There's a piece of news that has made me endlessly giddy and excited. Star Citizen is going through a pretty fundamental Flight Model change, it looks
amazing and I feel like I have to nerd out about it.
To understand the joy there, you have to imagine what it's like to have been playing that game for close to 8 years and have seen every iteration of that flight model come and go. From amazing and promising to slow and plodding, from twitchy hummingbirds to flawed simplifications and flat-out broken, it's really been places and never quite felt right. It's never given the impression of something that knew where it wanted to go, that gave as defined and unified a vision as it now does today.
To say that there's been bitter community in-fighting around flight in SC would be a massive understatement. It's a small sub-culture that would both amaze and horrify you if you dug into it. The flame wars surrounding controller balance, IM, pvp and others were biblical. Point is, in those changes are solutions to long-standing problems (high speed combat, abrupt movement, depth of flight decisions, UI) that feels like water in the desert. They went from seemingly having no idea where they are going to resuming on the path they were on and implementing both community and developer ideas from over two years ago. Hell, even Torque might be making a return and white whales I thought we'd never see like Jerk suddenly made an appearance.
Flight has historically been one of the things that SC has never really nailed down while coming really close to greatness. And it's been really frustrating because no other sim short of ones like KSP have ever gone into such detail, fidelity and breadth in simulating their virtual spaceships. Space sims are really, really freaking hard. After so many years waiting, this seemed to me like we are finally getting closer to something really right and it's put a huge smile on my face.
Also, SW:Squadrons reveal today, please be good!
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