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I'm not thrilled at the deal with Saitek/Mad Catz. I've never particularly liked their build quality, though I've dialed back slightly with grudging acceptance of my R.A.T. mice. I still tend to range between unimpressed and mildly annoyed at their drivers, depending on the day and how poorly they're behaving.
They announced they'll be working to deliver modular interior components for Cutlasses, Constellations, and Retaliators in the near future (think swapping between med bays, cargo bays, bomb bays, and dropship passenger bays), and suggested that they're reworking the ships to either share those modules between them, or at least heavily recycle assets to make creating the modules for each very quick.
They announced that this month (knock on wood) the social module will go live alpha, permitting us to leave our hangars and walk around an ArcCorp landing zone.. with other players! They gave a quick tour of ArcCorp, and it ran much more smoothly than back at PAXeast. They showed off a variety of shops, and said that once they get this out to us, that team will begin populating clothing customization, as well.
Star Marine will follow closely on its heels, slated for alpha release to us in September (pinch of salt).
Finally, the 2.0 alpha (first release of multi-crew) is targeted to release soon after CitizenCon, which would suggest late October/early November. So we should see it before the end of the year, hopefully?
They announced that as of today's (yesterday's?) patch, there's a new version of Vanduul Swarm, rebalanced to be more challenging and (I think somebody said) 18 waves. If you beat the new version, you'll be able to use REC to fly a Vanduul Glaive, and the first 1000 to beat it can pledge for one, apparently.
They formally announced their partnership with Saitek to create custom peripherals of all sorts. They showed renders of the designs for the HOTAS, a keyboard, mouse, headset, and a deluxe HOTAS, all of which are said to be modular (AFAICT, that means the HOTASes separate and can be joined to either end of the keyboard, which is admittedly nifty). The keyboard has an OLED, with no indication yet on what kind of information it's capable of displaying or how. The deluxe HOTAS is supposed to have a die-cast metal frame and a big (touch-? Chris seemed unclear on this)screen on the base. Both the stick and the throttle on both HOTAS models had thumb-placed trackballs "so you can aim and fly at the same time" which... well, I'd rather they had dialed back their stance on the utility of gimbaled weapons than made an optimal joystick that only they produce, and is still pretty awkward as far as trying to multitask that many axes. We'll see. This is definitely something where I'll be waiting for some folks to get one and review it rather than jumping on it sight unseen, I think. It'll be important whether Saitek brings their best game on build quality and components, for me. The one thing I have to concede was pretty sweet was they showed off three color schemes (they used the joystick as an example showing the differences, but the other pieces all looked like they fit one of them, so I'm assuming they'll all be available for all the peripherals) for different in-game manufacturers; they had an RSI scheme, an Anvil one, and an Aegis one. Oh, the basic model of HOTAS looked like it was heavily informed by the Saitek X-52 stick; I'm assuming they kind of went with that as a starting point.
They talked a bit about their animation philosophy, which was mostly retreading ground they've covered in the Star Marine status updates, explaining how their goal is to not "cheat" by having detailed first-person animations that don't translate directly to third person.
Then, they finally got to the 2.0 demo. They started in a small room, with the player taking cues from Chris to open the shutters on the window to reveal the space station outside, which was simply gorgeous and massive in scale. Then, Chris explained that the player and his friends have received a mission to go recover a derelict Retaliator across the system.
So the player puts on his helmet (flip, cheer) walks out of the room, into the large, open hallway of the space station, where his 5 friends await. They move around the station a bit after looking out the window a bit more, and find the airlock, which they cycle to go outside.
Once outside, they walk across a few catwalks to reach the landing platform that hosts 3 ships: a Gladiator, a Super Hornet, and a Cutlass. Two of the guys board the Hornet and Gladiator, and we see that all the boarding animations work for the other players and synch up, as they swap the feed around between players. We watch one of the players lift off, and then open up the Cutlass' boarding ramp. The other 4 climb aboard, and we can see them moving around inside from outside, and we can look out the door to see the other ship hovering and moving about, all to highlight the seamless change between local physics frame of reference and the bigger level as a whole, which is a pretty neat (and useful) engine feature they've come up with from scratch, if you're into that kind of thing.
Then, they watch the Hornet lift off, and the Cutlass lifts off, too. Two of the guys are sitting in jump seats in the cargo bay, one's flying the Cutlass, and the other guy is walking around in the ship while the pilot is maneuvering around. They switch the pilot to an external view, so you can see into the cockpit. The pilot's operating the stick, as we're all used to by now, but then his buddy walks into the cockpit from the cargo hold. The pilot starts spinning, and they cut to the passenger, who is looking out at the space station and space around them as the world spins at his friend's controls input.
Chills. This is frankly amazing. As they said earlier, this is the dream. Or, at least, the building blocks for it, for me. The actual dream consists of making sure that those extra passengers have interesting and useful things to do to contribute to the fight in a fun way that the pilot alone couldn't manage with more UI automation. I'm hoping they're smart enough to figure that part out. We'll see in the next several months.
Now, they pull up the nav point for the Retaliator. Oh, no! It's 3 million kilometers away! Hey, no sweat. The pilot engages the quantum drive, and everything zooms past, including some planets or moons and a zipping starfield that elongates to streaks. Chris tells us that every inch that they're covering could be flown at normal combat speeds, and we're travelling the entire length of this seamlessly -- there's no loading screens or pauses to zone or anything. CryEngine supports 8-kilometers-on-a-side maps... their upgrade to 64 bit throughout the engine, along with modifications they've made to handle high variance in information density (empty space is very uninteresting and empty, compared to a space station with hundreds of rooms and thousands of props, or an asteroid field with tons of things packed into a small area) has brought that up to 8 billion kilometers on a side.
They come out of quantum drive near the Retaliator. They did a couple flybys, if I'm remembering right, then cut to the interior of the Cutlass, where the passengers get up... and open the ramp. They walk outside, and now they're EVA in zero-g. They maneuver over to the docking collar, open it up, and go inside.. still weightless. One of the guys enters a busted docking collar, and they follow him as he uses his hands to grasp corners, brace himself as he bumps into walls, and so on to move through the zero-g. It looked really good, and I can't wait to see how it holds up in a bigger variety of environments, not to mention how it controls.
He arrives at an access panel that he opens, and then interacts with the guts inside, activating artificial gravity. He goes over to a computer panel and pulls up a power management UI, where he starts turning systems on. I can no longer help myself -- I'm grinning ear-to-ear.
One of the other skeleton crew enters a turret, and the last one goes to the cockpit.
And now, as Rori said, a crew of pirates show up in their Constellation! There's a fight... and the Retaliator ends up taking too much damage before killing the Constellation, and can't fly home, lol. As one of the players runs back to the engineering screen to try to bring systems back online, Chris playfully scolds the blue team for being too good and ruining the ending they had planned, where they'd have the Retaliator land back on the station for a nice shot of scale. (they repeated the demo and took it easy on the Retaliator afterwards as an encore)
After landing, there was one more scripted surprise. It's worth not spoiling. And looks damned good on-screen.
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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
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