Fetching a ship, without being told to wait 45sec while it has a good long think about it??
I also really miss the landing UI, which made it so much easier to stick a large ship into the drop-in hangar. I dont like the idea of switching to 3rd person to land, and usually just get my mate to guide me in, and i really wish that UI was still there so you could do it properly yourself. The automated landing you need to be pretty close to the pad surface for it to do the rest, at which point you're already past the hard part. But when you're trying to get through the actual entrance, it feels like you're going into a hangar a size too small. Maybe the Herc is right at the limit of an XL (?) size hangar dimensions so its a particularly snug entry.
I never really get the manual landing. Surely it makes far more sense with all the sensors and computers on board to have automated landing. After all SpaceX have managed it alreadyFetching a ship, without being told to wait 45sec while it has a good long think about it??
I also really miss the landing UI, which made it so much easier to stick a large ship into the drop-in hangar. I dont like the idea of switching to 3rd person to land, and usually just get my mate to guide me in, and i really wish that UI was still there so you could do it properly yourself. The automated landing you need to be pretty close to the pad surface for it to do the rest, at which point you're already past the hard part. But when you're trying to get through the actual entrance, it feels like you're going into a hangar a size too small. Maybe the Herc is right at the limit of an XL (?) size hangar dimensions so its a particularly snug entry.
Fetching a ship, without being told to wait 45sec while it has a good long think about it??
I also really miss the landing UI, which made it so much easier to stick a large ship into the drop-in hangar. I dont like the idea of switching to 3rd person to land, and usually just get my mate to guide me in, and i really wish that UI was still there so you could do it properly yourself. The automated landing you need to be pretty close to the pad surface for it to do the rest, at which point you're already past the hard part. But when you're trying to get through the actual entrance, it feels like you're going into a hangar a size too small. Maybe the Herc is right at the limit of an XL (?) size hangar dimensions so its a particularly snug entry.
Its one of the things that crossed my mind when watching that, just how quick and easy it is to grab your ship and go.....
lol, thats true. I think manual landing is just more satisfying, but probably a significant factor is that the automated version just feels so slow (pause while you hold the button, it automatically centers itself to the middle of the pad, and then lowers) and you've already done 90% of the job by the time it'll let you do it anyway, so theres little benefit to be had.I never really get the manual landing. Surely it makes far more sense with all the sensors and computers on board to have automated landing. After all SpaceX have managed it already