Star Citizen's first-person shooting is getting backpack-reloading, dynamic crosshairs, procedural recoil, and other improvements to 'bring the FPS combat to AAA standard'
pcgamer.com
Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I'm no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
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imagine paying pcgamer for an advertisement like this to shout about dynamic crosshairs and backpack reloading like its fucking 1998.
Worse than all that, it's a fucking space sim. Why are all these space sims wanting to add FPS?
It’s not a space sim.
It’s a life sim set in space.
Chris won’t stop until ShowerTech(tm) is in the game with realistic health debuffs so there’s a consequence when you don’t do the maintenance gameplay loop on your ship’s bathroom.
I wish that was entirely a joke.
But Star citizen has always had FPS missions as a core gameplay aspect, and it’s really one of their main selling points. In no other game can you walk out of a mission, into a ship, hop in the pilot seat and go from the ground to orbit with no cutscene and all of it under player control. The amount of crazy shit you can do just because your character can leave the pilot seat is ridiculous. A month ago I teamed up with some dude who did bounty hunting. He EMPd the other player, had me EVA over to their ship, shoot open the airlock, and gun down the target, all so his buddy could come over and harvest the ship for resources to sell. The emergent gameplay, even though the game can still be very rough, is a really cool aspect of what they’ve made.
I admit, I was a backer of the original campaign for Star Citizen. However, with the dev cycle what it is, I think I'll be a grandparent before the game releases from early access. Last time I played it, it was a buggy mess, with only combat, and was not fun to me. I also admit, a lot of my angst comes from the way Elite: Dangerous tried to make FPS combat, etc., a thing. As someone who plays that game to explore, that entire DLC, as well as the alien shit they added, was part of system I had no interest in and, in my opinion, has further led to the downfall of E:D, a game that has been waiting for atmospheric landing, etc., but still, years later, barely has non-atmospheric landing.
I get the desire to walk about your ship, have carrier ships you can walk around with other players, and space stations you can visit actual NPCs in. However, if I wanted to shoot stuff, I'd play an FPS. I play E:D to explore and get that fear/anxiety/dread I only ever feel watching American politics. Just not my game play when I wanna just chill and narrowly avoid crashing my ship while exploring!
I think some of them want players to be "pirates," so they give them the tools to do so.
I'm only speaking from experience in other space games I've played.
That's a cool aspect of it, no doubt, I just wish it took a backseat to the core game play. We have so many FPS games, but not many great new-gen space sims.
And if this space sim can create perfect FPS experience, now you’ve got all the FPS money funding the development of a space sim.
See how that works? Markets create synergies and non-zero-sum games. In this case, putting the limited resources for the space sim into FPS elements makes new resources available.
But that's never how these things go. They put so many resources into FPS aspects that they almost entirely abandon the space sim. Just look at E:D for an example. They dedicated a whole DLC to walking around your ships and then threw ground assault missions into it.
The immersion from being a part of the world, walking around and experiencing stuff is neat and immersive. If the focus was on that stuff first and FPS second, cool, but that feels rarely the case.
Thanks for the comment!
Yeah, whenever I get in contact with another vessel my instincts tell me to board and start blasting
LOL. I totally thought these were internal names for novel features from the headline🤣