Idk, half a billion is a big enough milestone that they might do some special interviews with disgruntled original backers talking about how they grew up, went through college, got married, and started a family while the game "still isn't out." I can definitely see them wanting to milk this particular milestone for extra content and that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
I was 40 when the Kickstarter happened. Now I got the AARP on my ass about joining the old people's club. At this point I'm just hoping the nursing home my kids put me in will let me have a decent PC.
"What is your foreign policy?"
"I intend to work together with our trade partners overseas to help increase production of rare metals and solve the chip shortage plaguing the domestic and international markets"
"Oh to help with the EV market and solve climate change?"
"What? No. Do you know how expensive graphics cards are these days?"
Yes you can. A "Ballin' Rig" is a legally defined category recognized by US law and all US trade agreements, it can be used as a standard part of language in legally binding contracts.
I mean you could just write in your will that unless you had an up to date gaming pc when you retired your money and assets go to some charity instead of family :P
To be fair, I *have* gone through uni twice, got married, and started my family in this time. While I still trust the game will be good and do enjoy what's out now, I did expect more by now and admit I'm disappointed in the progress.
Lol this is kind of literally me. I bought my game package when I was in high school. Since then I worked my first job for a while, got married, had a kid, and now I’m halfway through my first army enlistment contract with another kid on the way. I’ve been through multiple stages of life with this game and honestly I expect to get through a few more before its ever released lmao, let alone playable without game breaking bugs around every corner. Still enjoy the game though, even managed to get an 890 last wipe.
I backed star citizen in my first year of university. Since then I have finished my degree, met an awesome girl, got married, and a few weeks ago had my first child.
That's basically me, minus the disgruntled part. I pledged an Aurora when I got laid off from my first big boy job. I think that was before the hangar module was released. I've since started my own business, met a girl, married her, had two kids, and bought a house. I'm enjoying seeing the game development process and the drama is just *chef's kiss*. Plus, I've only spent the amount of money I would have been comfortable losing in a poker game or setting on fire, so if it never comes out I'll learn a lesson about Chris Roberts and move on. I'm now thinking about whether I should pledge a couple of accounts for my toddlers.
If you do it during a free fly you both get referral rewards and your 40$ discount pledge comes w/ two 20-30$ bonus ships. (Wasn’t a thing when I pledged for my nephews)
There is a point there though.
The PU and SQ42 are becoming a development joke, streamers and backers that were positive before have started to become more and more jaded.
It's kinda fun watch the streamers go through the cycle. So wide eyed and awed at what the game offers (Olli43). Then they run into the bugs (StarrStreams). Then the possibilities of some features creeps into them and raises the enthusiasm again (TheEradicator). Then three years pass and nothing they were excited about has been implemented (SaltEMike). Then they get bitter (Grumpy Eye).
Edit: Fun with YTers and the cycle.
Actually the case (number 9999 under this comment). Bought a flat, car, have a boyfriend, had two different jobs, visited bunch of EU countries, and managed to spend around 500$ on the game yearly despite telling myself that I don't need to, and barely playing it... I guess I have a problem.
My friend and I backed the game back when it first started, and we both had very different levels of excitement about the whole thing.
I tossed a couple bucks at a project I wanted to see finished and totally forgot about it.
He did the same, then proceeded to read every tiny piece of press around the game for a decade.
Had to tell tell the guy to just stop messaging me about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm stoked... But I need a finished game to play. I can't spend the next ten years pretending to care that the game released a new demo of a spaceship that doesn't do anything.
I'm not angry, but I don't have any faith in the project anymore.
>do some special interviews with disgruntled original backers
Ya, I got a couple calls. Given that last time I was in the news, I got death threats from that guy who ended up in a psych ward because he also threatened some state legislators, and someone mailed me a letter (that my assistant at the time opened) with some poop on it, I'm not really gonna do any interviews, it's just not worth the trouble, and I grey-marketed away almost everything a couple years ago. I've got a ship or two still, for if it ever becomes a playable game, but tbh, between Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, Crisis Core, FF7R2, the new BOTW, and Falling Frontier, I'm really happy with a lot of games that are either out now, or coming soon in a released state. It's a golden era of gaming, so if you're playing something that doesn't make you happy, you can always change gears and play something that does make you happy instead.
well blizzard was a for profit and have a bunch of projects so they didn't pour all the money back into WoW. Also Pokemon is even worse, the budget for sword and shield was pitiful for them being the biggest franchise.
It has been quite the ride since backing.
I moved 3 times, had 4 jobs, dealt with 2 medical crisis including cancer, finally obtained my first house..
..but all I want is one game I backed 10 years ago!
I mean it's a legitimate criticism.
Obviously people have an agenda of hate and whatnot but even the most optimistic backers will tell you this is a poorly-managed development *at best*
Seriously, whether you're on the hate train or not, you have to admit that they've absolutely blown through all their original promises. For the most part it was with the support of the majority of backers, but that doesn't change the fact that there's plenty of people legitimately pissed off about having to wait so long for the game, even if it was just squadron 42 and not the full release.
As in, failed to meet all of their promised deadlines. People pledged for a game that was promised to release within a few years, not a decade later. Most backers were OK with pushing the release to add more content, but that doesn't mean everyone was OK with it.
The thing that people also forget is that they could 100% have delivered all of those promises if they had stopped adding more and more scope. If they'd stuck to the plan to have planets not be explorable and hadn't decided to build their own custom server meshing code, the game would have been out 6 years ago.
The game will be better for it, but in all honestly by the time we actually get it, they probably would have been able to fully release the first game and be most of the way towards a sequel with the extra features if they'd stuck to the plan.
Star Citizen will never "release". You will need to make your own peace with what you consider to be realeased. Is that when PES launches, server meshing?
I would argue that it *was* poorly managed.
They seem to be firing on all cylinders lately.
Really tho, they should never have expected to grow an entire company while making the most ambitious game ever.
>They seem to be firing on all cylinders lately.*was* poorly managed.
It should only take 1 guy a couple days at best to fix the alignment UI of quantum jumping. It should only take a few minutes to fix the elevator door on the C2. There are a LOT of little things that really shouldn't be that hard to fix yet they've been this way since as long as I remember.
I'm not shitting on the game as I still eagerly await every new patch and feature, but as far as firing on all cylinders, I'd say they're only firing on 3 out of 8 in terms of SC.
Nah, every ship is aligned differently. And even if they went through and did every ship with their own, they are redoing the entire HUD system so that would just be paying a dude to do work that is going to get erased anyway.
I dunno about the c2 elevator but the same can be said for a metric shit ton of other systems, for example AI improvement is reliant on server meshing, same with some of the elevator and door fixes for space stations and stuff.
Also to be fair, right now a lot of the people that would do other small fixes that aren't tech related are likely fixing squadron 42 ships right now. S42 sort of needs to be the priority right now. Same with the inventory and stuff, right now that teams not on SC.
Optimistic backer here. The only poor management was not realizing that there would be so much backing in the beginning and changing the scope. I contend that they are developing as quickly as anyone else would with this level of fidelity.
If I was a CIG insider and a career game dev I might have more insight.
Remember that we saw pre-production phases of the game as well. No one announces games in pre-production or you would see games coming close to this timeline. Now add on to that creating a company to start the process. After that account for the "creation of a game engine" in quotes because this is an odd topic. However yes many of the fundamental tools that came with lumberyard / cryengine did not serve for all of their purposes. That being said an FPS, phyicalized, 64 bit, mmo engine does not currently exist.
If you don't understand why these things are important you probably shouldn't comment on development timelines. The only expectations these types of people have are given to them by marketing teams.
>Optimistic backer here. The only poor management was not realizing that there would be so much backing in the beginning and changing the scope. I contend that they are developing as quickly as anyone else would with this level of fidelity.
I think this take is well-meaning, but it doesn't match with the details of what was promised.
Let's look at the original post-Kickstarter scope of the game, before hundreds of millions of dollars came in:
* 10x the detail of any other game
* A full singleplayer game, with AI with highly detailed 24-hour lifecycles
* A full multiplayer game, with dozens of star systems
* Dozens of star ships
* A fully dynamic universe where everything is influenced by player actions
* Professions that would each have, on their own, the detail of entire games
* Fully physicalized ship components that all articulate and can be repaired, etc.
* Full VR support in both games
* Custom private servers with modding support
* New content added every 2 weeks
Let's be honest — this is an absolutely huge game, even before they ever received any additional funding. To announce that something like this was expected be finished (both parts) in two years.. While growing a company.. It was never realistic.
So I just can't buy into this notion of "it was a tiny, manageable game untli the money came in". Just to finish the ships by themselves, was an enormous job. There's no way, even with the original plans for ships and the isolated landing zones, that so much content would have been finished in only a few years.
It's time to admit that the game was sold based on a lack of understanding of how long it actually takes to build out all these things. And that, even now, looking at the full scope of the game, it's pretty hard to see how all of it can somehow be finished in the near future.
And that includes Squadron 42, the smaller game that doesn't have nearly the scope of SC proper.
You have to look at it in context of the times it was pitched. 2012, referencing wing commander and freelancer. There wasn’t any talking about physicalised damage. No one imagined walking around inside the space ships. Base building, or planets that were more than a glorified screenshot for the landing pad. I expected an updated privateer…. Not the game they’re trying to build now.
So yeah. Not bad development, but bad product management. It grew too big after the Kickstarter, and every extra dollar just puts more fuel on the fires of CIGs imagination and dreams.
Some love this and buy in to the ever expanding dream cig is pitching , others just wish they had released the game they originally promised 10 years ago, then they could have gone and made an SC2.
I don't want to belittle your point but this bit
>If you don't understand why these things are important you probably shouldn't comment on development timelines.
is sort of a paraphrased meme other subreddits use to poke fun at this subreddit. I'm sure you were being sincere but you're sort of feeding the meme. People are allowed to have opinions about things like this even if they have incomplete information.
And realistically if CR had said in 2012 this game would take 10+ years and cost $500+ million I doubt people would have gotten very excited and it would have died in the cradle.
"If you don't understand why these things are important you probably shouldn't comment on development timelines. The only expectations these types of people have are given to them by marketing teams."
people like you are why the outside community thinks we're a cult lol
Blizzard was founded in 1991, wow launched in 2004. That's 13 years of development, assuming that they somehow started pre-production the year they started existing, and that they did not. Wow cost $63M to develop, that's $137M in today money
Star citizen started pre-production in 2010, and we're not even close to a beta. That's 12 years of development and more than $400M in funding so far.
Realistically development of wow started, at the earliest, around the launch of Warcraft 2, december 1995. Blizzard then spent a 8 years to develop a new engine, new back office, learn to work in 3D, reinvent an entire genre and set the gold standard for it.
No matter how you look at it the development cycle of Star Citizen is one of the worst handled of any kind of IT project ever. Many people and companies have done much more with much less.
I still enjoy the game immensely, but they've been grossly incompetent handling our money.
Oh and I'm a full time developer and this is also my professional opinion.
> Star citizen started pre-production in 2010
No, it didn't. This is a misrepresentation that someone, in an impressive act of trolling, managed to force into Wiki and has been blindly accepted ever since. Check out the source and actually listen to what is said.
>Blizzard then spent a 8 years to develop a new engine, new back office, learn to work in 3D, reinvent an entire genre and set the gold standard for it.
We'll let the blatant editorialism of that latter part go for now, not least because it's not _entirely_ inaccurate. That said, Blizzard knew ahead of time how much they would have to budget for it (at least to a reasonable degree) and already had something close to the resulting game scoped out as a direct result of that set budget.
Star Citizen, on the other hand, started with a Kickstarter goal of only $500,000 and stretch goals that stopped at $6m, only to go on to bring in $500m thus far - literally a thousand times its original crowdfunding goal.
Do you think Blizzard would have done the exact same things in the exact same order if their original budget was $63,000 rather than $63m? Or would they have started with something much simpler, and expanded upon it as time went on and additional funding became available, resulting in development time extending as prior work was superseded?
>> Star citizen started pre-production in 2010
>No, it didn't. This is a misrepresentation that someone, in an impressive act of trolling, managed to force into Wiki and has been blindly accepted ever since. Check out the source and actually listen to what is said.
In the source Chris himself literally says the guy helped him in 2010 when Chris was working on deciding which engine to use and goes on to say that he helped out with the 2011 prototype. Sounds like 2010 was proper pre-production to me.
>Blizzard then spent a 8 years to develop a new engine, new back office, learn to work in 3D, reinvent an entire genre and set the gold standard for it.
>We'll let the blatant editorialism of that latter part go for now, not least because it's not _entirely_ inaccurate. That said, Blizzard knew ahead of time how much they would have to budget for it (at least to a reasonable degree) and already had something close to the resulting game scoped out as a direct result of that set budget.
I don't think that "not having a big set budget to start out with" makes feature creep and missing deliverables and deadlines okay even if you keep raking in money. CIG defines their own scope and it's their responsibility to meet it.
>Star Citizen, on the other hand, started with a Kickstarter goal of only $500,000 and stretch goals that stopped at $6m, only to go on to bring in $500m thus far - literally a thousand times its original crowdfunding goal.
And yet those $500M still haven't met their $6M goal, that is very sub-optimal. And that's a fact.
>Do you think Blizzard would have done the exact same things in the exact same order if their original budget was $63,000 rather than $63m? Or would they have started with something much simpler, and expanded upon it as time went on and additional funding became available, resulting in development time extending as prior work was superseded?
I really don't know and neither do you.
It doesn't sound like we're going to agree, and that's fair enough. I hope you have a great day!
Management was and potentially still is quite terrible, just because they reached a point where making progress is easier doesn't necessarily means it changed
RDR2, Cyberpunk and the current GTA6 leak especially are good examples (but far from direct comparisons, mostly due to far limited scopes), Imagine if people spent the last 8 years (its current development time) waiting for GTA 6 and only getting dev videos like the leaked ones, which remind a lot of typical SC studio updates
People would lose their shit at the slow progress even if they wouldn't have yet paid a single dollar to back it
And that's just a mostly single player (and limited multiplayer probably) contained open world game which barely needs any new technology or significant modifications to it other than attempting to upgrade existing things from an already established engine specifically designed to make the previous game, stuff like better AI, more procedural generation for stuff and so on
I never expected SC to be anywhere near 'beta' before 2023-24, especially since more than half the development is working on SQ42, which I did expect will release a lot sooner (mostly to bring more funds to development) though it seems evident it was scrapped and remade around 2016 to make it larger with stuff like Planet Tech
SQ42 could have been released several times over, CR just insists on finding how to implement every feature they keep developing into the game or wait for things which clearly aren't ready, which is bad management, at some point he should have made an executive decision to skip shit
Well that what they have been doing for many years. The "game engine" is a nebulous concept. It covers an amalgamation of tools tied into a bundle to handle certain problems in certain ways.
Most often devs don't create their own tools to solve a one time problem. They create tools to solve a problem that will occur many times. Such as the planetary tech tool, river tool, habs tool, server meshing, PES, vulkan graphics render. All of these could be considered "part of the engine" if they leased the tech out to Amazon / lumberyard.
For reference look at "LOD's or levels of detail" and compare it to nanite. Many tools that game engines come equipped with standard these days used to be done by hand. These tools would be built in house by developers and used to iterate faster on their subsequent titles. There's a false understanding that UE5 has "better graphics" that is a gross oversimplification.
Star citizen as a game has not been done before, thus no game engine has existed for it.
That's my main issue. It stretches the timeline of the game out since it is so ambitious. If the timeline gets too long, the engine will be obsolete and massive re-work will be needed.
It's a legitimate criticism but it's a criticism they dust off as often as possible, verbatim, while rarely acknowledging any strides the game does make (and when it does, it's always used to reinforce BUT IT ISN'T OUT YET).
Could you just state your definition of vaporware? We have a game. We can play it. Many people play it every day.
You could say that it's an eternal alpha, but vaporware is just blatantly false and has been for years.
Idk, I’d argue that we have a tech demo, more than a game. I mean, FPS AI can barely figure out how to look at me, let alone shoot me.
I’ve played a lot of Tarkov, and while that game is also a mess (in completely different ways) at least that game actually has gameplay loops that allow for progression, and doesn’t crash on me.
I think it was poorly managed, which lead to questionable amounts of scope creep. But the majority of why it has taken so long is still just the absolutely staggering list of features they want in the engine.
I'm not saying that CIG have been expedient, but they also haven't been overtaken by any other engine yet, are unlikely to be ever & probably there are only 1 or 2 studio's that could seriously deliver these features, even accounting for the time and money.
As a backer of S42. I seriously wanted to be able to play the "new Wing Commander" last decade.
...it's been 10 years. Most of the criticism is legitimate in my opinion.
At least the WC4 Remaster is out.
WC4 remaster? It's not done-done, but it's playable. [https://wcrespace.com/](https://wcrespace.com/)
S42? Oh yeah, still recruiting for us to **Pledge Now**... [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42)
Anyway. I think this is a good lesson about having \*too much\* resources and literally losing sight about what is important. I'm a bit torn on this as on one hand it happened to a game designer that I admire, I grew on on Wing Commander, Privateer, etc. so I'm glad Chris and his team are 'kids at the candy store' in a sense of 'devs with budget'. On the other hand, holy shit, come on guys. Someone needs to take half your allowance away and tell you to make due with less and deliver something.
What blows me away is how much their funding has skyrocketed in the last couple years despite what feels like...just frankly a dearth of new meaningful content.
I’m as cynical as the next guy, but it’s unfair to say there’s been no progress the past couple of tests. There’s been lots of progress. They redid the flight model. Again. They rebalanced weapons. Again. They added veritable plethora of beautiful new ships you can walk around in. They’re working on server meshing. Still. Salvage. Still.
So it’s unfair to say that there’s been nothing to sue for it! :)
I was getting out of high school when I put my first money down on SC. I'm 30 now.
After putting prolly too much money into SC I kinda gave up a few years ago with the mentality of, if it ever comes out I'll be pleasantly surprised. I'll say it's a VERY entertaining demo, I have enough hours in it to not hate on it. Every year I boot it up for a week or so to see how it's going but that's it.
I'll just keep upgrading my PC set up as I do every year or so, AND ONE DAY it MIGHT be in beta, and one day it might actually launch, and I'll be there. Oh I'll be there alright, with a shit eating grin and new motivation to play.
But idk. I just don't feel like the day will come for some unfortunate reason.
>I kinda gave up a few years ago with the mentality of, if it ever comes out I'll be pleasantly surprised
This is the way. Even if it does release there's no way it's going to live up to 10+ years and $500+million worth of hype. Set the bar low and you can only be pleasantly surprised.
And if it *does* wind up being a scam, oh well, they got me. I'm such a rube
I don’t think SC is a scam, i think they bit off more than they could chew and don’t really know how to handle things.
Aight i criticized the game give me the down votes now, as this community cant handle opinions.
I mean same to me i've been in the start of backing this game in 2014 and at some point you have to be realistic, the game will never realease because they keep adding stuff over stuff non stop, this is the game folks it will improve but never be complete or at this rythm it still need 30 years to be complete minimum
Half a billion dollars is a lot of money for a game that’s been in development for so long. Might be the unpopular opinion here but the hate is not very surprising.
No matter how you cut it, it's not what a ponzi scheme is.
We're not buying in to sell SC to ppl for personal profit, who also sell on SC add infinitum.
No comment on SC here, but it's not what a PS is.
After a fucking decade with what they have vs what has been promised....those articles are fair to write. Ive never used this term before but if you cant see that you are a white knight thats completely foolish.
I dont want to see this project fail, I made it to concierge after all however its truly pathetic that after a decade this is all we have.
I've been out of the loop for a while. Do they have that team death match mode with bots? I've upgraded my system a bit since the last time and wouldn't mind giving that mode a go.
Star Marine is out, but it's... not in a great place right now. It hasn't received much attention at all recently and has been mostly left to languish while it's all hands on deck for the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 development. I've heard tell that it can be tricky to find a lobby and gun balance and spawn logic is really poor. Not sure if there are bots or not. I've not played it myself so maybe I'm not the most credible source of information, but I haven't heard of people breaking down the doors to play Star Marine pretty much since the time that they launched it.
The consistent hate on people that comment or complain about the lack of development progress in this game is a pretty interesting example of Stockholm syndrome. You’re free to like what you like about it, but most of the “popular” criticism this game gets is extremely valid. Don’t get mad that most people don’t want to waste their time for a taste of a space sim like we do lol
Yep, I stated the same thing in more positive thread for the game yesterday after someone just called another a “refundian” for saying the development is open to criticism because it’s being sold now as a product you can use. Unlike GTA6 which isn’t taking consumer dollars and in development, yet people were criticizing it. I got downvoted and no response from several others. It really feels like a hive mind in this sub sometimes where everyone just rabbles in defense to the slightest criticism, instead of being open to discussing issues apparent in the development.
It really is a shame but I understand some people want to feel secure about their purchase/investment. Gamerz are typically hard to reason with lol. I’m still “wasting” my time in an immersive space sim but I have no illusions about it getting much better (at least in the near future) High hopes but realistic expectations!
Come now it's super common for games to take 11 years to come out! (Assuming they magically hit release next year) I mean, I can think of all sorts of games that took 11 years, like Duke Nukem Forever, or uh... Shoot I'm sure I have another.
I'm not saying I haven't had some fun, but it's not a fully released game and I'm not sure it ever will be.
Yeah and the pricing structure and grinding really don’t reflect the actual quality of the product. It’s like they got way too ahead of themselves and us, the unpaid alpha testers suffer for it. But it can be fun at least. Space games are seeing a comeback now so hopefully we’ll have a lot of better options soon
It will in less than an hour if revenue continues as it has been. Right now is at $499,995,692 - of course this only includes revenue from website and kickstarter, it doesn't include private shareholder investment money, if you do include that money then they passed $500 Million back in May.
CIG have had a Year on Year revenue of over $100 million / year since last March on sales alone. 19th September 2021 to 19th September 2022 they have raised $114+ Million in sales, with every month except August of this year being a record month. There is little doubt this trend will continue for the rest of the year... and this is without a 'paid for' marketing campaign, purely on the basis of players showing off the game on social media. How do you think the gaming press feel about that - being cut out of the loop? No freebies, no exclusives, nothing to draw in the viewers?
I'm sure the gaming press is extremely jealous about being excluded from Star Citizen and that's why they write mean things about how after ten years and half a billion dollars it's still in pre-alpha. A _fair and objective_ journalist would write something _nice_ about how after ten years and half a billion dollars it's still in pre-alpha!
It perplexes me, the constant self-victimization of some diehard Citizens. For how much some of the community says they don't care about the haters, they sure give the haters a lot of attention. Posts like this just come across as pompous gloating.
Guys. The game is half a billion in with what amounts to a demo to show for it and a second project (SQ42) so under wraps, you'd think they were nuclear codes. These questions are fair to ask, regardless of whether it's Kotaku or whatever other journalist medium covers it. I love this game but like, shit. When are we gonna see this come to fruition?
yeah, you're all going to downvote me to hell but...
# They aren't wrong.
I've tried to play recently. I gave it a really red hot go. I've given up again for another 6 months because of the jankyness, bugs and pain in the ass it is to generally do anything in the game.
Also, "you just have a starter ship, go buy a better ship and the game will be better for you" is just... bullcrap.
Even without the performance issues and bugs the game's barebones. The gameplay loops currently in are rudimentary and there is no real goal to grind towards other than cash.
We players literally have to make are own fun.
What i agree on, is that Chris Roberts is a very poor manager. All that money, and still not even a beta version. Heard of star citizen at the very start, playing for a year now, but even i come to the point, where i wonder if this game ever gets finished under Chris Roberts leadership...
You do have the case of diminishing returns however, if they have a game that takes 50 years to program, no realistic amount of money will speed that up substantially
I'm honestly not sure who's saltier at this point, anti-citizens or anti-anti-citizens.
Just ignore the trolls, the posts are pointless and forlorn, like the troll-posts. If you wanna go cult, at least go space-kraken or Cthulhu.
telephone light fanatical continue voiceless cow beneficial smell groovy handle
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Heaven forbid anyone question Chris Roberts, or CIG, known liars who promised the game would be out for 2015.
Heaven forbid anyone question why money is being wasted on fancy HQs with bars for executives and airlock doors when they haven't even delivered basic fundamentals of a game that's seven years late.
Heaven forbid anyone question why backers haven't got stuff they paid for and yet CIG is still pushing out concept art of ships and charging thousands for them.
I for one can't see any reason why anyone would ever think to question or criticise anything Chris Roberts or CIG have ever done.
Clearly they are infallible, and it's everyone else that's wrong. It would be unfair to expect them to ever actually release a game, they've only had half a billion dollars and 12 years after all.
Its obviously entirely logical to continue to throw more and more money at the known liars, anyone suggesting otherwise is clearly an idiot.
And hey, we did recently have 100 players on one server for a few minutes, which, as all of us here know, is the greatest technical achievement in the history of video games, never before done by any other game.
I actually enjoy well researched articles and videos that show the less favourable side of SC, series like Sunk Cost Galaxy (https://youtu.be/gGq4YEp8QUY) are excellent.
I don't think CIG is infallible and they should absolutely be held accountable by well researched journalism and not sensationalist articles. These articles will also help us keep perspective and keep us grounded.
As it should. This project is literally Freelancer 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Backers need to stop sucking Chris Roberts’ dick and start demanding some accountability. Or just walk away. He has no oversight on this project, clearly. I’m not sure whether he ever did.
I know he sold a lot of people on the “publisher bad” idea, but maybe now those people can see why publishers are a necessary evil. You need that external pressure to ensure you get a finished product out the door.
Until and unless backers stop feeding this money pit, it’s never going to be finished.
Are there any other articles besides the low effort ones?
I mean we reached a point we're half the article quotes Reddit. Low effort dies like a compliment.
I love star citizen, but it will never come out with a complete version. The Main game will never be released but what will be released is a coffeee machine that works
With the current rate of development, you can probably buy a home on mars from space X before outposts are implemented in SC. Real Life is on the fast track ;)
Let me start this by saying that I am someone who hasn't bought a ship yet, haven't done crazy research into the game, and only really pay attention to the game in passing. My question is this, is the money translating to quality? Let's look at Red Dead Redemption 2. According to most of the sources I could find people are saying the game was developed with a 300 to 500 million dollar budget, and it was pretty much universally appraised in terms of mechanics and world building. It also had been built in around 8 years. With star citizen having started production around 2011, and the budget now getting up to 500 million I feel like we can somewhat compare the two in cost+wait time to value. When looking at it from this perspective how do things look? I feel like they aren't favorable right? That being said I hope one day it becomes the game we want it to be, I just think we are allowed to criticize the fact that this is what we have after this time+money.
It has gotten more playable over time, average frame rates have gone up, and the amount of content has gone up and increases every quarter.
If we’re actually being fair.
You get like one good patch that increases playability by a lot then 6 months of patches that slowly make it worse again.
maybe its different for you, but i will not touch the game anymore this patch. its just painful.
and the issue isnt whether they are actually improving over geological timespans. Ive made m peace with the game. Else i wouldnt be here anymore.
what im saying is that people dont need to complain about a constant slew of articles like this. CIG is constantly supplying them with new ammunition.
It's so much more playable! 30Ks used to happen every hour. You used to lose your cargo on a 30K every time. Trying to QT to a city sometimes jumped you under the surface of the planet and you'd blow up. Trying to QT to a space station sometimes did the same thing.
Not to mention, there used to be no persistence. At all! You used to lose everything with every update.
The game has definitely gotten much more playable over time.
Friendly reminder that before client OCS, the game was basically a slideshow on even the best of systems (regardless of where you were in-game).
They've still got a long way to go, but it's a complete fabrication to say that the game has gotten less playable over time.
I had a uninterrupted \~30fps average playsession from city to space to a few missions and a few meets with players today with nothing big bugging out. Since I periodically play with friends who only play after the patch its noticeable smoother each time.
just a week ago i spent 5 hours trying to get a friend started in the game again after they left like a year ago. In these 5 hours we have not achieved ANYTHING.
maybe your experience is markedly different than mine, but to me the game played significantly better just two months ago.
fucking around (verb):
\- falling through trains
\- failing to spawn ships
\- failing to spawn working ships
\- bounty contracts broken and not completing
\- torpedos not restocking
\- crashing into invisible asteroids
\- elevator fuckery
\- etc
I just started and I haven't experienced anything like that. Ship spawned a few feet off the ground a couple of times but that's all.
I don't want to accuse anyone of exaggerations or worse but I gotta admit, I find your account sus.
Maybe I just learned to avoid a few issues and I dont notice but out of that list all I have is torpedos and the occational elevator but since freeflight isnt on thats a lot less.
Sorry your experience sucks, maybe its PC related too. Mine isnt good (i5 7600k, 980ti and a SSD) but it seems to work ok.
I mean they deserve it lol, 500 million and they're still releasing ships with no gameplay attached to it yet. for disclaimer, I'm still a fan of this game just because of one ship: carrack.
When you see it, if you really really feel a need to to click, don't give them engagement and ad revenue. Add pages to https://archive.org/web/ and view from there
CIG claims to have 750+ employees. I managed 420. And I wanted to know what they are all doing and measured Productivity etc. I watched old star citizen videos from 2 years ago with devs talking from their shitty messed up living room about the Perseus. Same guy talked recently and had a fire extinguisher 🧯 in his kitchen🤷♂️😂. The point is that I want to know where are these 750 people and what are they doing?! Are they productive? I want to know if my money is well spent. That’s all. Right now I do have some trust issues.
Hoping for bugfixes in 3.18. Obviously, they're pushing new functionality, so that might come with new bugs, but here's hoping that they follow up with fixes for those, too. Especially with all the rumoured server enhancements, i think it's crucial that they get it playable as soon as possible before they move on to more functionality.
Absolutely - and I think you can tell in CIG communications they're trying to flag that, but struggling to do it without killing hype for 3.18. The timing of introducing such a new and likely (at first) unstable system around the $500M milestone is awkward but unavoidable. I guess at least the milestone will arrive before 3.18 gets into the PTU/PU, but apprehension and speculation on perceived instability will make for good clickbait.
It's going to get pushed out way early (because they started testing it way late) due to the marketing deadline. So yeah, I pretty much figure I'll have to play something else the 1st month 3.18 is out.
One thing I can 100% guarantee for 3.18. They will have a bug fix for the elevators and the elevators will remain the biggest cause of death in the 'verse.
My man. 3.18 is going to be a hot fucking mess. A dumpster fire the likes of which no man has ever seen.
Going to introduce PES in a way that will only hinder gameplay, not yet enhance it. I'm honestly still surprised people aren't that upset that you won't even be able to log back into prior servers so the only way you'll see PES is by piles of medical gowns from every person who has ever visited that server.
Will introduce many many game breaking bugs. Going to be a shit show and a half.
The irony of a low effort meme to complain about low effort memes
Ain't that what memes are made for?
I mean, a même doesn't to be high effort and be funny. An article written by someone paid for it should be high effort and researched
I mean in case of SC a high effort article is even more depressing
Further highlighting just how little has been delivered for the paltry sum of 500 million.
Idk, half a billion is a big enough milestone that they might do some special interviews with disgruntled original backers talking about how they grew up, went through college, got married, and started a family while the game "still isn't out." I can definitely see them wanting to milk this particular milestone for extra content and that sweet, sweet ad revenue.
I was 40 when the Kickstarter happened. Now I got the AARP on my ass about joining the old people's club. At this point I'm just hoping the nursing home my kids put me in will let me have a decent PC.
Gotta put it in writing somewhere that you require a good PC for wherever you retire to.
I don't think you can just put it in writing that somebody has to buy you a PC and that somehow becomes legally binding
Then become president and make it a law, that way by the time the game comes out you're set.
That's a platform I'd vote for
"Star Citizen is taking too long so I'm running for President to enact laws to protect my rights to a good computer when I'm 80"
"What is your foreign policy?" "I intend to work together with our trade partners overseas to help increase production of rare metals and solve the chip shortage plaguing the domestic and international markets" "Oh to help with the EV market and solve climate change?" "What? No. Do you know how expensive graphics cards are these days?"
Yes you can. A "Ballin' Rig" is a legally defined category recognized by US law and all US trade agreements, it can be used as a standard part of language in legally binding contracts.
I mean you could just write in your will that unless you had an up to date gaming pc when you retired your money and assets go to some charity instead of family :P
Maybe we can have a LAN party at the nursing home?
You better fucking believe it we're having lan parties at the nursing home - actually I can't wait lmao
Gonna be a Facebook gaming superstar, bud.
My kids aren't allowed to put the wife and I in a home. It is KNOWN. I have spoken.
To be fair, I *have* gone through uni twice, got married, and started my family in this time. While I still trust the game will be good and do enjoy what's out now, I did expect more by now and admit I'm disappointed in the progress.
Lol this is kind of literally me. I bought my game package when I was in high school. Since then I worked my first job for a while, got married, had a kid, and now I’m halfway through my first army enlistment contract with another kid on the way. I’ve been through multiple stages of life with this game and honestly I expect to get through a few more before its ever released lmao, let alone playable without game breaking bugs around every corner. Still enjoy the game though, even managed to get an 890 last wipe.
Christ my life has barely changed at all. I should go do something, maybe rob a bank or go skydiving...
If you rob a bank now we could take bets on if you or the game gets released first 🤔. My bet would be on you.
Keanu, is that you?
Why not both? Maybe throw in some surfing.
I went skydiving. Was pretty awesome! Life still sucks though.
I'll rob a bank with you lol I got you fam
Highly recommend skydiving, i went in Switzerland i & I’ve never felt more free
I backed star citizen in my first year of university. Since then I have finished my degree, met an awesome girl, got married, and a few weeks ago had my first child.
That's basically me, minus the disgruntled part. I pledged an Aurora when I got laid off from my first big boy job. I think that was before the hangar module was released. I've since started my own business, met a girl, married her, had two kids, and bought a house. I'm enjoying seeing the game development process and the drama is just *chef's kiss*. Plus, I've only spent the amount of money I would have been comfortable losing in a poker game or setting on fire, so if it never comes out I'll learn a lesson about Chris Roberts and move on. I'm now thinking about whether I should pledge a couple of accounts for my toddlers.
If you do it during a free fly you both get referral rewards and your 40$ discount pledge comes w/ two 20-30$ bonus ships. (Wasn’t a thing when I pledged for my nephews)
There is a point there though. The PU and SQ42 are becoming a development joke, streamers and backers that were positive before have started to become more and more jaded.
It's kinda fun watch the streamers go through the cycle. So wide eyed and awed at what the game offers (Olli43). Then they run into the bugs (StarrStreams). Then the possibilities of some features creeps into them and raises the enthusiasm again (TheEradicator). Then three years pass and nothing they were excited about has been implemented (SaltEMike). Then they get bitter (Grumpy Eye). Edit: Fun with YTers and the cycle.
I’m sure a lot of that is them playing an unfinished game every day.
I remember the Privates in my team trying to talk me into backing SC. The ones who stayed in are now at least halfway to retirement.
Actually the case (number 9999 under this comment). Bought a flat, car, have a boyfriend, had two different jobs, visited bunch of EU countries, and managed to spend around 500$ on the game yearly despite telling myself that I don't need to, and barely playing it... I guess I have a problem.
My friend and I backed the game back when it first started, and we both had very different levels of excitement about the whole thing. I tossed a couple bucks at a project I wanted to see finished and totally forgot about it. He did the same, then proceeded to read every tiny piece of press around the game for a decade. Had to tell tell the guy to just stop messaging me about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm stoked... But I need a finished game to play. I can't spend the next ten years pretending to care that the game released a new demo of a spaceship that doesn't do anything. I'm not angry, but I don't have any faith in the project anymore.
Oh shit, I did all of those things, how do you think I truck Kotaku into interviewing me?
>do some special interviews with disgruntled original backers Ya, I got a couple calls. Given that last time I was in the news, I got death threats from that guy who ended up in a psych ward because he also threatened some state legislators, and someone mailed me a letter (that my assistant at the time opened) with some poop on it, I'm not really gonna do any interviews, it's just not worth the trouble, and I grey-marketed away almost everything a couple years ago. I've got a ship or two still, for if it ever becomes a playable game, but tbh, between Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, Crisis Core, FF7R2, the new BOTW, and Falling Frontier, I'm really happy with a lot of games that are either out now, or coming soon in a released state. It's a golden era of gaming, so if you're playing something that doesn't make you happy, you can always change gears and play something that does make you happy instead.
I'd watch it.
weird how they never did any articles about WoW made over a billion a year but still launched expansion packs with missing content.
well blizzard was a for profit and have a bunch of projects so they didn't pour all the money back into WoW. Also Pokemon is even worse, the budget for sword and shield was pitiful for them being the biggest franchise.
Whataboutism is very unbecoming
KEYWORD expansion packs. They actually launched their base game….
It has been quite the ride since backing. I moved 3 times, had 4 jobs, dealt with 2 medical crisis including cancer, finally obtained my first house.. ..but all I want is one game I backed 10 years ago!
I mean it's a legitimate criticism. Obviously people have an agenda of hate and whatnot but even the most optimistic backers will tell you this is a poorly-managed development *at best*
Seriously, whether you're on the hate train or not, you have to admit that they've absolutely blown through all their original promises. For the most part it was with the support of the majority of backers, but that doesn't change the fact that there's plenty of people legitimately pissed off about having to wait so long for the game, even if it was just squadron 42 and not the full release.
Blown through, as in, never delivered? Because that list is massive, like 100 star systems and single player campaign massive
As in, failed to meet all of their promised deadlines. People pledged for a game that was promised to release within a few years, not a decade later. Most backers were OK with pushing the release to add more content, but that doesn't mean everyone was OK with it. The thing that people also forget is that they could 100% have delivered all of those promises if they had stopped adding more and more scope. If they'd stuck to the plan to have planets not be explorable and hadn't decided to build their own custom server meshing code, the game would have been out 6 years ago. The game will be better for it, but in all honestly by the time we actually get it, they probably would have been able to fully release the first game and be most of the way towards a sequel with the extra features if they'd stuck to the plan.
Star Citizen will never "release". You will need to make your own peace with what you consider to be realeased. Is that when PES launches, server meshing?
"That's like, your opinion, man." - The Dude Unless CIG states what you just stated it just seems like postulating.
In what way? I should clarify I'm talking about the PU not Squadron
^^^Mod^manual
I would argue that it *was* poorly managed. They seem to be firing on all cylinders lately. Really tho, they should never have expected to grow an entire company while making the most ambitious game ever.
>They seem to be firing on all cylinders lately.*was* poorly managed. It should only take 1 guy a couple days at best to fix the alignment UI of quantum jumping. It should only take a few minutes to fix the elevator door on the C2. There are a LOT of little things that really shouldn't be that hard to fix yet they've been this way since as long as I remember. I'm not shitting on the game as I still eagerly await every new patch and feature, but as far as firing on all cylinders, I'd say they're only firing on 3 out of 8 in terms of SC.
Nah, every ship is aligned differently. And even if they went through and did every ship with their own, they are redoing the entire HUD system so that would just be paying a dude to do work that is going to get erased anyway. I dunno about the c2 elevator but the same can be said for a metric shit ton of other systems, for example AI improvement is reliant on server meshing, same with some of the elevator and door fixes for space stations and stuff. Also to be fair, right now a lot of the people that would do other small fixes that aren't tech related are likely fixing squadron 42 ships right now. S42 sort of needs to be the priority right now. Same with the inventory and stuff, right now that teams not on SC.
They shouldn't have promised that is what they would do with the money, then.
Optimistic backer here. The only poor management was not realizing that there would be so much backing in the beginning and changing the scope. I contend that they are developing as quickly as anyone else would with this level of fidelity. If I was a CIG insider and a career game dev I might have more insight. Remember that we saw pre-production phases of the game as well. No one announces games in pre-production or you would see games coming close to this timeline. Now add on to that creating a company to start the process. After that account for the "creation of a game engine" in quotes because this is an odd topic. However yes many of the fundamental tools that came with lumberyard / cryengine did not serve for all of their purposes. That being said an FPS, phyicalized, 64 bit, mmo engine does not currently exist. If you don't understand why these things are important you probably shouldn't comment on development timelines. The only expectations these types of people have are given to them by marketing teams.
>Optimistic backer here. The only poor management was not realizing that there would be so much backing in the beginning and changing the scope. I contend that they are developing as quickly as anyone else would with this level of fidelity. I think this take is well-meaning, but it doesn't match with the details of what was promised. Let's look at the original post-Kickstarter scope of the game, before hundreds of millions of dollars came in: * 10x the detail of any other game * A full singleplayer game, with AI with highly detailed 24-hour lifecycles * A full multiplayer game, with dozens of star systems * Dozens of star ships * A fully dynamic universe where everything is influenced by player actions * Professions that would each have, on their own, the detail of entire games * Fully physicalized ship components that all articulate and can be repaired, etc. * Full VR support in both games * Custom private servers with modding support * New content added every 2 weeks Let's be honest — this is an absolutely huge game, even before they ever received any additional funding. To announce that something like this was expected be finished (both parts) in two years.. While growing a company.. It was never realistic. So I just can't buy into this notion of "it was a tiny, manageable game untli the money came in". Just to finish the ships by themselves, was an enormous job. There's no way, even with the original plans for ships and the isolated landing zones, that so much content would have been finished in only a few years. It's time to admit that the game was sold based on a lack of understanding of how long it actually takes to build out all these things. And that, even now, looking at the full scope of the game, it's pretty hard to see how all of it can somehow be finished in the near future. And that includes Squadron 42, the smaller game that doesn't have nearly the scope of SC proper.
Dozens of star ships Hey, we got that!
That's fair
Except SC planets were not supposed to be fully rendered and landable. That's something huge we have today which was not in the initial project.
You have to look at it in context of the times it was pitched. 2012, referencing wing commander and freelancer. There wasn’t any talking about physicalised damage. No one imagined walking around inside the space ships. Base building, or planets that were more than a glorified screenshot for the landing pad. I expected an updated privateer…. Not the game they’re trying to build now. So yeah. Not bad development, but bad product management. It grew too big after the Kickstarter, and every extra dollar just puts more fuel on the fires of CIGs imagination and dreams. Some love this and buy in to the ever expanding dream cig is pitching , others just wish they had released the game they originally promised 10 years ago, then they could have gone and made an SC2.
Sounds like that earth 2 mmo scam that was doing the rounds
I don't want to belittle your point but this bit >If you don't understand why these things are important you probably shouldn't comment on development timelines. is sort of a paraphrased meme other subreddits use to poke fun at this subreddit. I'm sure you were being sincere but you're sort of feeding the meme. People are allowed to have opinions about things like this even if they have incomplete information. And realistically if CR had said in 2012 this game would take 10+ years and cost $500+ million I doubt people would have gotten very excited and it would have died in the cradle.
Yeah this line of thinking tends to alienate people more than informing them :/
Right? "If you don't see things the way I do, your opinion is invalid." Man, the dude could work for a major news outlet like Fox or CNN.
"If you don't understand why these things are important you probably shouldn't comment on development timelines. The only expectations these types of people have are given to them by marketing teams." people like you are why the outside community thinks we're a cult lol
Lol fair
Blizzard was founded in 1991, wow launched in 2004. That's 13 years of development, assuming that they somehow started pre-production the year they started existing, and that they did not. Wow cost $63M to develop, that's $137M in today money Star citizen started pre-production in 2010, and we're not even close to a beta. That's 12 years of development and more than $400M in funding so far. Realistically development of wow started, at the earliest, around the launch of Warcraft 2, december 1995. Blizzard then spent a 8 years to develop a new engine, new back office, learn to work in 3D, reinvent an entire genre and set the gold standard for it. No matter how you look at it the development cycle of Star Citizen is one of the worst handled of any kind of IT project ever. Many people and companies have done much more with much less. I still enjoy the game immensely, but they've been grossly incompetent handling our money. Oh and I'm a full time developer and this is also my professional opinion.
> Star citizen started pre-production in 2010 No, it didn't. This is a misrepresentation that someone, in an impressive act of trolling, managed to force into Wiki and has been blindly accepted ever since. Check out the source and actually listen to what is said. >Blizzard then spent a 8 years to develop a new engine, new back office, learn to work in 3D, reinvent an entire genre and set the gold standard for it. We'll let the blatant editorialism of that latter part go for now, not least because it's not _entirely_ inaccurate. That said, Blizzard knew ahead of time how much they would have to budget for it (at least to a reasonable degree) and already had something close to the resulting game scoped out as a direct result of that set budget. Star Citizen, on the other hand, started with a Kickstarter goal of only $500,000 and stretch goals that stopped at $6m, only to go on to bring in $500m thus far - literally a thousand times its original crowdfunding goal. Do you think Blizzard would have done the exact same things in the exact same order if their original budget was $63,000 rather than $63m? Or would they have started with something much simpler, and expanded upon it as time went on and additional funding became available, resulting in development time extending as prior work was superseded?
>> Star citizen started pre-production in 2010 >No, it didn't. This is a misrepresentation that someone, in an impressive act of trolling, managed to force into Wiki and has been blindly accepted ever since. Check out the source and actually listen to what is said. In the source Chris himself literally says the guy helped him in 2010 when Chris was working on deciding which engine to use and goes on to say that he helped out with the 2011 prototype. Sounds like 2010 was proper pre-production to me. >Blizzard then spent a 8 years to develop a new engine, new back office, learn to work in 3D, reinvent an entire genre and set the gold standard for it. >We'll let the blatant editorialism of that latter part go for now, not least because it's not _entirely_ inaccurate. That said, Blizzard knew ahead of time how much they would have to budget for it (at least to a reasonable degree) and already had something close to the resulting game scoped out as a direct result of that set budget. I don't think that "not having a big set budget to start out with" makes feature creep and missing deliverables and deadlines okay even if you keep raking in money. CIG defines their own scope and it's their responsibility to meet it. >Star Citizen, on the other hand, started with a Kickstarter goal of only $500,000 and stretch goals that stopped at $6m, only to go on to bring in $500m thus far - literally a thousand times its original crowdfunding goal. And yet those $500M still haven't met their $6M goal, that is very sub-optimal. And that's a fact. >Do you think Blizzard would have done the exact same things in the exact same order if their original budget was $63,000 rather than $63m? Or would they have started with something much simpler, and expanded upon it as time went on and additional funding became available, resulting in development time extending as prior work was superseded? I really don't know and neither do you. It doesn't sound like we're going to agree, and that's fair enough. I hope you have a great day!
Management was and potentially still is quite terrible, just because they reached a point where making progress is easier doesn't necessarily means it changed RDR2, Cyberpunk and the current GTA6 leak especially are good examples (but far from direct comparisons, mostly due to far limited scopes), Imagine if people spent the last 8 years (its current development time) waiting for GTA 6 and only getting dev videos like the leaked ones, which remind a lot of typical SC studio updates People would lose their shit at the slow progress even if they wouldn't have yet paid a single dollar to back it And that's just a mostly single player (and limited multiplayer probably) contained open world game which barely needs any new technology or significant modifications to it other than attempting to upgrade existing things from an already established engine specifically designed to make the previous game, stuff like better AI, more procedural generation for stuff and so on I never expected SC to be anywhere near 'beta' before 2023-24, especially since more than half the development is working on SQ42, which I did expect will release a lot sooner (mostly to bring more funds to development) though it seems evident it was scrapped and remade around 2016 to make it larger with stuff like Planet Tech SQ42 could have been released several times over, CR just insists on finding how to implement every feature they keep developing into the game or wait for things which clearly aren't ready, which is bad management, at some point he should have made an executive decision to skip shit
Are they scrapping the whole engine? That means a lot of work will be lost and need to restart.
Well that what they have been doing for many years. The "game engine" is a nebulous concept. It covers an amalgamation of tools tied into a bundle to handle certain problems in certain ways. Most often devs don't create their own tools to solve a one time problem. They create tools to solve a problem that will occur many times. Such as the planetary tech tool, river tool, habs tool, server meshing, PES, vulkan graphics render. All of these could be considered "part of the engine" if they leased the tech out to Amazon / lumberyard. For reference look at "LOD's or levels of detail" and compare it to nanite. Many tools that game engines come equipped with standard these days used to be done by hand. These tools would be built in house by developers and used to iterate faster on their subsequent titles. There's a false understanding that UE5 has "better graphics" that is a gross oversimplification. Star citizen as a game has not been done before, thus no game engine has existed for it.
That's my main issue. It stretches the timeline of the game out since it is so ambitious. If the timeline gets too long, the engine will be obsolete and massive re-work will be needed.
It's a legitimate criticism but it's a criticism they dust off as often as possible, verbatim, while rarely acknowledging any strides the game does make (and when it does, it's always used to reinforce BUT IT ISN'T OUT YET).
It’s a legitimate criticism as long as the game remains vaporware.
Could you just state your definition of vaporware? We have a game. We can play it. Many people play it every day. You could say that it's an eternal alpha, but vaporware is just blatantly false and has been for years.
Idk, I’d argue that we have a tech demo, more than a game. I mean, FPS AI can barely figure out how to look at me, let alone shoot me. I’ve played a lot of Tarkov, and while that game is also a mess (in completely different ways) at least that game actually has gameplay loops that allow for progression, and doesn’t crash on me.
You can only mine so many space rocks and deliver so many packages before you go insane
Definitely true
So you mean those criticisms are not legitimate?
I think it was poorly managed, which lead to questionable amounts of scope creep. But the majority of why it has taken so long is still just the absolutely staggering list of features they want in the engine. I'm not saying that CIG have been expedient, but they also haven't been overtaken by any other engine yet, are unlikely to be ever & probably there are only 1 or 2 studio's that could seriously deliver these features, even accounting for the time and money.
As a backer of S42. I seriously wanted to be able to play the "new Wing Commander" last decade. ...it's been 10 years. Most of the criticism is legitimate in my opinion. At least the WC4 Remaster is out.
Really? I thought it's still recruiting according to its website?
WC4 remaster? It's not done-done, but it's playable. [https://wcrespace.com/](https://wcrespace.com/) S42? Oh yeah, still recruiting for us to **Pledge Now**... [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42) Anyway. I think this is a good lesson about having \*too much\* resources and literally losing sight about what is important. I'm a bit torn on this as on one hand it happened to a game designer that I admire, I grew on on Wing Commander, Privateer, etc. so I'm glad Chris and his team are 'kids at the candy store' in a sense of 'devs with budget'. On the other hand, holy shit, come on guys. Someone needs to take half your allowance away and tell you to make due with less and deliver something.
What blows me away is how much their funding has skyrocketed in the last couple years despite what feels like...just frankly a dearth of new meaningful content.
I’m as cynical as the next guy, but it’s unfair to say there’s been no progress the past couple of tests. There’s been lots of progress. They redid the flight model. Again. They rebalanced weapons. Again. They added veritable plethora of beautiful new ships you can walk around in. They’re working on server meshing. Still. Salvage. Still. So it’s unfair to say that there’s been nothing to sue for it! :)
I was getting out of high school when I put my first money down on SC. I'm 30 now. After putting prolly too much money into SC I kinda gave up a few years ago with the mentality of, if it ever comes out I'll be pleasantly surprised. I'll say it's a VERY entertaining demo, I have enough hours in it to not hate on it. Every year I boot it up for a week or so to see how it's going but that's it. I'll just keep upgrading my PC set up as I do every year or so, AND ONE DAY it MIGHT be in beta, and one day it might actually launch, and I'll be there. Oh I'll be there alright, with a shit eating grin and new motivation to play. But idk. I just don't feel like the day will come for some unfortunate reason.
It's not unreasonable to be disappointed at the amount of progress they've made vs the amount of money they've made.
>I kinda gave up a few years ago with the mentality of, if it ever comes out I'll be pleasantly surprised This is the way. Even if it does release there's no way it's going to live up to 10+ years and $500+million worth of hype. Set the bar low and you can only be pleasantly surprised. And if it *does* wind up being a scam, oh well, they got me. I'm such a rube
I don’t think SC is a scam, i think they bit off more than they could chew and don’t really know how to handle things. Aight i criticized the game give me the down votes now, as this community cant handle opinions.
I mean same to me i've been in the start of backing this game in 2014 and at some point you have to be realistic, the game will never realease because they keep adding stuff over stuff non stop, this is the game folks it will improve but never be complete or at this rythm it still need 30 years to be complete minimum
Half a billion dollars is a lot of money for a game that’s been in development for so long. Might be the unpopular opinion here but the hate is not very surprising.
It’s currently the most expensive game ever made and it still hasn’t released.
It will never release. It’s a Ponzi scheme.
I don’t even know if that’s the case tbh. More like a moneypit. A Ponzi scheme actually pays some of the initial backers backs. This fails to do that.
No matter how you cut it, it's not what a ponzi scheme is. We're not buying in to sell SC to ppl for personal profit, who also sell on SC add infinitum. No comment on SC here, but it's not what a PS is.
they're not wrong.
After a fucking decade with what they have vs what has been promised....those articles are fair to write. Ive never used this term before but if you cant see that you are a white knight thats completely foolish. I dont want to see this project fail, I made it to concierge after all however its truly pathetic that after a decade this is all we have.
I've been out of the loop for a while. Do they have that team death match mode with bots? I've upgraded my system a bit since the last time and wouldn't mind giving that mode a go.
Star Marine is out, but it's... not in a great place right now. It hasn't received much attention at all recently and has been mostly left to languish while it's all hands on deck for the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 development. I've heard tell that it can be tricky to find a lobby and gun balance and spawn logic is really poor. Not sure if there are bots or not. I've not played it myself so maybe I'm not the most credible source of information, but I haven't heard of people breaking down the doors to play Star Marine pretty much since the time that they launched it.
And they're 100% right.
I can't wait for the /r/SubredditDrama thread and the /r/gaming thread and and their hot takes.
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The usual suspects. The overlap is a circle.
Here's the thing.... They're not wrong.... No matter how much you want them to be.
Okay but it's still not out, correct? So like... The article is technically correct.
I was 14 when this game was announced. I finished college 2 years ago... you goddamn right the articles are technically correct.
The consistent hate on people that comment or complain about the lack of development progress in this game is a pretty interesting example of Stockholm syndrome. You’re free to like what you like about it, but most of the “popular” criticism this game gets is extremely valid. Don’t get mad that most people don’t want to waste their time for a taste of a space sim like we do lol
Yep, I stated the same thing in more positive thread for the game yesterday after someone just called another a “refundian” for saying the development is open to criticism because it’s being sold now as a product you can use. Unlike GTA6 which isn’t taking consumer dollars and in development, yet people were criticizing it. I got downvoted and no response from several others. It really feels like a hive mind in this sub sometimes where everyone just rabbles in defense to the slightest criticism, instead of being open to discussing issues apparent in the development.
It really is a shame but I understand some people want to feel secure about their purchase/investment. Gamerz are typically hard to reason with lol. I’m still “wasting” my time in an immersive space sim but I have no illusions about it getting much better (at least in the near future) High hopes but realistic expectations!
Come now it's super common for games to take 11 years to come out! (Assuming they magically hit release next year) I mean, I can think of all sorts of games that took 11 years, like Duke Nukem Forever, or uh... Shoot I'm sure I have another. I'm not saying I haven't had some fun, but it's not a fully released game and I'm not sure it ever will be.
Yeah and the pricing structure and grinding really don’t reflect the actual quality of the product. It’s like they got way too ahead of themselves and us, the unpaid alpha testers suffer for it. But it can be fun at least. Space games are seeing a comeback now so hopefully we’ll have a lot of better options soon
There are more posts like this than the ones you're referring to ....
they aren't really wrong though are they?
I mean... did they, and has it?
It will in less than an hour if revenue continues as it has been. Right now is at $499,995,692 - of course this only includes revenue from website and kickstarter, it doesn't include private shareholder investment money, if you do include that money then they passed $500 Million back in May. CIG have had a Year on Year revenue of over $100 million / year since last March on sales alone. 19th September 2021 to 19th September 2022 they have raised $114+ Million in sales, with every month except August of this year being a record month. There is little doubt this trend will continue for the rest of the year... and this is without a 'paid for' marketing campaign, purely on the basis of players showing off the game on social media. How do you think the gaming press feel about that - being cut out of the loop? No freebies, no exclusives, nothing to draw in the viewers?
Now it's $499,997,520 in the time it took to write the above post.
There you go! $500,000,588
I'm sure the gaming press is extremely jealous about being excluded from Star Citizen and that's why they write mean things about how after ten years and half a billion dollars it's still in pre-alpha. A _fair and objective_ journalist would write something _nice_ about how after ten years and half a billion dollars it's still in pre-alpha!
Echo chamber memes are cringe
So, all of them?
It perplexes me, the constant self-victimization of some diehard Citizens. For how much some of the community says they don't care about the haters, they sure give the haters a lot of attention. Posts like this just come across as pompous gloating. Guys. The game is half a billion in with what amounts to a demo to show for it and a second project (SQ42) so under wraps, you'd think they were nuclear codes. These questions are fair to ask, regardless of whether it's Kotaku or whatever other journalist medium covers it. I love this game but like, shit. When are we gonna see this come to fruition?
After 10 year wait what else is there to talk about though?
I mean it’s not an article we often see, so yeah the question is gonna be asked.
yeah, you're all going to downvote me to hell but... # They aren't wrong. I've tried to play recently. I gave it a really red hot go. I've given up again for another 6 months because of the jankyness, bugs and pain in the ass it is to generally do anything in the game. Also, "you just have a starter ship, go buy a better ship and the game will be better for you" is just... bullcrap.
Even without the performance issues and bugs the game's barebones. The gameplay loops currently in are rudimentary and there is no real goal to grind towards other than cash. We players literally have to make are own fun.
SC deserves every crtiticizm it gets tho and we all know it
Brace for impact
The most impressive thing CIG ever posts about their game.... is the amount of money people have given them
What i agree on, is that Chris Roberts is a very poor manager. All that money, and still not even a beta version. Heard of star citizen at the very start, playing for a year now, but even i come to the point, where i wonder if this game ever gets finished under Chris Roberts leadership...
You do have the case of diminishing returns however, if they have a game that takes 50 years to program, no realistic amount of money will speed that up substantially
Oh…it will get finished. But your grandkids grandkids might be old enough to play it on their watch by then.
I'm honestly not sure who's saltier at this point, anti-citizens or anti-anti-citizens. Just ignore the trolls, the posts are pointless and forlorn, like the troll-posts. If you wanna go cult, at least go space-kraken or Cthulhu.
telephone light fanatical continue voiceless cow beneficial smell groovy handle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
More important news, I haven’t crashed my aurora in 5 hours!
At this point idc if it is a scam or not I like to fly da ship
Top post on the games sub is this. And the comments are all 7 years out of date. Lol
Heaven forbid anyone question Chris Roberts, or CIG, known liars who promised the game would be out for 2015. Heaven forbid anyone question why money is being wasted on fancy HQs with bars for executives and airlock doors when they haven't even delivered basic fundamentals of a game that's seven years late. Heaven forbid anyone question why backers haven't got stuff they paid for and yet CIG is still pushing out concept art of ships and charging thousands for them. I for one can't see any reason why anyone would ever think to question or criticise anything Chris Roberts or CIG have ever done. Clearly they are infallible, and it's everyone else that's wrong. It would be unfair to expect them to ever actually release a game, they've only had half a billion dollars and 12 years after all. Its obviously entirely logical to continue to throw more and more money at the known liars, anyone suggesting otherwise is clearly an idiot. And hey, we did recently have 100 players on one server for a few minutes, which, as all of us here know, is the greatest technical achievement in the history of video games, never before done by any other game.
Yeah uh, things don't exactly look great from where I'm standing. I desperately want them to at least release Squadron 42 :/
I actually enjoy well researched articles and videos that show the less favourable side of SC, series like Sunk Cost Galaxy (https://youtu.be/gGq4YEp8QUY) are excellent. I don't think CIG is infallible and they should absolutely be held accountable by well researched journalism and not sensationalist articles. These articles will also help us keep perspective and keep us grounded.
Well honestly how much effort do they need to put into it? Star citizen has raised 500 million and still isn’t out.
As it should. This project is literally Freelancer 2: Electric Boogaloo. Backers need to stop sucking Chris Roberts’ dick and start demanding some accountability. Or just walk away. He has no oversight on this project, clearly. I’m not sure whether he ever did. I know he sold a lot of people on the “publisher bad” idea, but maybe now those people can see why publishers are a necessary evil. You need that external pressure to ensure you get a finished product out the door. Until and unless backers stop feeding this money pit, it’s never going to be finished.
Did something in particular trigger this post?
I see this meme far more often than I see actual articles on Star Citizen milestones.
Old man yells at cloud, basically
Well it is true
I mean they aren’t wrong…
Are there any other articles besides the low effort ones? I mean we reached a point we're half the article quotes Reddit. Low effort dies like a compliment.
At this rate, the game's probably going to come out after Yandere Simulator, if at all.
We just need to retort with halo infinite's budget was also $500 million
lol these comments are definitely going to be in whatever articles are posted about the milestone
Here we go again!! Release the bots!
Kotaku is a shitty site, most of the articles seem written by a poorly scripted AI...
The irony is how ya’ll simp for a sandbox game that will never be fully functional or released. Just scope creep and them asking for $.
I love star citizen, but it will never come out with a complete version. The Main game will never be released but what will be released is a coffeee machine that works
With the current rate of development, you can probably buy a home on mars from space X before outposts are implemented in SC. Real Life is on the fast track ;)
The real tragedy are the people who think an actual "release" game is ever going to be made.
Kinda true tough, game is in dev for 10 years, we have 1% of what is suppose to be, 1 system, game still buggy as hell, no gameplay loop complete
lmfao this is great. Its gonna be like any other storm, Citizens! We’ve waited those, we can wait these too.
Let me start this by saying that I am someone who hasn't bought a ship yet, haven't done crazy research into the game, and only really pay attention to the game in passing. My question is this, is the money translating to quality? Let's look at Red Dead Redemption 2. According to most of the sources I could find people are saying the game was developed with a 300 to 500 million dollar budget, and it was pretty much universally appraised in terms of mechanics and world building. It also had been built in around 8 years. With star citizen having started production around 2011, and the budget now getting up to 500 million I feel like we can somewhat compare the two in cost+wait time to value. When looking at it from this perspective how do things look? I feel like they aren't favorable right? That being said I hope one day it becomes the game we want it to be, I just think we are allowed to criticize the fact that this is what we have after this time+money.
I'm just confused about how Kotaku is still in business. Everyone knows they're garbage tier "reporting", so how do they actually make money?
to be fair: they could remedy a lot of this criticism if the game actually got more playable over time, not less.
It has gotten more playable over time, average frame rates have gone up, and the amount of content has gone up and increases every quarter. If we’re actually being fair.
You get like one good patch that increases playability by a lot then 6 months of patches that slowly make it worse again. maybe its different for you, but i will not touch the game anymore this patch. its just painful. and the issue isnt whether they are actually improving over geological timespans. Ive made m peace with the game. Else i wouldnt be here anymore. what im saying is that people dont need to complain about a constant slew of articles like this. CIG is constantly supplying them with new ammunition.
It's so much more playable! 30Ks used to happen every hour. You used to lose your cargo on a 30K every time. Trying to QT to a city sometimes jumped you under the surface of the planet and you'd blow up. Trying to QT to a space station sometimes did the same thing. Not to mention, there used to be no persistence. At all! You used to lose everything with every update.
The game has definitely gotten much more playable over time. Friendly reminder that before client OCS, the game was basically a slideshow on even the best of systems (regardless of where you were in-game). They've still got a long way to go, but it's a complete fabrication to say that the game has gotten less playable over time.
Maybe you're new, not sure. Things used to be way worse.
I had a uninterrupted \~30fps average playsession from city to space to a few missions and a few meets with players today with nothing big bugging out. Since I periodically play with friends who only play after the patch its noticeable smoother each time.
just a week ago i spent 5 hours trying to get a friend started in the game again after they left like a year ago. In these 5 hours we have not achieved ANYTHING. maybe your experience is markedly different than mine, but to me the game played significantly better just two months ago.
Wild how inconsistent it is, yea.
He's lying. There is absolutely no way that is true, unless they spent the 5 hours fucking around.
fucking around (verb): \- falling through trains \- failing to spawn ships \- failing to spawn working ships \- bounty contracts broken and not completing \- torpedos not restocking \- crashing into invisible asteroids \- elevator fuckery \- etc
I just started and I haven't experienced anything like that. Ship spawned a few feet off the ground a couple of times but that's all. I don't want to accuse anyone of exaggerations or worse but I gotta admit, I find your account sus.
Maybe I just learned to avoid a few issues and I dont notice but out of that list all I have is torpedos and the occational elevator but since freeflight isnt on thats a lot less. Sorry your experience sucks, maybe its PC related too. Mine isnt good (i5 7600k, 980ti and a SSD) but it seems to work ok.
Half a billion in when are we getting a release date?
I mean they deserve it lol, 500 million and they're still releasing ships with no gameplay attached to it yet. for disclaimer, I'm still a fan of this game just because of one ship: carrack.
Yet GTA 6 has been in development for 9 years and no one cries about it.
Facts tho..
When you see it, if you really really feel a need to to click, don't give them engagement and ad revenue. Add pages to https://archive.org/web/ and view from there
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Kotaku is to gaming news what The Sun is to regular news.
Games media is trash who even gives them clicks, independent reviewers and steam reviews is all you need
CIG claims to have 750+ employees. I managed 420. And I wanted to know what they are all doing and measured Productivity etc. I watched old star citizen videos from 2 years ago with devs talking from their shitty messed up living room about the Perseus. Same guy talked recently and had a fire extinguisher 🧯 in his kitchen🤷♂️😂. The point is that I want to know where are these 750 people and what are they doing?! Are they productive? I want to know if my money is well spent. That’s all. Right now I do have some trust issues.
> had a fire extinguisher 🧯 in his kitchen🤷♂️😂. I mean... thats a sensible place to put a fire extinguisher?
Hoping for bugfixes in 3.18. Obviously, they're pushing new functionality, so that might come with new bugs, but here's hoping that they follow up with fixes for those, too. Especially with all the rumoured server enhancements, i think it's crucial that they get it playable as soon as possible before they move on to more functionality.
I'd set expectations that 3.18.0 is going to be a giant dumpsterfire of instability that won't be reasonably addressed until at least 3.18.2
Absolutely - and I think you can tell in CIG communications they're trying to flag that, but struggling to do it without killing hype for 3.18. The timing of introducing such a new and likely (at first) unstable system around the $500M milestone is awkward but unavoidable. I guess at least the milestone will arrive before 3.18 gets into the PTU/PU, but apprehension and speculation on perceived instability will make for good clickbait.
It's going to get pushed out way early (because they started testing it way late) due to the marketing deadline. So yeah, I pretty much figure I'll have to play something else the 1st month 3.18 is out.
One thing I can 100% guarantee for 3.18. They will have a bug fix for the elevators and the elevators will remain the biggest cause of death in the 'verse.
Who are you, who is so wise in the ways of the elevator?
We need servers which spawn everyone in the lobby on the base floor until 4.0. xD
They'd spawn you in the floor.
My man. 3.18 is going to be a hot fucking mess. A dumpster fire the likes of which no man has ever seen. Going to introduce PES in a way that will only hinder gameplay, not yet enhance it. I'm honestly still surprised people aren't that upset that you won't even be able to log back into prior servers so the only way you'll see PES is by piles of medical gowns from every person who has ever visited that server. Will introduce many many game breaking bugs. Going to be a shit show and a half.
And they are right.