Topic: Sol Contingency Update

[Ionized]

Just noticed this over on the Sol Contingency site:
http://forum.sol-contingency.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&p=12992#p12992

I think that if they can get Proving Grounds out soon, they can capture enough support to keep going. Take too long and they risk getting overshadowed by Overload and DU.

[D2Disciple]

I think Sol Contingency is becoming the 6DOF equivalent of the new Acura NSX - in development so long that it becomes irrelevant before it even releases. I was very much looking forward to SolC, but now... Not so much. Even if Proving Grounds dropped today and it was stable, polished, balanced, and fun, there have to be players - and that's going to be a tough sell this late in the game.

SolC has lost a lot of traction, and frankly, moving away from Kickstarter is a good plan. I wouldn't back a game that's delayed the release of their demo for almost a year. Furthermore, if developing in Unreal 4 is so hard, why not just stick with Unreal 3? It still looks good to this day, and it would be a wonderful alternative to those that already have trouble running D:U. Even integrated chips could run it smoothly at good detail levels now... I'm actually very disappointed in the performance of Unreal 4 Engine, and I never thought that UT3 games ever looked dated.

I really want SolC to work out, and the videos really impressed me initially, but day by day it slips more and more into obscurity and irrelevancy - especially after a successful Overload KS.

[Ionized]

Yeah, moving away from kickstarter is a good move, they've missed that boat.

I still don't get why they went for a closed Beta for Proving Grounds, an open beta would have been far better for getting the community interested. It's strange that what initially felt like a community based project now has less community involvement than the more commercial 6DOF games in development. They tend to go dark for months on end which has dampened a lot of the interest I had in SolC. I'm not trying to bash them, I really like the look of the stuff that they've shown and want them to succeed.

[Scyphi]

Well, you have to keep in mind that with open community testing, the downfall is that by the time you release the final product, you're already intimately familiar with the game and how it works and it's various details because they've largely already played it. Less chance to truly surprise or wow your audience upon final release for what you've got planned for your game. By keeping it closed, you can then have more you can keep quiet to save and surprise/wow your audience upon a final release. I betcha that's what the SolC crowd were thinking when they elected to do that, and I can certainly understand them wanting to do that if so, as I'd personally would want to do the same thing. Whether or not that was a smart call for them to make given their position in all of this remains to be seen.

Furthermore, if developing in Unreal 4 is so hard, why not just stick with Unreal 3?

Because the mentality is that the gaming world (at large) is of the opinion that if there exists better graphical rendering means than what you've already got, you must use it and press it as far as you can, or gamers (at large) will deem the game graphically inferior to the competition and thus gamers (at large) are more likely to deem your game a bad game on those grounds alone. I've seen it happen before, so much so, it literally does make more marketing sense to just use Unreal 4 rather than 3 just so to avoid it.

But it's a stupid mentality, personally, and not the least bit true. Look at Minecraft, after all. That game's graphics is utterly backwards in many ways in comparison to other games of today, but people play it anyway because they enjoy the gameplay, because that's what really matters. But no, these days too often a game is judged by how good the graphics are, so much so I've seen some developers take so much time focusing on the graphics they forget to build a game. 

...I'm not bitter about this, what gave you the idea I was bitter? 

As for me and SolC, I confess that since it left the realm as a Descent game, I've been largely indifferent about it. If it makes it as a final game and gets that successful final release, great, if it doesn't, it'll still be mourned, but it's not the end of the world for me either. 

[D2Disciple]

Because the mentality is that the gaming world (at large) is of the opinion that if there exists better graphical rendering means than what you've already got, you must use it and press it as far as you can, or gamers (at large) will deem the game graphically inferior to the competition and thus gamers (at large) are more likely to deem your game a bad game on those grounds alone. I've seen it happen before, so much so, it literally does make more marketing sense to just use Unreal 4 rather than 3 just so to avoid it.

This is true, sadly, although I've come to think that Unreal 4 really doesn't scale very well on lesser hardware - I.e. an Unreal 3 game at ultra-high settings looks much better than an Unreal 4 game on medium or low. UT3 at it's highest settings also requires far fewer resources than UT4 at low... So don't advertise what engine you're using, give it a solid art direction, and call it an "indie" title (which it is), and people won't care. Sol-C is a three-man crew on their own funding trying to compete with big corporations with zillions of dollars and hundreds of employees, and they just won't be able to in the long run.

Just my two cents.

[Pumo]

I totally agree, the decission to move the game to Unreal 4 is not very clever, IMHO.

Also, what I don't understand is why they decided to go closed beta before an open beta stage. It's still a beta, and by no means a final release, so what's the point? 
 
I'm still excited to check it out, but they have been saying constantly that there's a big surprise coming every now and then, to later just say that there's actually no suprise and that you have to wait indifenitely. So it's getting a bit old and tiresome.

However, I still wish the best to the team, and really hope to see them achieve an excellent game, be it delayed or not.

[Ionized]

Unreal 4 does have good cross-platform support, but I'd be suprised if this were the main reason behind the switch. I use Linux but do have a dual boot so that I'm not left out if there isn't native Linux support. If the reason is for graphics then I don't see the delays that Unreal 4 has caused to be worth it. It looks really good on Unreal 3.

You've done a better job at articulating what I was trying to say about the closed beta as well

[-<WillyP>-]

[Ionized]

I'll believe it when I see it, but I do want to believe it.

[Yoshimitsu]

I'm ready to download it tonight and play as soon as I get home from work! I was in the closed beta and even with the slightly unpolished gameplay and limited player pool, I've never had so much fun in a multiplayer game!

Hope to see you all there.

[Pumo]

Oh well, what do you know, in the end it's finally here! 

My apalogies if I sounded a bit apathetic and disappointed, but since the events of the Interplay C&D, and the stressful stuff and arguments going during the D:U and Overload campaigns, I turned perhaps a bit cynical regarding new Descent-like projects, even if I'm excited and supportive of all of them.

So sorry to the SolC team, I know they are giving their best effort for this project!

Will check the beta as soon as I can!   

[Ionized]

My graphics card picked a great time to die on me. Running with an old spare one at the moment that just won't handle this game. Going to have to wait until I can get a new one.

[-<WillyP>-]

I just played it it looks great and works well. Multiplayer only, and you have to be logged into Steam first.

[D2Disciple]

I completely forgot about this because I was too busy playing the new Doom open beta. Is that bad? That's bad, right? 

Downloading now. Glad to see that they released this finally... Can't wait to jump in 

EDIT: So I've been playing it for a little while, and I have to say it's impressive stuff. Unfortunately, my immediate thought when I first played was, "it's too slow," and I never shook the feeling. I will say that it has some things really going for it - particularly the weapons, which are rather well-balanced, and the aiming, which feels much smoother with a mouse and keyboard than many other 6DOF shooters. Graphics are excellent, although there's one particular room that must have a memory leak or something - I was getting 40 FPS -regardless of resolution - on my GTX 960M, as was another player who said he had a desktop GTX 970 Ti. Also, the video options seem to crash when making changes, and only when I alt-tab or ctrl-alt-del out does the game unfreeze (strange). As far as combat, it's tight, cramped, frenetic, and satisfying.

Unfortunately, it also doesn't seem to be doing much that Descent hasn't already done or isn't already doing, at this point. Furthermore, it didn't take long for the chat to become a D:U bash-fest, which makes for an uninviting, elitist, and toxic environment. Actual quotes: "ANYTHING is better than Underground." "I'm REALLY P***ED that they made them take off the Descent title." "This should have the Descent name because of nostalgia." That was something I was worried about with SolC, and I hate to say that my fears were warranted in this case. The game is fun, but politics sour any experience, and any otherwise good game is not immune. SolC certainly has the opportunity and the groundwork to be very much it's own thing, and I hope that it doesn't die as nothing more than a political alternative to D:U.

But overall, color me impressed. I'm enjoying it - don't know how long the fun will last for me, but for now, it's a good diversion from other 6DOF shooters. 

[Scyphi]

I'm late to the game, but I downloaded and tried it out myself now, so here's my thoughts.

Set-up was a breeze and the game performs remarkably. Unlike DU or Overload, I didn't have to touch the graphical settings at all; game played smoothly on defaults save for some very so-slight-blink-and-you'll-miss-it stutters that's probably more networking than graphical.

The main menu was straightforward in terms of content but was beautiful graphically. Adding that tastefully-done demo vid to the background was an excellent choice and fun to watch, and the dramatic menu music (which I loved) really adds to the effect. Don't know if this menu is just temporary until the final game is complete (feels like it might, given how it's set up) but I hope they stick with that for the final deal.

Rest of the music in the game, however, was only okay. Just okay. It's sort of a hybrid between the hard rock/industrial vibe from the D1/D2 redbook songs and D3's more techno-electronica sound that doesn't leave much of a mark with me. It's not bad, and it's certainly not driving me up the wall, but it's not sticking-in-my-head-because-I-love-it-so-much either. I more of just tune it out, which isn't really what one wants to hear about their music.

Did like the attention to detail on the sound-editing though, very polished. I think it's cool you could select one missile on one end of your missile loadout and then select another missile at the other end of the loadout, and you can hear your ship rapidly sort through the missile slots in-between to get to the one you want. 

The graphics are very nice and detailed, very smooth and refined, and I liked their use of color for the most part, whereas DU and Overload are still fine-tuning theirs and currently only have so much to offer, so I'll give it that. The Neptune map was fun to just cruise around and explore. However, I did feel that it all felt a little...flashy. There's a lot of details that get missed in the gameplay because you just aren't focused on them, you're focused on the game, and there are others that get hidden behind other effects that are layered ontop of it (one big one is the static-y screen when you die, which completely obscures what are otherwise nice looking deaths) and I can't help but question if the game really needs quite that much. I've found that D2X-XL occasionally has the same problem; all these flashy add-ons that don't actually add that much to the game, except with SolC the problem's more subtle.

This especially shows with the weapons, which have so much flash and little details put into them that they never quite behaved like I expected them to, and had slight delays for rendering the significant graphical effects. There wasn't really any weapons that gave the immediate results I'm used to with Descent...and even they weren't quite quick enough (fun fact: for lasers, your energy gauge will actually go down BEFORE the shots actually fire from the ship due to this slight delay). Because of this, I found myself largely favoring the weaker weapons such as the lasers and the gatling gun simply because they fired more immediately when I pressed the fire button...and even that wasn't quite quick enough. And all the missiles seem to have this faint pause before actually firing, meaning they didn't quite fire when I had the shot lined up but rather a fraction of a split second later when I no longer could guarantee that I still did. The weapons themselves were also only so-so. You can see the Descent influence on most of them but at the same time are fairly generic, or rather routine at least. Nothing I hadn't really seen before in other games. Though I did think the Mac gun (I think that's what it was called...#5 on your loadout) was a neat mix between a fusion and a mass driver...even though it's delay between shots was significant enough that I started deliberately avoiding it (because the game auto-selects new weapons. Probably could turn that off, but I never got around to checking).

The hud is generic but effective. I certainly can read it a heck of a lot better than DU's elaborate thing. But didn't really like the reticle. It works fine, it's just not much to look at.

As D2Disciple observed, movement is too slow, to the point I'd say the controls are sluggish. It was immediately apparent the moment I joined a match. It felt like I was perpetually playing in the Magnum with its brakes constantly sticking slightly.

Also like WillyP observed, you do need Steam to find matches, and you have to be logged into it BEFORE you start the game, or it'll fail to realize you logged in after the fact until you reboot the game.

In-game, I noticed that if your shields exceed 100, the game will gradually reduce them again until they reach 100 once again. Probably done in an attempt to keep the playing field level as often as possible, which makes sense (though why they don't just have the game auto-cap it at 100, I don't know...that seems simpler to me), but when I noticed it, I wasn't sure at first what was causing it. As I was playing the Vertigo map at the time, I thought maybe I was too close to the lava and that this was causing me to take damage. It wasn't until I noticed it stopped at 100 that I caught on to what was happening. 

There were plenty of matches being auto-generated by servers, but unfortunately at the time I played, there really wasn't anybody on. Only really got one chance to play against another player when one popped up briefly for part of a match in a map that was sadly a bit too big for only two players, but I had fun, and did okay. I got three kills on him, and he got...eight...on me. But considering that in DU I barely get in one kill to every dozen everybody else gets on me, I'll consider that a good game for me. 

The point of all that though is that I do get the impression that SolC hasn't exactly made waves with the community, and maybe I chose a bad time to play (4-5 pm MST) but it feels like the excitement already wore off on players and now there's only a passing interest at best.

It doesn't help that I'm of similar mind. I enjoyed what I played, but I have to admit I'm not exactly jumping up and down to get back in it again. The gameplay's good, it just all feels...done before. SolC isn't really offering anything new to the table that others don't already have. Considering this is multiplayer we're talking about, that won't be so bad if the singleplayer missions that the game's to focus on next deliver...but otherwise I can't say I really see what's so great about SolC. I mean sure, it looks nice to look at and it's fun to play, and it has a Descent vibe...but what's special about it? It's not really doing anything for me to say that it stands out from the rest, y'know?

And to be honest, it doesn't actually feel that Descent-y to me. The physics are there, yes, but beyond that, I get none of the real powerful Descent vibes that I'm looking for--just a passing faint reminder and callback...which honestly isn't quite enough.

I'm actually surprised to hear from D2Disciple there are apparently people praising it over DU, because DU's got the same problem. The physics are there, and DU's got the added benefit of having the name, restored versions of the weapons, and best of all a Pyro-equivalent, but it still doesn't have that same Descent vibe...something I can look at I immediately say "that's Descent." Just a passing echo that makes me say "that's...sort of like Descent...I guess?" I really don't see what SolC has that DU apparently doesn't in the minds of these players, because to me, they feel largely the same at the moment. Overload's really the only one of these three that's got the actual solid Descent feel to it, without dispute, which again I feel says oodles about how these teams are approaching their respective projects.

But then I guess I don't want SolC to be a spot-on replica of Descent either...it's got an excellent chance to experiment with the formula here, throw in something new that Descent doesn't have so to make it stand out and sing it's own song. Personally, I think that's the greatest thing the SolC crew can do now. We already know they can't recreate Descent now, so why not try and compete with it? Do it one better? (can't believe I'm actually saying that, but I am) I guess what I'm trying to say is that I was hoping the crew would be more inventive with SolC, and right now I'm not really seeing an attempt at it.

In the end, I see SolC as a good start...but as much as I hate to admit it, it's going to have to do a bit more to really grab my attention more than this.