Absolutely gutted. Can’t believe that half an hour went so quickly and it’s a month before I can do that again. Great fun to play against the others.
I am a complete n00b at this. I’ve not played a space fighter game since Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64). I was intrigued after the post on HN a little while ago, went to the homepage, watched the video and have been itching to play this since.
I have been stranded away from home so I don’t have my usual desk with gaming mousepad and stuff. I also forgot to switch my VPN connection off (so probably +10ms latency), but I didn’t notice any latency at all anyway. Crappy UK ISP (Talktalk) and WiFi, but everything felt instant and smooth.
Surprised by how playable this is on a first gen i5 laptop. It wasn’t just playable, but it was additively playable. i5 520M (using HD Graphics), 8G, SSD, Chrome, 7x64.
I appreciate why it says desktop, keyboard and mouse. Rapidly discovered that I was not going to shoot anything or fly in any kind of willful direction with my touchpad or ThinkPad nipple thing. Probably a good mouse and a keyboard with NKRO would have been a better idea for me.
I think I need the reticle thing to auto-recenter. Either “moving the reticle by x changes my direction by x”, or lifting my finger from the touchpad resets the reticle position. Manually recentering was a nightmare while trying to dodge and fly and shoot. I was overcompensating and lose my bearings. It might be playable for someone that knows what they’re doing, but I was out of my depth.
With auto-recenter, I think it would be easy for me as a complete novice to pick up and play on a touchpad without any other changes. I’ll hopefully be jumping in with a mouse next time, but being playable with a touchpad eventually would make me far more likely to jump in more frequently.
I ended up switching off the mouse flying mode and just using the keyboard. It was much easier. I started killing more and sucking less. I couldn’t figure out how to strafe while in keyboard mode though.
I fear if there were more players, I’d get slaughtered too quickly. A lot of my kills had a large element of luck to them, so I think roughly the number of players we had was best for me to start off with. The buzz from first kill has me hooked.
Also I was very glad that you’d turned on “no clip” or whatever it’s called, because I’d rapidly have suicided more than I killed. Initially I was moving around in space like frog riding a bottle rocket. (I wasn’t a whole lot better by the end of the half hour, but I could follow and shoot.)
Overall: Excellent fun. When the NPCs all dropped in, it was how I imagine being in BSG must feel. And just dogfighting between a small group of other players was a blast.
But without catastrophic damage; more bounce.
My bad.