Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.
I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.
Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.
Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important
Lots of people have done the same… But if they’re rich and still chasing after money? They’ll never stop
the wing commander series was famous for inflated development costs, freelancer was repeatedly delayed and eventually released like five years after it’s announcement, and since then… he’s been working on star citizen
Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.
Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.
I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.
It’s been that way basically since it first was available, they make so much money on whales buying the expensive ships that they really don’t seem to care about finishing the game.
They keep adding more and more paid content you can buy, while the game is barely playable with incredibly poor performance, and constant bugs like not being able to finish missions, cargo randomly disappearing, cargo glitching into ships and causing them to explode, etc… And the game is generally just extremely unstable with lots of crashes.
That’s where Derek Smart went wrong, I guess. He actually released his game, not realising that you can just sell the hype vapour on its own. Rookie move.
“Earlier this year, Microsoft was given a brief presentation for Squadron 42, CIG’s spin-off campaign of Star Citizen that consists of around 20 different chapters (levels) of various lengths. It’s understood that the plan for Squadron 42 is to get it out of the door as soon as possible, with directors of the company hoping the influx in cash will sustain Star Citizen’s development and help to push Squadron 42 as a multi-game series, which will see the game’s story span over several different episodes. As for when Squadron 42 will launch, I wouldn’t want to guess, but it’s understood that the game has only just made it to its “feature complete” stage, despite the claims last year.”
Nonononononono… Microsoft means gutting the game in every way possible to get it to run on the Xbox toaster edition…
As for the end of that, thankfully they gave a release window today (2026) I hope most of this isn’t true though. What they want to make is seriously impressive
One of them is for rich kids though, who have overpowered gaming rigs, and money to throw away on fictional space ships. Sure Elite Dangerous has the whole galaxy, but when it just repeats itself, it kind of is just as good as one solar system really.
I’m always surprised Ubisoft gets so much flak when other developers are doing much the same thing.
That said, my main annoyance with Tsushima is: You’re not a hero. 99% of side quests end with the people you were helping ending up dead, and possibly some other nameless NPCs rescued. It just feels tragic.
It’s a perpetual issue where it’s easier to code in 20 more enemies than 2 or 3 more innocent, living people to have conversations with.
That doesn’t really explain why Ubisoft got shat on for it, while Ghost of Tsushima often got praised into oblivion. I constantly found myself thinking that it could’ve just as well been a Ubisoft game, just with less content.
Thank fuck, that’s definitely one of the game’s more detrimental flaws. I hope they also work on varying their quest design more, as well as mixing up the tone of the writing and acting more frequently.
I enjoyed the beautiful locations, solid combat and often great boss fights, but the game in general was too monotone for me to be truly captivated by it. Towards the end I felt worn out by it, having to mentally steel myself to even finish it. I get that the serious samurai trope is what they’re going for, but while that might work in a 2-hour movie it becomes incredibly one-note over a 50-hour game. Kenji alone is not enough to break up the flow with some variety. Especially with the gameplay being very repetitive too - so many missions are simple walk-and-talk, ride-horse-and-talk and go-to-spot-kill-mongols.
Good, it’s the one thing that kept me a long time from finishing the game after chapter 1. I only wrapped up the main story last week, after not having played for like 2 years lol. The main story of the game isn’t even that very long actually, or at least chapters 2 and 3, and the open-world content got repetitive very quickly.
The Square Enix ones mentioned in the article are nothing earth-shattering–the Final Fantasy XVI PC port and what’s most likely the Final Fantasy IX remake. FF9 was part of the previous Nvidia leak.
wccftech.com
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