Star Citizen - from single system - to multi system

…for the past six years of its pre-alpha phase, SC or Star Citizen has been a single-system game. It features a central (unlandable) planet called Crusader which acts like a surrogate sun to a selection of moons on which you can land. You spawn all your ships and weapons/armour loadouts from a centralised geosynchronous space-station above Crusader.

Only recently has SC added a second planet on which you can now land, and from which you can re-spawn your loadouts.

The single-system game formula works great for the concurrently-developed single-player game of Squadron 42 because all the members of the game are ‘born’ in the narrative of the Space Carrier of the Bengal Ship in which they all live. It’s a single-system with a single-system gaming interface containing moment-follows-moment i.e. serial, indicators onscreen.

CI want the game to be ‘as real as possible’ adn even though CI are materialising spawning ships into and out of the game using ‘smoke and mirrors’ they don’t want to Monetise Hyperspace, as I’ve always said they should. If they did, they could then invent some clever MobiGlas app that orders ships or weapons for the player and they are generated on the fly (robotically?) component by component, in front of the player, whereever it is allowed to happen. Give the process and onscreen timer and you’re off.

Imagine that you’ve spent a fair bit of YRM or Your Real Money buying actual ships now for your ‘future gaming garage’ i.e. for when the game goes live… How will you transport your ‘garage’ of ship around the verse with you? Because that’s what a TOTALLY REALISTIC game would entail. Some-one or some agency would have to physically get any of your ships from your Home Base or Registered Residential Planet where your physical garage lives and bring them to you. Will you be marked as Player A from System J ingame?

Additionally, related to the multi-system gaming experience they’re going for:

• CI refuses to address the Orbital Mechanics issue.
• CI refused to address the NPC-driven economy issue.
• CI refuses to address the multi-Star System issue.

What happens when you can jump from star system to star system? How do you decide which Star System to be ‘born’ in? Or is everyone thrown into the ‘verse from a centralised gaming locationn from which they’ll have to effectively emigrate to te outer reaches of various neighbouring star systems? Is there such a geographical game flow or is it all assumed to be concurrently-running or homogenised gaming space, like their so-called NPC-driven inter-stellar economy. Who does the flying in this space-flight game, player or AI? And what of freight costs associated with production… will all transportation of assets have to be LOCAL due to market forces?

I mean, they say they’ll get to it. Jump points will be in game evenetually. All in good time, Mike. But there are certainly no published prototypes for these three essential elements of intra-and-inter-stellar space gaming or how the hope to bridge the light-years gap between your physical garage and your need to fly another ship for another purpose.