It's objectively a good target for ridicule that the game has raised enough money to make the next Grand Theft Auto off of a strange and exploitative business model, been in development for over a decade, and still has no release date. At the same time, there's more game in that public alpha than a handful of fully released products, so calling it a scam never made sense.
It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game. The rest of the industry is encroaching on it, and it's ridiculous there too. Right now we're looking at a AAA industry that's taking about 5-6 years to make a game, and everyone knows that has to come back down somehow; the ones that go longer than that are Prey (2006), Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good & Evil 2, etc. Not a great track record.
the business model was no more “exploitative” than something like Apex or PubG that make literal billions yearly off cosmetics
Those are bad too. In different and sometimes arguably worse ways. But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU. That, of course, makes Star Citizen an easy target once again.
People have their ego wrapped up in the criticisms about the game, they don’t like the idea that they got duped into hating on something by people who profited off their rage. People need to stop trying to save face; they were wrong about Star Citizen and SQ42.
I saw a trailer for this game with Gary Oldman in it 8 years ago. 8 years. They cast a lot of fan favorite actors that were already, let's say, of an advanced age, and I'm betting one of them dies by the time Squadron 42 comes out. I'm looking forward to playing Squadron 42, but if it takes you 8 years from the time you had something to show for your work for that single player mode to come out (which can and should be smaller in scope than an MMO and have none of the CI/CD restrictions that a live service game has), then you can bet your ass there's something to criticize there. At the very least, project management. And it's totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn't exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.
I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there's a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it's doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective. What we can actually play and get hands on is a game that, after all this time, has some rough technical performance and plenty of bugs, paid in exchange for features that offer only diminishing returns as you expand the circle of the game's audience out further from the people looking for the strictest simulation. Starfield couldn't get 60 FPS on console, even skipping 80% of the minutiae that SC is targeting, and Red Dead Redemption II also took flak and criticism for how the game felt to play for prioritizing a lot of simulation-y things as well. Those games aren't immune to criticism either, and they were able to come from teams who had successfully built acclaimed games in the past, iterating on them.
Also, that "8 years" is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that's reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2012 with a CG trailer, but I distinctly remember a Giant Bomb interview with a CDPR designer in ~2014 ahead of the Witcher 3's launch. Of course most of CDPR wasn't working on Cyberpunk yet. Jeff Gerstmann asked what Cyberpunk was looking like at that time, and the CDPR rep just responded that it was a stack of design documents a foot high off the desk.
If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that’s not exploitive.
It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don't even know when you'll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it's priced to cash in on whales. At least it's not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.
The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they’ll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it’s a scam and now it’s suddenly “Well of course it’s was never a scam, no one would actually think that.”
Don't attribute to me what others have said. Plenty of other people have called this a scam, but right at the top, I said that never made sense to me. Maybe a few weeks ago, I said something right here on the fediverse that someone interpreted to be too positive about Star Citizen, and the next response was to ask me how much I paid into the game. Those people probably haven't changed their minds. I am not them. I think for myself. That is not me gaslighting you. It's me having a different opinion than someone else you spoke to.
You misunderstood what I said by diminishing returns. They're clearly important to you. The further away you get from that level of hardcore enthusiast, the more like you're going to find people who don't find those features to be important compared to a game that runs better and with fewer bugs, let alone how they affect the actual game design. No game is immune from criticism, and people can and will criticize it for all of these things and its business model. If I'm a person who paid $45 because I wanted to play Squadron 42, which at the time I believed was a game releasing in 2016, how do you expect me to not criticize them for taking 7 more years and still not having it done when it's a much smaller scope than the MMO that they're building?
Stop trying to make it out like we’re rubes who got a fast one pulled on us
Once again: I did not say this. You are arguing with me about things other people said. Argue with them.
I don’t think it’s about loving to shit on something, you can only get burned so often with overhyped games, i rather have the game speak for itself when it’s released.
Copied from reddit user u/iamshieldstick on reddit because I hate having to watch an 8m video for a 1m read of info.
Summary
Thank you for making the game surpass 1 million copies sold!
The highest priority for the team is developing the DLC and working on the sequel. Brainstorming and exploring different aspects of the projects.
Planning another patch in November (exact dates are still being discussed).
Expect some balances in the weapon assembly system
Rising dodge will be provided as a default skill, eliminating the need to unlock it from the P-Organ. This is to ease the difficulty in the early stages of the game specifically against the shovel puppet (aka Pancake Bot).
Polendina will sell 2 additional Quartz from the first stage of his shop.
They will give Alidoro costumes to all players as a token of gratitude, including his mask
They will introduce an extra slot for facial accessories, enabling the wearing of hats and glasses at the same time.
They are planning to add new wearables in the game - the Alchemist’s Hat (Venigni Hat) and a brand new pair of glasses!
Aside from these, several other elements are currently in preparation. For a comprehensive overview of the final contents, please refer to the upcoming patch notes
They are grateful to the players for praises and compliments on the music. They are currently in the process of preparing the release of the soundtrack. The collection will have nearly all the music from Lies of P, totaling more than 60 tracks.
They are also working more diligently and investing considerable thought and effort to meet the expectations in the Wo Long Fallen Dynasty crossover and make the collaboration of the highest quality.
Working on DLC - they are hiring new developers to join their team.
Shared some sketches from the DLC. These images are merely the tip of an iceberg. Let your imagination go wild and anticipate what’s to come.
Doesn’t seem like that fair of a comparison. MGS3 HD is a finished game while the trailer they released of MGS3 Delta is an in-engine preview which mostly just shows what the engine CAN DO not necessarily what the game is going to look like
Very true. What with many games coming out…questionably rushed on launch, this footage should be taken with a grain of nanomachines until the final release.
Eh, it’s just unreal engine 5. It’s fairly proven on this level of visual fidelity and then some. I would be shocked if it looked worse than this on release
I am in shock at the number of people upvoting positive comments about this scam project. Until they refund all the people they defrauded to get the project off the ground, they will continue to be dragged down by their own fucking karma.
Suckers want to spend money on it now, knowing everything we know now? That’s on you. But plenty of us didn’t know we were being conned at the time.
I will never let myself live down the stupidity and shame of falling for their bullshit not once, but twice. I’m ~$150 poorer thanks to my impressionable college-brain thinking their “complete in a few years” line back in 2014 was even remotely possible.
It’s sort of how I try to view my past fuckups: I can’t change the past by feeling like an idiot for making some mistake, but I can try to learn to not make the same mistakes again (and instead make new and exciting mistakes) and learn to “forgive myself” in a sense.
Fuckups are inevitable parts of life, and beating myself up over mistakes won’t stop me from making new ones. I do need to learn from them when I make them, so I might as well do it in a way that’s less unpleasant and doesn’t require carrying around an ever-growing pile of memories labeled “I’m an idiot for doing […]”
@Stillhart@SeaOfTranquility even if it comes out its gonna be pay to win garbage. They sold goddamned star destroyers for thousands of dollars, you think those won't have an advantage?
I can't believe there's people who still defend the amount of time and money that's gone into this. It boggles the mind.
Spending more than a basic access package is absolute stupidity and those that do it and regret it have no one to blame but themselves. I spent $45 dollars and play the exact same game and can buy most of those expensive ships with in game money after a few days of playing.
I have had hundreds of hours of great times in Star Citizen. Your anecdotal experience and very emotional hatred for this project because of your own bad financial choices doesn’t make my good experience, the most common experience, untrue. The massive, growing number of active users trumps your loud minoroty’s passionate hatered. Hatered 100% based on hot, salty tears because you wasted your own money on pretend spaceships like a spoiled child, not based on an objective look at things. You were 100% informed about the realities of this project, you just ignored it. I know this because I’ve been following it too and didn’t spend buckets of money on a videogame that isn’t even done yet. Because that would be really irresponsible of me.
This game keeps making money and keeps adding more users. This is because it is fun to play for more people than not. Otherwise they would be failing after this many years. Grow up, get a life, focus on games you like, ignore the ones you don’t like a healthy adult. Don’t spend money on speculative projects if you don’t want the project to change, caveats have been everywhere saying as much since day one. The only person that lied to you was you.
I personally don’t like the game at all. Some mechanics are interesting, but the game being pay to win and “shit on new players all you want, there is no consequences” just makes me never want to start it again. I really thought there would be some semblance of PvE possible, but you’re always in a PvP setting.
That being said though, while I do hate the dev process, and find it disingenuous, it’s not a scam at all.
Not enjoying the game is a fair criticism. It is slow paced and there is no pvp off switch, only things you can do to minimize risk by learning best practices. It’s not for everyone. It’s going for a sci-fi second life vibe, it’s not very gamey. I don’t think everyone expects that. And the prototype criminality system is rather useless right now, you’re right, so you get griefers and undeserved fines here and there. I can still have a lot of fun despite these things, but I can totally see it being not worth everyone’s time, especially for the lesser flushed out jobs. I have had my share of bug induced rage quits.
But yeah, they are making a huge game in good faith, any claim of it being a scam is childish. Any claim that it’s not fun is a valid opinion if they’ve actually tried it.
They know whale hunting is paying for the game, without them it’d be a tiny, indy, space game we’d have all forgotten about by now like they thought they’d make back in the original in Kickstarter. Some people have better stuff than me because they earned it, some just bought it, but it’s more RPG than competitive shooter and the in-game progression is fair so far so it hasn’t been world breaking yet, plus it ads a lot of diversity and multicrew options right out the gates. So it’s not great, but it’s less shady than premium currencies, battle passes, or loot boxes to me.
I prefer that they are spending the money one actually developing advanced/new engine technologies than just releasing a half baked cames and a huge profit.
They got loads more money than they expected and increased the scope to match.
(I agree on the pricy ships though)
Even if they went bust and the game failed, I would be happy if other big studios got the engine.
Before Star Citizen got announced, I tried to get up a project that would’ve been better, bigger, and far more revolutionary… only I didn’t lie about it, so funding fell on blank stares at best, and a bunch of insults at worst.
Congrats, you voted with your wallet to get conned, so you got what you voted for. Same with No Man’s Sky.
The average citizen has no vision or perception of the costs involved, so you either con people, or nothing gets done.
Are you a well-known developer though? One of the reasons why Starfield attracted so much attention was the name Chris Roberts attached to it. As flawed as his legacy is, he’s a household name in the industry. Are you? What was your project about? How big was your team?
Precisely, you just described what’s needed to pull a con. My project was just an engine capable of running a real-scale galaxy with consistent time travel, we had no great concept artists capable of churning out eye candy marketing material. Should have made it a solo project about digging mines, or something.
Revenue is not the same as money spent. They have raked in enough money to build to build a rocket, so have many games. That’s a good thing. All you are doing is calling them successful.
Usually yes if you use only numbers, but when you use alpha/beta/release cycles etc, it’s not that uncommon to have them start from 1.0 as well.
As an example, the fifth phase of minecraft dev started with “Minecraft Alpha v1.0.0” and once it got to v1.2.6, the next was “Minecraft Beta v1.0.0”. The proper Minecraft 1.0 came after Beta 1.8.1.
That was a standard that existed because of older, ‘linear’ SDLCs. It stopped being the case when Agile development took over. When you’re using Waterfall, and all your milestones are planned out before a single line of code is written, you can do that.
Modern software development doesn’t work like that, and it’s silly to use nth-degree nested decimals (0.1.0, 0.1.1.2) when you can just use 1.1, 2.13, etc, and call something RC1.0 and 1.0 on release without bothering with internal version numbers or project codenames (or just keep the working version numbers anyways).
We just had a discussion about the other day, and it kind of did start me thinking that there’s been something of a dearth of space combat games, or at least a shift in focus away from it relative to the early 2000s. And some of the major space combat game series have shifted towards FPS or on-the-ground elements.
Star Citizen has a bunch of people who I think want another Wing Commander aiming for it, and it’s kind of shifting towards first-person play to some degree.
X4 added more walking-around-on-space-stations stuff. My own impression was that it didn’t add much to the game, but maybe some people were into it.
Elite: Dangerous is apparently shifting to focus more on the on-the-ground portion of the game, according to a comment someone left in the discussion I linked to.
You could argue that maybe people really want the extra stuff, to walk around, not just fly, and that it’s a natural progression for the scope of a game to expand over the course of a series, but Project Wingman – an indie fighter combat game (not space – atmospheric) in the vein of Ace Combat – did quite well. It excluded most of the fluff, the cutscenes and so forth. I’m thinking that maybe there’s room for games with a reduced budget but which just do the core of a given game.
Maybe the answer is that popular interest in the sort of theme of “Hollywood space” – fighters flying around as if they were in an atmosphere, visible laser rounds crawling around – were a product of space travel being new and exciting, or due to the Cold War space race popularizing space or something, and that we just don’t have that around any more.
There’s a Reddit discussion on the matter here, and one users suggests that maybe it’s that space combat games work well with relatively-low-end computers that couldn’t handle rendering a complicated surrounding environment. Like, in space, you’ve got a small handful of ships flying around and little else to render, but in an FPS or similar, you need to be rendering foliage and all sorts of other things that chew up processing power. Maybe it’s just that space combat games were a point where technical limitations of computers fit well with what the genre required, and now we’re past that point.
I think what you're noticing about on foot sections in modern space games is because merging that sort of experience with a space sim is truly the space sim's "final frontier", so to speak. It's the only part of an immersive gameplay experience that is yet to be executed as cleanly as the in-ship portion of a deep systems driven sci Fi space exploration game.
It's why Starfield is the way it is, they tried to conquer that frontier as well, and had to make a lot of concessions to do so and didn't have any prior experience in that sort of genre. I think it is safe to say that Starfield didn't succeed well enough or deep enough to be the definitive shining example of a space sim with equally executed space and ground gameplay styles (partially because it's not truly a space sim at all, more like an arcadey take on it )
One day a game will, and it'll be awesome, but it'll probably still be a while. Starfield showed that even if you throw lots of money and a professional team at it it's not a sort of game you can easily make.
Have you played Everspace and Everspace 2? They’re more arcade-y but they scratch the same itch for me. The core gameplay is just fast paced space dogfights
I like the person casually walking into the fire at 19:05. I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly, most noticeably at the end of the video.
Amazing tech demo, but I wonder if they’re focusing on the right things. Physics-based nosebleeds are cool, but not as noticeable as getting reflections right.
I also noticed reflections in the water near the edges of the screen don’t show properly,
It’s called screen-space reflections: Things that aren’t on screen don’t reflect because, well, they’re not rendered. The alternative is either not having reflections, having the “screen” not be a rectangle but the inside of a sphere, or, and that’s even more expensive, raytracing.
It’s a bog-standard technique and generally people don’t notice, which is why it’s good enough. Remember the rule #1 of gamedev: Even if not in doubt, fake it. It’s all smoke and mirrors and you want it like that because the alternative is 1fps.
You can also do overscan, but that’s costly since you’re rendering a bigger picture (I am not a rendering engineer but have experience with offline rendering)
Well yes I was answering under the assumption of “eradicate 100% of artefacts”, and as long as you don’t render all the perspectives there’s always going to be some angle somewhere that you’re missing.
Practically everything in rendering is a terrible hack (including common raytracers as they’re not spectral) but realism is overrated, anyway.
We’ve been trying to tell y’all this for years, we just want you to have fun and not listen to horrendous “journalists” that smear Star Citizen for clicks. But you don’t create multiple offices across the world with over 1000 full time employees and dozens of third party contractors if you’re trying to scam your fans. You also can’t create a AAA studio from the ground up in just a few years. This studio started with 8 people in a basement and it grew slowly, because you have to. Only so many people are looking for work at a time and only so many of them are hirable. It took them 10 years just to have as many devs as other AAA studios, but they knew they had the budget to go AAA from early on. So for a long time there weren’t enough people to deliver a game of this scope in a reasonable time. They knew it, we knew it, it was part of the plan. They were hiring like mad across the world for years and years because the payoff in the end will be a well supported AAA game like no other. Now that they are chugging along at full speed, people are starting to see what the rest of us have been trying to show you. Yes, Chris Roberts wants to be a billionaire CEO. But he also wants to build a rad game in good faith and has the money to do so.
So yeah, it’s taken a while and will be a while still, but it’s a genuinely fun game to play, even now. If it goes belly up tomorrow I’ve already got my money’s worth of enjoyment out of it. Every quarter, new massive updates drop. Once Squadron 42 is launched and running smoothly I think it will change a lot of hearts and minds. Just play SC during a free fly week. It’s janky as early access games always are, but genuinely a fun time.
You should all be angry at the shitty hit pieces that deprived you guys of quality online scifi shenanigans by lying to you about this game and remember gaming news isn’t always good journalism, sometimes reputable sites will post tabloid garbage because there are no rules, only shareholders and click quotas.
You’re right, but I think its important to recognize that important distinction, otherwise some, such as myself in the past, have been lead to believe that they had previously released a successful game
Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and quality of their decisions what you want, but they were always very honest and transparent about the work they are doing and the huge goal they are chasing.
but people are playing it now. dont they know its garbage? any game that doesnt have 90fps and has a loading screen is an automatic zero out of ten. its the way of gaming
This is visually impressive but with what they’re showing in gameplay, it doesn’t look much like 4 or 5 like I think I expected? The aiming looks like it’s the 2 and 3 style of stop, hold aim, move gun. That said, it also showed crouch walking which isn’t in 3. I’m curious how similar or different it plays.
My big points to hit for a remake would be an improved camo and surgery system. The original game has you pressing start a lot. Like a lot. Having a quick menu for camo would be gigantic. Surgery right now is mostly, you’re in a boss fight and got hit, now pause and see if you ran out of bandages yet.
Crouch walking was in the 3ds remake of 3. I fully expect this to be identical to that version and gameplay with no enhancements to anything except the visuals.
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