Star Citizen's First Person Shooter Module Revealed at PAX Aus

[silverleaf81]

To be honest, I'm less worried about the FPS part of Star Citizen and more interested in the space combat and exploration part of the game. The FPS part should be quite easy for them, seeing how the game is using a modified version of the Cryengine. (the same engine used in Crysis) I'd like to know how they (For example) are going to render a full solar system with the Cryengine.

That being said though, the FPS part at the moment looks quite meh to me, but I am very interested in the idea of Micro G FPS combat.

 

[Vault101]

so you board enemy ships and it turns into a FPS?

AWSOME

 

[Ark of the Covetor]

My main issue is the combat looked sluggish on a gameplay level, not just an animation one.
The gun moved awkwardly, the sway was over exaggerated, and either the guns had ridiculous spread or enemies were overly bullet spongy for how they appeared.
On top of that, the HUD felt cramped, cluttered, and seemed to be just a little bit behind the action. The helmet intruded far too much on the screen. Simple squad UI was figured out back in Republic Commando, which had a "tactical" visor that gave the needed information without cluttering the screen or removing a third of it.
The gun seemed centered on the screen in the Doom style, and the barrel of the gun was not lining up with where bullets were going.
In addition, the zero-g combat seemed incredibly awkward, with the sluggish gunplay being exaggerated by sliding and a difficult movement environment that slid players into walls and corners.
On a non-gameplay related note, the developer wasn't fooling anyone with that dialog. The demo was poorly paced, the commentary was awkward and obviously fake (change to a serpentine formation, Ta-ta-uh-tango down), and the crowd didn't seem into it at the beginning (the one guy yelling "Use the knife", people cheering to "shoot someone").
This demo made me regret them adding an FPS mode, not be excited that I can board ships. I'd rather have a better space sim than the ability to board ships in awkward, unnecessary sections.

Yes, I know it's "pre-alpha" or whatever it's called now. But these are game mechanic issues, barring the HUD. Major changes are needed, not balancing or tweaking numbers. If they're confident enough to demo it, that likely means these major components have been decided on, with limited options to change.
Evolve is currently in Alpha, with bugs being shown as crashing, balancing or matchmaking issues. There are issues, and big ones at that, but the gameplay seems locked down and satisfying. Star Citizen does not appear the same way, and sound or animation changes are unlikely to change that.

I just wanted to address one specific point regarding the gun lining up/position on the screen; what's interesting is that we've been trained by existing FPS games to expect something which is actually wrong, and what SC is presenting is actually correct - the gun is held where it is actually being held, as the third-person and first-person animations are synced; what you're seeing while in first person is an accurate representation of your character holding the weapon. By contrast most normal FPS games essentially have two disembodied forearms holding a gun sitting beneath a camera floating at head height, and the position and angle of the gun are designed entirely around it "looking right" relative to the crosshair. Similarly, in a normal FPS the actual gun is completely superfluous to the mechanics, the bullets originate from an arbitrary point near the camera, meaning in third person terms they're coming out of your character's forehead, mouth, or neck, while in SC the bullets are actually fired from the muzzle of the gun and the inaccuracy of hipfire comes from the position and motion of the actual weapon, rather than in the form of an arbitrary set of numerical increases to bullet deviation from the crosshair.

The rest of your objections seem matters of taste(perfectly valid of course) in terms of the pacing of the gameplay. For myself, I'm interested to see how it turns out - there are plenty of fast-paced in-your-face pew-pew FPS games around, and plenty of hybrid "arcade shooters with military trappings" so something with a more deliberate pace, longer TTK, and actual consequences for just rushing in without thinking will be a refreshing change if they execute it well.