Star Citizen - Won't Support DX10 or 4GB PC's

Star Citizen is already unforgiving. And you'd better have a decent rig ready, because it's ready to leave slower rigs in the dust.

Cloud Imperium has never made any bones about the demanding nature of the game—you will recall the bit about how consoles "couldn't possible handle" it—but if you were thinking you'd be able to coast through with the mid-range rig you built in 2011, think again: When asked by DSoGaming if the minimum requirement could be cut back again, Engine Technical Director Sean Tracy said, "Likely not."

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Of course, if you're gaming on a PC with 4GB and a DirectX 10 card, the odds are that either you're playing Peggle, or you're already looking into a fairly major upgrade. And by the time Star Citizen rolls around, which isn't likely to happen for a couple more years, that sort of system will be just about completely untenable for any kind of gaming that isn't built into Windows.

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More information.

Sounds good to me.

I'm not really into Star Citizen (yet, I don't find the idea of a flight sim with combat all that interesting and hopefully there will be more to it) but I applaud devs leaving the stone age of computing and going with (no longer all that modern of) contemporary hardware and usage.

Plus given what's been shown of this game one could easily guess that the sys reqs would be more in line with "next gen" than ancient history.

I'm also not very enthusiastic about the game too. Even aquiring it looks complicated, having to buy separate ships, game modes and such. I just hope when it's released it won't be a microtransaction-heavy game.

Gwendo said:

I'm also not very enthusiastic about the game too. Even aquiring it looks complicated, having to buy separate ships, game modes and such. I just hope when it's released it won't be a microtransaction-heavy game.

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Complicated?

You pledge for a package - and it's 30$ for the entry level ship.

Then you have access to the full game and a starter ship. Considering that everything in the game can be earned by playing it - just like Elite/Frontier/Privateer/Freelancer - that's pretty straightforward.

The scope of the game is so massive that I struggle to imagine any other game in existence that offers that much for such a low price.

As for the system requirements - that's a match for what they're going for. From the very initial pitch, Chris Roberts has been crystal clear about this being a PC-only game that will push everything to the limit. It's NOT meant to run well on a mediocre rig.

That's the price of progress, and if the game is anything like it seems to be - I'll pay it with a smile on my face.

DArtagnan said:

The scope of the game is so massive that I struggle to imagine any other game in existence that offers that much for such a low price.

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It might appear like good value, but why would they ever be so foolish as to release the game?

61 million so far and they don't have a game.

Why is a game that doesn't exist making more money than many that do?

As it stands, people can conjure up an imaginary version of the game in their minds based on wishes and pixie dust and a feature list Peter Molyneux would be proud of.

Even getting closer to release will probably hurt sales as they need to start getting realistic and admitting they can't get in half the features they promised.

Maybe wait and see how it turns out, but it will be a long, long wait…

SirJames said:

It might appear like good value, but why would they ever be so foolish as to release the game?

61 million so far and they don't have a game.

Why is a game that doesn't exist making more money than many that do?

As it stands, people can conjure up an imaginary version of the game in their minds based on wishes and pixie dust and a feature list Peter Molyneux would be proud of.

Even getting closer to release will probably hurt sales as they need to start getting realistic and admitting they can't get in half the features they promised.

Maybe wait and see how it turns out, but it will be a long, long wait…

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Why? Because people apparently want to support it.

They don't have a game? That's really odd - considering it's a project under development set for release in 2016.

I know it can be a strange concept to some people. That's probably why crowdfunding didn't happen in a big way until recently.

Yes, it's all a fantasy - and all the work they've done and released so far is one big hoax. So are the detailed monthly reports on what every single team is doing. The videos and PAX shows are all made up of tricks and deceit.

Conspiracies everywhere!

As for promises, that's another interesting concept. Some people take goals and ambitions to mean promises. That's not what the words mean, though.

There's no way Star Citizen will have all the features they hope to develop for release. No one with the slightest sense of reality would expect that.

But if they make half the features, it will still be the most advanced and progressive space game ever made.

Some people get excited about that, and others don't.

But yes, if you have these trust issues - waiting is definitely the way to go. No reason to support something you don't believe in.

Good. Because IMO:
- Phonegames hurt the industry progress
- Consoles hurt the industry progress
- Cuddling with ancient machines hurts the industry progress

I'm watching this project closely, but have yet to buy in. Feature creep is my fear as the money just continues to pour in.

I'm also supportive of this project, and I'm glad they've decided to pull out all the stops and push the hardware requirements. I'd rather have it be the best it can be, and if necessary wait till upgrade time to enjoy it. So tired of having lived under the quality ceiling imposed by development parity with the last gen consoles.

We'll see how well Elite does, because it actually has a fairly similar feature scope, to be added over time. They've just been a bit quieter about it.

Ripper said:

I'm also supportive of this project, and I'm glad they've decided to pull out all the stops and push the hardware requirements. I'd rather have it be the best it can be, and if necessary wait till upgrade time to enjoy it. So tired of having lived under the quality ceiling imposed by development parity with the last gen consoles.

We'll see how well Elite does, because it actually has a fairly similar feature scope, to be added over time. They've just been a bit quieter about it.

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While I really like Elite, I don't think it has comparable scope.

Star Citizen is entirely hand-crafted at this point, which is a pretty big deal. They're talking about procedural generation of content, but the release version will be nearly all by hand.

From my time with Elite, I'm not really excited about going exploring - because every system looks pretty much the same - and the stations have minimal variety.

Judging from the PU demo of Star Citizen, the planets will all have completely unique assets and content - which is much more interesting to me.

Beyond that, the level of detail on the ships in Star Citizen is simply in a different universe altogether, so to speak.

That, coupled with dedicated teams for the FPS module and PU simulation should make for a much more wholesome experience.

Oh, and then there's the whole Squadron 42 singleplayer campaign of SC, where the very first chapter is supposed to be bigger than the entirety of Wing Commander.

I wish ED all the best, but I'm not seeing the games as being on the same kind of level at all. ED is like a fraction of SC when it comes to detail and content.

That said, both games are in development still - and I guess we'll see when they're both out.

Of course, I've already pledged more than 100$ to both - and I've been a subscriber to SC for a year now.

So, naturally, I intend to play them both quite a bit

DArtagnan said:

As for the system requirements - that's a match for what they're going for. From the very initial pitch, Chris Roberts has been crystal clear about this being a PC-only game that will push everything to the limit. It's NOT meant to run well on a mediocre rig.

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For those who were around during the Origin years, they know that pushing a PC to the limit to play the latest Chris Roberts game was nothing unusual.

I remember Strike Commander. It ran like a slideshow on the PC I had at the time. But it sure was a damn pretty slide show.

So what kind of a game well this Squadron 42 thing finally be?

Morrandir said:

So what kind of a game well this Squadron 42 thing finally be?

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It will be a modern Wing Commander more than anything.

DArtagnan said:

I wish ED all the best, but I'm not seeing the games as being on the same kind of level at all. ED is like a fraction of SC when it comes to detail and content.

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Well, I don't play alphas and early access and such, so I'll take your word for it. What I was driving at is the similarity of focussing on getting a solid core module out the door, with a view to adding FPS exploration, planetary surfaces, boarding parties, etc after release.

One thing, though – I did watch the clip of SC doing a planetary landing and running about on a surface base. It looked to me as though the landing on a the planet was, in a sense, like docking with a station – a cut scene takes over, and you're landed at one of the sandbox locations on that planet. Without procedural generation, this seems very likely to be the case, since hand-crafting the surfaces of entire planets to explore is infeasible. In that sense, isn't SC likely to be constrained in relation to ED?

Ripper said:

Well, I don't play alphas and early access and such, so I'll take your word for it. What I was driving at is the similarity of focussing on getting a solid core module out the door, with a view to adding FPS exploration, planetary surfaces, boarding parties, etc after release.

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Well, except that SC already has much of it in place - and the team at ED are just talking about what they'd like to add in a possible future.

It's a tremendous effort to add the kinds of things they're talking about, but I guess the talk is enough to make the games appear similar.

One thing, though – I did watch the clip of SC doing a planetary landing and running about on a surface base. It looked to me as though the landing on a the planet was, in a sense, like docking with a station – a cut scene takes over, and you're landed at one of the sandbox locations on that planet. Without procedural generation, this seems very likely to be the case, since hand-crafting the surfaces of entire planets to explore is infeasible. In that sense, isn't SC likely to be constrained in relation to ED?

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The actual landing sequence is non-interactive, that's true.

I guess constrained is one word for it.

But, you know, it depends on what you find interesting in a game.

If you take Frontier - from 1993 - they already had planetary landings. But, the actual planets were completely barren except for a single landing spot with a few polygons representing buildings on it - and an absurdly simplistic terrain mesh as you "explored" the surface of the planets.

Personally, after a handful of landings - it kinda dawned on me that there was nothing unique about any of them.

Star Citizen will have dozens of extremely detailed locations done by hand - close to a hundred, I believe - with a lot of unique and voiced quest content on them.

Some people get excited by numbers - like the hundreds of thousands of star systems in Elite Dangerous.

Personally, I'm all about actual content and visual variety - and I'll take hundreds of hours of constrained exploration over an infinite amount of hours of exploring a tiny variety of assets randomly put together.

SC is kinda like Skyrim where ED is kinda like Daggerfall, in that sense.

But, to each his own.

Though, of course, Chris Roberts have hired people dedicated to procedural generation, and maybe they'll come up with a way to have entire planets be explorable - as well as interactive planetary landings. But that's too far off for me to get too hopeful about it.

Ripper said:

Without procedural generation, this seems very likely to be the case, since hand-crafting the surfaces of entire planets to explore is infeasible. In that sense, isn't SC likely to be constrained in relation to ED?

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Possibly, though of course, ED won't come with planetside environments at release. They've promised that in a future update/DLC, but for the moment, it's all about the inside of your ship...

And I'm not sure if SC will have the same kind of size and scope that ED does, but I've still had waaay more fun with SC, even already. Even if ED ends up being way bigger with its billions of star systems, SC seems to have a lot more flavor, at least IMO.

I was so psyched about ED, but I've found that it's really hard to play with keyboard and mouse. I keep looking at those really expensive joysticks and being sad.

My ideal solution, which perhaps is what SC are planning with that new team, would of course be both! Complete procedurally generated environments, with lots of handcrafted locations and characters inserted in key places.

I'll be interested to see how well procedural generation can be done in No Man's Sky.

Ripper said:

My ideal solution, which perhaps is what SC are planning with that new team, would of course be both! Complete procedurally generated environments, with lots of handcrafted locations and characters inserted in key places.

I'll be interested to see how well procedural generation can be done in No Man's Sky.

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I'd agree with that

I prefer handcrafted content, but it's impossible to make it fast enough to keep up with the consumption rate.

So, a procedural approach with enough sophistication to "fake" something truly interesting would be a fantastic addition.

But, to be frank, I've never actually experienced "convincing" content made in that way. They might as well not really have it at all in most cases.

DArtagnan said:

It will be a modern Wing Commander more than anything.

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Ok, thanks. While I enjoyed playing WC back in the days, today this is not a game for me.

Morrandir said:

Ok, thanks. While I enjoyed playing WC back in the days, today this is not a game for me.

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I wasn't a really into WC as a whole, but I loved Privateer. So if this is Privateer on steroids then: