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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Well that’s just not true. You don’t just rename it to .exe and it will work on PC. The already made multiplayer will look for non-existent hardware, using obsolete and insecure methods to secure to a service that no longer exists on a completely different operating system. They would not only need to completely rewrite the client side net code from scratch, they’d have to write their server side code from scratch too, on top of paying a massive monthly fee to AWS or whatever to host it. Adding multiplayer won’t convince enough additional people to buy it to offset these costs; almost everyone is buying this game for the single player. Adding multiplayer means less profit and more delays.




  • So if you miss a payment your mouse shuts off?

    How is your standing policed, with an always online requirement? So if I move and need to wait to get my internet up, I can’t use my mouse?

    Are they legally liable for lifetime support or are you signing away that right in the EULA and they can end support for your “lifetime” mouse on a whim?

    I’d rather rent my furniture than subscribe to a mouse, but both practices are exploiting this world’s rampant financial illiteracy.



  • Their accents are different. Bob has a Midwest touch to his speech, as is standard for Illinois kids like him, Steve speaks classic Western New England, typical of his Massachusetts upbringing, which is almost exactly the same as American Standard.

    But these two came up in the New York comedy world around the same time. They weren’t close but had many mutual colleagues. It might be more about a similar performance style than a regional accent you’re noticing.









  • They’re already almost half funded on day 1, so they’ll at least get their shot, which is always nice.

    I don’t think they plan the same level of fidelity as other games, the character models and rigs are pretty basic, the bulk of it just building content like art for planets. Going from ship to planet in a shuttle, for example, will have a loading screen and it will load you into to a flat word that uses trickery to appear to have a curved horizon. Procedural generation of terrain and stuff is actually pretty easy these days, engines have it all ready to go.

    So I’m fairly optimistic! We may not get every feature, but I do think we’ll see a 1.0 in a few years if funding keeps going this well.


  • The ship is really Star Trek looking, truly, but it’s getting replaced with a much less infringy looking one. We can all see this is the off brand version of the Star Trek game we wish we had, but they are very safe from a lawsuit. Once you get into it, you see enough of a difference that it’s riffing on Star Trek, certainly, but it’s still enough of its own thing. The new ship will really do this game a lot of favours in setting it apart instead of leaning into it.


  • There’s lots of info on the Kickstarter page, but yes, each role will have lots to do. In the tech demo, there’s a tutorial where you start the ship up from a cold start to give you a taste of the engineering role. It takes a long time, you gotta start up the main reactor and distribute power. The ship has kilometers of pipes and wires that deliver power and resources around the ship, all of which need maintenance and repairs over time. When they go down, the components they supply go with them. Every role will have tasks, except passengers. Every role will be fillable by NPCs. If you want to be the lone head chef player on a ship of NPCs, go for it! Just pick the job that has the right amount of task time and type for you.

    Landing on planets will be achieved by using shuttles, the big starship doesn’t land. I’m very excited about flying shuttles.

    Combat is definitely going to be a thing, ship to ship as well as small arms, repelling boarders or boarding something else yourself. Ship to ship combat is lasers and railguns, nothing that requires storing explosive chemicals for munitions.

    Other races will be procedurally generated, as will their attitudes. They might want to hug you and give you cool technology to use or they might shoot strangers on sight, or something in between. If LLMs get their training sources sorted, costs down, and are able to run locally within the game client, then alien races might have lots to say. But those are big ifs.

    Essentially, the story is we’re humanity’s first long range exploration vessel. We’ve only ever been to alpha centauri, and that took a long time. Now we need to go out and explore. Players will have the option to share game databases, so while we are in our own games and locally hosted servers, we can explore the galaxy together like it was an MMO.

    This game isn’t intended to be wall to wall excitement, this is going for a simulation, which means immersion, roleplaying, believability, and atmosphere are more important than constantly engaging in gameloops. It’s going to be more exciting than flying a jet liner in flight simulator, but this isn’t a very arcady experience. There is downtime, so I prefer bigger multiplayer servers to fill that time with hanging out or making our own emergent fun. That makes it more niche, not for everyone. But it is for me :).