FoxChard

Thats exactly what I've been saying for a long time. CIG doesn't and has no requirement to disclose their funding models. CR probably wasn't a poor man when he came to the project, nor Ortwin, nor any number of other people who prefer to not to be named. Remember that the original kickstarter was said to be a demonstration of community backing to potential investors? Anyway, like you said, I was joking. We're also down to 33.9 days now.

They'll be out of cash in 34.6 days. Tops.

Like, I'm crashing one into stuff. Its going to happen.

O_O

I've always been ok with the wait. Get it done and get it done right. I'm particularly pleased with the effort that they're putting in for hair, beards, and head accessories. Just like how each of the avatar bodies has to sell really hard to escape the uncanny valley, so do their features. With armors in particular I'm pleased that the female clothing options appear to be sensible and realistic. Ultimately, we'll all need to face the facts that this is going to start off as a game filled with men and women both wearing spandex spacesuits most of the time.

@Narayanthis is truly inspired. Absolutely incredible!

Chard would locate it, then Chard would check to make sure Chard was alone, then Chard would name it Bagel, then Chard would take the opportunity to have Chard's way with it. When Chard becomes bored after a few hours of intense play, Chard would probably tell @Chimaera(because FC should know, and pick the FC who Chard thinks is least likely to want Bagel entaglements), then Chard would sell the location on the open market to the highest bidder as fast as possible to cash out before things got crazy. Chard would also consider buying and setting up a whole new generic account to do the transaction so that Chard would be absolutely anonymous in the deal because Chard dislikes people noticing Chard (and Chard realizes that the whole stupid way Chard wrote this post was counter to that goal). @stefmarsteris that just a random gif or do you watch Critical Role too?

Since this is being discussed again, I'll offer up that no, I don't think escort gameplay will be required for anything. Lets say it simply. I think the chance of being in combat while doing any sort of exploration is fairly low unless you're in densely populated space. You're exploring who else is going to be as far out on the fringe as you? Your ship has extended fuel tanks-who else can even get out that far without a starfarer? Escorts are pilots who are being paid by someone to be bored. I think that very few pilots who are "hardcore" will fly the direct routes that are easy to interdict. This alone will probably reduce your chance of interdiction to near zero until you're arriving at, or departing a fixed destination. There will probably be enough "casuals" and NPCs trafficking the direct routes that nobody will even bother looking for you in deep space. Even if you are somehow interdicted, that won't guarantee you'll get into a fight. The people doing the interdicting will have the choice of engaging or fleeing. Having escorts will probably deter some people from attacking, while those who do come at you are either stupid or believe they actually have a chance at winning. If its the later, you should be worried. If you're going into space that you absolutely know is dangerous, then weight your risks versus rewards. If you happen to find pirates in the middle of nowhere in deep space, chances are they weren't looking for you and may not even be aware that you are there. They'll have assumed that they're just as safe as you are in deep space surrounded by eons of nothing. So if that is the basic situation, how can an explorer even afford to pay for an escort? (Your guess is as good as mine, because right now we have no idea if exploration is a money making prospect). You may get lucky and find that you join an exploration squadron that wants to provide its own escorts, or if you have friends that want to play escort for you. Some T&I types may have the cashflow to pay escorts, but they'll be running huge operations with big ships that could actually have the profits necessary to buy an escort. For escorts to be used in the first place, you should assume that the escort is going to want a share in whatever rewards come from the activity. I honestly think that most players will be astonished by the price tag of paying a few players to ride shotgun on your mission since if they actually want to fight-there are better places for them to go in order to find combat and rewards. I do not regard AI as a good substitute. If the market works the way it should, even NPC escort pilots could turn out to be expensive. Then they need ships that are kitted out for a long duration flight. At the moment that means Banu Defender and the Aegis Vanguard. And depending on how long you're out for, will you need a starfarer or a vulcan to go out with you as well! Like it or not, the most sensible gameplay option that most players will opt for is to take the risk and go without an escort, and they'll probably be doing it without a full crew too. Most players will probably try to risk it all for the chance of a greater gain. And since the chance of something going wrong is relatively low, why not take that risk most of the time? Especially with exploring! If you found a derelict that starts giving off the xenomorph vibe, there is nothing wrong with hopping on TS and the portal to recruit some backup.

Because I'm trying to be edgy and refer to the Spiderman puddlegate controversy without saying anything more. Like those kids on the twitter.

Since we don't have a source of CIG created controversy (for the week), I will recommend that we start up the Nyxgate Controversy. REEEEEEEEEEE! This is not what we have in game. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Where is my dark star system, space clouds, and giant asteroids? Grab your pitchforks and your hashtags and lets go burn down reddit.

Timestamped for the part I want, of course! I think their pace will increase over time as they get their tools in place and build up a larger library of city assets that they can use, reuse, kitbash, or reshape. Lets go back. Just listen to Papa Chard as he takes you back. Anyway. Way, way back they were going to build out a few architecture styles and then replicate them across the verse to more rapidly construct cityscapes and landing zones. With a handful of modifications and altered color palettes they could use the same assets for multiple locations in a single system: Of course, this ain't gonna fly these days, but I still think something extremely similar is possible. Once they get a good library of assets, they should be able to kitbash new city scapes together (which now that I think of it was always their plan anyway). I'm having problems hunting down all of the exact posts and I'm not sure what was post and what was video and being that I'm extremely lazy, I'm not going to dig into the videos for supporting evidence. The Hurston and ArcCorp of today are good models of what can be done (somewhat) rapidly (I'm sure it took years of effort to get Hurston to where it is now, but probably only months of effort to build the assets we saw during the recent demo. I get the feeling that the old Hurston from last year got scrapped in its entirety since everything was at a different scale than what we saw this year). Much of each city is being cleverly hidden underground in the large art blocks. There aren't many apparent surface roadways. The people of the future apparently have discarded the idea of single family homes sprawling across the landscape and mass private automobile ownership. Additionally, they've shown early versions of their rapid cityscape, architecture, and building interior prototyping and procedural systems. We don't know how far those have gone. With Hurston though, we're still getting told that a lot of the central facets of cities are being curated. I'm not sure how they're going to speed their creation up or how they can make that procedural. The larger spaces though should be somewhat easier to build. They can probably automate that the way they're doing plants and rocks-just replace the nature assets with city assets. The hard parts are always going to be hero zones like the Spider, or Terra Prime, or Earth or those crazy alien ruins on Hades (etc.) where things are described as so unique and iconic that assets cannot be readily used form elsewhere.

Apart from Tony Z saying that none of those prices were representative of anything... Yes. Things should be worth grinding for.