To Start With, I'm not really an MMO player.
I love space sims though, so when I noticed that the free week had started last month and my guild was all looking for something new to play as we all finally gave up and dropped off of Dune, I mentioned it to my guildies.
I only mentioned it, mind you.
We'd been talking about hopping out to a new game for a few weeks by then. We all get along and we're generally able to flail in the same general direction with a bit of corralling, so with Dune falling by the wayside for us we started looking.
It was just sort of Serendipitous that I mentioned Star Citizen. The free week was starting that night and I figured I'd give the game a shot after almost jumping in like three or four times. Turned out like four or five of my guildies had all been players for for a few years or had played pretty seriously years before. They saw me and the guild boss dicking around and crashing every two minutes,
After they got done laughing at us for about an hour, they hopped in and started helping us out. And they're the ones who got us to jump in for real. Because they all had some high end stuff and talked a bit about the gameplay loop surrounding wipes and the like.
Then one by one, members of the guild started popping into the discord and asking about it and we (The bossman and I) were having fun and the mix of PVP/PVE and noncombat activities appealed to us, so one by one my guildmates started installing it.
Fast forward a couple weeks. Most of us who took part in the free-fly are now shiny new owners of Aurora Mk II's and we're tooling around making nuisances of ourselves as we learn the gameplay loops we need to know, for whenever the next wipe comes around.
Friday night, one of the guys who's been into Star Citizen for a bit, mentions a timed event is going down, something to do with aquiring the better high end gear. It's PVP in pyro so we need to get our shit together on account that it's a magnet for high tier players and move fast...
We eventually get our shit together.
But... We did not move fast.
We get there and it's a colossal shit show almost immediately. Two Idris' (Idrisses? Idrisie? XD) and what I think was a Polaris are parked right on the entrance. One of my other Guildies was harassing them with torpedoes and another was doing a gnat impression with his light fighter.
Well, one of my other guildies saw the way the Idrisses were parked and he bet that one or both of them was a one man crew. So, now unable to do the... whatever the activity was called, (I can't remember it off hand at the moment, sorry) we all decided to load into his... Stealth Dropship of some sort I think? (It had a Cybran vibe from supreme commander) and made an insertion from behind some asteroids. five of us dropped out of the back and made our way to the Idrisie in free flight. It took almost 8 minutes. and it was straight out of a movie.
While the Asteroid base and the capital ships kept getting larger and larger our dropship pilot got his shit rocked firing a couple torpedoes at them. But we all expected that, so our mocking was pretty boilerplate.
A few minutes passed in silence for us, until a few other players showed up and began harassing the Polaris and we got to watch the Polaris just, fuckin' curbstomp different kinds of fighters for a solid four or five minutes.
That was good TV!
Finally I made it to the open hanger of one of the Idrisses! Unfortunately just as I was running up the ramp, the ship started to fly off. One of my other guildies was able to reach an airlock, but it was locked down just as he landed after the pilot went to quantum. Which you know... Damn!
But I was in!
Having landed in the main hold, I took the freight elevator up to the crew deck. with the help of one of my other Guildies (Who has an Idris for himself) I made my way to the Bridge.
Sure enough It turned out to be a one man show. I'm not sure if we got spotted or if he was dipping out to pull some loot that he got, but either way he was in the pilot's seat when I shot him in the back with a Fifty Cal LMG about forty times.
After almost fucking it all up by mis-pressing the interact button half a dozen times trying to take the pilot's seat. I finally managed to sit down and activate the self destruct.
My Guildies mocked me for this for a minute, but also took the time to inform me that if this guy wasn't a fucking moron, He'd be respawning in the medical bay and I should probably post up somewhere and be ready to fight the guy desperately trying to save his ship.
Which I did!
And We fought a glorious duel!
Wherein I missed about fifty two times and finally got him when he dived for cover in a bad spot and I was able to dump half a drum of 50. BMG into his abdomen!
Needless to say. I'm hooked. That was some of the coolest emergent gameplay I have ever fucking experienced.