and what they've released has massive gameplay issues.
It does have bugs but Arena Commander is already fun to play, IMHO. Gameplay has similar feel to Diaspora, which is a good thing. So even if AC is all there was, Id probably buy it. After all, there arent many proper 6DoF combat sims around, are there. And its not like paying $40 will ruin anyone.
No, AC does not play similarly to Diaspora. It wants to, but completely fails. The reason for this are:
Because maneuvering thrusters are so freakishly strong, ships seem to have zero mass and therefore flail all over the place when you're turning. **** handling, basically. This isn't even a debatable fact. It's why every ship has gimballed weapons everywhere. Trying to aim fixed weapons with these controls is very difficult. Which brings me to the second issue:
Time to kill is far, far too long. The harder it is to aim your weapons, the shorter the TTK should be. SC has gone the other way. It's hard to hit and it takes forever to kill. This is why I say the biggest enemy in AC is boredom. It takes forever to get a gun kill.
There are other issues too, like the terrible HUDs, the cockpits that obscure most of the fights, the poor visual and auditory feedback when you're getting shot at, but those are the two biggest ones.
I think AC is worse than Diaspora in every way except graphics, and even that's debatable. AC's effects and sounds are pretty bad.
For example, the explosions shown
here look terrible.
As awesome as Diaspora is, when a $93M game made worked on by 200-500 people is being less than favourably compared to a free game made by a dozen people in their spare time, something's wrong. And sure, SC isn't done, but flight mechanics are something that should have been nailed down ages ago. If it plays like this after 3.5 - 4 years of development, it isn't going to change much between now and release. AC is what made me get out of SC. It's what tore down the hype fog and convinced me that CR's vision for this game just wasn't going to result in something I'd like, and it's what made me open to evaluating the other problems the project has. I played in again a few weeks back and it hasn't meaningfully improved.
When they add multi-crew ships, expect AC to get worse. Multi-crew turreted ships will either be horribly vulnerable or they'll rule the battlespace. I have never seen a sim, atmospheric or space, that has managed to make them balanced with single-seaters. Most games make them vulnerable because otherwise, single-seaters are useless. But if SC goes that route, backers who bought those expensive 250$ ships will rage. Quite a quandary.
Fineus: Like headdie said, that's very fair.