The Glade 4.0

Can someone give a quick summary of what this is and why it's awesome? Is this a new MMO or something?

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Yes. Did you ever play Wing Commander, Privateer, or anything along those lines?

This is a persistent universe MMO Space Sim from the guy that made those games.

Kaffis can probably provide more insight than that

Or this:

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Holy shitsnacks!

"Or something" is probably a good descriptor. It's a game with a traditional single player campaign which serves as the jumping off point for a multiplayer universe with persistent characters and equipment.

Gameplay itself is flight simmish space combat. The single player campaign ("Squadron 42") Will have a strong narrative, with branching story paths based on mission success or failure and character interactions between missions. Pull up some info on Wing Commander 1-3 for an idea of how that works.

The persistent universe itself is where things get a little goofy. Traveling between fixed locations will serve as a user-transparent matchmaking lobby that will set players up randomly in instances with NPCs and other players. So it's not entirely what most people consider an MMO, but meets other qualifications easily.

The persistent universe will feature a detailed economy, though it won't feature traditional crafting. The persistent universe will support multiple playfulness and careers based on ship selection and on game activities. You could choose to haul goods from place to place to make your living, or to hunt bounties, or to pirate shipping lanes, etc.

The game isn't out yet. A year ago, it launched a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign which offered digital access to the game (single and persistent multi) on all tiers, along with alpha and beta access. Higher contributions are incentivized with immediate access to a variety of different ships in the persistent multiplayer. Since the conclusion of the initial Kickstarter campaign, a discounted version of the lowest pledge package without beta/alpha access was added.

In August, the first part of what will become a modular alpha was rolled out to backers. In that, players received the patch client and the ability to run their character astound a hangar which contains the ship or did they've pledged for (provided it's one of the models which have been mostly completed in-game). The ships have animated interactions and modelled interiors, since immersion us one of the watch-words for this project and community.

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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

Not sure I get how this is supposed to work.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... Instancing

For example,

You, Kaffis, and I are on each others friends list. You and I are together, flying from Cleveland to Chicago. Pirate Mus has me tagged a person of interest and is "following" wherever I go when he leaves new york as well.

Mean while Joe Nobody is leaving Toledo. A battle instance is created for Joe Nobody for the Space Around Toledo.

Two minutes later we enter Toledo Space on our way to Chicago, as Joe is trying to leave. Since there is room, we are dropped into his "instance" of Toledo. Shortly after that Pirate mus, who was following me, is dropped into that instance as well. Lets say along with Various Npcs that we've reached the limit of the amount of ships that can be active. Anyone else leaving or arriving in Toledo will get a new instance unless they are friends or following you, me, Pirate Mus or Joe. However the system will save slots for such people. For example, if we call for help and Kaffis, who is sitting in his hangar in Troy, decides to come help. He has to fly from from Troy to Toledo which means he may only be in time to recover our life pods. Alternatively if you or I had two seater, he could instantly "possess" our npc gunner.

Make sense?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Rori's got it down pretty well.

Another way to look at it is in comparison with other games, to compare and contrast the way it will work with those.

EverQuest, pre-whatever expansion it was that added instanced dungeon runs or whatever, didn't instance the world. There was one North Karana per shard (to use the UO term). If you were in North Karana, and somebody else was in North Karana, you could simply go find each other and attack/group/trade/whatever. Star Citizen's Persistent Universe won't do that, in part because they need more tightly controlled player caps to manage real time piloting combat, and in part because they're not going to have shards at all -- it's all one big shard.

EverQuest II (or City of Heroes, if you prefer) instanced everything, creating multiple running copies of a given zone, and allowed you to be aware of what instance you were in, so you could consciously change instances to meet up with somebody to group/trade/whatever. Star Citizen wants to minimize the circumstances in which you're even aware you're in an instance, because being cognizant of that and manipulating it breaks immersion.

StarCraft, or MechWarrior Online, or what have you, consists of a lobby/match finding system where you say "I want a multiplayer match" and it connects you with a bunch of other players searching for a game, too. This is actually very close to what Star Citizen will do to create random encounters while autopiloting, except it makes the process invisible to the player. Instead of hanging around in a chat lobby, and then hitting a "Find Game" button, you'll be flying your spaceship, preparing to go to your next destination a long ways aways. So you set your autopilot with a destination to fast travel across the vast systems (note, this isn't jumping from system to system, but might be travelling from the exit of one jump point to the entrance of another jump point). The server will then randomly decide whether or not to search for an encounter along the way -- think of random encounter tables in old tabletop RPGs, "while you're travelling, you happen across X, what do you do?" -- and then it searches for other players (or NPCs, because remember the system simulates a lot of NPC traffic as part of the economy) in a similar region of space who have also hit autopilot, or recently dropped into a random instance, and creates and instance for them to encounter each other. Now, you can either sail right by each other until you've put sufficient range between yourselves to re-engage autopilot, or you can stop and hail each other, maybe strike up some trade, or perhaps one or the other of you will attempt to fall upon the other and take his stuff. Maybe you come out of autopilot to discover a group of other ships already engaged in combat -- do you try to figure out what's going on and help one side out, or do you keep to yourself and hope that the aggressor leaves you alone? Etc.

In addition to the random assignment of these, there are things you can do to tilt the scales towards being placed in a random instance with a given other player. If they're part of your organization, that will make it slightly more likely. If you're grouped with them, it becomes much more likely if not certain. If you have a mission that involves them (or perhaps some other conditions we don't know), you can tag them as a Person of Interest, which also increases the odds of "randomly" encountering them while travelling through space. All of this is meant to make it unnecessary to know what instance you're in, so it can happen in the background.

Now there are some things that haven't been explained in as much detail, perhaps because their not as solidly designed yet and are still having different options weighed. Namely, things like how persistent locations like capital ships, planets, and space stations factor into this scheme.

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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

Ahh, ok. That makes it much more clear, thanks. The way you had worded it, it sort of sounded like "ok here's an instance lets you and me fight for no apparent reason". I didn't want to get all worked up over it since I figured I was just misunderstanding what you were saying.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Yeah. They're just often referred to as "Battle Instances" because that's where most of the fighting will probably take place -- as opposed to the persistent locations which will be much more heavily patrolled, etc.

It's worth pointing out that the "Dogfighting Alpha," true to Star Citizen's modular rollout's form, will basically be the foundation the battle instances develop from. So, yeah, at the start it'll just be "here's an instance, lets you and me fight for no apparent reason" because the underlying reason is testing. But at that point, it's basically any other server-based or lobby-based multiplayer game.

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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

Well, that's alpha for you. I think the modular roleout is quite the innovation, and I'd like to see other companies try it, to the extent it makes sense for other types of games.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."