We’ll have to wait until it’s out to see. The statement that they want to minimize grind? Hoooooly crap, that’s the exact opposite of what RS was. To get to the higher levels and max a skill, it was basically a mental game of sticking to the best xp/tick strategies, which could still take a month or more to max one skill. That was after they had introduced a bunch of new things. The original days? It was a third job on top of it being the second job to do it in months.
It was also really fun for being so simplistic and had a good mix of self-aware humor, so I have hope for their new game.
RuneScape to me is about having an easy enough game that you always have something to do on.
I’ve got a few 99s, but I still have plenty of others to do, and if I don’t want to do skilling, I can go do some of the plethora of quests I haven’t done yet. If I don’t want to do either of those, I can go find quite a lot of different things to do ranging from very easy to very difficult.
I’m sure most people stick around for the grind, but for me, it was always because there was SOMETHING for you to do. :)
The most misleading statement ever though. It’s only halfway XP-wise. You will have unlocked much better training methods, gear, support skill, possibly more money, than earlier in the skill. Time-wise you’re definitely way over the halfway point.
Sure its playable but the game is still (and i think always will be) lacking the VAST majority of features they’ve been talking about for more than 10 years.
Like what? What features specifically have they been talking about (for more than 10 years) which have yet to be implemented? Most of the core systems seem to be there, just seems like they’re polishing up what’s already in the game.
The last one that’s missing is IIRC Jump-points and they’re adding that within 3 months. They’re still fleshing out salvage and the dynamic economy stuff, but the initial implementation is there.
I could have sworn when I pledged in 2014-2016 (can’t recall at the moment) I pledged cause Squadron 42 was hyped to be released in a much shorter time. I’m not complaining, I spent some more cash on it, but I thought I was going to get a fancier single player space game before now. I loved Wing Commander as a kid, even had to get a tech to figure out the highmem.sys and possibly other optimization in the windows .bat files to even play so wanted to play the newest of Chris Rpberts.
Of course maybe I misunderstood at the time and it wasn’t supposed to be coming that soon, which is why I’m not bothered even if it passed, I think they are trying but got into feature creep. I haven’t logged on in over a year now but I keep an eye on things to try when it seems interesting and get use out of my HOTAS.
Since you’re replying to every comment I’ve made - Alpha still doesn’t have a set meaning. It changes between people who use it.
Logging in and doing the content you couldn’t do when you originally bought it still means it’s progressing and yes, it qualifies as a game no matter how mad that makes you.
What part of “it’s still being fucking developed” keeps getting past you bud? “It’s just a tech demo, it’s not a complete game” - no fucking shit. You being pissy that it’s not done as fast as you want it is entitlement and you should really grow the fuck up.
In its initial debut on Kickstarter, Star Citizen was marketed as “everything that made Wing Commander and Privateer / Freelancer special.” The proposed game was claimed to include a single-player story driven mode called Squadron 42 that would include drop in/drop out co-op, a company-hosted persistent universe mode, a self-hosted, mod friendly multiplayer mode, no subscriptions, and no pay-to-win mechanics. The initial estimated target release date was stated to be November 2014, with all proposed features available at launch. Additional promised features included virtual reality support, flight stick support, and a focus on high-end PC hardware.[3] While the initial release would be targeted for Windows, Roberts stated that Linux support was a goal for the project after its official release.
Cool, too bad it’s one of the worst pay to win games. Last time I checked you had to pay real money to buy in-game stuff and the prices were by no means pocket change.
It really isn’t though. For one you don’t “have” to buy anything except a starter package for $45, everything else is optional if you want to support development. There also isn’t really a “win condition,” there’s PvP, but it’s not like ranked matches or whatever.
Also those people buying the largest most expensive ships are going to be in for a rude awakening. You will have costs for managing ships that currently isn’t in the game, but when it is I imagine the big spenders will bankrupt themselves (in game currency). There’s also the fact that ships larger than a one seater will need crew so you can’t really do much with them on your own.
The prices of ships can be absurd, but I think the people that buy them are just shooting themselves in the foot. I’ve been a backer since 2014 and aside from the starter ship I only bought one “extra” cheap shuttle because I love having access to it through any wipe even though I could earn it in game fairly quickly.
Damn, as of years ago you’ve been able to buy new ships with in-game currency. You’re not even keeping up on the game you’re bitching about. Sure you can always buy better ships with real money, you can have whatever reservations you want about that, but calling it pay to win seems like a stretch. Elite Dangerous has long proved space battles are often a skill issue.
Chris Roberts has always had the ambition for a space sim where you could truly do anything, but never had the resources to actually create it.
So what is Star Citizen supposed to be?
An open world sandbox where you, a citizen of the stars, can choose to be Whst you want. A space trucker? A pirate? A bounty hunter? A smuggler? These aren’t new things in the space sim genre, but Star Citizen wants to make these aspect less like a game and more like a life sim.
So instead of clicking a few buttons to fly your spaceship, your character wakes up in bed, has to manually walk over to the ship hangar (maybe take the train there, if you’re on the city planet. Yes, the train runs on a schedule), manually access the hangar via elevator, climb into the ship, activate the ship, request take-off from control, wait for the hangar doors to open, and then you fly your spaceship.
This level of granular detail is meant for every aspect of the game and is the reason why Star Citizen will never get done!
Y’all have been burned too much, so when you see someone creating something bright and exciting, all you see is fire. Stop reading clickbait headlines, stop taking the word of tinfoil hat loonies just because it satisfies your irrationalinal desire to hate this game. They get so much wrong and manipulate the rest you’ll feel like a fool when you see for yourself. Try the next ree fly, face the cognitive dissonance and make up your own mind. Then get frustrated with the manufactured outrage that tricked you from having fun with us this whole time.
Gaming journalism is about generating clicks for shareholders, full stop, but you’ll believe them over an independent studio run by a guy whose career is full of beloved, well made space games. You have fallen into an enshittification trap and are missing out because of it.
Look at the number of comments on posts about hating star citizen. If you were an unscrupulous gaming news company, generating Star Citizen drama equals clicks and money. Go watch the weekly Inside Star Citizen episodes or dev livestreams, read the massive monthly reports, use the dev tracker to communicate with one of their thousand employees on the forums. This is a game being made in good faith. How is a constantly growing playerbase and financial success somehow considered a sign this game is bad? How does spending that money on development , pushing out massive quarterly updates and inventing new gaming tech mean this project is dead? How does the most openly developed game out there mean they are clandestine fraudsters? It’s the shareholders of gaming news who are trustworthy here? Think critically, don’t just feed your initial reaction.
People don’t make fun of starcitizen because “games journalism”. They laugh because it’s development hell is funny. Even if a satisfactory product come out the other end, it’ll still be an internet legend.
Star citizen exploits its userbase with a never-ending drip feed of bite-sized consumables, just as long as you keep feeding the machine.
This is not some poor little indie dev. They have taken over 600 million from they’re users, and have nothing finished to show for it. I treat them with the same distain that I do companies that trive on lootboxes and live services, as they all work from the same base template. At least the live service people made a game before squeezing every penny out of people.
I “bought” this game when I was in high school. I’ve graduated high school, college, and I’ve been in the workforce for 7 years. Still no game.
So yes, they should figure out this game is going to be, set a launch date, and work towards that schedule. This forever-in-development thing they have going on is ridiculous.
Edit: Alright, it’s not fair to say “still no game.” There is a game you can download and play, but the question I have is does it have all the bells and whistles you expect from a complete game, or is it a technical demo with some game features? See my other comment in this comment chain for why my opinion is what it is.
“Still no game” see, this bad faith shit you do is just chef’s kiss. You can go play it right this second. Their updates to this point are open to play. Right now. “Still no game” isn’t just dishonest it’s a fucking lie and you keep saying it.
They don’t have to set a launch date, they don’t have to put down in writing for you what the game is going to be, and they have roadmaps and are updating the game constantly. You are owed fucking nothing more than what you’ve been given and you throwing a tantrum about it isn’t just frustrating, it’s childish.
If you don’t like the development cycle, move the fuck on and stop bitching about it. You have a life, right? 7 years in the workforce. Play a different game and stop letting this one live rent free in your head. As a grown man, that should be pretty easy. Let the developers decide what they do with their game and if you don’t like it, nobody is making you play it. Nobody is making you keep up with it. And the constant posts of people bitching and moaning “Why isn’t it out yet? Fuckin’ scammers >:(” drive me up a fucking wall.
It’s been a decade and people still rage bait this game.
It is pretty easy not to think about this game, it does not live rent free in my brain. I bought the promise of a space ship over a decade ago when there really was no game. The “game” then was here is your spaceship in a garage, stare at it and marvel. That was the whole game.
Over time i’ve seen bits and pieces of it in my feed, I remember when they added being able to fly the spaceship, idk when that was, but again that was the whole game. You could see pretty space but still no substance.
That was really my last experience with it because I think somewhere around this point is probably where I started working full time and stopped really following game news.
Flash forward to today I see this post to see the game is still a work in progress, I shared my opinion.
So if there is a decent game by now with a plot that would be great, I would give it a shot. But if it’s still just a fancy tech demo where you can run around for a bit but there’s really nothing to “do” then I’ll wait another decade.
I still can’t play the one I actually bought, Squadron 42, so no there’s no game. There’s a live demo for star citizen but nothing but promises for the one they said would come out first
So this hyper specific thing that they changed focus from is why you shitcan the entire rest of the game? The story driven campaign that takes a lot more time and resources you’re upset about taking time to develop? Like come on man. This really is Cyberpunk all over again. Just let them work. Go play Helldivers 2.
Yes me pointing out they still haven’t done the part I paid for is shit canning the game. I’m sorry I don’t want to just play a tech demo while I wait for the game.
Also bad analogy as cyberpunk was playable and launched
Notice how “Squadron 42” has a different name than “Star Citizen”? You bought the tech demo for a module of a larger game when you could have waited because clearly you’re not interested in the tech demo. Development isn’t a straightforward process and you had to know that going in. Sorry you think there’s “no game” because the section you wanted isn’t done yet. You’re just wrong.
Cyberpunk released nearly unplayable under the pressure of people threatening to kill the developers for pushing back the release date too many times. Almost like they shouldn’t have put a release date. You seem wildly uninformed about both games.
You do realize the original kickstarter and pitch was for squadron 42 right? And by backing you’d get extras in the form of the MMO Star Citizen universe coming out after the SP Squadron 42.
Honestly I don’t think you know anything about either…
Reasons You’ll Want to Play Star Citizen
A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in Space is unending, endless and so are your opportunities. Strike out to make your fortune amongst the Stars or sign-up for a tour of duty in the UEE Fleet.
Constantly expanding and evolving universe We’re committed to making Star Citizen a living, breathing universe that is its own entity. It will be a constantly shifting and evolving place for players to explore and affect.
Micro updates rule! We’re not interested in having yearly updates. Once live, we will have a team of people adding content on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. So we’ll always be adding data, stories and campaigns as well as reacting to the needs and actions of the players.
Squadron 42 - A Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want Playable offline or online, co-op with friends, you sign up for a tour of duty with the UEE fleet, manning the front lines, protecting settlements from Vanduul warbands.
Life during wartime If you distinguish yourself in combat, you might be invited to join the legendary 42nd Squadron. Much like the French Foreign Legion of old, they can always be found in the toughest areas of operation and always snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, regardless of the odds.
The conflict never ends Upon completion of your tour you’ll re-enter the persistent Star Citizen universe with some credits in your pocket and Citizenship to help you make your way. But in the universe of Star Citizen when one conflict ends, another is just around the corner. You’ll have opportunity to spend more time with your squadron mates as additional Campaigns are released as part of the content update plan.
And unlike most kickstarter scams, they’re still trying to honor that original pledge.
Notice they didn’t promise an exact date? Damn that’s wild. You wanted to be an early backer so congrats, the monkey’s paw curls and now you need to grow up because you somehow haven’t over the course of the development of the game you keep whining about taking so long.
The adults who backed this project with WAY more money than you are still mature enough to put this in the back of their mind and go about their life with the assurance CIG will make good on these pledges. Helldivers 2 is a great game and there’s no kickstarter for you to buy and bitch about later.
It’s been an ALPHA since I first play tested sometime in 2016. In that time Halo Infinite released with a more polished game than this shitty tech demo
Yeah, 8 years. The typical game development cycle. For Star Citizen, the well known highly ambitious game. You people can’t even wait until it takes them longer than a typical fucking cycle to bitch and moan about how long it’s taking. Fuck off already.
This is all just stuff they’re porting over from Squadron 42 now that they were able to move those devs back to SC. I have no idea why this deserves it’s own article.
They should be bragging about the 400 player single shard test they just finished.
400 on a single shard (server) that actually quite a lot. It is far far easier to just throw a bajillion different servers at the problem and only have a relatively small player count per server. Having 400 running smoothly on a single server is a very impressive optimization achievement
Correct and eve has been very impressive with its per server player counts as well. It’s a completely different type of Beast mind you, trying to keep that many players synchronized over something like a first person perspective real-time movement game is a completely different ball game from keeping spreadsheet simulators synchronized.
Still a very good achievement of optimization regardless but definitely a completely different ball game from synchronizing a first person type content where the players are free to just move in whatever fucking weird ways they want rather than linear vector paths
Yeah eve handles it by slowing down time in-game. So each player has less actions for the server to handle per cycle.
Every game has their way of handling it. Cig is doing it via the replication layer and dynamic meshing. IE multiple servers talking to a “boss” server that scales based on needed load without Eve’s crutch of time scaling. Totally different technologies.
Eve’s solution worked based on what they had and needed at the time, but it’s old hat now.
Thousands of hours on high brightness with a static image and it will start to retain elements of the image.
The torture test is important but what ya boi needs to do now is to create a more realistic test. Using static elements for maybe 6 hours at a time every day. That’s still “torture” as most users are probably not playing the same game for that long, but still within the realm of possibility.
You'll definitely have users gaming on the thing for 8+ hours every day, so I don't see much value in that. Like I said, you might as well just wait for users to report their experiences.
You’ll definitely have users gaming on the thing for 8+ hours every day
Yes, that’s exactly my point. Definitely some but not many.
Like I said, you might as well just wait for users to report their experiences.
Report them to whom, exactly? Not everyone is going to hop onto the internet to publicly report their issues. How are you going to account for the conditions? What if there’s nothing to report?
Not everyone is going to hop onto the internet to publicly report their issues.
But enough people are. People are talking about every small thing they did, what happened, whatever.
Also, with all the different plugins or stats available on this thing to track everything, you can probably create a pretty detailed breakdown of what someone did with their Steam Deck.
It never ceases to amazing me how angry people get when a game isn’t perfect and bug free. We want more and more content and graphics with the same amount or less resources, all the while refusing to pay any more for it.
I miss the days when people were happy with n64 and ps1 graphics. You didn’t need a team of 200 people to put out hyper realistic graphic open world games that people would still shit on.
Fucking why? You can buy a ship for $20, go download the game, and play it this very second. The fuck does the “1.0 release!” title do differently? Give you full license to shit on how it’s now out and xyz isn’t done?
The people concerned about it releasing are the same ones who will bitch about it releasing ‘too soon’. Fuck em.
I’m on the other side of the fence here, amazed that people still bat for a company that can’t deliver a product after what, 10 years past the first estimate release date?
I’m not on any side of the fence. I just see these posts shitting on games all the time, and get tired of seeing them. If you don’t like a game fine, don’t play it. But making games is hella difficult. I make indie games in my spare time, and I can honestly say, just making a single player game is hard, let alone a multi-player game, or anything realistic. Like Jesus, if you have such a huge problem with these games, go make a better one yourself.
I agree with you for most games, people are picky and don’t understand the challenges. But this game solicited donations 10 years ago, people bought into the vision, and they were wildly successful, I think they raised $600M, which is like the most money any game has ever raised?
And despite that, 10 years later, it’s still mostly just a tech demo (edit: perhaps I’m wrong? Maybe there is $40 worth of playable content. See discussion in child comments, I haven’t tried this myself in many years, out of fear of being disappointed again). They are focused on adding cool but superficial animation things, rather than just making a fun playable experience.
If they were focused on making a fun playable (but possibly buggy and limited) game then it would be different. But instead they seem to be chasing random superficial features like projecting your face from your web cam onto your character. It feels like they are not seriously committed to making even an early access game in a reasonable timeline.
If this project was funded by some billionaire who wanted to spend 30 years to make the most amazing MMO ever with a ton of never before seen features, then that would be fine. But instead normal people chipped in $40+ to fund this game, and the developers don’t seem to be prioritizing actually making a fun playable game. It’s barely beyond a tech demo even 10 years later (edit: maybe this is not completely accurate). It is reasonable to assume that the management of this project does not care about making a playable game, they can work on whatever fun features they want, they’ve already made a ton of money.
edits: perhaps I’m wrong about the state of the game. I haven’t tried it in a while. I’ll have to give it another try.
I agree that the project has fallen victim to arguably the worst example of scope creep to ever plague the gaming industry, but it’s much further along than “barely beyond a tech demo”. I know people who play several hours a week and say they’re having a great time. There’s definitely a full game in the alpha, but it’s far from polished or finished.
To your point about feeling different about the slow development if it were funded by a single investor rather than crowdsourcing: what’s the difference? Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI. Isn’t that all that matters with an investment? I’m not sure why it would be better if it was just a single investor being happy rather than a million investors being happy, even if it is all just delusion.
TL;DR: I may be mistaken about how playable it is, I’ll have to give it another try. Thanks for the reassurance. I haven’t tried it myself in many years, and have only relied on articles like this to hear about the progress. Perhaps I’m biased since the comments always love to hate on Star Citizen and few people are defending it. RE single investor: if everyone who paid money for it was happy then yeah there would be no difference. But I think a lot of people paid money expecting a longer gaming experience within a few years, and instead it’s taken a long time and they’re still focusing a lot on cosmetic things rather than gameplay and content. IMO gameplay and content should be the top priority, and cool visual stuff can come later. But if piracy/mining/exploring planets/missions can actually provide ~10 hours of enjoyment without being seriously hindered by bugs, then I’m totally wrong and should update my comment.
Thanks for the info, perhaps I should update my comment. It was barely beyond a tech demo when I tried it so many years ago, but it does seem like it’s added a lot since then (and I’ve only learned about it after digging in more today). I’ve seen some comments in this post that said there isn’t much to do besides walk around and look at stuff, which matches my experience many years ago, but perhaps it’s not really accurate anymore. Some articles have talked about piracy and mining actually being viable as ways to make money to get a better ship. If those are enjoyable and not severely limited in content and so buggy that progress is hard, then I’m totally wrong and can maybe say that 10 years later my return on investment is adequate :) , and maybe in another few years there will be even more content and give me something more like ~10+ hours of enjoyment.
I know people who play several hours a week and say they’re having a great time. There’s definitely a full game in the alpha, but it’s far from polished or finished.
This is actually really reassuring to me, I’ll have to give it another try.
Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI.
Perhaps the people you’re talking to about it now are somewhat skewed towards people who still enjoy it for what it is now. I’ve almost forgotten and wouldn’t think to mention it to most people, but I paid $40 for it around 9 years ago, because a friend mentioned it to me and it seemed like such an amazing idea. It showed so much promise, the racing seemed fun and complex, and later I tried Squadron 42 and felt like I could see the vision coming together. But then after not trying it for a few years, I keep hearing more of the same thing: new cool superficial feature, but still lacking in significant enjoyable gameplay. I am actually kind of scared to try it again and be disappointed in the lack of content.
I realize too that Squadron 42 is apparently a fairly long and mostly finished experience? That alone might be worth $40, though I do think 10 years is a little long to wait for that. I’ll concede that they do seem to be delivering on some of the hype, it just takes way too long, and I’d rather they prioritize on something simple but playable for long periods, versus cool immersion and fancy animations and concepts.
Perhaps a lot of the people who enjoy it now enjoy the kind of role playing aspect of getting in a ship with friends and walking around exploring? I would enjoy that somewhat too, every few years, almost like a really advanced VR chat, I guess. But my friends have lost interest in this due to the never ending development cycle. And I would hate to be the one to say “hey guys let’s try this out again, it’s way better now”, and then have everyone be disappointed when someone gets stuck in a wall or the content seems really limited.
Anyway to summarize: perhaps I’m wrong, maybe the game is worth $40 now and I’ve just been biased from people loving to hate on a game that they haven’t even tried. I’ll have to give it another try.
I think it’s worth a try if you haven’t played in several years! There isn’t a lot of gameplay if you don’t have a ship geared towards combat/mining/cargo, but those contracts are pretty fun (there wasn’t a huge amount of variety, but still several hours of gameplay). I will admit that all my evidence of player enjoyment is anecdotal, but it was a bit shocking to me to hear about how much fun friends were having when I keep seeing so much hate towards the game online. I’ve gotten a couple ships as gifts from friends/family, but my PC hasn’t ever been beefy enough to run the game at a stable frame rate (I’ve since upgraded so it’s probably time to try it again ¯*(ツ)*/¯)
Awesome, thanks! It’s nice to hear a perspective that is different from the mainstream. I’ve also been limited by my PC for a while, but I’ve upgraded since I last tried it, so hopefully I’ll have more luck this time.
Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI
Every person you know personally? Most comment sections I’ve seen discussing Star Citizen seems to have at least one or two people who are unhappy with their roi. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve been able to get my full money’s worth yet. I think I will some day, I know it’s more than a tech demo, but the gameplay isn’t quite there yet and the game is still really buggy and unoptimized.
If they can release Squadron 42 this year or next, I think that’d really start to turn things around for them more than anything else
Let’s be honest the people who would defend their ROI have lost interest in defending it to the unwilling. Star Citizen has become a cat call to all the haters whenever it’s posted in general gaming (namely r/games and c/games now) communities. The only way the narrative changes is by showing not telling, and that only happens with further polishing like this article is covering, and in future release.
There is a reason they’ve successfully increased pledge numbers year over year, you just don’t hear from people outside that community due to this stigma that’s not worth bothering to explain.
Homie you’ve been able to fucking play it for a decade. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you’re the problem. If they said they released it years ago and called these all “updates” you’d have nothing to bitch about and that’s why I fucking loathe people like you. It’s not “officially released” so it’s a scam, it’s disappointing, it’s whatever the fuck else you can dredge up to downplay the fact they’re still fucking developing it like any other active game. Even Elite Dangerous still drops updates and it predates Star Citizen. You people are impossible to please and it’s exhausting. Move the fuck on.
tech demo out = game is playable, unbeatable logic
If they said they released it years ago and called these all “updates” you’d have nothing to bitch about
It’s not about what the developers say the state of the game is, it’s about what’s actually out and playable - and for Star Citizen, last time I checked it’s some barebones version with one planet, bajillion missing features, 200000000$ ships and in general a buggy mess
You star citizen fans are insufferable. I get spammed with these videos, ads and articles hyping up the game for being the best thing ever, always claiming the next update to be some gamechanger but it’s still the same unfinished garbage. Love how every time someone mentions the absolutely disgusting monetisation, it goes in one ear and out the other.
Now get back to licking chris robert’s shoes, you’ve missed a spot
Lawsuits for what? They never promised any customer that they would immediately deliver a working end product. As far as I can make out, they offer early access to an in-development product, with your purchase going toward funding development. It’s more akin to a donation with strings (access to the product).
I’ve literally never paid for Star Citizen. Not sure how I’m supposed to be a sweaty fanboy…
It’s a large scoped game, and from what I’ve seen, they’ve slowly been turning it into an incredibly feature-filled game that goes beyond the scope of what most other games deliver.
Lmao because morons like you keep calling it a scam despite it making massive improvements. They could have cut and run 40 million dollars ago. You just want something to hate on and it’s genuinely pathetic.
You want an actual scam game to bitch and moan about? Go winge about The Day Before. That one actually took the money then shut down their studio like proper scammers. Don’t see them sticking it out while crybabies write up shit like you every 4 months when they get bored.
I’m sick of literal children saying “Don’t release the game if it’s not done! We’re tired of buggy messes!” then a week later saying shit like “Wow this game is still in development? They should release it already wtf.”
You gonna join the losers that made death threats to the Cyberpunk 2077 team to release their game early? Fuck off. The only people still crying about Star Citizen are the ones that bought a ship to find out their garbage PC can’t even run the game or worse - they’re console owners.
I own an Xbox and have zero interest in playing Star Citizen. Still gonna tell everyone it’s a scam and all your bitching can’t change a thing about it lol
My hardware is twice as powerful as anything that existed when the game was supposed to release. Still runs like dogshit. I log in once a year to see if the game is still trash. The game is still trash. It’s not a literal scam, but it might as well be because Chris Roberts hasn’t been able to actually complete a game since Wing Commander. Which I loved, and unfortunately that spurred me to flush $40 in the toilet.
Almost like it was being developed not for the day it began development but for the future when they intend to release it. Almost like optimizations are the last stage in development.
You’re a fucking moron just blabbering about shit you don’t understand and I’m glad you can’t do anything but whine and piss yourself about how your $40 hasn’t given you the best game your little brain could conjure up. It’s been a decade. Grow the fuck up.
I did and it was as worthless as yours. It set out to have an extremely wide scope. It’s not feature creep if it’s intended from the fucking beginning.
That’s a cool aspect of it, no doubt, I just wish it took a backseat to the core game play. We have so many FPS games, but not many great new-gen space sims.
And if this space sim can create perfect FPS experience, now you’ve got all the FPS money funding the development of a space sim.
See how that works? Markets create synergies and non-zero-sum games. In this case, putting the limited resources for the space sim into FPS elements makes new resources available.
But that’s never how these things go. They put so many resources into FPS aspects that they almost entirely abandon the space sim. Just look at E:D for an example. They dedicated a whole DLC to walking around your ships and then threw ground assault missions into it.
The immersion from being a part of the world, walking around and experiencing stuff is neat and immersive. If the focus was on that stuff first and FPS second, cool, but that feels rarely the case.
Chris won’t stop until ShowerTech™ is in the game with realistic health debuffs so there’s a consequence when you don’t do the maintenance gameplay loop on your ship’s bathroom.
I wish that was entirely a joke.
But Star citizen has always had FPS missions as a core gameplay aspect, and it’s really one of their main selling points. In no other game can you walk out of a mission, into a ship, hop in the pilot seat and go from the ground to orbit with no cutscene and all of it under player control. The amount of crazy shit you can do just because your character can leave the pilot seat is ridiculous. A month ago I teamed up with some dude who did bounty hunting. He EMPd the other player, had me EVA over to their ship, shoot open the airlock, and gun down the target, all so his buddy could come over and harvest the ship for resources to sell. The emergent gameplay, even though the game can still be very rough, is a really cool aspect of what they’ve made.
I admit, I was a backer of the original campaign for Star Citizen. However, with the dev cycle what it is, I think I’ll be a grandparent before the game releases from early access. Last time I played it, it was a buggy mess, with only combat, and was not fun to me. I also admit, a lot of my angst comes from the way Elite: Dangerous tried to make FPS combat, etc., a thing. As someone who plays that game to explore, that entire DLC, as well as the alien shit they added, was part of system I had no interest in and, in my opinion, has further led to the downfall of E:D, a game that has been waiting for atmospheric landing, etc., but still, years later, barely has non-atmospheric landing.
I get the desire to walk about your ship, have carrier ships you can walk around with other players, and space stations you can visit actual NPCs in. However, if I wanted to shoot stuff, I’d play an FPS. I play E:D to explore and get that fear/anxiety/dread I only ever feel watching American politics. Just not my game play when I wanna just chill and narrowly avoid crashing my ship while exploring!
You’re right, getting out and moving around and hoping into the pilots seat of your ship is cool and I love to see that stuff. However, I don’t know why it always has to tip toward violent encounters instead of just having the ability to feel immersed in a space ship or station.
Because an FPS avatar is the body many people are most used to inhabiting in game worlds.
If you want people to feel immersed in an environment, you have to give them the virtual body they’re used to.
Like imagine you’re playing Battlefield 5, and then UFOs land and you go on a big space adventure. If you’re not still able to pull out that tommy gun and fire rounds the same way, your body feels different. It doesn’t feel like you’re there.
FPS is the biggest genre with the most resources in it. That makes it a standard for virtual environments everywhere.
I have to agree. Games tend to resort to violence immediately now, no need for justification. I didn’t imagine Starfield would be a shooter at all in fact. Ultimately it was almost exclusively shooting
I get the desire to compare the two games but Starfield tried too hard to color inside the lines by giving a story and lore while simultaneously trying to make an open ended sandbox which gave us neither. There’s a LARPing town of cowboys with dirt roads existing a few minutes from a hyper advanced planet with platinum roads and somehow they haven’t made contact? The cowboys haven’t progressed their dirt and wood town despite being in spitting distance of a planet of machines that could fabricate advanced tools in seconds?
Star Citizen seems to take the Dark Souls approach of light narrative, heavy world building, “go learn the world by experiencing it.”
But I would honestly say that the only things I liked about Starfield are the things you’re kind of dismissing. The story and ambiance pieces worked really well, and I ONLY wanted that part.
Every time I had to do anything space travel, combat, space combat, or inventory management, I died inside.
I also felt like the cities and locations were tiny and didn’t feel lived in or real. Basically the immersiveness of the game which thrives on immersion was not handled well so I was left with a terrible shooter.
Well the story held the game back because the game wanted to be more open than than the story allowed and vice versa where the game held the story back because a lot of areas were underdeveloped or don’t make sense with where they are for the sake of the story they wanted to tell. It felt like two conflicting ideas at the core which ended up with what we have.
Why are cowboys within trading distance of a future tech planet? How have they not interacted to a point where they don’t need dirt roads? The only answer seems to be for the sake of being neat and is baffling. Empty planets being explained as being on purpose to ‘get more joy out of discovering ones with things on it’ and just… it was astoundingly average and competes for the worst Bethesda game against 76.
Bethesda excels at world building and it was disastrous to watch them fail at that.
That’s the ultimate goal though. Just last night I flew from a mining outpost on a moon to find resources, scanned a whole bunch, pulled out of my ship with a mining buggy, mined a bunch, and then logged out from my bed within the ship. 0 combat. That’s a life they want to have possible and I’m all for it! lol
I think it’s just that fps stuff sells and all the COD kiddies wouldn’t look at SC at all if they didn’t focus on pewpew everything. Hell they have a cargo ship that has an advertisement of it shooting its guns …lol ffs why? It’s just marketing bs.
That’s the entire thing they’re doing. The violent encounters are being planned for, obviously, but they’re not a requirement.
Star Citizen’s approach seems to be to add the ability to do as many things as possible while giving you the option to define how you want to interact with them. Of course, you’re probably going to have to defend yourself from the stray pirate or bandit with whatever you end up doing but that’s par for the course.
The phrase “AAA game/developer” has lost all meaning for me over the years. I just can’t drop the clichéd $60+ on these titles anymore, especially with quality and support waning. I don’t see this game being any different; the writing’s on the wall.
Well, see, with Star Citizen, you buy it to have an unreleased game that will allow you to buy a ship for 8000 dollars that you can… stand around inside of and look at.
Seriously, This is peak gaming… how can you losers not understand how great this is?! /s
This game is 45 dollars. It always has been. Support for it has only increased over time. Also I really don’t look at CIG as a AAA dev, whomever said that forgot what a Kickstarter/self funded game is.
Oh shit. I think it was literally 10 years ago I ‘pledged’ the base game (Aurora Mr). It still has less hours than Microsoft minesweeper, which let’s face it is a banging game.
I liked the game, when it was advertised as a moddable singleplayer game with drop-in drop-out co-op. As well as moddable multiplayer you can host yourself.
Now, I don’t have any interest it whatever that cluster fuck has become.
Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.
Maybe because development has a high ongoing cost that they do not have any other product to take up? Star citizen has a fairly large scope, and the fact that they have even gotten to the point where a fairly high number of gameplay loops are fully integrated is quite impressive. If you look at their ship designs, for example, you can see just how much care was put into a lot of the designs (see the architectural reviews, for example)
Except scope hasn’t really changed in years? I might be wrong since I’m not trawling through every single piece of content released but I’m pretty sure most of the expansions are related to CIG figuring out details of already promised features.
I’m sure someone following the game closer can provide more details on that.
I’ve spent $49.99 on it. As a space sim fan, it’s one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had in a game. Blows Elite Dangerous out of the water in terms of seamlessness. If it was better optimized it’d be one of the only things I’d play.
I’m not trying to you’re wrong about anything. But for a certain customer, it’s already a pretty great experience.
When did they ever “release” it without saying its also early access?
edit - assuming downvotes are cause of a misunderstanding. im not defending early access or star citizen. I am just saying I do not recall them “backpedaling” to early access. I thought they had always advertised it as early access. Which itself is shady af
What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.
for the record I paid for this and am watching with hopeful eyes, but please stop pretending that being able to launch the game and walk around is playing
Playable in very loose terms. I booted it on a decent rig (13700k/32gbRAM/3080ti), after ~10min of loading screens I finally got my ship onto the pad and tried to take off from the planet; half way into the burn out of the atmosphere, I clip out of the pilot seat, through the whole ship and start free falling back to the planet while my ships continues to burn away from me…. I alt+f4’d and uninstalled that hot garbage.
Calling bullshit on this. Have a very similar rig and I load into the cities within a minute or two, and if I spawn on my ship or a station it’s faster than that.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne