As a budding game developer, watching mobile games dominate all the game awards is so incredibly frustrating.
My first game award, I watched those Farmville motherfuckers take award after award, while amazing indie games are given lip service but not the trophy.
Yeah same thing happened to the Ford Pinto. People just hated on it for literally no reason. Not that it was a terrible vehicle that would kill you on a rear end impact via instant combustion. Hate campaign!
Yeah. It’s unfortunate. I really like Eurogamer, rps, and gamezindustry.biz and all those places. My combo of addons and filters seem to stop the cookie stuff but I know it’s obnoxious if you don’t have that set. Thanks for the link!
I was expecting 25 minutes of gameplay. I skimmed the video, but it looks like around 5-8 minutes of cut-up gameplay, maybe another 8-10 minutes of cutscenes, and the rest looks like the “making of”. I did not see any evidence of a product that is anywhere near completion.
No, 10 years since the announcement of their intent to build the game. Then they had to build the company, the engine, and they are building 2 games at once (SQ42 and StarCitizen).
Developing a AAA single player game + an MMO at the same time, with the components working across the 2, and now being at the point where they are feature complete on SQ42, is pretty impressive.
I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.
They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.
The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.
They didn’t start pre-production in 2010, that’s when they started building the Kickstarter video, unless you’re counting the broad story strokes in CR’s head as “pre-production”, in which case Starfield was in pre-production for 25+ years. :P
Development on SQ42 started in 2013, and 10 years to not only build a game, but the engine tech and the studios as well, is not at all crazy given the game. Major games like RDR2 and GTAV take 8+ years, and they are working with already-established teams, and not doing anything crazy tech-wise.
And yes, MMOs have extremely long lives, both pre- and post-release. Eve is over 20 now. WoW is who knows how old. Maple Story devs have literally had kids and watched them go off to college.
I won’t tell people what to do with their money, but it’s clear people have bought in to both of these games existing. And if it were my money, I’d want to believe in these devs. But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.
And I don’t think the timeline is crazy so far with their development. What’s wild to me is thinking that a newly founded studio, even a well funded one, can knock out a competent single player and MMO with these scopes. It’s slim chances from an outsiders perspective.
Take a look at what mature and well funded studios are putting out in 2023. The likes of Starfield are actually some of the better cases. I know the incentives are different, but still. So I’m expecting a lot of tooling to need to be done for both these games to exist and exist at an enjoyable playability by the end of the 20s.
Anyways, im not trying to kill enthusiasm for people who enjoy interest in the project but to everyone outside of that, this isn’t reassuring. All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.
You are basically throwing out the existence of bad AAA games to discredit the idea that people can pull off AAA games. Here’s a secret; in software development, money and experience cannot overcome bad management. Lots of publisher-driven games release as crap because the publishers have them pegged to a certain financial quarter they want to show a revenue pull in, irregardless of where the game is at.
But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.
I think it’s fair to hold early access games with skepticism, but plenty of people do play early access games (and SC).
But also, CitCon is first and foremost an event for current players, not a marketing one for new players. It’s a bunch of dev panels on nitty-gritty details of things like UI design, flight model physics changes, npc AI design, backend economy simulations, sound and lighting, etc. The SQ42 video was them throwing current players a live-view bone about the state of SQ42 development, rather than just the usual Jira-derived sprint status reports and development milestone updates that we get every 2 weeks.
All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.
This is just cynicism about publisher-driven game-dev. It may be justified for those, but SC is not one of those, it’s quite literally an “indie” (publisher-independent) game. Plenty of independent game developers create “large-scope” games (Grim Dawn, Kenshi, Rimworld, Project Zomboid, etc) that have scope and depth (e.g. in number and complexity of mechanics) comparable to what AAA games do.
If people had not been actually playing SC (since what, 2016 for PU release iirc?) then I’d understand the idea of its potential “non-existence”, but it’s hard for me to take that stance seriously when it’s sitting on my harddrive right now.
Last night I did 2 ‘bunker missions’ (infiltrate facility, kill bad guys, loot), and salvaged 3 derelict ships. Night before that I was doing bounties on NPCs and running bomber support for some guys who had gotten pinned down by another group of players at a planet-side wreck site (Ghost Hollow). I don’t do mining, or cargo hauling, or drug running, or ship or ground pvp, or player-rescue medical missions, or racing, or investigations, but those are also in there.
I swear sometimes it’s like the people who talk about SC ‘not releasing’ seem to have no clue about what has literally already been released.
A lot of people tend to forget, comparing SC’s timeline of development to other AAA games doesn’t work when those games are pushed out early, rushed to the finish line by publishers who don’t care about polish, only sales numbers, and are fine with compromise at every level.
Chris Roberts doesn’t do compromise. Every system in SC is created for hyper realism, down to working hydraulics and gears for the moving parts of ships. He wants everything to be perfect, and he’ll call it done when he’s happy with it.
And like you said, it’s technically playable right now. I’ve never before been part of an alpha development, able to make posts about bugs that actually get read, commented on, and fixed by the dev team. Most game “betas” are just a 3 day early-access where nothing will actually change.
The game is hyped up so much because we see the potential, enjoy playing what we can, and love having a say in it’s development.
Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. Between April 2013 and April 2018, Ken pledged $4,495 to the project. The game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.
According to the game’s original pitch on Kickstarter, it would be a space sim with a co-op multiplayer game, an offline single-player experience, and a persistent universe. It’s since become a massively multiplayer online game and a separate single-player game with first-person shooter elements called Squadron 42, which RSI originally pitched as “A Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want.”
Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”
So if they still are on the hook to provide all that stuff and many people are in a similar situation to this guy, that’s a lot of merch that they gotta produce after they have done the game.
According to the game’s original pitch on Kickstarter, it would be a space sim with a co-op multiplayer game, an offline single-player experience, and a persistent universe. It’s since become a massively multiplayer online game and a separate single-player game with first-person shooter elements called Squadron 42, which RSI originally pitched as “A Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want.”
This is what bugs me the most about this whole fiasco. I paid into the original Kickstarter because Wing Commander through Freelancer were my favorite games and I wanted more of that.
The current project, even if we were to VERY charitably call it a game and call it playable, is nothing like Wing Commander or Freelancer.
If they were still making an actual Wing Commander type game after all this time, my copium might still be in full effect. But this current… THING… isn’t even the game they promised in the first place. It’s so disappointing.
I didn’t quote that bit, but that’s actually what he was upset about too.
For Lord, it’s no longer the game he thought he was getting. The first person mode is an especially hard sell. “I have [multiple sclerosis],” he told me. “My hands shake badly. I have tremors…They just recently confirmed that you have to do the first-person shooter thing to get through Squadron 42. I can’t do that, I just can’t do that. So my money’s stuck in a game I can’t possibly play.”
I played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job.
I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It’s definitely my favorite of the bunch.
Everspace 2 was fun, but never hoked me for some reason.
The most “Wing Commander” game in recent memory was Star Wars: Squadrons, IMHO. Shame they decided to make it CoD in space though… I’m not big on the multplayer aspect and the single player campaign was super short.
Starfield was a huge disappointment. etc etc
I believe they said the last expansion for X4 was the last one. Here’s hoping there’s an X5 coming.
played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job
Yeah, it never really clicked for me, and I didn’t like the “faux online” aspect either. I bet that it’s probably pretty in VR, though.
I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It’s definitely my favorite of the bunch.
Ah, okay, I didn’t think that that’d be your cup of tea, because while the game does have fighters, it tends to favor large ship combat, and my take is that the dogfighting isn’t too elaborate – like, if you can leverage strafing in X2, the enemy AI isn’t all that great at predicting where you’ll be. There isn’t, I don’t know, breaking missile locks or whatever. Though I guess that exploiting dead zones in fields of fire is a thing. And there’s a management focus, and the ability to indirectly manage many ships. I hadn’t played much of X4 myself, though I did do X3 a fair bit.
Do you enjoy the fleet command aspect of it? There’s a game that I recall that felt more like a fleet naval combat simulator in space, not on the first-person dogfighting aspect. Lots of naval warfare-ish jargon, focus on sensor and counter-sensor stuff – I suspect that people who like something leaning a bit more milsim would like that. It was early access when I played it, but probably enough to have some fun with it. Let me find the name.
They flash through a lot of functionality in a few seconds quickly in the demo vids there on steam, but you can see the ship and weapon configuration, fleet and ship commands, system-specific damage control, some of the electronic warfare stuff, things like that.
So, I enjoyed what was there, but I can imagine someone finding the faux-naval jargon a bit opaque. Sort of like operating a naval group, with ships with specialized roles. The graphics are okay, but beauty isn’t their goal – they’re trying to do a combat environment in space.
I actually ran across it when looking for a non-space milsim fleet naval combat game, and was pleasantly-surprised.
I’m not big on the multplayer aspect
Yeah, ditto.
Starfield was a huge disappointment
I liked it, but then I wanted a Skyrim or Fallout 4 out of it, not a space combat game. Yeah, the space combat there isn’t much more than a pretty minigame.
Well to be fair, X4 isn’t my favorite of the bunch because of its (lack of) similarity to Wing Commander. It’s not really that kind of game. But it is fun and scratches the space economy itch more like a Freelancer or Eve.
I hadn’t hard of Nebulous. I see what they’re going for graphically (Homeworld style). I’ll have to keep an eye on it. But yeah the fleet combat part of X4 never quite got me interested beyond “if I make 100 fighters, I should be able to take out pretty much anything”. Controlling large fleets was always a weakness of the game, one of the janky bits. But Building stations, setting up an economy, piracy, and all that stuff is still fun.
But yeah the fleet combat part of X4 never quite got me interested beyond “if I make 100 fighters, I should be able to take out pretty much anything”.
Ah, okay. I was just trying to figure out how it differed from some of the other things you listed, and fleet combat was one. But the economic side is another, and, yeah, I can see the economic side of the X series being appealing if building a big space empire is a goal.
If you’re looking for a space economic sim, that’s entirely-absent from NEBULOUS, and in fact they even mention that up-front on the product page – they’re going for combat simulation. So it won’t fill that slot.
Yeah, probably not my cuppa tea, but I will keep an eye on it. Space ships blowing each other up has potential, even if it’s not my favorite style of said activity.
And I bet it releases before Star Citizen for a fraction of the price!
Sorry to bear the bad news, but Elite: Dangerous has abandoned developing any further VR functionality.
To my knowledge VR still works in ship cockpits and is still amazing there, but the last big expansion’s big draw added new on foot content that doesn’t support VR at all. In VR it displays in headset as a giant 2D screen in front of you, if it chooses to work with the headset at all.
The tech debt they have and will incur alone will be a huge mountain to climb. You can't develop a game for that long without having to go back and completely rebuild things with newer tools.
Even their rewards show their age now. CD and DVD collections and such. What's going to happen when it comes time to fulfill all those merch order for backers in 2028 or whenever? What happens when virtually no one uses disc media anymore and they are struggling to even burn all this stuff?
This is my main concern about the game. With tech that moves this quickly, you have to understand that game companies who are established are living on the very edge of that debt.
Like starfield for example. Who knows how old it’s code is from the start of its development. It’s why Bethesda games break frequently and crash often. When you develop games on a 8-10 year cycle, think of how many hardware generations that is. 3 to 4 right? So when you’re talking about building an engine, then running it and building a game, then supporting it, all over the coarse of 15-20 years of coding? It’s a giant mess to program and there’s no way in hell it can be optimized properly.
Not to mention the massive task of upgrading the game as new hardware and new engine features arrive.
It’s going to get ugly when the chickens come home to roost on this one. They are slowly marching towards $1 billion. They are over $600mill already. And people still donate. It’s baffling.
Currently Star Citizen is at the #1 spot for the most money spent on a video game’s development on this list. And that’s including adjustment for inflation.
It's even worse if you look further down on the other unofficial figures list at Marvel's Avengers. It nearly costed as much as Red Dead Redemption 2 (also unofficial numbers). My assumption is, that the license is in these costs included and why it balooned it.
That's easy when you consider that there hasn't been basically any sort information about S42 for a long time now. Still doesn't really prove anything about a potentially finished product.
I was skimming it, but there did appear to be a couple of E3-type gameplay footage clips. I can’t say if they are new or not because I haven’t been following SC closely.
Wouldn’t it just be perfect irony if they run completely out of money before managing to release something/anything? Though with how many people put in money over and over even though progress over the years has been slow to say the least I guess the more likely outcome is nuclear holocaust putting a damper on the release schedule.
I still remember being in college and hearing people in the lab next to me excitedly proclaim that they were able to pay $100 for a rare ship that has X Y Z features including handling, top speed, and fashionable interiors.
They weren’t able to use the ship yet, but oh man was it a great investment for when they’d one day be able to ride them.
So fucking bizarre. But, if you have people out there thinking like my then peers, you’re guaranteed to have a long term stream of income based on loose promises alone.
They lost me like exactly after I put in money and started the insurance idea. I regret heavily putting money directly to the main site instead of kickstarter, at least I might have chance to get a refund or something since the pitch content changed.
Haven’t they made close to a billion dollars when counting the Kickstarter, starter packs sold via the website, and the “microtransactions” for things like ships (which are more macro than micro with the prices often being way over 100€)? I doubt they’ll run out of money any time soon, although hookers and blow definitely aren’t free
Scientology has been running strong from their grift for decades.
They are going to eventually run dry when they’ve burned through every ounce of their reputation. But it’s a long, long path of riches and broken dreams in the meantime. By the time it’s finally done, Chris and the other COs will have retired with their hundreds of millions, and they won’t care.
Xbox games are on PC. Playstation games are on PC. Nintendo is Nintendo. If Microsoft ever bought out Nintendo, Nintendo would disappear, effectively making consoles obsolete. People will still buy consoles, but they would be pissing away their money.
There will always be a market for consoles. If you buy a game, know for a fact that it works. If you have a PC, it can start to be obsolete, or your graphics card might not be supported, or your OS might not be patched, or…
There will also always be a market for PCs, because you can do things cheaper, and/or better than consoles.
While I don’t expect every single Xbox and PS owner to drop their preferred console in favor of PC, even though they should, those issues you listed as benefits of console over PC aren’t real. Consoles become obsolete just like PC hardware, your graphics card might not be supported is the same situation, your OS might not be patched is not an issue whatsoever. It’s just a shame that console owners think those things are issues.
PCs slowly drift out of support for games. Over the years, some, but not all, of AAA games just don’t work on your computer. Consoles have static generations where things either work or they don’t. This is the pro and the con of the PC.
You simply do not have that problem with a PS4, it works for PS4 games. If you want a game that is only released for the PS5, then you buy a PS5.
PCs over the years are home to new operating systems that kill off older standards that run games (dos support, 64 bit architecture, etc) but that happens once every 20 years. With console gaming, it happens once every 6 years. If I want to play Half-Life 2, I can. If I had a PS5 and wanted to play GTA San Andreas, I couldn’t.
Xbox has backwards compatibility for games all the way back to the original Xbox. Not only is there backwards compatibility, but pretty much all those old games also get HDR support and some of the big ones like Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect also got 4k textures for 10+ year old games, free of charge (don’t have to buy a remaster, etc)
Completely ignoring that collectors preserve computer games the same way they do consoles, and just preserve a computer with the necessary requirements.
And both those computers and those consoles are subject to deterioration which has been a large argument towards backing up games through emulation. While you may never want to good luck finding a working Atari Jaguar CD, and that's just one of the easier examples.
I’ve never had a game stop working, ports to PC occasionally break but I’ve never had one just quit being compatible. Hell I can boot up early 90’s games on my windows 10 machine right now right alongside early 2000’s, 2010’s, etc.
To do the same on console you’d have to have like five or six different console gens and their discs just laying around all over the place.
I have a PC where I could (and regularly) play almost every single game ever made, from Pong to Elden Rings. If I bought a PS5 today, I could only play games exclusively made for PS5 (not many, mind you), this also means a lot of PS1, through PS4, games that have never been ported are unplayable on a PS5. On my PC however, I can comfortably play almost every single game from every single generation of PlayStation up to PS4. I can also play every single AAA game ever released in history. Something that the PS5 cannot do, it only plays PS5 games.
I primarily play PS consoles. I prefer the controller. With today’s technology and cross-platform play, I can still keep playing the controller that I like with friends I have developed over the years.
PC will be my way forward as I transition past this generation. I’ve been on Sony since the PS1 (I’m old). Plus, at least I can play the older PS1/2/3 titles on PC without a SUBSCRIPTION.
Nah man PC building is too much, I wanted to do it in my new place so I could run some emulators in my living room, thought I’d finally use Steam etc. but the prices to build are painful. I’ll take a console and go without retro gaming for a bit.
I’d love if they bought Nintendo, it would make me buy Xbox and whatever service I could use on a PC and Xbox. Their psn.
Nintendo suck. Their games get delayed, their consoles are mid. They literally only sell because of Mario and Zelda. That’s why they absolutely drip feed that content. The only reason we’re getting a new Mario Bros is because they’ll announce a new console next year and they can re release it. And charge full whack because they have a captive market.
At least if Microsoft had Mario we’d get regular releases of new Mario games. That’s all I want Nintendo for.
Their games get delayed because they actually finish them before release. They’re one of the last AAA publishers who still believe in quality control. This is a very bad take.
It’s not a very bad take, Sony does the same thing, we have 2 fully sledged open world Horizon Games and 2 incredible God of War games released in the time it’s taken Nintendo to announce a Mario Bros platformer for their flagship device. Literally the most Nintendo game ever and they couldn’t get one that wasn’t a port on to the Switch
Odd examples to pick, Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarok were both delayed and the first original Mario platformer for the switch came out in 2017 (Odyssey - if you think 3d Mario games aren’t platformers you haven’t played them). Nintendo has also been releasing tons of other games as well so it’s not like they’ve been doing nothing.
Also, to be fair, When you have a platform with 10 times the total sales (Wii U sold ~14m, the switch is at ~130m right now) it makes sense to port over the good games from the console no one owned. Mario Kart 8 deluxe, a game originally from the Wii U, has sold ~55m copies, which is about 4 times what the entire Wii U console sold. There’s a reason they kept doing it, and it’s because most of the Wii U titles were good games that people will enjoy which released on a dead platform.
If you’re going to criticize Nintendo, criticize actually valid things like the scummy price increases on the ports (not just the ports’ existence), the poor online system that costs up to $50 per year per account, and a legal team who goes after anyone doing anything that isn’t directly playing the game. To be clear, a Microsoft buyout probably wouldn’t change any of those things because it’s making them money. Look no further than American companies like Disney largely using the same strategies Nintendo does. Microsoft is no different.
To be fair, the Switch has Super Mario Maker 2, which is the definitive 2D Mario platformer. The only real advantage that Wonder has is that the game isn’t limited by the items in the game, and the trust that the levels are curated to be good. Otherwise Mario Maker is a superior product. It honestly feels weird to see Wonder being released at all.
Yeah I’m not sure if Wonder will be good, I mean probably because they have a high standard and all but still. I do think Maker is different in that the world design is unimportant, secret levels and Easter eggs etc. and there is zero curation. I actually gave up after a bit because I kept just getting ridiculous levels that were boring.
The idea is to get people into your walled garden and then milk them for everything it’s worth. Roblox does a good job gaming wise… kids spend hours playing many different games but never leave Roblox. So the hunt for the solution that can improve on this, is on. If you can get people to order their groceries from within your walled garden and take a cut… you’re golden.
For sure… but this is like chasing the dream. And in china they have an everything app… so … they keep pooring billions into these bottemless pits.
Edit: I also think most people don’t trust corporations to get them the best deal. So if you ask Amazon to get you product X … they will fuck you on price.
It really did fuck things up which is depressing. The game was a masterpiece of an immersive sim and the atmosphere of the whole game is like no other. With a different name, I think it could’ve sold better. Even I avoided it because I was mad about Prey 2 being canned and the reused name, until I saw Markiplier play it and fell in love almost immediately. Such a beautiful game that deserved better.
Hopefully the infection mechanics are done, I really didn’t enjoy this season and only launched the game to do the holiday and anniversary events since the anniversary hat is limited and holidays are kinda limited.
I liked the robot season a lot, the plague/infection one was just tedious and unappealing aesthetically to me.
Still love DRG and can’t wait to play after the season 5 update.
They bought a bunch of assets that didn’t work well together, made a poor attempt to make them work together, and released a buggy half-finished game…oh and the hame was completely different from what they said they were working on.
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