For those wondering about why such basic features are mentioned here it’s because work on Squadron 42 (single player part of the project) moved to the polishing stage and everything created for it is being ported back to Star Citizen (multi player part).
Is it worth an article? It is if you’re interested in the game, I guess?
Is SC a perfect project? Of course not, far from it. I do find it interesting however how… angry it makes people and how much they want it to fail. Yeah, I know $1000+ packages and so forth (not needed if you just want to play the game btw).
For those interested in actually checking for themselves whether it’s a scam or not, there are free flight events multiple times a year - you get to see the current state of the game with everything good and bad it entails. Surprisingly enough, they tend to bring in more players every single time.
Just because the product they are making is quality does not mean it isn’t a scam. The game was supposed to be released a decade ago now. They said they had the entire single player finished and ready in 2014. The things they have made are impressive, sure. But after that amount of time its looking more and more like they lied about how ready things were to get more funding, and have been doing that for a decade now.
I absolutely agree with this point. I think CIG’s inability to openly communicate when things go bad is a big reason for the scam allegation (that and loooooots of issues with planning, especially early on). I see it’s as a serious problem for a project that presents itself as “open development” (which it is, don’t take me wrong, but not as much as it should be).
I think both CIG and players underestimated how long it takes to build a company, tech and two big budget games at the same time. It’s 100% on the devs to realize and communicate that, which they failed to do.
For better or worse, S42 is officially in its final stretch. Is it really? Transfer of people towards SC seems to confirm that but we’ll see when the game finally releases. When that happens we’ll also see whether game taking this long was worth it.
On the contrary, the last few years were pretty much fully focused on Squadron, with SC being maintained by (almost a) skeleton crew - hence the slow updates.
Now updates are seemingly picking up, though it’s early to say for sure since we only got one quarterly patch so far, with next one probably targeting April-May (depending how porting some of new additions goes).
They didn’t, they just had a big announcement on October that SQ42 is “feature complete” and that it’s entering the polish phase which is why they moved devs back to SC. The remaining teams stay on SQ42 as so-called “strike teams” to polish and tweak tech.
Source: I follow the development way too much, send help lol
It’s not that they lied about it being complete, it’s that they entirely changed the scope of the game around 2014ish. If I remember correctly they even had a poll asking the community if they’d rather wait for planetary landing which was originally not meant to be in the game.
The original game was freelancer 2.0. you don’t land on a planet, you get into a cutscene and then appear in “New Atlantis” (yes I’m referring to star field, that’s not a city in SC) then as the story goes a developer made a tech demonstration they called “pupil to planet” showing the ability to continually zoom out from, you guessed it, looking at a pupil and going all the way to space with no loading screen so the had to essentially rework the game from the ground up. The story and a lot of the assets/voice work, etc was all done and “ready” for what that game would have been, but since the change they now had to rebuild a lot of the systems and make new systems for the way the game works now. That’s just squadron 42 (the single player game) star citizen the MMO has always been a bit on the “back burner” waiting for SQ42 to complete.
Now that we’re past all that, and just this last weekend SC had a majorly important tech test that seemed to go very well, they’re putting the last foundational pieces together so they can actually complete the game.
If anyone wants to say it took too long, I’m with you. I backed in 2014 and thought “damn, answer the call 2016? That’s a long ass time.” but to say it’s a scam? They’re the dumbest bunch of scammers in the entire history of scamming, Nigerian princes and all, if this is supposed to be a scam.
If SC simply showed their original roadmap and timeline, it would speak to itself if it is a scam or or not.
As someone who bought in from the start (when everything was bundled), the argument of “not a scam” fell through when they started to hide their original roadmap.
Just to clarify, which roadmap are we talking about?
The changes to the release view from last year or so?
One from CitizenCon after addition of full planet exploration?
One from the early days where SC was suppose to be a prettier Freelancer with planets separated by a loading screen and consisting of a small hub for activities?
I’d like to make sure which one we’re talking about.
Edit: I’d also like to add, how far are we going with people being scammed?
I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?
I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?
Maybe, maybe not, but is entirely possible to be scammed while also being in a position where you should have known better; the two are not mutually incompatible.
Of course, but I think it’s a bit harder to defend this accusation with all of this info available and the ability to try the game for yourself for free. The latter is what I’d suggest to anyone interested in the game, even if they aren’t worried about wasting money anyway.
Eh, let’s not act like CIG is completely blameless in all of this. They made a lot of mistakes along the way and SC is still far from what they promised it to be.
Yeah it’s honestly pretty fun, but there were juuuust enough performance and stability bugs that I gave up and returned it. I think it has potential and I’m glad someone is doing this.
Which is why I appreciate them doing free flight events. They don’t present the game in the best light a lot of the time but it’s a great way to test if the game is for you in it’s current form (or even in general). They are also a good way to prevent new players from feeling scammed so there’s that.
I feel like a lot of us backed and stayed with this project despite all of the issues exactly because they’re trying to do something no one else is willing to risk. It’s a rough road, full of mistakes and delays but they’re sticking with it, which is more than many people expected.
Because everything ran locally at a datacenter, the real killer app of Stadia would have been a super-massively multiplayer game. There wouldn't be any problems with latency between game states, (any lag would be between the server and the console.) Imagine massive wars or mediaeval battles with thousands of participants. They never developed games that took advantage of what was unique about the platform.
AFAIK, MMOs keep all the game state on the servers already. The difference is that what they send to the client is key deltas to the game state, which the client then renders. Stadia type services instead render that on the datacenter side and send the client images.
With their expertise at networking and so-on, Google might have been able to get a slight advantage in server-to-server communication, but it wouldn’t have enabled anything on a whole different scale, AFAIK.
IMO, their real advantage was that they could have dealt with platform switching in a seamless way. So, take an addictive turn-by-turn game like Civilization. Right now someone might play 20 turns before work, then commute in, think about it all day, then jump back in when they get home. With Stadia, they could have let you keep playing on your cell phone as you take the train into work. Play a few turns on a smoke break. Maybe play on a web browser on your work computer if it’s a slow day. Then play again on your commute home, then play on the TV at home, but if someone wanted to watch a show, you could either go up and play on a PC, or pull out your phone, or play on a laptop…
Larger massive multiplayer capability was one of the features Google was touting upon Stadia's launch:
Over time, Buser [Google’s director of games] says we should not only see additional exclusive games on Stadia, but also cross-platform games doing things on Stadia “that would be impossible to do on a console or PC.” Instead of dividing up virtual worlds into tiny "shards" where only 100 or 150 players can occupy the same space at a time because of the limitations of individual servers, he says Google’s internal network can support living, breathing virtual worlds filled with thousands of simultaneous players. https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18654632/google-stadia-price-release-date-games-bethesda-ea-doom-ubisoft-e3-2019
Sure, they claimed that, but it’s telling that nobody ever took them up on that.
Google’s internal network may be good, but it’s not going to be an order of magnitude better than you can get in any other datacenter. If getting thousands of people into the same virtual space were just a matter of networking, an MMO would have already done it.
A shard is going to be storing the position, orientation and velocity of key entities (players, vehicles, etc.) in memory. If accessed frequently enough they’ll be in the processor’s cache. There’s no way the speed of accessing that data can compare with networking speeds.
That doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been some kinds of innovations. Say a game like Star Citizen where there are space battles. In theory you could store the position and orientation of everything inside a ship in one shard and the position and orientation of ships themselves in a second shard. Since people inside the ship aren’t going to be interacting directly with things outside the ship except via the ship, you could maybe afford a bit of latency and inaccuracy there. But, if you’re just talking about a thousand-on-thousand melee, I think the latency between shards would be too great.
You’d only be able to play with people local to you, in the same Stadia datacenter. If Stadia wanted to minimize latency, they would increase the number of datacenters (thus making fewer people per instance).
This happened with Helldivers, everybody forgave them and immediately rewarded them by continuing to play/buy, and then they turned around and stuck PSN account requirements on a tonne of other games. Looking forward to the same cycle happening again very soon 🫡
Good choice. I haven’t really kept up with new releases for a few years as the mainstream of the industry started to feel more and more like a scam, but I wonder if anybody’s ever done studies comparing the percentage of people with short term memory issues, and the percentage of people who play video games – because video game consumers seem to forget getting screwed over and constantly get surprised when they reward bad behaviour lol
I would've wanted a conclusion just to shut up all of the dead-horse beating to dust memelords that for years have been wagoning their tiresome HL3 jokes.
But, it's like, how many games have we waited so long to be released whether it's to continue the story or end it and the reception being more of "...wait that's it?!" than "I'm satisified."
Gamers are the hardest people to appease, so I get the sentiment that Gabe not only felt stumped but written himself into a corner with HL3. Whatever hype at all that has been built, is insurmountably high that whatever Valve pitches out, it's going to be mixed. It'll have a higher chance of being what happened to Duke Nukem Forever in context, than it being what Baldur's Gate 3 became 23 years later after Baldur's Gate II. It's a very narrow window to hit that sweet spot.
This has literally always been the case with Steam, the only difference is that people are told up front now. Things will likely continue to operate exactly the same as it has until now, I doubt Valve wants to disrupt the giant money train they have.
As far as I know there is no mandatory DRM on Steam either, so if a publisher wants to they can just make their game be portable and not require Steam to even be installed. Pretty sure all the re-releases that use DOSBox or ScummVM are like this, for example.
Yeah there are loads of DRM free games on steam (mostly indies of course). Steam just offers a very basic (and easily bypassable if you know how) DRM to devs/publishers but they absolutely don’t need to use it.
Nickmercs has always been a piece of shit. I feel like he's only ever stepped up to bat for his friends when they've actually done some heinous shit, so seeing his defense of Doc only further confirms my belief that he did it.
Nickmercs' support is an unexpected canary in this coal mine.
It’s like when people that cheat on others in their relationships start accusing their partners of cheating or have major trust issues because of their guilt (or whatever it is). And by that same logic I conclude that Nickmercs is a pedo (if he can do it with the LGBTQ community without evidence then he wouldn’t mind me making similarly wild claims about him, right?).
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.
It’s utterly ridiculous how copyright law has been twisted to erode the very idea of ownership. Does it have software on it? Well then it’s not just against the terms of service… It’s illegal!
Some researchers did a study several years ago and found that adding a virtual nose decreased motion sickness significantly. However, I don’t think I’ve seen any developers try this. I wonder if it’d help.
Have they discovered a link between people with big noses and less motion sickness? Imo these are the more important questions that will drive humanity forward
Yes although I’m hypothesising large nose peoples brains will be doing this with a larger area hence the greater effects against motion sickness. It could lead to novel treatments for motion sickness like wearing a big nose while riding on a bus.
TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.
If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc
I bought the game about 6 months after it was released and I had over 3000 hours in that game before I stopped playing a few years back.
The first 1200+ hours was in Snowday alone, and I doubt I’ll ever have as much fun in a video game than I did in that mode. I started to play all the modes plus the steam workshop mods (for hundreds of hours) just to get better car control to play Snowday.
Unfortunately at the end it was all competitive and it had started to be more of a chore than fun but I stand by those first thousands of hours at the most fun I’ve ever had.
Hell, most of the time even the losing part of Snowday was enjoyable when playing against and with the right people.
Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.
The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.
Im completely oblivious to any of the enshittification, but like any online game the fun is long gone for most people. Skill floor is way too high. As soon as you join a match youre completely outskilled by everybody and its clear youre nothing but a hindrance to your team.
Your opponents laugh at you and style as hard as they can and your teammates resent your existence, assuming they stick around long enough to make it clear.
Hyper-competitive games are fun for about 3 months and then youre either in or out.
Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.
There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.
Why is the consumer just expected to roll over and take it when a game sucks instead of the responsibility being on the publisher to release updates until the game resembles what was originally advertised? Games aren’t on ROM cartridges anymore, you can still improve the game after it’s released.
Look, No Man’s Sky set the precedent for what you’re supposed to do when your game sucks at launch. And we should expect nothing less from game studios with ten times the person-power and money.
Obviously sucking at launch is bad. But it’s inevitable that some games will suffer that fate and as No Man’s Sky showed, that’s no excuse for the game continuing to suck after launch.
Yeah, if a product is sold, I expect it to work for the most part. Now, mistakes happen, and not much to do about very obscure things and it's great if thing can be added afterwards.
But what I want, and this is apparently wild, is a finished 1.0 product that works as expected.
I pre ordered no man’s sky, because the people who made fucking Joe Danger said “I’m going to procedurally generate a universe”
I played it a bit at launch, but the antihype, especially spoilers about the ending made me stop. It’s a bit dense to try to get back into at the moment, but I regret nothing. I paid a modicum so that the guys that made Joe Danger could make a universe, and because me and people like me didn’t demand a refund, they got to do it.
Agree. Also the same with CP77 - I don’t care how much they update and polish that game, I’m not touching it again. It was barely playable on XBOX1X on release. I luckily was able to sell my launch day copy with a small loss, but I’m not trusting them with my money again, after I (and many others) have been misled, and given an unplayable game on consoles.
I am not an investor to lend money to the company for development, I am a consumer, so I want a working game for my money on Day 1, otherwise I’m shopping elsewhere - as plenty of studios manage to great and polished games (e.g. most PS exclusives).
I always wait a few years before buying a game. It prevents situations like this and saves aot of money to boot. Not just the game price but also because I don't need the highest spec pc
I have no proof but in my eyes it all smells like Sony and other gaming news are to blame. They hyped up the game to unachievable levels and then held Hellogames to the previously set deadline. I am very happy they sat down and finished the game, although there is new content patch ever few months still. Gave them those 60$ happily even though it’s not my kind of game.
CP2077 had a bunch of issues on release as well. Much better now. I feel like they(developers) need to bring in different testers near release. If you have the same testers whom have been testing builds for years it can probably be hard to see the issues with the same clarity.
Also stop having release dates. Just use vague terms like 2nd half 2024. When you get the release build, anounce a date, like a month later, give your devs a couple weeks off as there will be missed bugs after release. Hard release dates aren’t helping these situations.
It’s not about unknown issues on the dev side, it’s about greed. CDPR wanted to release for Xmas when the large playerbase of the prev gen consoles was still relevant, so they happily pushed marketing and lied to take people’s money, hoping they can pay exec bonuses and fund future development from that.
Sony had to pull the game from the online store, as it was barely playable. One good question of course why Sony would let it even be there without testing, but of course major companies are trusted to QA themselves, and not release a broken game - luckily this seems to work most of the time.
Because people will pre-order games to the point that it’s made a healthy profit even before it’s even released. Consumers vote with their wallet and for some reason gamers just constantly choose to show publishers that shoddy, half-assed products are good enough for them.
Exactly, when you buy a shit product you should learn not to do the same thing. People are still out here buying crap and complaining on the internet where the money having developers couldn’t give less of a fuck.
Gabe was talking about the making of Half Life, back when you shipped your disc and that was that. And the game was, apparently, crapola.
There were patch and updates back in the day. The problem was that not everybody had a good internet connection or a connection at all, during the 90’s.
Games like Daikatana and SiN were flops due to bugs that required patches to fix.
It’s because that’s how capitalism works. If you keep buying stuff from the same source without due diligence, you can’t be surprised when you get stuck with another sucky game.
The only incentive to spend resources on fixing a game is to preserve reputation for future games.
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