Squadron 42: Space combat game by the creator of wing commander. Ambitious as hell.

[Finicky]

Elaborate presentation video here: http://www.gamespot.com/shows/gamesp..._panel20121010
High quality screenshots here : http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...-screenshots_8
Higher quality short trailer here : http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/g...itizen-trailer
Crowd funding pitch, always funny to watch these things : http://player.vimeo.com/video/51135962

Skip to 23 minutes in the presentation if you just want to see the tech demonstration/gameplay bits.


Seems like the guy is really ambitious about the game, for example he mentions how you can have other players aboard your ship to just roam the deck/hallways and look out of the window as you fight, or man your turrets like in star wars, or even man your fighter jets inside your hangar (if you have one) and take off from inside your hangar and protect you/fight alongside you.

Imo the from the presentation the guy seems really insightful (though his nerves seem to be killing him), well worth watching.
Here is an article that happens to also be a good summary of the presentation:
http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/...-chris-roberts

From the tech demo bit: the graphics look insane, to me it looks like the kind of mega leap crysis was in 2007 compared to everything else at the time.
The cockpits look brilliant too.

http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/
Here is the game's website, it will have all the info and updates about the game, this is also where their crowd funding thingy is located.

[BobbyFizz]

Still another year or so till we'll be playing it in any form (alpha/beta etc), by what he said in the presentation. Looks absolutely brilliant though.

Edit: est. delivery on the early access pack is Nov 2014.

[Finicky]

Still another year or so till we'll be playing it in any form (alpha/beta etc), by what he said in the presentation. Looks absolutely brilliant though.

Edit: est. delivery on the early access pack is Nov 2014.

Yeah but mixing wing commander with freelancer and eve and adding a bunch of all-new stuff should make any space game fan salivate.

He actually genuinly sounds like he wants to make a game, a special game.
Most presentations sound like they just want to make money, and the game is but a means to an end.

[Drake Sigar]

Yeah but mixing wing commander with freelancer and eve and adding a bunch of all-new stuff should make any space game fan salivate.

I want a fantastic single-player story in the midst of a galactic war and a slew of deep colourful characters to fight alongside and play poker with. It seems unlikely I'll get that if the developer insists on mixing all those elements when just one is hard enough to get right.

*Heroic pose* General buzzkill, away!

[frenz0rz]

I'm incredibly excited, but I pray it doesnt go the way of Freelancer. That is to say an extremely overambitious myriad of brilliant ideas that is never completed, and is eventually cut to pieces and released half-finished so as to prevent the whole venture being a total failure. Thats not to say that I didnt love Freelancer, but the whole experience was always slightly soured by the nagging feeling that it could have been so much more. I truly hope that this becomes the game that Chris Roberts has wanted to make all along.

At least this time theres no big nasty publisher (Microsoft) to force the thing out before its done and then proceed to dismantle the company. Hoorah for crowd funding?

Also, please have John Rhys-Davies as a voice actor in the singleplayer campaign again.

(Edit: He was in Wing Commander too?!)

[Sparkasaurusmex]

you can have other players aboard your ship to just roam the deck/hallways and look out of the window as you fight, or man your turrets like in star wars, or even man your fighter jets inside your hangar (if you have one) and take off from inside your hangar and protect you/fight alongside you.

If this works I will need some friends! Sounds awesome, just what I've always wanted in a spaceship game.

[Mohorovicic]

Oh brother. Another space game that pretends it's World War I dogfight sim.

Okay - so real space is boring. I get it. But why not use something else then? Basically what you want for games like these is a)zero gravity environment and b) friction(or in other words, a medium - probably an atmosphere). Is it really that hard to come up with an original setting that combines the two? Hell, I can think of several possibilities right now. Most of them are borderline improbable, sure, but they're still better than tearing the laws of physics a new one in ye olde space.

[coldvvvave]

Oh brother. Another space game that pretends it's World War I dogfight sim.

Was BVR combat ever realized in any non-hardcore sim game?

[Makariel]

I'll probably just walk around the carrier for hours, looking for people to play poker with. 'Ambitious' is a word being thrown around a lot now, but that sums it up quite nicely. For now I'd just want to see the Wing-Commander-esque singleplayer campaign. If they make this Privateer/Freelancer MMO afterwards, that's fine too, as long as they don't charge me a monthly subscription fee.

Oh brother. Another space game that pretends it's World War I dogfight sim.

World War 2 I think. At least it's not adapting what looks like line infantry tactics from Napoleonic times (ME3, I'm looking at you) or 17th century naval warfare (Star Trek Online), so thats already something.

[Bilbo1981]

Looks amazing!

[Grizzly]

From the tech demo bit: the graphics look insane, to me it looks like the kind of mega leap crysis was in 2007 compared to everything else at the time.

One of the big advantages of making space games is that space is empty, and therefore, does not have to be rendered into polygons. So polygons you normally spent on, say, trees and buildings can now be spent on making spaceships extremely pretty.

[Internet]

$30 / 24 pounds is a hell of a lot to pay for a game kickstarter, and hosting the crowdfunding on his own site is a bit sketchy (even if it will save tens of thousands).

[internetonsetadd]

... hosting the crowdfunding on his own site is a bit sketchy (even if it will save tens of thousands).

I think it went beyond sketchy and halfway toward failure. To have that level of exposure and not be able to convert it into pledges at maximum capacity was a long dive off suck mountain. The campaign page is presently failing to do a couple crucial things. There's still no counter (the total was somewhere north of $400k last I saw). And there's no easy comment page for the forumly disinclined, and thus no means of encouraging casual backers to stay involved. I'm pretty sure these things matter.

IISC, at launch the first two tiers of substance ($30 and $35) were limited, with the $40 tier being the standard base tier. The $35 tier is gone now, and the $30 tier doesn't seem to be limited any longer. I'm not sure what impact that's going to have on the campaign, but I imagine any savings self-hosting was going to provide is on its way toward evaporating. As much as I want this project to succeed, I'm not sure I'd be willing to spend $40 on a digital pre-order two years in advance, so good riddance.

[DaftPunk]

We have a new graphic king :o

[RakeShark]

The amount of squee I've have over the last 2 days... I need to write something up for y'all. Soon.

[Hensler]

I dunno - I'm pledging some money, but I remember big promises like this about Starlancer and Freelancer that never came to fruition. Freelancer was a fun game, but it was more or less Diablo in space. Before Microsoft bought out Digital Anvil, Roberts was making Molyneaux-esque hype and promises about what he was making. I'm hoping for greatness out of this project, but the man has burned me before.

[BillButNotBen]

This sounds and looks awesome - but...

I never liked the wing commander flight model... it felt like it had no flight model.

I've never been able to enjoy a space sim without a decent joystick. They just don't feel right on a mouse or a gamepad. Even freespace 2 felt like a floaty console shooter when i tried to play it without a joystick. And no-one has a joystick now. And no shops sell joysticks. And even if you have one it's probably in a box somewhere and it's a pain to dig out.

I honestly feel that curent gen tech could make an awesome space shooter... but I don't know if they can overcome these issues. Particularly the second. Unless they bundle in a stick peripheral guitar-hero style.

[SanguineAngel]

This sounds and looks awesome - but...

I never liked the wing commander flight model... it felt like it had no flight model.

I've never been able to enjoy a space sim without a decent joystick. They just don't feel right on a mouse or a gamepad. Even freespace 2 felt like a floaty console shooter when i tried to play it without a joystick. And no-one has a joystick now. And no shops sell joysticks. And even if you have one it's probably in a box somewhere and it's a pain to dig out.

I honestly feel that curent gen tech could make an awesome space shooter... but I don't know if they can overcome these issues. Particularly the second. Unless they bundle in a stick peripheral guitar-hero style.

Well I am 100% with you on the joystick front. Since discovering WC & X-Wing on the PC I have only ever felt right piloting spaceships with a joystick. Mouse control just doesn't feel right. It's too precise, too easy, doesn't control right and doesn't feel epic.

I always liked the Wing commander flight model and x wing and freespace etc. I preferred IW2 though. When freelancer came out I snapped it up but the mouse controls made it feel like a completely different genre. more like diablo as someone said above.

Anyway... joysticks are widely available! I bought one a couple of months ago - not some massive flight sim behemoth but an honest to goodness joystick http://www.logitech.com/en-gb/gaming...extreme-3d-pro got it for like £25 too. Grab one, play the old classics and pray this game is going to be everything we dream of!

[RakeShark]

I never liked the wing commander flight model... it felt like it had no flight model.

Funny enough, I asked Roberts about this.

Wing Commander 1 and 2 did have full flight models, but Wing Commander 3 did not. Essentially the lead programmer cheated when production was nearing the end, which had the odd benefit of giving birth to the autoslide feature. It's why the combat in WC3 feels like you're always flying in a straight line as opposed to momentum we had been used to in prior games. The intended flight model was then reintroduced into Wing Commander 4.

[deFUNKt]

Feel I need to post somewhere that I'm pretty cheesed off by their roll-your-own-crowd-funding debacle.

After pledging I got a receipt from PayPal and a notification from MailChimp that I'd been added to some list but nothing at all from RSI. The account details I submitted on pledging won't log me into their site and after I manually created an account with the same details I cannot post because my account isn't activated (after 24+ hours) though there's no mention of activation by e-mail and no such message in my Inbox (or SPAM trap). I e-mailed their support address 48+ hours ago and haven't received so much as an automated acknowledgement back.

I understand that there's no way to fully test systems under extreme load and that sometimes things go wrong but there's not even so much as a sticky post in their forums offering answers to common concerns or what they're working on resolving - how hard would that be? All in all I don't think I can remember ever parting with cash before just to feel so shabbily treated.

My advice; DO NOT PLEDGE UNTIL THEY CAN DEMONSTRATE THAT THEY AREN'T IN FACT RANK AMATEURS.