Well this article is kinda saying that they are barely keeping their head above water as it is, and CIG is vastly mismanaging money and driving development heavily on how many ships they can sell in that year.
So if anything I'd say that this strategy doesn't seem to be working out for them anymore
The only part I believed they might actually deliver on since it isn't boggled down by network issues, but I guess even that was too much to hope for. I still remember the 2018 lie of "it's weeks away from being shown" only for them to not show anything or the next 5 years. If it weren't that troublesome to get it (and it's a small sum anyway) I'd probably fight for a refund out of principle alone.
If they’re keeping their head above water, even barely, it means they are keeping their head above water. Without delivering a product. For YEARS.
They’re earning money by selling empty promises year after year. Not a lot of money. They’ll never become billionaires from this game. But there are lots of people in there (mainly executives and CEO and whatever) earning a decent salary. On empty promises! It’s as close to a scam that it can be without being illegal.
I guess, but the fact they are now laying people off is for sure a sign that things aren't going well enough. CR might live the rest of his life in a mansion but his legacy is in a crapper and he's not gonna get another chance at this (at least I hope people wouldn't fall for it twice).
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
Dwarf fortress is a finished game and the original version, which is awesome as is, was always free. Not at all comparable to star citizen or eve online
Dwarf Fortress is very much NOT finished. Its roadmap is already more complex than most live game feature sets and Tarn and Zach are generally pretty adamant about it likely never being "finished"
Maybe consider reading more rather than just having a knee jerk reaction of “comparison to thing I don’t like, bad. I MUST REPLY!!!”
That is true of basically every game. It is why we moved away from “Game, wait a year, expansion, wait a year, expansion. new game” on to DLC and now straight up live games. It is just a reality of development as it lessens crunch (you can put features off for later updates) and removes the old ramp up/down model.
The issue is not that star citizen is trying to be a live game. It is that it is horrendously mismanaged and helmed by a “rockstar developer” and his family. Apparently the brother actually DOES know how to ship a product, but he isn’t the one who runs around telling people to prioritize bedsheet deformation. Or to insist on needing 64-bit coordinates rather than using the industry standard approach of only loading a few cells within range of the player (and then lots of complex shenanigans to update the rest at a much lower rate). And so forth.
And I am not even going to complain (too much) about the sp campaign never coming. That is what I bought a decade or whatever ago and I am still pissed that was immediately dropped in favor of making the game Microsoft said “… fucking no. Release Freelancer god damn it” to. But the majority of current players want star citizen so… fine.
But the issue is just that there is no competent leadership. And all anyone has been able to figure out is “If we keep releasing ships, people will keep buying them”.
Because if they had gotten a vertical slice in? This would have eaten ED’s breakfast and NMS would never have had a chance at recovery. It was everything that every elite game has been working toward (and Evochron already did a decade or so ago…) and would actually give people stuff to do with those ships. Add in new solar systems, game systems, etc after the fact.
Yeah there’s “CEO resigns over sexual misconduct allegations of groping” and “Executive denies sexual misconduct, 13 women have come forward”
But this, what tf did these guys do?! Damn!
Edit: Fucking Christ
"…and after apologizing for that initial behavior over a year later, how he then groped and raped her at an industry event. They claim Gbinigie asked them to meet him and some friends in a hotel lobby ahead of a PAX industry party. Gbinigie, however, arrived alone, and asked if they wanted to head to his friends’ room, where the rest of the group was apparently waiting. After brushing aside a “feeling of panic” and following Gbinigie to the room, they saw there was no one else in the room.
“I’m still not ready to relive the intimate details publicly, but that’s when he forced himself on me. It wasn’t the longest experience as, as he said at the time, his friends were expecting us - but it was enough for him to get out of me what he’d clearly wanted from the start, and to put me in my place,” they wrote.
“It’s taken a long time and a lot of therapy to stop listening to words that are burned into my brain - ‘you should be grateful’ - to forgive myself for the fact that at a certain point I stopped fighting him, and to try to be okay as I can be with the fact that my first experience with sex at all was rape. It wasn’t the longest experience, but it was enough to still fuck me up to this day”
For me it wasn’t about the leveling or end game content. It was the engagement - you had to interact with other players, negatively or positively, to truly progress. Then they added dungeon finder and for all I know the other four players could be bots for all the engagement you get.
In the US, if you're moved to another location for that amount of time involuntarily that's an arrest not a detention. Seems the French code gives more police powers than our constitution.
Yeah, I played it for a while between stopping EQ1 and starting WoW when that released. Fun game at the time, but the expansions took a lot away from the experience as they naturally muddled the idea behind it.
Still, an important stepping stone in the progression of MMORPGs, in particular to mass PvP.
And even today there are no other games that do PvP as well as DAoC did. I am playing guild wars 2 and that is as close an experience as I have found in any newer mmo.
My thoughts, exactly. I still have the original game in the box . World of WarCrack captured me for a few years. I still remember the beauty of the world as I ran or rode horse between cities. The pine forests with snow falling was amazing.
I lost interest because I’m a solitary gamer and you really need to be a guild member to enjoy it. That leads to mandatory raids at 2 am, etc., which I just can’t handle.
TL;DR: The game only has two developers, who are also married. Unfortunately, one of them has been diagnosed with cancer, and coupled with the usual 2020 struggles, they don’t have enough money left to pay for active developers.
From the story and their words, they seem really passionate about the project - they are former developers from another MMORPG game. It seems like they are putting the game on “life support”, hoping to see some improvements in the sales. If things don’t change, the project will ultimately be halted.
It makes me sad. I don’t have any interest in MMO games, but they seem genuinely good people who tried their best. And cancer sucks, and seems like it’s late stage too.
“Gaming journalism” did its best to not mention it every time something with kotick came up. Blizzard would release shit about games as a smokescreen. A scandal where Kotick groped a guy in front of an elevator? NEW OVERWATCH 2 DETAILS ANNOUNCED!
I would expect to see this kind of article in 2019 prior to the launch of WoW Classic, not now in October 2023. Classic has had the same mindset that’s pervasive in retail from the very beginning. Everyone rushed straight to 60 and promptly began raidlogging to preserve their precious world buffs. Parsing and speed running in raids was all anyone cared about.
You are right but classic WoW hardcore has really fixed most of those issues because if you rush things you will probably die. Anyway I really agree with this headline because I logged into retail WoW during a thunderstorm because if you DC while you are playing it's basically an automatic game over, anyway I was bored as hell immediately. Retail is all about doing raids and dungeons, which is fun if you like that but I actually enjoy simply leveling in classic hardcore way more, and the best part is I don't have to be logged in for hours at a time leveling unlike in raids.
I didn’t play Vanilla but my friend talked me into Classic at launch. I played for a year or two before quitting and playing retail (which I’ve since stopped playing as well).
I loved my time in Classic but in retrospect, my fondness was just for my guild. I hated the “leveling journey” they’re praising here. Both games are a rush to max level…Classic is just slower.
With limited time, I really don’t want to spend half my night looking for a group and then traveling to the dungeon. I don’t want to wait 20 minutes for the quest mob I couldn’t tag to respawn.
Personally I just don’t want a level grind in an MMO. I love them in single player games (or even some multiplayer like bg3) but not in an MMO where levels are a barrier to entry for a lot of game activities. I think I would have loved Classic as a jobless teenager but now…it’s just not for me.
I’m happy for anyone who finds joy in Classic, though.
loved my time in Classic but in retrospect, my fondness was just for my guild.
The social aspect and the game being slower are intrinsically tied together. Having to run to the dungeon and then wait 15 min til a straggler shows up lets you know the people you are playing with in ways that modern MMOs and their gogogo playstyle just don’t allow.
Classic was full of systems that intentionally put the social aspect of the game front and center.
But I got that on my retail guild, too, we just weren’t waiting for the zeppelin while we did it. By far the biggest social loss of the modernization is that so much of it is cross-server now - you’ll probably never see the people in your group again after the dungeon. I do miss knowing nearly everyone on the server. The time our whole faction rallied to stop this one guild from getting scarab lord after they griefed another guild by mass reporting them is one of my favorite gaming moments of any game.
But really, it’s the LACK of systems that put the social aspect front and center. There was very little to do outside of pvp and leveling alts - two things I didn’t enjoy. Non-raid nights were usually extremely boring, Classic became a chat room I’d keep on my second monitor. As fun as guild chat might have been, the lockdown is long over and I don’t find that to be a great use of time.
As a kid I’d sit my favorite tfc server just to chat so I get the appeal but with so many options out there, I guess nowadays when I log on I want to play more than socialize
Just a shout out to Stephanie Sterling for covering Koticks fuckery since the beginning (on youtube) And Jason Schrier for publishing it (kotaku, now bloomberg, and freelance), even as it has fallen on deaf ears for the better part of a decade. Activision Blizzard has been rife with frat boy culture that kotick promotes would have been a bloody nose on the new face Microsoft wants to put on the company.
Stephenie sterling has been an absolute legend covering this. Been watching the jimquisition for a long time now and i never miss an episode about kotick.
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