@Jennkryst said in General Video Game Thread:
Elite Dangerous is adding Space Legs. Whoop whoop!
I'm looking forward to booting it back up and trying that out once Odyssey hits!
Meanwhile, I loaded Star Citizen up for the first time in forever a little while ago and holy flipping cheese.
Logged into a city (New Babbage) on one of the corporate-owned planets (Microtech) in the Stanton system. Got up, went downstairs, took a maglev train over to a shopping mall area, bought some new clothes (and a chicken burger!), took the train back to the residential area, got one of my vehicles out of storage in a garage, drove around in the snow outside, drove out of the city and off into a forest, wandered around, drove back when the weather got shit, went back inside, took a train to the spaceport, got one of my ships out of storage, got takeoff clearance, flew across the system to another planet (ArcCorp), got landing clearance, hopped out, got transport over to Bevic Convention Center to check out the displays for the in-game "Invictus Week" stuff, went to the shopping area, bought different clothes (FASHION IS THE TRUE ENDGAME IN EVERYTHING), went back to hop on my ship, was planning to fly off to somewhere else for more clothes shopping when I got poked on Discord with "Hey, we need a healer, the one who was going to go run this with us can't make it, can you come help?" and logged off of Star Citizen to go play FFXIV instead.
It's interesting, really. Elite and Star Citizen are trying for very much the same sort of full living universe, but have taken very different approaches to it.
Elite went for a deep but narrow cut of their system; they picked a very small number of things and built those systems, then built a whoooole bunch of content for those systems. It let them release something functional very early on, but it's also meant that sometimes as they add new stuff—like when they added planetary landing and whatnot—they have to backtrack and rip out things (hence why getting out of ships has taken them so long, among other things). But it means what they have live at any given moment is a fully functional game.
Star Citizen, in contrast, is building out a broad but shallow version; they're building every system in the game (landing, ship maintenance and customization, mercantile, cargo, cities, enivronmental biomes, procedural content, ship-to-ship combat, FPS combat in an environment with gravity, FPS combat in zero-G), but then only making one or two bits of content with the systems to tune them and make certain that everything interconnects and works together well, building out one solar system to make sure all the pieces work on a wider scale, and then expanding out into the rest of the universe. It meant any one system you could play with was pretty cool, but the whole thing felt more like a very large engine tech demo than anything else.
So Elite always felt to me like we could do things, but there wasn't a lot of detail to anything and they were all sort of siloed systems. You had a universe to fly around and explore and mine and trade in, but it felt narrow. Everything you could land on that wasn't a space station was a rocky surface, every space station you landed on was just a menu you interacted with from in your cockpit, etc. Star Citizen, in contrast, always felt to me like they had a lot of detail—look, I can walk around inside my ship! I can see how systems will be damaged, and how I'd need to put down and repair them in a dire situation, if dire situations could arise!—but not much to do, because every system was getting just enough content to test the system and show it worked; like I said, a tech demo more than anything else.
And now Elite's starting to add some of the missing major systems/features into the established game, while Star Citizen's adding all kinds of content into the systems they've spent all this time building and interconnecting with planets and missions and storylines and whatnot, and I'm actually really eager to see where they both go. Right now SC still feels like a tech demo in alpha 3.9, admittedly, but it's starting to really feel like a tech demo of a game instead of an engine.
It feels like we're on the cusp of a very good time to be an internet spaceship enthusiast.
to 
