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Ship Review - Day 7
MISC is definitely not just the first acronym that popped into a hack writer's head when he was given the assignment "Come up with a corporation for all the random poo poo that doesn't belong anywhere else." In the year 3000 Space Japan will partner with the space Chinese Turtles to make a whole bunch of ships with space Chinese Turtle technology. Why didn't they partner with the space Japanese Birdmen? Don't be a loving racist, okay, that's why. Anyway some of these ships are getting to the core of what is wrong with Star Citizen so here we loving go.
MISC Reliant
Price: 65-85 USD
Guns: Probably, got to have guns on your news van
Speed: Fast? I don't know.
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Supposedly a lot of things, none of them in-game
Reviewer's Thoughts: So by the time the Reliant was "Concepted" CIG and Chris had gone well off the rails in terms of design. No longer just a space MMO with fighters and trading, Star Citizen was an everything simulator. Variants couldn't just be good at combat, they had to introduce whole unique lifestyles, each targeted at a weird subset of the dreaming fanbase. The Reliant was sold as, no poo poo, a News Van, a Mobile Science Platform, and a general Minivan. And of course it couldn't just be like "Oh it's got a yellow paintjob and we made a twitch deal." Chris had to promise an "Enhanced imaging sub-suite" and envision a whole range of news-reporter gameplay, none of which had previously been designed or integrated into the game. Scope creep began to turn into a rapid unplanned scope disassembly. There is no scope anymore- the scope is literally everything. This ship, of course, has only been released as the base variant because the extras make no sense and cannot be implemented in a sane universe to any degree of buyer's satisfaction, so they never will be. The base variant is another crappy low-cost starter ship. I'm sure it works fine for the purpose but it is functionally no different from the Avenger or Mustang or Aurora.
with strut:
without strut:
MISC Freelancer
Price: 110-165 USD
Guns: 4 very big guns
Speed: Moderate
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: Yeah
Reviewer's Thoughts: Star Citizen's price-creep has given it a real problem. Namely, that most of the original ships are way more effective for their prices than ships these days. The Freelancer, for example, is a 3-man trade ship with 4 size 3, and 2 size 1 guns. It's reasonably maneuverable and has decent shields. This makes it an unbelievably effective combat ship, in many cases better than ships two to three times more expensive than it. If it were sold today it'd probably cost 250 dollars, but it is grandfathered in at the original price. I mean it's still insanely overpriced, don't get me wrong- but it is highly effective in that price range compared to poo poo like the news van. Anyway, they made a shitload of variants for this thing and they mostly make sense in that they all trade one aspect to enhance another- better cargo, better jump range, better combat- but they're all kind of boring and I won't talk about them here. This is a good ship and, alongside the Cutlass, probably would be my go-to for general purpose "loving around" ships if I could loving afford one. It can't be all good, though- CIG royally hosed up the interior design on this thing when they first released it. They decided that the canopy needed a strut literally right in the center of the pilot's vision. Naturally this got a ton of flak, and they eventually fixed it in one of the seven hundred inevitable redesigns that they seem to have to do on every ship.
MISC Razor
Price: 145 USD
Guns: Oh I'm sure it has some
Speed: Super duper fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can race!
Reviewer's Thoughts: Another example of scope explosion. So CIG introduced a race mode early on in the game's conception. I don't know why, nobody was really clamoring for Formula 1 in their fleet combat sim, but after coming back from Monaco Chris seemed to think it was very important to include for some reason. So they started selling race ships. First it was just a variant of the 300i, but faster! Then they sold a dedicated race-only ship, the M50. Naturally racing wouldn't be very exciting if there was only one ship, so they sold another- the Razor, and it is strictly faster than the M50 so I guess gently caress you if you bought the earlier ship. As for the races themselves- well, there's only one track, nobody plays that mode, and it has never been updated or changed in any meaningful way. It takes about 2 minutes to complete a race and mostly involves instantly rotating your ship at the next ring and just gunning it. To alleviate this tedium, CIG introduced "Scramble Races" in-game, but they are randomly mixed between space races and ground races, and hey guess what you can't haul ground vehicles in one of these, so pretty much guaranteed you will never get the race you want. Also the actual race itself is broken. It is pretty clearly the lowest possible priority. This is because racing in a fleet combat sim is stupid, and everybody on the dev team knows it except for Chris.
MISC Prospector
Price: 155 USD
Guns: It has rock guns
Speed: Surprisingly fast
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can mine!
Reviewer's Thoughts: Much like racing, mining in Star Citizen is a hosed up mess. Early on mining was introduced as a pillar of economic activity in the game's concept, because Eve has it, and other MMO's have it, and Elite has it, and it's just kind of a staple of spaceman space adventures in general. How else are you going to get minerals in the year 3000 if an intrepid commando doesn't pilot his faster-than-light ship up to a big asteroid and shoot some chunks off of it? Robots? Don't make me laugh. Anyway illogic of mining in a post-scarcity economy aside, Chris had grand plans for mining. You'd fly up to the rocks and scan them by planting sensors on them and detonating charges. One player would control the cutting lasers, another would handle the tractor beam, another would run the ore processor, because those all sound like exciting jobs that people will spend hundreds of hours doing. They sold a great big-rear end ship for like 500 dollars based on this concept. Then a couple years went by, and they sold (and immediately released) this one. It doesn't have sensors to place. It doesn't have explosives to detonate. It doesn't have a tractor beam or an ore processor. It has a single laser, and you mine by firing it into the rock, exactly like every other space game. Critically, though, this ship is the only thing in the game that can mine. And it costs 155 dollars. CIG took the whole mining mechanic, reduced it to the same laser-on-rock as every other game, and then sold it to backers for triple the price of a full and complete AAA game. loving... Star Citizen, man. Of course if you point out to backers that this ship is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of mining introduced and sold along with the great big frigate-sized ship, they will tell you that "It's tier 0! They will improve it!" They won't improve it. What they're going to do is come up with a completely different type of mining, that only the big ship can do, and the type of mining that the Prospector can do will always remain exactly as it is now. That's right- they are going to have to start implementing whole aspects of the game entirely for one ship or another, because they loving sold them already and didn't think about crossover.
MISC Hull-C
Price: 100-1000 USD depending on hull size
Guns: Oh I'm sure it has a turret
Speed: Doesn't exist
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can trade!
Reviewer's Thoughts: Here is another entirely single-serving ship design. It is the trader, it is made to trade. Chris watched the "Heavy Metal Queen" episode of cowboy bebop and decided he wanted space trucking. So they made and sold a space truck and, hilariously, copy-pasted it four more times. That's right, you can buy this thing in A, B, C, D, or E variants, scaling from a tiny little starter up to a carrier-sized monstrosity. It's just the same hull shape at different sizes. Naturally they didn't think this through at all, and the interiors and exteriors are going to have to be completely redesigned across all 5 ships because poo poo like windows and doors absolutely will not scale that way, but those are problems for future Chris! Also, the way this ship is designed makes it completely incompatible with every single landing pad in the game- you literally could not land this ship, if it gets loaded up with boxes the way that the concepts indicate. They have introduced no mechanic or landing pad that would fix this, to my knowledge. They also haven't released any of these ships! What a coincidence! If they ever do they will have to have some kind of like docking collar to docking collar spacedock implemented at every station, which... is never going to happen. Future Chris is gonna have a lot of scrambling to do.
MISC Starfarer
Price: 295 USD
Guns: Bunch of useless turrets
Speed: Slowest thing in the game
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can get shot
Reviewer's Thoughts: Boy I'm getting tired of reviewing all these single-mechanic ships that were sold without any thought being given to the mechanic that was attached to them. Time to kick back and review a... space fuel tanker, you say? For a game that doesn't... doesn't actually require fuel for general flight? And also has no refueling mechanics? Okay. Sure, gently caress it. So this is the Starfarer, the space refueling tanker that every aspiring fleet commander needs to have in his or her (but let's be real, his) hangar! Your fleet won't get anywhere (there's nowhere to go) without one of these to refuel (you can't refuel) it! Just the thought of running dry (there is no fuel) has left many fighter pilots (people who bought fighters) in a cold sweat (you can't sweat either). Buy a Starfarer and ensure you never run out of gas again! So yeah. There are two types of fuel in Star Citizen and neither is required for flight- there is boost fuel, which runs your afterburners, and there is quantum fuel, which lets you jump around. The Starfarer can refuel neither of these, because refueling isn't a thing that actually exists in game. Even if it could, it wouldn't be necessary because every station and landing platform in the game can refuel and they are all easily reachable. But the Starfarer sure does exist in game! What do you do with it? loving nothing! It is a slow fat pig with no mechanics attached to it, that exists only because they sold it at one point and can't back out of that deal. Behold the future of all of your single-mechanic spaceships.
MISC Endeavor
Price: 500-1000 USD
Guns: who cares
Speed: doesn't exist
Can It Do Anything Other Than Fight: It can destroy your game design
Reviewer's Thoughts: Ah the capstone. The MISC endeavor. At the point this was sold CIG had gone completely "gently caress It" and was just shoveling poo poo out the airlock and into backer's hands as fast as possible. This is a science ship! A farming ship! It's got a biodome! It's got a telescope array! It's got a supercollider! It's got a Research Pod and a Science Pod which are two distinct different things! It's got a medical bay! It's got a landing bay! We literally sold each of these modules on its own, for real cash, so we can't just drop them later- and we have no idea how we're going to implement any of them! It's a capital ship with like 8 distinct game mechanics tied to it, none of which we thought through in the slightest! Buy it NOW RIGHT NOW! We'll figure out how space farming works and why you'd even want to do it later. gently caress you, Future Chris! Eat all of my poo poo, presented in the form of this ship which could be three complete self-contained games in itself, signed Present Chris!
Did you think I was kidding about the telescope array?
Or the particle collider?
Surely the farm pods though right?
Huh. So, at this point anyone paying attention to CIG has to come to one of two inescapable conclusions. Either they have scope creeped themselves into an impossible situation, where there is no way they are going to release anything that even comes close to the promised gameplay, and what they actually put out will be like "Telescope array: Gives a +10% buff to your research speed!" Or, they never intended to actually implement any of the stuff I have mentioned in this line of ships: multi-crew mining, ship refueling, space science, news reporting- and are literally just selling ships based off a list they made at one point of "Things to do in space." MISC, more than any other company and ship set in the game, exemplifies why Star Citizen will never be a complete product. It can't be. No game could contain all of this and not just be reality plus spaceships. They aren't selling structured pieces of a fun design that they already have in their heads here. They're just throwing everything at the wall and, whether it sticks or not, oops they already sold it and now they have to deliver. They can't deliver. Do not buy these ships.
