Tales from behind enemy lines
Tonight I used my evening to play 3.6 but it wasn't very interesting so I'm not doing a full write-up. Observations instead:
* They give you a shitload of ships and cash in this PTU, it's almost like an actual test environment as opposed to the "PU" which is definitely really a test environment except you don't get any of the stuff they want you to test, you have to buy it. It's extremely normal to have a separate testing server for your game that is itself in early access super-duper test mode alpha. It's even more normal to have a super-duper secret testing phase before that public testing phase before the regular release that is still actually just a testing phase. With all this testing you know every bug in the game is getting found, and smashed, in record time.
* So I got to fly the Retaliator which is the huge bomber that we all thought was going to be really cool back in the day. I am happy to report that it still sucks poo poo, though apparently (?) the torpedos now work and do absolutely devastate the super expensive chariots in PvP so that's cool and hilarious. But it still has 5 turrets that can't be used unless you get 5 actual people to sit in them, and no other guns, and it's very slow. Also none of the HUDs have been updated in the last like 5 "tiers" of HUD updates so you have to fly it blind all of the time, effectively. It's almost like they aren't uniformly updating poo poo with their passes and they just do updates to the stuff they want to sell to you again.
* Flying across the universe has been made even more fun. Now in addition to 15 minute flight times and your loving quantum drive overheating in mid-flight, you can also be interdicted. Now, you might think "Oh cool NPC interactions like in Elite" but no. No. This is Star Citizen. The interdictions are completely random and they are absolute. You will be pulled out of QT, there is no way to avoid it. You will bring your ship to a complete stop and let them "Complete their scan." If you do not- you are immediately given criminal rating, which will gently caress up your plans if they include landing at literally any place in the game because pretty much all of them will just shoot your rear end. So if you get interdicted you just... lose several minutes while they scan you. Naturally, for test purposes, the malevolent spirit that inhabits Star Citizen makes sure that you will be interdicted 2-3 times per QT trip anywhere. Going 20,000 km? Interdicted. 30,000,000 km? Interdicted. 100km? Interdicted. It is anti-fun.
* The new rest stops are, in my opinion, much better than the old ones. I like the giant models. I like the giant no-fire zones a lot less. The only cool terrain in the game for pvp fights and pvp isn't allowed- also they're covered in turrets. Also I landed at one and just exploded randomly so that's fun.
* Hover mode is incredibly fiddly and makes landing intensely difficult. See it turns out that most of the ships were not designed with the assumption that you'd need to land while keeping the nose perfectly level. And there's no landing assistance. So you're basically going to have to go to external cam, or otherwise guess where the pads are, because the game's sure not going to loving tell you, and nosing down to look will kill you instantly.
* My whole thing tonight was box missions. I wanted to see if mission stacking works so I took as many box deliveries as I could find that all started from the same moon. I probably spent 30 minutes flying around that moon gathering 7 missions worth of poo poo. Then I spent another 20 minutes trying to QT to the planet to deliver them, while my ship constantly got interdicted or overheated. Then I went to land at the drop-off point (Gate 1 of Loreville) and there was a giant no-fly zone around it that didn't appear until I had already flown through it, and I blew up and lost all my poo poo. The evil ghost at the heart of Star Citizen strikes again- I flew for an hour and landed 7 different times without issue but the second I looked like I might get something done, boom goes the dynamite and I'm back in the wank pod.
* They made deliveries pay out 7 or 8k and the combat beacons spammed by NPC's payed more or less the same. They are very gradually tuning the economic output of the game to a more realistic level, probably spurred on by the fact that their internal metrics were showing that nobody ever, ever bought any ships in-game because nobody could earn more than a few k before the patches came out and reset the servers. I'm not going to call the payouts generous- it will still take 100+ missions to earn even a garbage scow, at the current pay rates. But you can stack missions pretty hard, so that's maybe 10 hours of work now instead of hundreds. Still not worth it but- eh, they're moving in the right direction. I do find it hilarious that basically anything bigger than a Constellation is actively a liability to fly right now- you want small hard ships for combat, and small cargo ships for deliveries. Big ships can't turn fast enough for the pilot to fight effectively, and can't move fast enough to stack a lot of deliveries. If this were a normal game I'd say that was good, that we're kind of seeing the bottom-feeder economy put in place and the big ships will get bigger, riskier missions eventually. But this is Star Citizen so it's actually all just kind of shaking out accidentally and if you bought an Idris you can get hosed.
