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Sam_Bass, (edited ) do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore

And009, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

I was hoping there to be a conspiracy story behind it but the crux is they don’t understand the concept of MVP or made anything before.

Thcdenton, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'
@Thcdenton@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah no shit

Allero, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.

The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.

Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!

Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won’t be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.

Astronauticaldb,

Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.

Edit: clarity and conciseness: added “originally” to the end of the last sentence.

Allero, (edited )

Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.

And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there’s plenty of buyers.

Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.

Maggoty, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

Misguided development at CIG? Why I never!

brey1013,

Shocked I tell you!!! Who could have seen this coming!?!

draneceusrex, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

Dull surprise.

thisbenzingring, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'
@thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

What’s the latest build weight in at?

It’s so many gigs, it’s not even worth trying every so often. Every time you load it, gigs to download.

Glad I only ever spent the initial $60

The first big disappointment was the end of the funding rewards. Is any of those original rewards even noticable? Oh yay a fish! And a 42 towel to look at!

peopleproblems, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.

I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.

Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.

ICastFist,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn’t call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems

All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.

ms_lane,

Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-

They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.

Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.

Hadriscus,

the christmas flood ?

antaymonkey,

IIRC their office flooded, destroying equipment and much of the game’s development with it.

Hadriscus,

alright

Pyflixia, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

We already knew this. It's just a grifting thing now.

Maggoty,

I don’t know if you can say that. They are releasing new content. It’s just very expensive to play.

Fades,

Look at the list of stretch goals, 65 million dollars worth. What have they delivered from that?

robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

It’s a grift, they ain’t delivering all that lmao

Maggoty,

A whole bunch of that stuff was already delivered actually. The systems are probably the big thing that hasn’t been delivered yet.

Phegan, do gaming w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

I like the idea of the concept behind star citizen. I also like not getting scammed.

For that reason they will not see a cent from me.

Adderbox76, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never “release” a finished game, you’re not going to be blamed for “bugs” while still collecting money on in-game purchases.

There’s a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It’s been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.

scrubbles,
!deleted6348 avatar

If massive universe sums like that were technically feasible all of the other studios would have done it. They were overly ambitious and didn’t understand the limits

Scolding7300,

In terms of immersion I think they’ve done a great job. Played during a free weekend. But they need to aim for a gameplay loop, polish, and release. Not this feature creep mentality

Maalus,

I mean Elite Dangerous is right there, finished, playable and fun.

CptEnder,

And is a mathematical model 1:1 scale of our galaxy.

Squizzy,

…that sounda awful, surely there is journey skipping?

mipadaitu,

Nope, it’s real time travel with no FTL. The reason it’s “finished” is that it takes hundreds of real life years to get anywhere, so they have plenty of time to populate the world’s before the first players arrive.

Squizzy,

Genius

swab148,
@swab148@lemm.ee avatar

No Man’s Sky too

Maalus,

Yeaaah, but they pulled the exact same thing Star Citizen did initially. They overpromised and underdelivered heavily. It took them years to get where it is now.

Player2,

And it first released a decade ago already (in a couple months)

Seditious_Delicious, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'
@Seditious_Delicious@lemmy.world avatar

OK. Never played SC so honest question here; What is wrong if the game is technically not complete? I mean the way I thought is that this means that it keeps evolving and expanding so new content and features become available as the game development progresses. What am I missing? Is this a similar situation to the Eve Online BitterVets?

sp3tr4l,

They consistently make promises for things that will exist in the future, which then takes them years beyond their expected timeframe to achieve, or just never do them because some other past promise or promise they will make later makes an original promise either totally unworkable or wildly different.

So, so many missed deadlines, which uh, actually were just aspirational.

And… this is a game that sells you ships, gear, for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of real world dollars.

Some crazy promise will be made and oh, turns out that means we have to rework something like half the game’s systems to support that, but also they’re adding new content constantly that is always in some limbo state between following the old system’s paradigms and attempting to follow the new system’s paradigm.

What you end up with is a constant state of everything being a bit broken, and a lot of stuff being completely broken.

Its less like a released game getting DLCs and more like an alpha test that just never ends.

Which, again, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.

dustyData,

SC is a scam. They sell ships for real money that only half work. The game is riddled with bugs, quests don’t complete. Users state is regularly wiped so there’s no point on progressing in it and instead of finishing the game they ask players for much more money to work on tiny niche technical problems that sound super important on presentations but don’t move the needle even a little bit towards a finished game. At best, it is video game history most expensive physics toy. In reality, when you scrutinize their finances executives have pocketed most of the money raised and devs have been paid poor wages and overworked to a constantly moving target. They have never finished a single roadmap item, but they have announced to fanfare at least 5 different development roadmaps that are the very definition of scope creep. Lots of announcements but never a release. Any competent studio would’ve delivered at least three completed games in the same timeframe for that amount of money. They’re an online asset store that sometimes let’s you fiddle with the digital models, not a video game.

dormedas,

It was kickstarted a decade ago with release dates which they’ve never kept thanks to a constant modification of what a release looks like - namely splitting the MMO-like Star Citizen out from the single-player blockbuster Squadron 42 - as well as scope bloat. A lot of people originally kickstarted the game (mostly for what we now call Squadron 42 + some multiplayer thing) but now a decade on, the MMO-like Star Citizen is seemingly the priority project and most of the people who are currently funding the game are primarily interested in that.

After hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it seems clear that Squadron 42 in particular is in development hell as it still can’t seem to make it to market. Star Citizen, while playable, teeters back and forth from basically unplayable to playable and all “progress” is subject to wipes.

Dhs92,

Just some context: from 2017 until last year they had the majority of the development staff working on SQ42, which they declared feature complete last year and now we have a planned release of 2026. Most of the development staff has been moved back to Star Citizen which is finally seeing a lot of tech come online that was promised years ago. Definitely has a ton of scope creep, and it’ll probably never have an official release, but it’s definitely a cool tech demo that you can play.

Fades,

12+ years

hundreds of milllions of dollars invested

65+ million dollars in stretch goal funding

All that and you get:

a cool tech demo that you can play (when it’s not broken or wiped)

hahahahahahahahahahaha

BirdyBoogleBop,

The game is exactly the same as it was the first time I played it except now the lift always shows up.

dragonfucker,

Game keeps wiping players inventories including the in-game money used to buy ships. You can’t progress in the game, they just wipe you.

Allero,

Long story short, they severely fail to deliver on their promises and also mismanaged their development incentives so that they are not financially interested to ever release, or even make the game fully playable.

krimson,
@krimson@lemmy.world avatar

Instead of focussing on getting the core of the game finished and THEN expanding it they do it the other way around.

For example the mining loop now is broken again, people bought mining ships and vehicles with $$ and they are completely unusable. Not to mention all the bugs and instability. I hope they succeed but right now things are not pointing to something enjoyable within the foreseeable future at all.

Cagi, (edited )

Don’t listen anyone here, positive or negative. Try the next free fly and see for yourself. Too many feelings for an honest answer.

But here’s my 2 cents anyway, ha ha: I enjoy it, they are pushing out regular massive updates that make it more and more fun every quarter. They grew a studio from 8 people to over 1000, which takes years to do, so complaints that they have taken 10 years of full scale development are incorrect. Some people don’t like the idea it may never be the full game they set out to make, which is fair, it’s possibly the most ambitious game to date. But it’s being made in good faith, reports of a scam are about as reliable as moon landing conspiracy theories for many of the same reasons. In the meantime, what they do have is already a lot of fun. You only need to spend $50 to get in, people spending more are doing so voluntarily and generally without regrets. They have more players and revenue every year than the year before, this wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t already a fun game for many.

Gameplay is like a second life in space. It’s very spaceship centric, but there’s lots to do besides pilot. It’s slow paced, the design does prefer immersion over convenience a lot of the time.

If you like big, slow (with moments of high intensity), immersive, cinematic games, or if you like sci fi it’s definitely worth a try. Lone wolf play is doable, but taking a role on a crew is more fun (at least for me).

brucethemoose, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

It’s still around?

I remember when Star Citizen first popped up, and it makes me feel old.

alcoholicorn, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.

To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.

This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

sp3tr4l, (edited )

Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!

… Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?

I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that’s almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.

perslue,

After 10 years they increased the per server population from 50 to 100, but don’t worry server messing soon TM.

So no.

limitedduck,

Meshing tests have gone up to 2000 and the shards that were left on overnight were 300-500. The current evocati build of 4.0 has meshing enabled, just limited to 100 for now

billiam0202,

To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.

Cris_Color,
@Cris_Color@lemmy.world avatar

Wow… I’m pretty crap at making decisions, but like… not that crap 😅

That’s like an impressively bad choice

G0ldenSp00n,
@G0ldenSp00n@lemmy.jacaranda.club avatar

This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn’t just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.

Agent_Karyo,
@Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world avatar

I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.

They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.

You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.

The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.

Fades,

Classic, the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is SO sure that they know the truth. So much so they’re out here correcting people and handing out false info.

so the engine they are building is actually pretty good

Keep living in a false reality pal. I’m sure you k or so much more than the engine dev who replied to you.

How much $$ have you wasted on star citizen lmao

nailbar,

This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

If you’re talking about Chris, he’s a coder too, and wrote some of the entiry container system for the game.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your info about them scaling everything down and that being the cause for wonky physics, though.

limitedduck, do games w Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they’re still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they’re going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1

fartsparkles,

Next it’ll be 1000 star systems while we’re still waiting on Squadron 42.

arudesalad,

Fun fact: If you take the year, add two, you’ll get the current planned release date for sq42

This isn’t dependent on the current year

limitedduck,

Personally, I don’t think they should be aiming for 100 anymore, even if it was promised. That number was for the original pitch and was arbitrarily high since it was for a much shallower and easier to create game

fartsparkles,

I’d gladly take a single functioning system rather than wait another 12 years of my life for this Kickstarter project to deliver.

jagermo,

The original pitch also had dedicated servers and those are gone, sadly.

limitedduck,

How are they gone? The current servers are hosted by CIG, there’s no p2p or player hosted servers. How would that even work for an MMO?

lime,
@lime@feddit.nu avatar

dedicated servers == player-hosted servers, usually

limitedduck,

I would say private server is more what you’re referring to, also CIG’s wording, but maybe agree to disagree. A quick search says that they haven’t cancelled that feature, but it’ll appropriately be the very last thing they work on

lime,
@lime@feddit.nu avatar

the common understanding of “dedicated server” is a server binary you can download and run yourself. a “private server” is usually still hosted on the company’s hardware.

limitedduck,

I can understand you have different criteria for dedicated servers, but private servers are certainly not generally characterized by still being on 1st party hardware. You need only look at private servers for Minecraft, WoW, and the like

lime,
@lime@feddit.nu avatar

minecraft server binaries are a prime example of a “dedicated server”. tf2 is another. the alternative is a “listen server”, where one player acts as server. note that the term’s use in gaming has very little to do with the concept of a dedicated server in general use, aka a machine dedicated to running a service. in multiplayer games a dedicated server is just the name for a binary that contains no client.

anyway, the important distinction is whether the means for the game to continue existing is in the hands of the players or the company.

limitedduck,

I understand, what confused me was your claim about the common understanding of the term when there are very much two valid and ubiquitous contexts.

lime,
@lime@feddit.nu avatar

honestly i think it’s an age range thing.

arudesalad,

Today they announced that it was cut down to 5 and they will slowly work their way back up to 100 after launch (whenever that is)

limitedduck,

It was a good decision. It was also smart of them to review the initial 100 planet goal to add some much needed context

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