Duckwarrior wrote:QUOTE (Duckwarrior @ Dec 19 2015, 06:00 AM) Does anyone have an inside track to the Elite Team? I understand that they have completed their game, so may have more time than the Star Citizen guys. I suspect the SC team will be more focused on trying to get a playable element of their own game out.
The Elite gameplay bears no resemblance to Allegiance, unfortunately, either in terms of dogfight feel, or in so far as there are multiplayer ships. You're absolutely correct about SC's focus atm, but all of what would be required in terms of game mechanics is already under construction, it would only be a matter of creating the setup, that is arranging the bases and spawn points, the over-arching rules about economy, reasonably simple stuff, comparatively.
SC already has the ships like bombers, troop carriers, stealth and scout variants. It doesn't have any kind of healing mechanic like nanites, but there are repair vessels that you dock at and get repaired, more like a carrier mechanic. It has the multi-crewed capital ships. Its most significant hurdle will be the number of ships which can exist in a single instance (read sector) without melting CPUs, but until they optimize and release finished code, it is hard to know where that will fall. One intersting thing is that each ship is its own instance, so there could be a dozen players on a ship but that won't count against the exterior instance cap, so multi-crewed ships don't nerf battles.
All in all, it has the potential to be mega-allegiance, but its persistent universe isn't going to have the territorial aquisition opportunities that make for many large battles, and death will have substance, so free-for-all persistent combat will be very hard to justify economically. This is why I think it's a marriage made in heaven, as SC has and will have more games within a game. They already have a racing, combat and will have FPS mini-games using all the PU tech but that are short duration games with no consequences, although they do permit players to fly their customized ships, so that would be a design decision, to allow customized ships or only allow customization as the game progresses a la Alleg.
