I’ve genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There’s just no actual focus on getting the game done.
We have a saying here that translates to something like this: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.
Also called bikeshedding.
My boss LOVES to throw that out all the time as a defense for when I inform him that he and mgmt are rushing something out the door that isn’t ready.
It definitely has wisdom but it’s not something to wave around all the time either.
Not that that’s the problem here, SC ain’t ever coming out and it’s not because of perfection. It’s because it’s a scam lol
Read this fucking gofundme trash: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.
I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.
Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.
NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn’t call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems
All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.
Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-
They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.
Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.
the christmas flood ?
IIRC their office flooded, destroying equipment and much of the game’s development with it.
alright
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won’t be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.
Edit: clarity and conciseness: added “originally” to the end of the last sentence.
Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.
And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there’s plenty of buyers.
Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.
Is anyone really surprised?
I do think they will at least release Squadron 42, but the main game is never coming out.
I’m pretty sure Chris Roberts views Squadron 42 as the main game.
I honestly don’t even think they’ll get that far. I mean they’ve announced it now, yet again, for a 2026 release date…two years from now. they’ve been doing this for the past decade. “It’ll release in 2016” then it’s “Squadron 42 coming 2018” and so on and so forth. Mark my words we’ll get to 2026 and at their little convention they have to further milk their userbase of money they’ll announce Squadron 42 for 2028 but please, user, they need more backers and as a reward for backing you’ll get a fancy ship you’ll never get to keep.
Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
I don’t, what else has he procrastinated on?
the wing commander series was famous for inflated development costs, freelancer was repeatedly delayed and eventually released like five years after it’s announcement, and since then… he’s been working on star citizen
Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.
Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.
Probably the same needs to happen here but I don’t see how it could happen in this occasion.
Chris Roberts is still rich, and could probably retire right now without worrying about anything. He could tank the company, and he wouldn’t care.
When has any really rich person ever gone “you know what? I actually have enough now…”?
Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important
Lots of people have done the same… But if they’re rich and still chasing after money? They’ll never stop
I guess Notch as well. Sold Minecraft for an obscene amount of money and got into indefensible right wing views instead.
I heard he got better after leaving twitter for years and coming back.
MySpace guy comes to mind.
How could you forget about your first and only friend Tom?
That’s the majority of them, but ragebait articles aren’t written about them, so you have no idea who they are.
Don’t be so easily manipulated by media.
I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.
I never fell for this, and I’m laughing at you if you did.
One of my ex coworkers has spent somewhere in the ballpark of 12k. He sells, flips and trades rare ships to sell back to people after the exclusivity of the ship has expired. He’s made like 4k. I don’t understand gaming anymore.
That’s not gaming anymore than people buying toys, leaving them in their boxes as an “investment” are into playing with toys.
Meanwhile the rest of us are buying games, playing them, enjoying them, moving on to other games and so on.
Yea that’s where I’m at. I’m platform agnostic, and the only game I simp for is the original halo trilogy. Microtransactions are dirty. And making digitized items a financial value just to sell them is the same as what you said, like Funko pop collectors.
to be fair this kind of expenditure and aftermarket exists in CCGs.
Yes of course! But I’d imagine the average CSGO/2 player is really only in for $100 or so on side market deals. Not 1000s. The lowest ship is like $35 or something.
CCGS, I meant like Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu Gi Oh
What is ccgs?
Collectable card game.
Oh duh. Lol my bad.
Lol if that game is ever finished, I bet there’s going to be some people who paid way too much for a ship that turns out to completely suck but seemed ok on paper. Kinda like a PT cruiser, except it looked ok on paper.
Lmfao the PT Cruiser! My Grandmother’s new husband has one, and he put flame decals on it as one does…backwards.
Yes theres a shit ton to balance. Honestly no mans sky seems more appealing now adays. I might go fire that up on my xbone.
They got my $40 in 2012. I absolutely loved the Wing Commander series; Wing Commander II was an embarrassingly important part of my adolescense, I love space sims, and still had fond enough memories of the name Chris Roberts that I didn’t think he’d blatantly lie and steal from me.
How people are still giving these clowns money I have no idea.
People are buying the dream. There is personal investment now- this isn’t a game, this is their game. Supporters tend to talk like this is a community project, not a transaction between a customer and a studio.
Whenever the studio finally folds, I guarantee there will be whales lamenting that if they’d only spent a little more they’d have kept the game afloat.
Same here. It was a much different time. Lots of games that originated in kickstarter became succesful. This just seemed like another one.
Hindsight is 20/20
i want to fall for it yet i keep waiting for further development, thankfully they occasionally do free flight events so I can actually test the game without having to pay
I used to be like you, laughing and enjoying life.
The new director of technology we just hired a few months ago flexed about how he’s now hit 6-digit donations to Star Citizen. It’s still early and he hasn’t shown any results, but if he’s following the Star Citizen path of growth, my department is fucked.
Why would there be? Seems to work really well this way. Just keep milking the idiots of their money.
The actual news is that the money is starting to run dry
And this CitCon didn’t do anything to stem that tide if true.
deleted by creator
Like, obviously?
i like to speak in question marks? good? im not being sarcastic?
Your comprehension issues are a you problem
?
Star Citizen sounds right up my alley in terms of game content and play, but I will never touch it due to the business model they’ve chosen.
All I want is a space pirate game that doesn’t require me to quit my job and dedicate my life to it in order to acquire a good enough ship to actually be competitive.
That, or a street racing MMO with realistic physics and a true-to-life level of customization and tuning, that has a map the size of small country. Like The Crew except no arcade physics and more than 5 players in a server. And also not shit.
Somebody, please make one of these two games already. I need this so badly in my lifetime before I die.
You want that online? If you’re okay with single player, the first one does exist: Check out the X series of games, the latest one is X:4 Foundations.
Idk about racing lmao
Gotta be online. Single player AI just isn’t good enough yet to entertain my dopamine-deprived brain. (I have ADHD).
My dream is to make or at least be a part of the former
It is very hard
For racing, you have Fly Dangerous. It is also a successful FOSS game!
and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.
sorry I meant durrrr
Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.
Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
Jesus fucking Christ! What a goddamn scam.
If you donate 65 million dollars worth of stretch goals we’ll make the game! But only if we meet the stretch goals… otherwise go fuck yourself, give us more money!
That whole page you linked is fucking gross. What kind of morons have dumped 65 million dollars into an unproven fucking kickstarter
Seriously, I encourage people to read the text for some of these stretch goals of tens of millions of dollars, it’s a goddamn scam
For reaching 3.5 million in donations, this is the stretch goal reward:
- Cockpit decorations – Turn your stock cockpit into your home with personalized decorations; amaze your friends with bobbleheads, photographs, dinosaurs, fuzzy dice, nose art, posters and many more cool options!
- Ship boarding – learn more about how Star Citizen will allow players to conduct boarding operations.
It sounds like a fucking scam, 3.5 million to be able to place decorations in your ship???
For 19 million dollars:
- Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
- Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
- RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!
Like really? You needed 19 million dollars to be able to provide a pdf ship manual to users? Good thing the PDF is free though!!! (Free, after paying 19 million usd of course)
64th million has finally allowed for the technology of having pets added to the game
Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.
I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.
Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.
I just hope when it finally releases it has just as many tits as Duke Nukem Forever
It’s called Store Citizen for a reason.
Scam Citizen
yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore
Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn’t just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.
I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.
They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.
You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.
The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.
Classic, the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is SO sure that they know the truth. So much so they’re out here correcting people and handing out false info.
so the engine they are building is actually pretty good
Keep living in a false reality pal. I’m sure you k or so much more than the engine dev who replied to you.
How much $$ have you wasted on star citizen lmao
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
If you’re talking about Chris, he’s a coder too, and wrote some of the entiry container system for the game.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your info about them scaling everything down and that being the cause for wonky physics, though.
Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!
… Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?
I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that’s almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.
After 10 years they increased the per server population from 50 to 100, but don’t worry server messing soon TM.
So no.
Meshing tests have gone up to 2000 and the shards that were left on overnight were 300-500. The current evocati build of 4.0 has meshing enabled, just limited to 100 for now
