They have a progress tracker on the website that shows the various components that are left to be worked on and which game is for. robertsspaceindustries.com/…/deliverables
Always take the dates with a grain of salt because they usually only list about 1-2 quarters only. But until recently, most of the bars were in S42 rows. I’m hoping for big news around it in October.
The other big indicator for their focus on it was last year when they relocated a bunch of senior leadership in the org to the UK with the stated reasoning of focus on S42 with the trans that were already working on it.
Most resources have been diverted to the single player campaign for a while. (Squadron 42)
They communicate what is being done for the persistent universe (Star Citizen) but it’s a slower trickle of features due to the resource allocation.
Generally, they made some really great gameplay engagements over the years but features are being prioritized based on the S42 needs. They only update on S42 once a month, but the updates have been looking like they are nearing feature completion (community speculation, not announcement) just due to them moving more toward bug fix/QA type stuff in recent months.
The next big information dump is scheduled for October at the convention that’s coming up.
They’ve given up on giving dates because the community is very unforgiving if the dates are missed. And in software, dates are almost always missed.
It’s been a long while since I’ve played it, so I had forgotten most things.
But the focus of a game makes a big difference in what features exist. I’m honestly not sad Bethesda skipped entry and landing. The game has enough content without it if you follow the quests, and if rather they acknowledge it’s too difficult and finally release a stable game.
Nintendo would probably prefer the 20 cent per copy license fee to a percent based one. New Pokemon games are sold at 60 dollars in the US and sell millions of copies. This is a bigger issue for indie developers looking to sell for a cheaper price to bring in sales.
While I had forgetten about Kerbal space program, I would point out two major things about that comparison. KSP is entirely about the ship flight. That is the entire games purpose. And second, when I played it a few years after release, it was hardly stable and wouldn’t be a good representation with the atmospheric density discussion. As I remember it that problem was largely ignored.
Can you give me an example of a game that solved the above problems? I’ve never seen a game that has that issue resolved for any ship configuration that could exist.
And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.
Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.
If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn’t realistic enough.
BG3 does give the ability to send stuff from lootable locations directly to camp, which solves half the problem. If I could sell stuff directly from camp the other side would be solved.
There is a valid argument of part of thee reasoning being determining what is really important to you prevents you from picking up literally everything and breaking the economy. But Starfields economy already seems pretty broken in my favor. I significantly upgraded my ship on both my first and second visits to New Atlantis. So I’m having a hard time feeling overwhelmed by the encumbrance.
I will say, finding a vehicle and not being able to drive it was a bit disappointing. But otherwise, I just wish there were more resources on the barren worlds.
I accidentally ended up in a romance scene with a character I had clearly told I was not interested in them. I thought the scenes were just their side quests for a while.
But other than accidentally having dinner kinky sex in the game it wasn’t that big of a part.
It’s not good that the games are broken and they are relying on modders to fix them. It would be totally fine if they released a fully functioning thematic sandbox for modders to play in though.
The thing about Bethesda games is that their modding tools are far and away from any other game, making serious improvements much more accessible. That’s one of the major draws of them.
I just wish every game didn’t have an unofficial patch requirement to keep it from crashing too often.