They would have over a hundred thousand players on a closed beta game? Goddamn that seems like a shit ton for a beta but I’ve also never looked at any game’s player count.
They didn’t get 100k players. The players they got counted multiple times. Someone got swallowed once but Bobby got swallowed 35 times because he’s a dumbass. That counts a 36 people getting swallowed.
It’s by the same folks that made that quasi-mmo Conan game. The bones were in it. It was just unpolished and sparse. If it’s the same core team and they’ve learned their lessons the Dune game should be pretty dope. I’m hoping it shows other MMOs that MMO isn’t a playstyle.
Oh shit did they make the Conan with the directional attacking and blocking? Age of Conan? I remember that game making my PC bleed, but I forced my way to play it at less than 30 fps.
I played the beta weekend, I liked it. I want to play it again once it’s out in June, although there were annoying parts. The sun gives you heat stroke or something as a status meter, and it makes you dehydrate faster until you get to shade. With how often you’re out doing stuff in the sun, it was kind of annoying, because I just had to keep going on blood harvesting trips through NPC camps, to proccess it at my base to keep my water stocked. But in the full game with better tech unlocked, I’m sure it ends up being fine.
A lot of people also got pissed at the sandworm because if you get eaten, all your stuff is destroyed with no way to recover it (unlike a normal death where you can loot your corpse), and sometimes it can feel abrupt when they breach. That said, I never got eaten ny the sandworm in my ~15 hours of play during the beta.
The games with death like that are much better, because they force players to care. From what I played, in Eve online you would really think before doing something stupid, because player killers would wreck your ship without caring that you grinded for 2 months to buy it.
Same was a thousand years ago in Ultima Online where you could get ganked and eaten by an ork bandit. That led to me taking a chance and run through a forest naked, because I had a house deed in my pocket, and I didn’t want to look like an interesting target. It ended up in a bandit chitchatting with me and letting me go with the words: “I wouldn’t walk around in these parts” - yeah, no shit.
Great experiences!
It’s just at some point gamedevs started catering to middle-school kids who would buy in-game stuff with their mom’s card and got upset when it wat taken from them.
Edit: typo (shop/ship)
Maybe some people just don’t like grinding for hours and hours to replace stuff they already acquired in a video game. I’m not sure why you have to present your opinion as if it’s the only valid option and everyone who disagrees is an immature child.
Maybe some people just don’t like grinding for hours and hours to replace stuff they already acquired in a video game.
Personally, I would rather that we have a variety of different game types and options. There aren’t very many MMOs that make death feel meaningful. If it’s not your type of game, then don’t play it.
I didn’t say you have to grind. This is exactly what I mean, tou would start thinking differently. You would take someone with you (hire a bodyguard? friends from yesterday’s pve stuff? guild/corporation friends?)
And for why I have to present my opinion - well, you do present yours. People present opinions all the time. Maybe you’re a child, I don’t know - you decided to read something “between the lines”, but were there anything like that, or are you just insecure?
You presented your opinion and then contrasted it with that of middle school children spending their parents money. If you don’t think that comes off as you saying anyone who disagrees with you has the perspective of a middle schooler then you aren’t a very good communicator.
The market did change in the end of 90s-start of 2000s - before, games were mostly done for “nerds with PCs”, because usually only well-off adults had something decent at home. Then, mass adoption of PCs, PS3and XBox, led to age of an average gamer drop to a teenager, for the first time in history. So many games were, in general, “dumbed down”. Now we see a great picture of market coming back, and there is a shitton of everything engineering/economics.. I’m not saying that middle schoolers don’t deserve to play games - they do, and I did. It’s just, for example, WoW’s “account bound” and “char bound” stuff wasn’t a good thing, but it then became a standard, and started an age of microtransactions (will you argue itcs a bad thing?)
I don’t mind very punishing death mechanics, but when pvp is involved I absolutely hate it. I play more than the average person, but when some sweaty ass pvp’er who plays 80 hours/week shows up, it’s just never going to be any kind of competitive fight. There is no way I will ever be able to do anything against that kind of player, and I’m also not in any way interested in trying. I like pve, not pvp.
Oh, of course in case of two examples I made, there are safe areas, stuff to do if you want to live in peace, etc. In Ultima, only you could unlock the door of your own house so hiding inside would work. And inside towns you could call npc quards (so everyone would have it as a shortcut).
In Eve there are many protected systems, it’s just getting stuff from nullsec (lawless/unowned) systems could be more lucrative, so you learn to take your risks.
I know it’s not always that way - as I see from Rust memes, everyone is just chaotically running around killing new players - but maybe it doesn’t show the real picture
The one thing a Dune game must have are scary sandworms, if it was like any other death nobody would care about them, so I agree they should destroy all your stuff. People need to fear the open sand
Absolutely - for me it’s not about making games “scary”, it’s about having “extreme reward/extreme punishment” mechanics which change players behaviors in interesting ways. But specifically, punishing unrealistic behaviours when you are afk and your character is in a scary forest, or when you are in a deadly desert choosing emojis in the chat
Not to get political, but instantly dismissing things as “looks like Trump” is so ironic as that’s exactly what those types of people do to reality. It also really brings the point home further when you are just repeating rhetoric without understanding the existing support.
I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly-mismanaged development process that ran out of control, and where they have no realistic way of fulfilling all the promises they made at this point.
This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.
In a traditional development environment, the publisher would have bailed on this a long time ago.
EDIT: I do think that it does highlight two things, though:
The risks with this kind of funding structure for game development.
The fact that there are a lot of people who really badly want a modern, good space combat video game.
I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.
Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.
The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.
But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.
Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.
In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] A small team of ex-employees, which later became Triptych Games, continued development from their homes.[14]
In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.
The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten players expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up. And the publisher wasn’t in a position to cut development off. In Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their own capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay.
But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that CIG knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.
I don’t disagree, but I …don’t entirely agree either.
It’s absolutely true that devs are pretty bad at estimating costs, because it’s not their job. (And they’re usually good at estimating timelines, but bad at insisting on them.)
It’s also true that games blow over budgets and deadlines all the time, and yeah I remember when Duke Nukem Forever first became a joke and then a meme.
But consider that DNF was completed by a small handful of devs who ran with an almost-finished game that they knew they could make happen. In contrast, there is no finish line for Star Citizen. There is no path to success. As you say, they can’t drop it and be satisfied, so they make more promises and ask for more money. But here’s the key: They KNOW they cannot fulfill those promises - existing or future. It’s impossible at this point! The only thing they’re doing is delaying the inevitable, which would be fine if it was their own time and money; but since they’re constantly begging for money from optimistic gamers with promises they have no intention of delivering on, they are grifting. No excuses, no conditions, no “but maybe…” just pure con-artistry at work.
X4 is more game than Star Citizen. Elite Dangerous is more game than Star Citizen. Both these games are still getting updates that expand and build upon their mechanics. But the time Star Citizen becomes 1.0, these other games will have already surpassed it.
Hell, graphically Star Citizen used to be cutting edge… Like nearly 10 years ago. Now it just looks kinda “normal”.
I mean I paid $45 dollars for a ship a decade ago and have since made 100s of hours of wonderful memories with my friends. I wish I got scammed more ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I spend about 100 on the game. I paid like 45 or 50 for the base game then spend about 50 to upgrade my ship. Honestly, I don’t feel ‘scammed’ at that price point. I feel bad for the dudes who spent thousands on ships though.
Last I saw, Squadron 42 (the single player version of the game) is function complete and undergoing optimization, but SC the multiplayer game will never be finished in my mind.
Star Citizen looked so fucking cool when it was announced like 15 years ago. Since then it’s dipped lower and lower every single time new info comes out.
Like, the hopeful dumbasses that got burned initially like my dumb ass did with No Man’s Sky, I kinda get… but how the absolute fuck are they still getting sales?? Are there seriously still people that don’t know it’s a scam?
Worse. The die-hards may as well be cultists at this point. They delude themselves as hard as MAGAts. (I know a few guys who’ve been off-and-on players for years, and they still try to convince me to join them!)
As someone who has exactly one ship in the game, it’s not ‘bad’ if you just want to go ‘live a space life’ and do stuff like that.
It’s cool you can go do stuff in-world and not have loading screens, and just fly around ships doing trading, PVE missions, or doing space stuff, it’s enjoyable. There’s not much else to it, but if that’s what you expect it’s fun.
I don’t get the cultists thinking they’re playing the game in some future state where it’s anything more than that, though. I spent like… fuck, maybe 100 bucks? For the hours I put in, I enjoyed it but I’d never put in the 10s of thousands of dollars other people have dumped into this game.
Years ago they had certain components for sale, but removed them due to backlash. Given how unique the game is, I don’t mind this so long as everything is also available in-game. Being familiar with the game and how it works, this doesn’t seem “pay to win” to me.
It’s not pay to win. You’re right. Spending big bucks on a big ship will still get oneself killed by a small ship earned in-game. People who call SC pay-to-win listened a bit to much to Derek Smart while sipping their Monster, snacking on Doritos, wonding how many days they have to wait for the next Call of Battlefield. Those people genuinely do not understand what kind of game it is, why money can be spent, and that not a single penny beyond a starter package even needs to be spent. Nearly everything bought with real money can also be bought in-game. The monies goes to support the project, its clear when you buy anything, and you get like a month to return no questions asked if you want to. Or return at ANYTIME for instore credits and swap to some other ship without spending anything new. The misrepresentation still blows my.mind to this day.
I get where people’s angst comes from. It’s been in development forever, it’s made mind-boggling amounts of money, and the way promises have been routinely made and then broken erodes a huge amount of trust. I can’t blame anyone for thinking of it as “Scam Citizen.”
But despite all that, Chris Roberts has created something that nobody has ever seen before. Even in its current incomplete state, there has never been anything else remotely like it. Maybe it’s the buddhist in me, but I have had so much fun with the game over the years as-is, rather than being upset with what it’s not or what it’s supposed to be.
Comparing it to other “normal” games, the optics of buying stuff can definitely seem pay-to-win, but for anyone that had played it, it’s clear that’s not how things work. And since the game is early access and wipes have been so frequent until now, buying components at this stage is really just a bit of a time saver. You can save a day or two of playing to fund and source the components in-game. I don’t see the problem with that, especially if it keeps development progress moving.
As someone that played star citizen and enjoyed the gameplay very much, this game has been basically ruined by greed for years now. They basically discourage playing the actual game with these practices. Sure, you can work your ass off and make a butt load of money to buy a bunch of cool guns, armor, and ships, but as soon as they do a server wipe, which they do fairly regularly, most if not all of it will get wiped clean. But if you give them real money you get to keep everything after a server wipe.
I even had a friend where his ship, bought with in game currency, glitched and he was able to keep it several updates later with no issue while mine disappeared. We both bought them with in game currencies at about the same time. Mine disappeared as soon as the update came out and he had it for almost two years! To me that sounds like it’s intentional and they could totally get away with letting you keep your stuff but they choose not to.
And look, I’ve played early access games before and I’m used to playing games that do a server wipe every once in a while or saves being incompatible with the new version, but I’m talking every update and multiple times a year. It makes it so the only sense of progress you feel is when you buy a ship with real money so you can still have it on the next update. It’s a very exhausting game.
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Aktywne