I don’t get why people are always so negative when a game is publicly developed for such a long time. It doesn’t really matter so long as the launch product is good.
But it’s not been launched. It’s kind of like all the people that were bashing Skull & Bones or Rainbow Six Extraction before they even came out.
Sure, now that they’re actually out you can say people were right but I also wonder how much of that is self fulfilling prophecy. If you literally kill the PR for a product/game, it’s really hard for any studio or company to come back from that.
Nowhere has this studio said the game as it has been seen by players is “done” or the launch product.
They took $669 Million USD and they’ve provided content and services for 11 years, people can and should expect returns befitting those numbers. Problem is, though, the team clearly hasn’t demonstrated the ability to make that sort of product.
While I can’t say I’ve paid more for less as a whole, I’ve definitely had a higher fun to dollar with SC than many other more finished, flashier games. It’s what you make of it and the people you meet along the way, just like any other MMO. It definitely has its warts and issues, but I think a lot of people also hate it because they were told it was bad and evil and I don’t think that’s really true. It has the trappings of any large game service products which people call greedy but it does cost a lot to run. I think a lot of the criticism boils down to that’s a lot of money and not a lot of fast progress, and that’s fair but this game is also unique in being public from a far too early point of development and many other games with smaller scopes are just as slow when developing a new engine/IP (relative to the scope) but the public doesn’t see much until we get to just about this point in development.
Funny to see this here, I actually played this last night for the first time in a year. I have a friend who is a diehard and wanted to play so I finally gave in as he’s played helldiver’s with me a number of times recently.
Anywho, the game is still unoptimized and buggy as shit. We did some new mission where you fly to the same base you’ve seen 5k times and take an elevator underground then you attempt to upload data while servers are overheating for some reason, and NPCs randomly spawn in elevators. Glitched out getting on the elevator and fell through the floor, adds spawning in elevators would just sit there and do nothing staring at the wall until you shot them. Got killed once, did not respawn in the ship as I had tied my identity to the bed - instead spawned back at my origin base - later found my dead body under the med bed in the ship. Enemy NPCs rubber banging all over the place, so we’re my buddy and I the net code clearly has major issues. Tried to pickup a container at one point and for some reason that injured me. The inventory system to loot guys is difficult to use / buggy as all hell. The same terrible interaction system where you hold F and use mouse to interact with things is ridiculously janky. The star navigation system is the same broke crap I remember from years ago, you can never smoothly set destination or even find the destination you want to go for. They’ve changed the flight controls for the 578th time for no reason. NPCs in my home spawn were walking into walls and glitching on stairs. I could go on.
Still no news on Squadron 42, still no firm release date, no new significant content in years (except ship sales!!!), pyro still not playable for non bootlickers, no jump gates, all the ground bases look exactly the same, no compelling gameplay loops you shoot shit in space jousting or you go to one of 700 identical basses on the ground to pickup boxes or shoot laggy NPCs. There is no “game” here it drives like crap for a project over a decade in the making with that much money wasted. I have no idea why people are still “playing” it, and no idea why so many continue to throw money at it.
Oh there’s a good reason for the flight controls change. Because the fucking neck beards who spend $10k on a “realistic flight sim” setup demand that their loud whining be accommodated or they will never stop whining on the official forums because their idiotic controllers couldn’t beat people flying with a keyboard and mouse. Because, you know their Cheeto stained fingers obviously know more about how futuristic space combat will work than actual engineers designing a space combat sim.
This is basically why I stopped playing. The willingness to let idiots dictate game design and balance made the meta insufferable and impossible to follow.
Because the fucking neck beards who spend $10k on a “realistic flight sim” setup demand that their loud whining be accommodated or they will never stop whining on the official forums because their idiotic controllers couldn’t beat people flying with a keyboard and mouse.
Back in the late '90s, there were a lot of PC flightstick-based flight sims, as well as space combat games. The Wing Commander series, from whence the lead on Star Citizen comes, was among these, and it was the idea of a new Wing Commander that was part of the appeal.
I think that it’s probably reasonable for a lot of people who put money into the game to want a viable flightstick-based game, given where they’re coming from, since that’s presumably what they were hoping for.
'course, given the huge amount of money Star Citizen’s taken in, it’s gotta have significant mainstream appeal, and not everyone is going to want to get a flightstick, much less other pieces of hardware.
I’m a little sad that there isn’t much when it comes to open-source combat flight sims, because I think that that’d be fertile ground for people putting together all sorts of neat control setups. FlightGear really focuses on non-combat flight (not to mention not being in space).
The point is that flight sticks designed for aerodynamic flight are a dumb way to control a spaceship, and this has unambiguously harmed the development. The fact that they are trying to “balance” clearly superior flight mechanics for these dumber control schemes says a lot.
The point is that flight sticks designed for aerodynamic flight are a dumb way to control a spaceship,
There was a whole genre of fighter-based space combat movies – and probably comic books and such, then later video games – that did take inspiration from atmospheric fighter combat. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Wing Commander, Freelancer, etc. And there’s a whole genre of conventions that were developed and came with them that weren’t hard-realism in terms of space combat, but were intended to be exciting and fun. I don’t think that’s really specific to any one game, but to the genre.
Some examples:
Craft don’t follow Newtonian physics; instead, they act like they’re atmospheric fighters, flying in a sort of fluid, where inertia can be redirected by turning the craft.
Dogfighting is a thing (whereas in real life, it was on its last legs even for atmospheric fighters when the genre was created).
Combat normally occurs at relatively-short ranges.
Weapons have finite ranges.
Lasers or some sort of energy weapon often follow a Star Wars-style convention of being a colored pulse moving slowly-enough to see, and making a noise.
Sound propagates through space.
Missiles and torpedoes are often a thing.
Explosive warheads exist, though presumably the kinetic energy of weapons in space would be much greater.
Armor is often a thing, though the practical viability of armor on a spacecraft is limited.
Some form of energy shield often exists.
Fighters are manned.
Fighters have glass cockpits, and someone physically looking through them rather than at computer displays.
There are beautiful, human-visible nebulas based on false-color NASA images.
Arguably, most of these don’t make a lot of sense in a hard realism space war simulation. If I had to guess, a lot of it is basically derived from the American naval war in the Pacific theater in WW2 or the early Cold War. It’s probably pretty appealing to an American audience; it’s directly analogous to fights that we fought, just in a more-futuristic setting.
But…that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad set of genre conventions, at least in my eyes. I think that the people who developed the genre came up with a pretty good set of rules to appeal to the consumer. Like, it’s not a real universe, no. But neither are vampire conventions or swords-and-sorcery conventions. Hollywood action movies have plenty of gunplay, but the vast majority of shot people don’t spend time rolling around noisily dying. All those genres are fictional too, but they’re optimized to be enjoyable. I can’t rip on them for that – they’ve made a lot of content that a lot of people really enjoy, though sometimes it’s also nice to delve into harder realism.
Sure, but the original iteration of the flight mechanics in Arena Commander was legitimately very fun. I played the shit out of it, and the ability to basically fling yourself across the map while strafing around asteroids in dog fights, launching missiles and dodging while you are in a three or four way fight with several players at once is still one of the best times I’ve ever had doing PvP in any game. The controls were intuitive but complex enough to require a decent amount of skill, and would have made for a really cool multiplayer experience.
The only people not having fun were the flight stick crowd, because they couldn’t fly and shoot at the same time. God forbid they put a mouse down next to their stick. Mind you, this was in small fighters - the whole meta at the time was that the mechanics for larger ships would be different and favor pure flying more over this mixed combat. But that wasn’t enough. They absolutely had to have their way. Suddenly realism was super important and these people spent all day making super serious posts on the forums twisting themselves in circles to justify why a flight stick was really the most scientific method for 6dof flight. So the devs started nerfing combat. First they killed the missiles, then they stared introducing stupid aim mechanics and before you knew it, what was once a very fun space combat sim was just boring.
This perfectly summarizes my experience every time I hop into the game after a year.
You’re saying that physics based coffee in mugs and new cape physics didn’t fix all the major issues when they implemented those two years ago? I swear they prioritize the dumbest work possible.
What’s the vision for this game? In my mind it’s like they want to create some massive P2W MMOFPS that somehow casuals will want to play despite some whales having paid into it for 10 years for game breaking advantages?
I admit I know little about the game, I’m just not sure how they’re going to attract that user base.
They wanna make a space life sim, basically. Right now you can buy ships with cash to support them, but can also use in game $. If you helped with cash, then you get certain perks like 1 off paint jobs, or lifetime in game insurance on the ship you bought. New mechanics have been slowly added to the game, in which if you have bought any cash ship, from $40 - 1000s, then you get their single player game when it releases, and immediate access to the games current online alpha.
The online alpha was SERIOUSLY impressive last I played, and that was early 2019. I bought a $35 starter ship pack very early on. I thought, “if this game succeeds then it’ll be very worth it, if it fails or is a scam, I only lost $35.” Which is what I think everyone’s attitude should be towards it.
Same here. I haven’t fired it up in ages though, and don’t even have my gaming rig up at the moment (nowhere to set it up with ongoing renovations at home). I should probably take a look this summer or fall when my network is finally up again. Apparently they’ve progressed a fair bit. I still have to agree that the amounts and time sunk in that thing are bordering on the insane, whatever the end result is.
For a game that isn’t technically out yet, Star Citizen is doing very well as it continues to rake in huge sums of money, and now there’s a new way to plunk down a bunch of it at once. The new Legatus Pack, which includes most of Star Citizen’s ships and a bunch of extras, is available for $27,000 USD.
Sure, that sounds like a lot of money, but consider what you’re getting: 117 ships, including the Anvil Carrack and Aegis Sabre, plus 163 extra items like the digital soundtrack and a digital copy of the Star Citizen novella.
I don’t think that they started out intending to “scam” players. I think that what happened was that they just mismanaged a development project, and every time they slipped and missed where they intended to be, the only way to dig themselves out was to keep making more-extravagant promises and figure out ways to take in larger sums of money to “fix” things. And what actually happened was that they kept digging themselves deeper into a hole; there’s no way that they’re going to deliver something that someone who spent the kinds of money that they’ve taken in is going to be happy with, not to mention all the physical items that they’ve promised to develop and send to people and haven’t. The developer doesn’t even have a good way out if things go badly – the developer can’t cut off the process without the people who have committed money for all the promises feeling ripped off, and no one potential customer can end the process, can’t say “well, the publisher cancelled the project”.
Many years back, a traditional game development process would have had the publisher, someone familiar with the game development process, say “this project has gone off the rails” and have cut them off from more funds, but because they’re getting funds by making more promises to players, they can keep going as long as players keep committing more funds. There’s an increasingly-large divergence between promises and what they can do.
I think it just highlights why the traditional game development process makes sense. That is, there’s a legitimate reason for having the publisher raise the money, have experience with the development process, and have oversight authority and milestones on a project and a single party with the ability to cut off funds if things go badly. If you’re a developer, it may chafe to have a publisher breathing down your neck, but…
And don’t get me wrong. I totally would like to have a good new space combat game too, like a lot of people. And I think that there’s room for a business model where players who really want to see a sequel to a much-loved game are willing to commit a (limited) amount of funds towards it.
But I also think that it needs to be made extremely clear that any given project may fail, that the business model needs to involve oversight from someone like a traditional publisher with the ability to say “this project isn’t working”, milestones, someone with expertise in the field running the numbers on the financial side, and some mechanism to stop the developer from just trying to buy their way out of the hole with larger promises.
The game development process does have a certain amount of risk. Part of doing game development is managing it and relatively-gracefully dealing with failure. I think that it might be nice to have someone produce some kind of intermediate model, something where a would-be customer can choose to expose themselves to risk, but also where there’s a route to kill the project if it isn’t going well. That protects the developer as well as the players – the developer can’t commit themselves to something that they can’t do, and the players can only lose so much.
It’s not a scam in the sense they are deliberately taking your money and not deliver anything in return. I am confident the people at CIG want to create something unique and amazing.
It is a very complex project though and you can argue about if it has been managed properly.
I check this game out once a year maybe, but there are lots of people playing this game daily and enjoying it even in its current alpha state.
In no way in hell is it worth the amount poured into it. Which leads to the only conclusion that the money is being mishandled. Put simpler: it’s a scam
I wonder if now they have enough money to refund me the 40usd I spended back then on their kickstarter, when I still believed I could get the next Privateer/Freelancer.
Call it an unintended scam, just like Peter Molyneux.
I do think that the amount of money people have poured in does show that there is legitimately a lot of consumer demand for a new Freelancer (well, or Wing Commander is maybe more apropos for Star Citizen).
Frankly, I’d rather have one done with minimal assets, and then go back and sell aesthetic DLC packs to make it pretty if people want.
Freelancer scrimped pretty hard on the out-of-cockpit assets. I feel like a lot of newer space games have blown a lot of work on building a pretty world that doesn’t add a lot to the actual core flying around and fighting bit, like X4 (particularly relative to earlier games in the series).
They decided to wait 10 years to reach 1.0, instead of putting out an 0.5 and spending the next 10 years releasing apology patches like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077.
Neither of those games took more than a year or two to become enjoyable. Not to mention neither of them cost their buyers hundreds or even thousands of dollars to enjoy. Bit of a silly comparison.
I wasn’t implying the No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk took 10 years to get good ( both are roughly five years old) just that they’ve spent their entire retail existence being patched and reworked out of a sense of obligation from the developers.
Not just sense, if they released just botched games and left it at that, it would make buying from them again (or anything the members of the team worked on) way more difficult. I mean heck look at Bethesda despite decades of bangers a bad couple of games and people just don’t care like they used to.
I bought the single player thing forever ago, played the PTU for 60+ hours and enjoyed it a ton. I got my money’s worth. But I’ll be even happier if single player comes out, I still watch the trailers on occasion and get all jazzed up.
I can’t imagine that people will keep shoveling money in for another ten years.
It sounds from the article like they’re starting to lay people off.
Roberts then touched upon changes at Cloud Imperium Games, some of which have to do with recent layoffs and a controversial relocation plan IGN reported on last month. Rich Tyrer is now senior game director, overseeing the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 alongside Roberts. Roberts said CIG had made the “difficult decision” to ask the Los Angeles development team to relocate to join other teams, primarily in Manchester, England, as well as Austin, Texas, and Montreal, Canada.
One member of staff called this “a mass layoff, disguised as a relocation of staff”, given the struggle in moving to another country “with little or no notice.”
I can’t imagine that people will keep shoveling money in for another ten years
See, that’s what I thought after the first hundred million with basically nothing to show other than being able to walk around your spaceship. Yet here we are.
I prefer “sac holders” in this regard, considering they’re clearly going about with both hands cupping the tender twin berries they can’t seem to stop from paying again and again to have SC kick without mercy.
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