Food for Thought: Long Travel Times

Citizencon was awesome, I'm taking in what we saw and giving it a lot of thought. Just travelling from Arc Corp to Hurston was an eight minute trip. Travel times are going to be quite significant in Star Citizen, especially for long hauls from one side of the 'verse to the other.

Space is Big: Star Citizen is doing a really good job of reinforcing the idea that space is big. In 3.0 we'll ideally get a taste of how much content is possible in just the immediate area around Crusader's moons. As devs explained in the Stanton panel they want to make travelling to another planet be a weighty decision. Going to another system or world is going to take time, there may be considerable risk involved. Plan your trip accordingly.

Organizations vs Friends vs Solo Play: This is a big one. Those of you out there who are part of orgs or run orgs. How do these travel times impact your group? If you want to do activities together, you need to operate in the same area. If half your org is in Sol, the other half is in Terra and ten others are scattered around in Xi'an space how can you put together events?

I think the direction Star Citizen is going is only going to strengthen organizations. They can be loose affiliations of traders who band together, they can be paramilitary groups who patrol and secure their local systems, or they could be a network of spies scattered across the entire UEE, buying and selling information with other orgs.

I could see delivery organizations or players popping up. Are you based in Kellog? Need a ship part only available in Stanton? I wonder if player organizations will start up to buy said item for you and deliver it to your system at a premium.

If you have a small group of friends you could stick together, hop from system to system going on grand adventures together. All of these play styles will offer vastly different experiences for people. Which gets to my next point:

Content Creators: A Youtuber/Streamer who spends their time playing and recording Star Citizen in one system is going to have vastly different content compared to another Youtuber/Streamer who's 8 systems away. System economies are going to be different, the background will be different. This will help give content creators their own identities.

At first glance it may seem like the long travel times from system to system and planet to planet will be a chore. If anything this Citizencon has shown me, is that we'll have enough to do in just one system, maybe even one planet to keep us occupied for hours. Maybe it'll get stale waiting during our quantum jumps, but even then there are certainly a lot of benefits from extended travel times.

I only hope we see two things:

• We never, EVER see fast travel.
• Some kind of companion app to tell my character to move from one system to the next while I'm at work so when I get home I'll be able to play with my friends in the evening.

Anyways it was a fun day, I'm tired as hell. Just wanted to write some thoughts down so I can turn in for the night. Looking forward to reading what your take is on these travel times.