As of now, Star Citizen has raised $769,261,551. Three quarters of a billion dollars.
And now they say they need to fire the QA department to “laser focus” to meet the deadlines of the release. That’s when you need QA the most. Otherwise that release is going to be a fucking mess.
I call bullshit. This is a money saving decision, which means they’ve blown through their $760 million dollar bank account. Insane.
Here’s one: Trading cards are something you own. Skins are limited to a game you’re licensing.
Here’s another: trading cards are portable; they can be put in a collection for display, put in a safety deposit box, etc. When CS goes, all the skins go with it.
Another minor one: baseball cards are informational, the skins are cosmetic only.
Mind you, I think both are forms of unregulated gambling and trading cards as well as loot boxes should have better societal scrutiny, but they aren’t identical.
No one buys baseball cards for the informational side of it. They buy them as a collectors item. The same as these skins. The only difference is that one is digital and one is physical.
Sports cards have been around for ages and no one gave a shit. People care about the loot boxes in games because it’s easy for a kid to get their parents credit card and rack up a ton of charges.
I would say yes, they are unregulated gambling. People also spend ludicrous amounts of money on cards. Though I don’t think that should factor into whether or not something is or isn’t unregulated gambling. It’s the chance product, not the money spent on it.
So those cards have been around forever, and no one complained about them.
People care about these loot boxes because it’s easy for a young kid to get their parents credit card and rack up a ton of charges because they see a cool skin and don’t realize that ultra rare or 1/1000 chance to drop means that they won’t get t without spending a ton of money.
By definition gambling can be defined as playing games of chance for money. Well they aren’t going to win money, their reward is a collectable item.
Or to take risky action in hope of desired result. I don’t really see how this fits that definition either. There’s no risky action.
I would prefer if there were no loot boxes because I’d rather know what I’m getting, but people are focusing on the wrong thing here.
Trading cards and gambling addiction have been studied for years. TCGs may not function the same as a slot machine, but it does trigger the same thing in your brain.
You're right. TCGs with blind draw boosters are also bad. I didn't complain about Pokemon cards back in 2000 because I was a child and didn't comprehend that that was what I was doing. I definitely stopped partaking in Magic: The Gathering as an adult though when I realized it was a neverending gambling treadmill. Today I frequent fighting game locals that are kept afloat by Yu Gi Oh gambling addicts who fill the trash cans with booster wrappers as they go back to the counter over and over again to buy more packs.
So those cards have been around forever, and no one complained about them.
There have definitely been complaints about gambling in relation to collectible cards. I don’t think anything has come of them in legal terms, but many complaints have been voiced.
Many would say so. Wizards of the Coast, the makers of Magic the Gathering, have worked very hard at balancing the two sides of the coin. On one side, they design cards such that power levels determine the demand (and thus price) for rarer cards on the resale market, and on the other they argue that the cards have no intrinsic value so that buying packs can’t count as gambling since there’s technically no expected profit for the buyers.
Should we also have a ban on all sports memorabilia then? It’s a gamble for me to go to my local team and have the players sign things and then at some point in the future it could be worth a ton of money?
Would this conversation be any different if they sold the cards for what they think the expected value is? Then you’d have people complaining about how they’re charging hundreds for a card and that’s not fair because little Timmy can’t afford it.
Edit: those tumblers that people drink out of have “rarer” colors and designs, better ban those two because of gambling.
Because society has deemed gambling a problem requiring regulation. These things exist outside that regulation while being psychology the same.
Also, gambling addiction has the highest rate of suicide of all addictions. And I think we should be trying to lower the amount of people that kill themselves.
I’ve never given two shits about what society has decided about my psychology. It’s nobody’s place to decide for me. If someone wants to kill themselves, let them. Help them even.
DRM is usually known for big games before they are released. You can find articles about how the DRM works online. If it’s a new type of DRM, they usually describe how it works.
Steam has it listed on the demo, and it will likely be listed upon release, not sure what their stance is on pre-release, but this is a requirement now on steam to list it.
It’s under the features section (where it says co-op, controller support etc.). Should be highlighted in yellow for all 3rd party requirements (including kernel and non-kernel anti-cheat).
I don’t think anti chest should be in stuff like singleplayer or co-op games but competitive pvp multiplayer games it absolutely is and should continue to be the standard whether you like it or not.
How did you miss the important specificity of “kernel level”? No one is hating on “normal” anti-cheat, but kernel level is not acceptable, which is why just that has been the thing people have hated for several years.
I’m sure this will do wonders for morale. Are they paying people overtime for these extra days or is it free labor demanded based on unrealistic deadlines? Nope… just time off.
I’m sure that this will result in some highly innovative and top notch updates. Star Citizen will surely be the greatest game ever. One day. After the last star has blinked out of existence.
They are not paying directly. As per the article you can get additional PTO days in the future, albeit only after Squadron 42 is released (whenever that’s going to happen) and if you are still with the company.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the games. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) is the organization. It also operates as Roberts Space Industries (RSI) but that’s primarily a marketing arm.
Yeah, agreed. When the game was in its initial round of getting money I spent some money on it, knowing it was a bet. Since then the drama has unfolded and I’m just very interested in how it will unfold.
Since then I have not stopped spending money on some select early access, but simply from the perspective that I’ll sponsor development and hope it goes somewhere. I’ll even sometimes try and give feedback, although nowadays a lot is in discord… and I refuse to yell into that void.
Back to the topic… It’s silly that a company like this still ends up in time crunch before an annual event they plan themselves… and the shadiness of giving pto only after launch and if you are with the company. Hell then they should give pto then and equity now… they are requiring their staff to invest in the company and offering 1:1 pto in compensation… that’s not compensation… that’s theft… as time in the future is less valuable than time now.
Ah, I see the early access model, except for employment. Put in extra work now and maybe you’ll get some days back in a few years. Unless the project fails… or you leave the company… or we don’t feel like giving you those days anyway.
yeah this can only work if implemented by the devs. The only reason this can be done for some older emulated games is that there is only a megabyte or two needed to capture the state of the entire system. Not several gigabytes.
No game should save gigabytes. Even megabytes can be too much. If the game is very linear a save could mean a single number. Even if it has character cosmetic customization and a convoluted plot with lots of choices it’s still usually in the kilobyte range. The larger saves (overall) would be sports games like rally racing where the game needs to be able to provide a thorough replay of every race.
system state is not the same as a save file. System state is the cpu registers, the process’ entire memory space (because you don’t know what the game might do at any point) gpu context, etc.
edit: example: the save file for older games was measured in bytes. System state is much larger han that. It contains everything not just what the developer decided to allow you to save.
I was under the assumption the collections that utilize this system do it by just saving the inputs and timestamps and simulate them as such rather than understanding the entire whole state. I’m not sure how it works with non-seeded elements
I do agree with you about the dev focus. It would be way more complex even though if feasible if you can simulate without it graphically but you I can’t imagine it just being a system similar to recording or achievements
that only really works with deterministic systems though. You could do that with a 6502 or simple systems because you could perfectly predict what the state of the system would be in just by replaying inputs. everything up to predicting all cache misses.
consider a badly written game on a modern console (remember that save states should work for any game) in which physics is tied to framerate. Follow the chain… framerate depends on system speed… which, indirectly depends on the ambient temperature (a console running in a hot climate would throttle earlier than one running in an air conditioned cool room). And because modern systems execute more than one process, it also depends on what else is running (were you downloading a game in the background, slowing down the game ever so slightly?) or unpredictable things such as interrupts on certain system timers. And the list goes on and on. Even if the game didn’t have physics depending on framerate, differing deltaTime on each frame means different floating point rounding errors happen, which could accumulate over time.
So in this case, replaying inputs does not get you the exact state. you were in. there are just too many variables.
Many emulators have been doing something like this for quite a while. Its called a “saved state.” In some cases, a saved state can introduce bugs into the game play and mess up your progression, but that is just in emulation.
And? Sony has patented their way of doing it, big deal if it’s been done elsewhere. It isn’t something PlayStation games can do easily so they’re building a solution.
This article isn’t saying this is some groundbreaking discovery of technology or something, nor is it a press release/announcement.
The points you make are the exact reason why people are looking at this patent in a funny way.
What they are describing in the patent is basically a save game or checkpoints for subchapters in a game. This is not innovative or new and that is the problem. You can’t patent something that can already be considered public domain or common practice.
It’s very much a big deal if this has been done somewhere else. The patent is obscure enough to look unique but it common enough to start years long legal battles.
On reading the patent, it is specifically referencing streamed game checkpoints. That is, believe it or not, very different than save games stored locally. Still, I find it hard to believe that NVidia, Google or Nintendo wouldn’t have a patent for that already. If not, it may still be considered common use.
The devil is in the details for this issue. Is it really a new thing or is it “reverse” patent trolling?
They did, but that isn’t really relevant to the discussion. The Wii Virtual Console is discontinued and technically doesn’t have live support from Nintendo like the Switch and NSO currently. If Sony somehow did get a patent for save states in games, I don’t think it would retroactively apply to the Wii.
I worry that this also has a rose tinted glasses effect on early user reviews. The only people leaving reviews for the first few days are going to be the people already invested enough to pay extra for early access, and they may be more willing to overlook issues with the game.
That's precisely what I'm seeing with streams of the game. There's so many bugs and just bizarre design decisions, especially with the opening hour or so, but the streamers then claim it's a perfect game with no problems.
A significant amount of the bugs do seem to be based on how long you've been playing and how far into the game you've gotten. The farther you get, the more bugs start appearing.
Glad there’s a fix for that first one at least. That’s too bad, but it does seem to be very specific - if it’s prevalent outside one system then it’s definitely a huge issue though (and it’s big already).
For the second thread, I’m not really seeing any specific bugs outside of 2, it’s mostly just complaints about performance. I have over 1 day in save time so I’d have expected to have seen some of them by now I guess lol.
The only one through these threads I can corroborate is an NPC once turned around and faced the wrong way during conversation. Otherwise it’s simply been minor script delays - someone leave from an elevator that’s still closed so they run in super speed, or there’s a small delay when seating/conversing and the audio desyncs for one line before it’s back to normal. Once an NPC starting clipping into the air one step at a time, but then they reached the ceiling and it stopped.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the game honestly. Oh, one other bug I’ve seen that I’ve seen mentioned is a quest on random planets where we are to place a gas sensor on gas spews. Well, I’ve found gas spews but no quest icons appear. Others said there’s ways to make it pop up when they’re seen though.
Compared to my launch week 2077 which was also very bug free both Starfield and it seems to have a reputation that people want it to suck? The games have shortcomings, absolutely but have they realistically negatively affect my gameplay experience? So far for both games, they have not.
That said, if I’d dealt with that ship bug I’d have gone crazy! So I’m not at all trying to dismiss the bugs, but rather am just generally more confused as to why my 2077 experience was prisitine and my friends was a bug fest. Do we get different distributions of the game or something!?
I wonder how long it takes for some of those people to transfer to a more embittered relationship with Bethesda over it? Assuming any of them have that “I’m staring at a title screen realizing I haven’t actually had fun playing the game in weeks but the dopamine loop of the ‘loot, kill, craft’ system had me deluded into thinking I was enjoying myself. Like a social media doom-scroller or something” moment.
You used to be able to literally brick your build (get to a point where it’s impossible to progress any further) in Bethesda games. I’m sure that’s changed now, but that paranoia lingers.
I haven’t bought a triple a game on release in ten or fifteen years. For this one enough of my friends were already playing it for several days by the time I got it that it’s hard to see it as “early” (certainly not patient, either, but it’s fun to cheat on a diet now and then). And I’m really not finding it buggy particularly, no more than any non-aaa title would be shortly after launch. I hate to be overly kind to Bethesda but it’s really not worth the hate the net is leveling at it
They might just as well show a slideshow of concept art, that’s all they’re doing. At no point are they showing what they actually have or are going to do, just what they want to do.
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