We just had a discussion about the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there’s been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it’s kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn’t add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it’s a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman – an indie fighter combat game (not space – atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat – did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I’m thinking that maybe there’s room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of “Hollywood space” – fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around – were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don’t have that around any more.
There’s a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it’s that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn’t handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you’ve got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it’s just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we’re past that point.
I think what you're noticing about on foot sections in modern space games is because merging that sort of experience with a space sim is truly the space sim's "final frontier", so to speak. It's the only part of an immersive gameplay experience that is yet to be executed as cleanly as the in-ship portion of a deep systems driven sci Fi space exploration game.
It's why Starfield is the way it is, they tried to conquer that frontier as well, and had to make a lot of concessions to do so and didn't have any prior experience in that sort of genre. I think it is safe to say that Starfield didn't succeed well enough or deep enough to be the definitive shining example of a space sim with equally executed space and ground gameplay styles (partially because it's not truly a space sim at all, more like an arcadey take on it )
One day a game will, and it'll be awesome, but it'll probably still be a while. Starfield showed that even if you throw lots of money and a professional team at it it's not a sort of game you can easily make.
Have you played Everspace and Everspace 2? They’re more arcade-y but they scratch the same itch for me. The core gameplay is just fast paced space dogfights
I like the person casually walking into the fire at 19:05. I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly, most noticeably at the end of the video.
Amazing tech demo, but I wonder if they’re focusing on the right things. Physics-based nosebleeds are cool, but not as noticeable as getting reflections right.
I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly,
It’s called screen-space reflections: Things that aren’t on screen don’t reflect because, well, they’re not rendered. The alternative is either not having reflections, having the “screen” not be a rectangle but the inside of a sphere, or, and that’s even more expensive, raytracing.
It’s a bog-standard technique and generally people don’t notice, which is why it’s good enough. Remember the rule #1 of gamedev: Even if not in doubt, fake it. It’s all smoke and mirrors and you want it like that because the alternative is 1fps.
You can also do overscan, but that’s costly since you’re rendering a bigger picture (I am not a rendering engineer but have experience with offline rendering)
Well yes I was answering under the assumption of “eradicate 100% of artefacts”, and as long as you don’t render all the perspectives there’s always going to be some angle somewhere that you’re missing.
Practically everything in rendering is a terrible hack (including common raytracers as they’re not spectral) but realism is overrated, anyway.
We’ve been trying to tell y’all this for years, we just want you to have fun and not listen to horrendous “journalists” that smear Star Citizen for clicks. But you don’t create multiple offices across the world with over 1000 full time employees and dozens of third party contractors if you’re trying to scam your fans. You also can’t create a AAA studio from the ground up in just a few years. This studio started with 8 people in a basement and it grew slowly, because you have to. Only so many people are looking for work at a time and only so many of them are hirable. It took them 10 years just to have as many devs as other AAA studios, but they knew they had the budget to go AAA from early on. So for a long time there weren’t enough people to deliver a game of this scope in a reasonable time. They knew it, we knew it, it was part of the plan. They were hiring like mad across the world for years and years because the payoff in the end will be a well supported AAA game like no other. Now that they are chugging along at full speed, people are starting to see what the rest of us have been trying to show you. Yes, Chris Roberts wants to be a billionaire CEO. But he also wants to build a rad game in good faith and has the money to do so.
So yeah, it’s taken a while and will be a while still, but it’s a genuinely fun game to play, even now. If it goes belly up tomorrow I’ve already got my money’s worth of enjoyment out of it. Every quarter, new massive updates drop. Once Squadron 42 is launched and running smoothly I think it will change a lot of hearts and minds. Just play SC during a free fly week. It’s janky as early access games always are, but genuinely a fun time.
You should all be angry at the shitty hit pieces that deprived you guys of quality online scifi shenanigans by lying to you about this game and remember gaming news isn’t always good journalism, sometimes reputable sites will post tabloid garbage because there are no rules, only shareholders and click quotas.
You’re right, but I think its important to recognize that important distinction, otherwise some, such as myself in the past, have been lead to believe that they had previously released a successful game
Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and quality of their decisions what you want, but they were always very honest and transparent about the work they are doing and the huge goal they are chasing.
but people are playing it now. dont they know its garbage? any game that doesnt have 90fps and has a loading screen is an automatic zero out of ten. its the way of gaming
This is visually impressive but with what they’re showing in gameplay, it doesn’t look much like 4 or 5 like I think I expected? The aiming looks like it’s the 2 and 3 style of stop, hold aim, move gun. That said, it also showed crouch walking which isn’t in 3. I’m curious how similar or different it plays.
My big points to hit for a remake would be an improved camo and surgery system. The original game has you pressing start a lot. Like a lot. Having a quick menu for camo would be gigantic. Surgery right now is mostly, you’re in a boss fight and got hit, now pause and see if you ran out of bandages yet.
Crouch walking was in the 3ds remake of 3. I fully expect this to be identical to that version and gameplay with no enhancements to anything except the visuals.
Nope! Download away! In 2012, Microsoft used to even have a self hosted download link acknowledgment of its abandonware status but it’s gone. So it here
Yep! Discovery alone has been going since 2006, and has had a 24/7 multiplayer server running consistently that entire time (barring minor outages from faults and attacks). Pretty incredible really.
I also don’t like thinking about it because I first registered an account on their forum in 2007… really puts the inexorable march of time into perspective.
I played the demo the other day. It really like it. Really nails the kind of PS1/DC survival horror vibe. I was getting a lot of Blue Stinger vibes from it
Honestly, I was interested in this game until the most recent re-release of the Metal Gear Solid games that Konami’s managed to fuck up.
I now 100% expect to see this game get fucked up too. If Konami can’t even handle the most basic of ports, how could we trust them to actually make a good remake of MGS 3 delta, arguably the best of the MGS series?
We shouldn’t trust them. If you have to get this game, pirate it, or pick it up on a deep deep sale way after it launches. Fuck Konami, They don’t deserve your money.
You can host your own server too, although there’s a few steps you need to follow to get FLServer working properly. There’s instructions on the Discovery forums for that.
youtu.be
Aktywne