I’ve been doing Mount & Blade these past couple months. Great fun, especially the 1866 mod I downloaded.
The trading and missions remind me of Privateer, which as I understand it is part of the Wing Commander series…? Also of Sid Meier’s Pirates!
~Max
Like it or not, Elite: Dangerous (and especially Odyssey) are like that. Once you get past flight training you’re on your own, and if you grab the wrong mission and fail it because it’s too hard for you (and there’s no way to know unless you have experience already in the game) you are in debt and your reputation is shot. It’s harsh and it’s supposed to be.
Star Citizen, on the other hand, is just overly ambitious garbage.
I guess the consensus here is that it’s not worth the download, stick to M&B which I am thoroughly enjoying?
~Max
As I happens, I have played a bit of Elite: Dangerous, and it’s night and day in comparison. It’s not the easiest game to get into, but the interface is mostly serviceable, and I was out flying missions almost immediately. It definitely seems unforgiving, but I can accept that.
I did figure out what I was supposed to do in Star Citizen after watching a video. There are apparently some terminals near the hangars that I can interact with to summon my ships. Now, I get the vibe they’re going for; they want all the in-game interfaces to be actually in the world itself, so any terminals or whatever are “virtually physical”. All well and good, except that there’s no hint in the game as to which terminals I had to go to. And there are zillions of terminals that are just decoration, with some tiny subset that matter. There should have been some guidance as to where to go.
When you search for new player guidance, one of the first pages you’re sent to suggests that you recruit an actual player to help you. That seems… ridiculous to me. The game is so opaque that you need people to explain in real time how to do basic things?
I’m sure I’d have gotten farther in if I watched a bunch more videos or found a tour guide or something. But no other game I’ve played requires this level of commitment just to play around.
That’s definitely a hard pass, even if this was a real game and not a bloated and buggy tech demo.
Echo that. I didn’t get very far in E:D, although it’s an extremely well-designed game. It’s just not the game for me. Still, they did a lot of subtle things to teach players in obvious and simple way. I could certainly argue that the developers could and should go farther in that respect, but the new player experience is not a complete disaster.
I’ve given Star Citizen a go, and, as previously discussed, Elite Dangerous and Mount and Blade. I’ve helpfully created a table for you.
| Game | Jank | Ambition/coder ratio | Theme | Guidance | Computer Required |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mount and Blade | Oh yeah. | Hugemungous | Low fantasy | Fairly low | An abacus should work |
| Elite Dangerous | Moderate to huge (DLC dependent) | Moderately low | Scifi | Pretty minimal | Moderately modern to top-end. |
| Star Citizen | Improbable | Improbable | Scifi | What? Who? Where? | probably need one of those bitmining farms to run this well |
Yeah good point. I’ve been playing Train Simulator World 2 on the Xbox and it is super bad for not telling you very basic things and giving you no clue as to why things aren’t working. Very frustrating to follow all the steps in a tutorial to end up with a train that has brakes still engaged and won’t move, then you find out from the internet that there are three or four other things that need to be done to set the train up properly.
Yeah. I can put up with a lot when it comes to janky/difficult initial experiences. E:D isn’t even that bad compared to the X series of games (X2: The Threat, X3: Reunion, X Rebirth, etc.). I put a lot of hours into those, and while you get dropped into the deep end as a new player, it was still possible to figure out eventually. Star Citizen makes those look like Disneyland. And not in a good way, where it feels like there’s a payoff.
It’s probably more so that the first time you experience the empty, buggy gameplay, there’ll be an extrovert fan talking in your earbud about how it’s actually really awesome, a feature not a bug, an experience unlike any other game, the future of pc gaming …
What’s “jank”?
Jank is the nouning of the adjective janky. Which means it’s put together sloppily. Held together by duct tape and bailing wire. And in the case of SC, a lot like a Potemkin village. Looks nice from a distance, but there’s nothing under the surface. Other janky games generally have more substance even if they’re still buggy and barely holding together.
And if that’s what they wanted, then they should have had a desk clerk at the hotel whom you could ask “Hey, where do I go to get a ship?”, and then signs saying “Ship rental, this way —>”, and then when you did rent a ship, the rental agent should have told you “And if you just use that terminal behind you there, you can summon your ship”, and a ship-summoning terminal should be right next to the ship-rental agency. Because that’s how a real world would do those things, and it’s supposed to be mimicking a real world.
So you’re looking for a game that puts the player on rails? Come on, you… oh, wait.
There are so many things wrong with the game, really, but the fact that they tried to make it like a real world and just aren’t even close is another symptom of the catastrophic, body-horror-level feature bloat of the project.
Had they just stuck with a clear objective, like “make this like Wing Commander Privateer, but cooler” then they’d have had time to perform focus group playtesting and guys like you and smilingbandit and acier could have said “the terminal thing is cool but there’s no useful NPC interaction and no one can figure this shit out” and they would have fixed that in 2015. Instead they spent that time adding ground vehicles or a cooking simulation part or whatever.
I don’t see how any project can survive this level of feature creep. Not just video games; ANYTHING. If one of my clients says this month “we’re going to purchase and install a new vertical CNC lathe in three months” I would think “well, this will probably work out, why not?” If every week they added a completely different add on requirement, like more machines or let’s add carpeting to the factory floor or let’s also start a football team, I’d assume the CNC will never be set up. Star Citizen is far beyond parody, it’s a pyramid scheme, albeit one that, bizarrely, the guy who runs it might still believe is actually a legit game project.
667 posts – nearly six years – ago:
Dr. Strangelove has nailed the most of it.
My definition of “jank” is a bit more subjective, and I sometimes use it fondly. “Bugs” have come to mean (generally) crashing events or other show-stoppers which make the game entirely unplayable. “Jank” has come to mean internal logic failures.
For instance, Bethesda games are often janky. Fallout 4’s death claws launching themselves hundreds of meters into the air upon death is not a show-stopping bug, but definitely not expected behaviour. “Goat Simulator” is a game that celebrates the game engine’s jankiness.
“Mount and Blade” isn’t really very janky at all, but I recall the animations looking a little off-kilter, feeling a little discount; it’s an entirely subjective assessment. But the game itself is broad in scope and entirely done by a husband-and-wife team. The ambition of the game is utterly stellar.
Also M&B had excellent combat tutorials, in my opinion. The manual (it’s an old game) gave some hints as to what you are supposed to do in general, and travellers in the tavern give you general direction as to suggested objects for the open-ended game.
~Max
There were clerks, incidentally, they were just non-interactive. Ok, maybe they don’t want to pay the voice actors yet. They could have still had some text-based interaction or the like.
But really, there are a zillion ways they could have handled it. The rental place could have sent you an email: “Thank you for renting from RSI rentals! To pick up your ship, please head to the terminals located near…”. Or the rental ship could have been added to a property list with a similar note. Or nav markers could have been added to your HUD. Or arrows appearing on the world itself could have appeared. Or a little signboard at the rental shop. Or a public address system that occasionally chimes in.
And yeah, fundamentally the problem here is that they were trying to emulate the real world but without adding all those extra bits that make the real world function. Though it’s getting to be a strange problem. An airport, for example, is going to hire some experts just to place appropriate signage, ensuring that it’s always clear where to head to reach a gate or the baggage claim or whatever. It’s a non-trivial problem to get right. Will persistent universe games (whether Star Citizen or otherwise) also have to hire experts to ensure people can navigate their world?
