By the time it comes out, other games will have already filled its shoes multiple times over. I bet Starfield will have several community mods that do everything Star Citizen does.
A chance to win the access to use a fictional character/weapon that will be revoked as soon as the game closes. Seems like even more of a scam than regular gambling, and that's already pretty iffy.
Gambling for JPEGs on a screen that cannot be resold and will be taken from you at a moments notice. This is a billion-dollar industry btw. God people are stupid.
Star Citizen delivers exactly what it promises: an infinitely developing sci-fi starship sandbox simulator.
The pace of development is glacial? Well, yeah, this kind of project should have a thriving community of add-ons to be of any use, or have 1000x the developers/artists working on it 24/7… but they decided to follow a single vision, instead of allowing people to fly in copyright infringing X-Wings and dildo shaped ships, so this is the resulting compromise.
I’ve only ever really watched this unfold with a causal interest, so whilst I’d like to know more, that article really said very little aside from a few dates and numbers.
More so, and the reason I’m making this comment, is the whole thing felt 100% like the second output of a GPT print. That format of “why is this the way it is? There at several reasons…” followed by a bunch of points that barely address the question, let alone answer it. That and the random bolder phrases.
Still, maybe is had more work put into it than Star Citizen?
Quite a lot of work has gone into sc (more work then exists in the game, thanks Chris Roberts), the problem is, and I’m saying this as someone who has played it with friends, there isn’t a lot of gameplay loop to play. There are gameplay loops, but imo they are kinda… meh?
Which makes me sad. I really want sc to be more than it is.
Roberts is the king of focusing on the wrong shit. Build out the gameplay loops before tacking on dumb shit? Nah let’s put milk and cookies in this bitch.
Who are the people who keep donating? Like, maybe around the Kickstarter era around 2010-2014 where all you needed was a popular name to get a huge donation. But after 2017, when everyone realized this game is going nowhere… why is there still support?
Why are people are still buying digital ships and bankrolling them?
Are they in a abusive relationship? Are they okay?
I’m an OG kickstarter backer and I kinda stopped caring a long time ago so I’m not super up to date on this stuff but, last time I checked it was infinitely more profitable for them to stay in development forever than to eventually release the game, has that ever been addressed ?
I don’t know if they’ve directly addressed this, as it seems like a terrible thing to even acknowledge, PR-wise even though it’s true. Though that doesn’t really affect my enjoyment of the game in it’s current state.
Same I was an OG kickstarter and after seeing the glacial development of the arena prototype I checked out. Came back for the persistent universe, it was so buggy as to be unplayable, checked out again (and sold my “lifetime insurance” too, made several times what I spent on that).
I just don’t see this going anywhere as long as Chris Roberts keeps focusing on dumb shit and not the core gameplay. It has become evident that Freelancer being as good as it is was a happy accident.
Freelancer was as good as it was because Microsoft bought the studio, and Roberts was out, they then spent a while cutting it down in scope and trying to fix it.
It took me two hours to read through that thing but it was well worth it. Fascinating article with some great insights into Chris Roberts, and seemingly as relevant now as it was in 2016.
Why SC out of all the space sim/sandbox games? Is there anything that this game has that no other game provides? Something about the community, a combination of features, gameplay loop or something else?
There are hundreds of games in that genre but many people obviously like SC so much that they are willing to spend larger amounts of money on it. I really wonder what it is exactly or if it’s just the general feel that game has. It’s not an easy question to answer from an outside perspective, its hard finding anything about SC at all except about its monitisation.
And again: I’m genuinely curious and not judging. People can like whatever game they want and spend as much money as they are willing to part with. I have often searched for an answer to this, but most articles/videos either say “expensive crap” if they don’t like it or don’t go beyond “it’s a space sim” if they do.
I haven’t played much of it, but what I can say about why I bought the game: Big space ships with interiors (most space sims really just give you a cockpit view) and the game looked cool. I paid $60 for it years ago and hop in it every now and again. You hear all about the monetization aspect of it and it’s not really been a problem for me since it doesn’t impact me in any way.
Thanks for asking a question and not immediately bashing my opinion! It’s not a common response I get with this game.
For me, SC as a space sim offers more of the “sim” than any other game. For example, my recent favorite gameplay loop is being a rescue medic. I have a cutlass red, which is red, has ambulance-like lights, and a med bay. I get kitted up with red armor, healing supplies and tools, and lots of extra food and water. Plus a few guns because whatever injured people is likely going to try to get me too.
Once all the shopping is done, I load up my cutlass red and wait for someone to submit a rescue beacon. (they can do this when rendered unconscious with a single key press) Once I get one, I speed over (I have equipped a very inefficient but very fast warp drive) and extract them or heal them on the spot if possible, and clear out any enemies in the mean time.
This is some of the most satisfying and rewarding gameplay I’ve ever experienced. Because it’s not a level someone designed, it’s pure emergent gameplay with extremely heavy simulation roots. There is no teleporting in and out of ships. Every door in the ship has a little button I have to press to open it. I have to stay hydrated. The little things add to it. It all comes together to make some of the best content I’ve ever experienced.
And the people I save are genuinely grateful. It takes time and effort to buy a whole new set of armor and weapons and such, so I’m saving them all that time and money, and while obviously not as impactful as actually saving a life, it makes it much much more gratifying than, say, resurrecting someone in planetside or squad or something.
That’s just one type of gameplay. But the principle is the same with other gameplay loops. It’s the most in-depth space simulation I can get right now. Sure, some other games are more polished, have better ship combat, run better (okay ALL of them run better), etc. But none of them have everything that SC does, with the level of realism that SC does, with the in-instance ship interiors that SC does.
As far as buying ships goes, honestly I just like big ships. I used to climb on tractors when I was a little kid. They were so much bigger than me and just looking at them filled me with a sense of awe. This game does the same. I have spent quite a bit on it over the years, but only $10 or $30 here and there, to upgrade existing ships to others. You can trade in ships for other ships, melt them down for store credit, use that to get different ships. I’ve had so many ships just from swapping them around and every time I spend money it’s just the price of ordering out, for a lot more enjoyment than I’d get from a pizza. It eventually added up to several hundred dollars and it was personally worth it for me to feel that amazing feeling of exploring what is essentially a mobile skyscraper or a hot rod or an ambulance or a fortress of destruction. You can earn most of these in game as well. But it’s easier to get that dopamine hit immediately for the price of an unhealthy meal haha. Now that I have that much money invested, it’s still “liquid” in that I can melt down my ships at any time and basically buy any currently purchasable ship immediately with no additional money spent.
Edit: since you mentioned community, the SC community is pretty like-minded. The people I save often go on to be my friends and play with me sometimes. Everyone is very nice. The most toxicity I ever see are people who join the game and shit on it, while insulting everyone else who plays it, then most likely leave and uninstall. These are people who think the game is a scam, maybe they’re original kickstart backers who are just mad about the game or even just bought it to ride on the hate train. (being mad after backing the kickstarter is a valid stance, but I’m not going to get into that here. The only invalid stance is believing other people shouldn’t enjoy the game.) The people who ACTUALLY play it regularly already know what they’re getting into. They have no illusions about what this game is, and because of that they end up being one of the most welcoming communities of any game I’ve played. Everyone’s just here to have fun with cool space ships and each other.
Disclaimer: I agree that SC is a burning pile of spaghetti code that will likely never be finished. I agree that they made promises in the kickstarter that they did not fulfill. I know you can buy thousands of dollars worth of in-game ships for an incomplete game. It will likely never finish. Yet I still play the game. And it’s really fun! Come play with me some time :)
This is actually one of the changes I like least. I love survival games (one of my favourite games ever is Wurm Online/Wurm Unlimited and it’s hardcore) and play modded Arma so I know how fun this level of immersion can be, but it just feels awful in SC. Stock up on snacks and water, go to warp to mission, get sucked out of the ship. Ok start the recall timer… get the ship back, load it up again, warp out and back, can’t rearm or refuel. Welp junk all my stuff again and relog because nothing but my running costs are persistent (nuking any semblance of immersion). Warp timers clocking 20 minutes? Yep you’re playing SC. Guy hotdrops on you while you’re trying to have fun and blows your ship up before you can even see him coming? Very immersive, especially because you know he got nothing out of it other than the satisfaction that you didn’t get to have fun.
Adding food and health bars while none of this rest of this works right feels like shit.
Yeah I can agree that it sucks major ass right now. The idea is cool, but it does get very annoying when re-buying stuff after dealing with bugs. One change that could fix all of this is getting to take out insurance on not just your ship, but your ship and everything in it (not including, like, ore or something. Only stuff you can buy.). So if I ever claim a ship, I could make that specific ship come with a specific set of armor, specific personal guns, ammo, medical supplies, and even food and water.
I do like shopping for stuff. But if I already know what I’m buying, especially if it’s the same stuff every time, I’d like my ship to come with it.
On a side note, drinking while in the pilot seat should be automatic, or at least very easy. I get so thirsty just sitting in my seat flying or idling/waiting.
But the idea of having to tend to bodily needs is something I definitely agree with and think is fun for a simulation, at the base level.
Edit: on many of the bigger ships, like the mercury star runner, there should certainly be waste recycling to provide you with water. It has toilets. It’s meant to sustain life for a long time. It has a bed and a fridge. There’s no reason to not let the ship help keep us hydrated.
I agree with you in concept, but I think certain suits wouldn’t make sense with that functionality. The skin-tight EVA suits with the small helmets, that have just a few minutes of oxygen I feel wouldn’t have the room/capability to allow the user to eat/drink hands-free. But there are several suits that are bigger, and designed for extended exploration sessions that have tons of oxygen storage and larger helmets/built-in backpacks that would absolutely have other life support like food/water built-in.
The smaller suits are designed just in case you need to EVA, and many ships have dining areas so you can pop the helmet off and enjoy a meal in comfort.
Well, thanks for that in-depth answer. It’s nice to talk about the actual contets of a game for once, instead of only talking around it like it’s usually the case nowadays.
It’s very interesting to hear about all this. I actually think there are a lot of games with far worse monetisation (think all the Airplane/Train simulators where you can buy singular vehicles for hundreds of dollars).
I’ll probably won’t play it tho, I don’t have the money, Conputing Power, or time lol
That’s a great observation about you hanging out around tractors as a kid and having that sense of awe. I had a similar thing as a kid with my grandpa working on semis and old cars. I really hope they do pull the game off despite my brain telling me this is all a house of cards. But exploring ships and space is so damn fun, this is the closest game to that. Tried all the X games and Elite and everything in between and SC, broke as it is, still has me holding out hope. At the very least if they never make it to a full release I hope someone else tries something similar. Starfield is fun but not scratching the same itch.
Have they stuck to a control scheme? I feel like every time I log in I have to relearn how to fly my ship and I get bored and then come back after a big patch and its different again.
I bought a super base version when they finally released some shit thinking it’d actually come out. That was like 16 maybe? Check in every few years and am always amazed at how little they’ve got done since the last time. It’s obviously vaporware. I hope someone starts a nice class action lawsuit against them. It’s fraud at this point.
I do the same thing and have tons of issues with how they’re making the game. That being said it’s far from vaporware. The experience is pretty jank at the moment but 2 years ago when I played a lot it was stable and you could sink a lot of hours into an actual gameplay experience, which is far from vaporware from my understanding. Theoretically you still can but I’m waiting to play until it’s more stable. It’s still alpha yeah but when it works it’s an actual game, albeit far from expectations and promises.
People should absolutely criticize the development but calling it fraud seems a stretch, they clearly have a product it’s just like 6 years away probably from being what they talked about 6 years ago lol. It seems more like mismanagement and development bloat. The insane backers notwithstanding. Even if they dump development now I had some fun times with $45 spent. It’s certainly an interesting experience to behold, I just think the hyperbole around the game can be ridiculous. My two cents.
I don’t want to get too ban happy on any site we think may be primarily AI generated. GamesCensor was pretty easy for me to tell, especially with the misquotes. Idk if there are any reliable tools out there for detecting stuff like this, but I’m keeping my eyes peeled.
There are no tools for reliably detecting the presence or absence of AI writing. But also, I’m just fine with banning sites because they are terrible. There is no requirement to promote garbage sites (and increasing their revenue and SEO by affording them an air of legitimacy) just because they haven’t been caught doing anything particularly egregious. At best, give them a six month timeout or something in case they eventually get their shit together.
Respectfully, this handling of garbage websites like they are actually journalistic endeavors is what confuses certain folks about what news can be trusted and what can’t. Now those folks can’t tell the difference between antivax, flat earth, and respected quality news. I mean I’m not holding you personally responsible or anything of course, but I’m just saying this presumption that low quality content has some kind of right to be shared and promoted needs to be looked at just as carefully as a decision to ban any particular site.
Also, most of the comments seem to be commentating on the headlines. If they bothered to click through and read, I think they'd feel more disgusted with the article than Star Citizen itself. xD
In all honesty: Star Citizen is better in many important ways than Starfield. Yeah it has technical issues and it is perpetually incomplete, but you can do things in this game that you can’t do in any other.
you can do things in this game that you can’t do in any other.
I'm not a SC hater, and had purchased Squadron 42 almost a decade ago, and I call bull shit on your statement. Please name all of the things you claim it innovates no other game does. I bet you money it does not and you cannot name anything special.
OK, take a delivery mission from the crowded space station you’re currently on, load a rover onto your ship (by which I mean actually load a rover onto your ship, not just press “equip rover” in a menu) . Walk onto your ship (again, meaning actually walk onto your ship, not just load straight into the cockpit), travel to your fly down onto the planets surface without a single loading screen, head down to your rover bay, get in and drive over to the delivery location to deliver the package. All without one single loading screen at any point in the process.
The closest I can think of to that is space engineers, except space engineers doesn’t really have “missions” in the same way SC does and the station would be a ghost town, and all the ships/rovers would look like LEGOs lol
Don’t get me wrong, the game is very unfinished and even by alpha standards it isn’t at all perfect and there’s a 50/50 chance that at some point in the process above you’ll get a 30k or some other game breaking bug, but I don’t see how you can have played the game like you say and not think that it’s doing things other games aren’t. There’s no other game that I’m currently aware of that actually provides the same immersive experience (when it works) as SC.
Whether or not those extra bits of immersion actually matter to you is an entirely separate question, but they are present and a good measure further than any other scifi game I’m aware of. If I’m wrong pleasepleaseplease fill me in, because I fucking love that shit in SC but can’t deal with the bugginess for more than short intervals lol
Given the current pace of development, how long would you reckon it might take them to get rid of the bugs, at least, the annoying game-breaking ones? I don’t mind incomplete content, but game breaking bugs is something I don’t have the patience to deal with. Like, I made the mistake of pre-ordering Cyberpunk - dropped it on day one cause of the bugs and didn’t touch it until three years later, when it was finally in a playable state (for me). Just wondering if Star Citizen would reach that sort of bug-free stage within the next couple of years.
If you can’t stand bugs, id just hold off entirely until Beta at least. Frankly they’ve still got a ways to go to just get the basic content in the game, several core gameplay loops like exploration are still missing, and some core pieces of tech like server meshing are still MIA as well.
Could be a year or two, could be another decade, could be never.
My advice for SC is as follows - if the game in it’s current state (check it out during a free fly event - which is probably coming up soon) is something you enjoy playing, then grab a starter ship and enjoy, but if you just want to play the “finished” game, then wait. And under no circumstances drop hundreds of dollars on internet spaceships lol - it’s really not that hard to grind your way in-game to good ships, and frankly you’ll have more fun that way, because there’s nothing to do with the most expensive ships right now anyways.
This article leaves a lot to be desired imo. Some of the stuff in here you can see is incorrect just from launching into the main menu of the game.
Here is my personal take on Star Citizen as someone who’s been following the project from the beginning:
If it’s something that interests you, you should wait for a free fly weekend and try it out. The game is far from done but it’s fleshed out enough now that you can have fun if it’s your thing. If you think it’s not worth buying, don’t buy it. Then you can come back on the next free weekend to check it out again and see the progress.
Everything else is just noise. Yes the game has raised a lot of money, yes there has probably been mismanagement and development has been slow. Yes there’s still a ways to go before feature completeness.
TLDR: Who cares. Go play it if it’s your thing and have fun, or don’t and just forget about it until they hit 1.0 sometime who knows when.
People who paid money expecting the promised timelines instead of useless feature creep, care very much. In fact people cared so much that CIG changed the user agreement to no longer allow refunds.
They took a stupid amount of money from people all while promising timelines that were never kept, and a game that I doubt will ever see completion before bankruptcy.
They need to stop throwing money and precious development time on minuscule features when their alpha can barely run on modern hardware without taking 10min to load and crashing shortly thereafter.
I hope that I am wrong about SC and the game does come out some day, because I will absolutely love the game in stable form; but the last few years have been painting a very grim picture of SC’s future
Fun fact, the user agreement doesn’t mean anything in Australia. Australian’s can get a refund any time they want because legally we cannot sign away our rights.
I got a refund a while back after I discussed this point, and my grievances with their broken promises, delivery failures and increasingly hostile sales tactics with RSIs (at the time) Director of Player Retention, Will Leverett.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. I think they should definitely give refunds to folks but that’s also the risk you take with backing a project. I’ve had plenty of disappointment with backing games, I don’t consider SC in that category but I can definitely understand people who do.
If they give me a refund I will stop caring, until then you don't really get to say 'who cares, forget about it for another decade'. I paid money for a product that still doesn't exist and is more than 8 years overdue, and that's even without getting into the discussion about whether the PU is worth it or not - where is sq42?
People paid money because they were promised a finished game by 2014. It’s still nowhere near finished. It hasn’t had an estimated release date for years.
Sure, if you enjoy the game at its current state, fine. No one should take that joy away from you.
This article was the same paragraph over and over. “Lot money, lot time, no game, please say date.” I didn’t really learn anything about the situation or controversies.
Imagine still believing you’re going to get a functioning game.
I was an initial Kickstarter who pretty much knew this was going to happen but had $60 to gamble. Fucking lolol the development hell has far exceeded my wildest expectations for Roberts inability to deliver a finished project.
You back 16 alphas and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Starfield won't call me cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
For every success, there's 100s and more failures, scams, and unfulfilled promises. Developers should seek traditional funding if they're so confident in their idea. If I'm taking a financial risk on a developer, I should get a financial return if it succeeds. "Kickstarting" is a fancy way of saying "lets socialize losses and privatize profits".
I’ve only crowdfunded a handful of gsmes, mostly vr. Because they can’t get traditional funding. Despite this I want to support projects that could be interesting. Without Kickstarter these projects would not exist, rather than switch to traditional funding.
I know there’s risk, i know they may never get finished. But its worth the risk in case a true gaming gem comes out.
Star Citizen is flawed in major ways, but it's still my favorite game even unfinished. It does things no other game does. It's a broken, incomplete experience, but it is still my favorite thing regardless.
It's easy to hate on it from the outside. I was an early backer and I echoed the sentiment many of these articles have. Last December I hopped into the Alpha with a friend and after playing it every week for the past 9 months I have to say that while I acknowledge the slow and flawed development, they made something I think is awesome today. It's maybe never coming out, but there's a sandbox today that's been worth exploring.
Yeah no one can argue that it isn’t a giant mismanaged, drastically overdue mess, but it’s literally the only game of its kind right now, I haven’t played in a little while now, but earlier on I put easily hundreds of hours into it
That being said, God I wish they’d get their shit together and get the damn thing finished… At least just SQ42…
The cheapest buy-in some years ago was like $35, and everything above that is like bigger ships and insurance on those ships if they get destroyed, IIRC.
Yeah but who’s to say the 35 dollar price point is fun. I want to know the price point the original commenter bought in at in order to recommend the game. It might not be a fun game at 35 but it’s fun at 635.
I've played the $35 buy in, and it has a fun dogfight mode, a fun FPS mode, and a buggy open world sandbox mode. It's more of a space game than Sea of Thieves is a pirate game, and lots of people loved that one even though you can see all it has to offer in an hour and a half.
I suppose it was ambiguous from the way I phrased it, but just that $35, back in like 2014. The equivalent these days when it's not on sale appears to be $45. Probably the last time I checked in on it was 2019-ish, but I ought to get access if Squadron 42 ever happens. At this rate, assuming it does happen some day, some of the actors they performance captured will be dead by then; plenty of them were getting on in years back when they first announced the cast. It's definitely not the worst $35 I ever spent though.
I'd say the lowest price point is still fun. I have lots of friends in my org who haven't spent over 35 dollars. You can earn money and buy ships in game, or rent them. There are plenty of zero to hero videos on YouTube where people start with nothing. I've spent money on the game, true, but I'm often flying the cheap ships because they're more fun to fly than the expensive ones. A cutlass black can be bought in game for very little, and it's my favorite ship to daily.
To me the whole purpose of that game is too get your money. There is either no intention to every finishing that game or the founder is so into good own bubble that he doesn’t realize that this week never be finished.
A popular streamer Lirik revisited the game 4 months ago and it was completely chocked-to-the-brim with bugs. Like literally every few minutes there was a bug, including several immediately when he began the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOsYh34Ng4E
I backed it on Kickstarter back in the day, so I think I’m only in for like $40 or something like that. I played around with the Alpha for a bit, but yeah now it just kind of sits there in the backlog.
If they ever release Squadron 42 I’ll play it, and if not… well I’m sure I’ve wasted $40 on dumber stuff.
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