It's precisely where Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium wants it to be. It's effectively printing money right now. There is no reason for them to ever "complete" it. They have not been incentivized...
It's precisely where Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium wants it to be.
It's effectively printing money right now. There is no reason for them to ever "complete" it. They have not been incentivized to complete it, nor do Roberts/CIG seem to have any desire to rein in their ambitions to actually release a functioning game.
They aren't making a profit off the game, you only have to look at their yearly financial reports. Basically all the money goes directly into the development. A few things to consider; Starfield,...
They aren't making a profit off the game, you only have to look at their yearly financial reports. Basically all the money goes directly into the development.
A few things to consider; Starfield, a single player, took ten years and 250 million dollars. Star Citizen is two games of comparable size and a live version being maintained, and they began a studio from scratch.
Also consider that relatively simple games like PubG and Apex Legends make over a billion in profits each year. It makes no sense to still be calling SC a scam in light of the fact that there are much easier and faster ways to make money than burning it all on a giant project like this. The actual profit comes when a game is feature complete.
These articles are trotted out every year because of Citizen Con, I have no idea why a certain demographic of people have made it their life's work to try and undermine this project.
Large, complex games do take a long time to be developed. That is to be expected. The accusations of "scam" start when you sell a 40k ship package for a game that doesn't really exist.
There are maybe a handful of people who have spent that much and it's not people who are in dire financial straits. It's made clear from start to finish that when you pay for more than the base...
There are maybe a handful of people who have spent that much and it's not people who are in dire financial straits. It's made clear from start to finish that when you pay for more than the base $45-50 that what you are paying for is direct the funding of the game (which has over a hundred ships delivered at this point) not that those ships have some inherent value in and of themselves. The ships are simply a perk for literally donating money so that the game can be made to exist.
They aren't tricking people into thinking the product exists when they spend that money, and they have proven that they aren't just taking the money and running. It's simply not a scam, the most you can argue is that it's taking a long time for them to deliver what they promised but even that doesn't hold much water in light of how we see clearly now that far less complex games have taken a comparable development time.
The minutiae of the definition of what is and is not a "scam" is not something I am equipped to discuss. I would just argue that when an unreleased game sells a 40k package, it is reasonable to...
The minutiae of the definition of what is and is not a "scam" is not something I am equipped to discuss. I would just argue that when an unreleased game sells a 40k package, it is reasonable to expect such accusations to occur.
I would sure hope they give me a picture of a car as part of the transaction, otherwise I’d have no clue what I’m buying! /s As long as they’re working on the car and sending me progress, I think...
I would sure hope they give me a picture of a car as part of the transaction, otherwise I’d have no clue what I’m buying! /s
As long as they’re working on the car and sending me progress, I think it’s not a scam. I do think that each time they decided to increase the scope of the car, and change the model to add more wheels/windows/seats there should be some sort of warning sent out to people who are waiting for that particular car, but it doesn’t seem like that’s exactly a scam. I paid for a product, they’re making the product. If you consider “a ship” the product like in your case, then they’ve delivered plenty of ships so that gives me a good idea of how long the rest will take.
If you think “the game” is the product, then I have great news: it doesn’t cost $40,000, it’s actually only ~$40ish dollars. And you get to use it in the meantime, so you’re free to play it and refund it if you don’t like it, same as any other game really.
I am allowed in the factory, I see the car being built, even test drive and enjoy it. I pledged for one ship and I have it in-game, right now, as well as permanent access to a continued and...
I am allowed in the factory, I see the car being built, even test drive and enjoy it.
I pledged for one ship and I have it in-game, right now, as well as permanent access to a continued and increasing stream of the features CIG promised. All the other ships I bought with in-game currency. I gave the pledge not because of the ship, but to support the project, if it were about the ship I could've simply waited for the ship after it was released and made available with in-game credits (they all are eventually).
None of this was unclear to me when I pledged. The ships themselves have no inherent value, and they were clear from the start that every ship would be earnable in-game.
So I got much, much more than a picture. The tired jibes about "jpegs" are worn out.
What if an unreleased game that’s still in active development has an option for you to contribute $40,000 towards its continued progress, and in return you get a shiny item in game? And would it...
What if an unreleased game that’s still in active development has an option for you to contribute $40,000 towards its continued progress, and in return you get a shiny item in game? And would it be perceived as more or less of a scam than the ability to contribute $40,000 and get nothing for it in return?
I guess I’m asking: are the semantics an important distinction to the actual transaction that’s happened?
I think it's less about semantics and more about the "contract" between the buyer and the developers. If the player thinks the purchase is a support of development, knowing fully the game might...
I think it's less about semantics and more about the "contract" between the buyer and the developers.
If the player thinks the purchase is a support of development, knowing fully the game might fail and never release, it's a totally different case than if the player thinks they are buying an asset woth $40K in a fully functional game.
I've never heard about anyone suing them for this, so I'd argue the people who bought this package knew what they're signing up for.
Well, you have every right to ask, but that was a report from a user posted on spectrum which got deleted which I saw via wayback machine, linked from the refund subreddit, which is a very unhappy...
Well, you have every right to ask, but that was a report from a user posted on spectrum which got deleted which I saw via wayback machine, linked from the refund subreddit, which is a very unhappy place to be and search.
It was a complete guide for UK users who gave money in the early years to use the local equivalent of small claims court to get their money back citing the 2016 release date. And it added up, back then a release was promised and not delivered.
I since got over my curiosity for Star Citizen, and the people I played with online are all in hiatus, too, since the persistence patch completely broke what gameplay there was.
The game's purpose is to enrich Roberts and his family and friends, it's why the company is so nepotistic in it's leadership, it isn't built to turn the mind of profits a FIFA or whatever does for...
The game's purpose is to enrich Roberts and his family and friends, it's why the company is so nepotistic in it's leadership, it isn't built to turn the mind of profits a FIFA or whatever does for EA, also, those are functional companies.
Star Citizen is a scam in the same way NFTs were, when so much of their cash flow is tied to pledges for ships that don't exist in the game, may not ever exist in the game, and the obsession with having all of these huge variety of ships for gameplay loops that aren't in the game, aren't on their timeline, and arguably, may not even be fun! They have sold many times over $100s of dollars of ships that are meant for mercantile, research, exploration, just huge lofty goals of gameplay that hasn't materializes in any form. It is quite literally a development ponzi scheme, and I'm sure their average cost per user is considerably higher than other triple A games (eg:$70). I'm not saying that there isn't a game at all that people can play, there is, but the entire concept of star citizens PTU and the idea of an active in game economy doesn't make sense, will never make sense. It has sold itself to pay to win whales while simultaneously saying "oh it isn't necessary just play the game and you can buy an Idris with credits" that won't jive with the people who paid $500 for an Idris, it never will, and it'll never make sense with so many ships if they are easy to obtain, people will flock to the biggest, most meta ship they can, and then the entire sim aspect breaks down. Like GTA when every NPC and player is in a Bugatti. It's why the capital ships aren't in the game, it's why cooperative is limited to moving crates around or being in a turret. It makes no sense. Elite Dangerous has a bunch of piecemeal gameplay loops tacked on to one another over time and it shows, many are disconnected and most people will simply focus on what gets them the most money, that again breaks the sim aspect they are shooting for. A game economy is inflationary to the extreme, I dunno man, if you take a step back you've got a tech demo that is missing 90% of what is promised and they keep making new.promises, that sounds like scam to me, complete with FOMO pledging of ships, LTI swaps, and a grey market for whales who are bailing on the project. It's IRL economy is more sophisticated than the one in game.
A positive claim that requires you to provide proof that the financial reports are a lie. Until then it's just a baseless assertion. Except that gameplay has emerged in "any form". Cargo, bounty...
The game's purpose is to enrich Roberts and his family and friends
A positive claim that requires you to provide proof that the financial reports are a lie. Until then it's just a baseless assertion.
Star Citizen is a scam in the same way NFTs were, when so much of their cash flow is tied to pledges for ships that don't exist in the game, may not ever exist in the game, and the obsession with having all of these huge variety of ships for gameplay loops that aren't in the game, aren't on their timeline, and arguably, may not even be fun! They have sold many times over $100s of dollars of ships that are meant for mercantile, research, exploration, just huge lofty goals of gameplay that hasn't materializes in any form
Except that gameplay has emerged in "any form". Cargo, bounty hunting, missions, racing locations and events, salvage (which I noticed everyone suddenly dropped off their list of things people said will never come) etc. Physicalized cargo and persistance has enabled legitimate piracy and boarding. Along with recurring in-game events like Jumptown that have provided a lot of sandbox activity. They just released a lot of improvements to the Arena Commander and Racing modules in the game as well. And on the horizon is the next actual system along with the first stages of server meshing to support it.
As far as undelivered ships, they delivered over a hundred. They just released the Hull-C, which was one of their most technically difficult ships as it extends and retracts to take large amounts of cargo. The reason there aren't large capital ships in game for players themselves is because those are the most complex assets in the game. Since not every feature is finalized, many of the oldest ships have required some retrofitting to catch up. To release one of the largest ships of the game before the features are more complete would mean double the amount of rework. But as we see larger ships like the Hull-C being released, it indicates pretty clearly that the game is nearing a more complete state. The capital ships will be the last additions to the game for good reason.
The arguments you are making were relevant perhaps seven or eight years ago, but they are not at this time.
Yes, I'm aware of the progress made and my points still stand. How long did it take from the pledge to the Hull-C releasing? Almost the entire development length? Or the banu merchantman et al....
Yes, I'm aware of the progress made and my points still stand. How long did it take from the pledge to the Hull-C releasing? Almost the entire development length? Or the banu merchantman et al. These huge expensive ships people pledged for years ago that never materialized, the ship or the gameplay. There is exactly how many environments in the game compared to what was promised?
It's inexcusable, whether or not the alpha is functional as a game you can dick around in. Regardless of if the game releases at some point or not. Answer the call 2016 right? Hilarious. You didn't address my point of how many ships have been sold to fund previous pledges to even get added, or all the work redoing their engine (all to continue clipping through your ship every quantum jump), redoing models/balance/net code.
The long and the short of it is that scope creep, absurd, literally insane attention to detail for shit that will never impact gameplay (toilets, coffee machines, bartending AI!!) has mired the project, and it's funding being dependent on the live service which takes resources simply to maintain, increasing the development costs and timelines. It's a black hole of dev work.
No...they don't. I literally just addressed you claims. Now you're shifting the goal posts from "nothing has been delivered" to "it took too long" even though I already addressed that point in my...
Yes, I'm aware of the progress made and my points still stand.
No...they don't. I literally just addressed you claims. Now you're shifting the goal posts from "nothing has been delivered" to "it took too long" even though I already addressed that point in my first post.
I don't know why you're so emotionally fixated on trying to ignore the reality that the game has been proven to not be a scam, but an earnest and succeeding effort. You need to stop. You can make assertions about "development blackholes" all you want, it won't make it true. There gas been no "feature creep" since 8 years ago when they recieved the large influx of money and mandate to expand the game. Everything since then has been with the goal of researching and developing those features and systems.
Correction: The company isn't making a reported profit right now. Note that for many many years, Amazon did the same according to their books, everything was "reinvested". And yet the boss owns...
They aren't making a profit off the game, you only have to look at their yearly financial reports. Basically all the money goes directly into the development.
Correction: The company isn't making a reported profit right now. Note that for many many years, Amazon did the same according to their books, everything was "reinvested". And yet the boss owns gargantuan yachts, surprising if the company seemingly made no excess profits, right?
Chris Roberts is living exactly as large as the idea behind the game intended him to. It's his company and his project, and it feeds him a continuous stream of money. It's the perfect solution for him.
I have no idea why a certain demographic of people have made it their life's work to try and undermine this project.
Mate. Seriously. "Undermine the project"? There's nothing I could undermine about it that Chris Roberts hasn't done already himself, in far better. And let's not kid ourselves: The only thing keeping Star Citizen from being long released are the people continuously dumping money into it, which makes it far more profitable to be working on it than releasing it. As long as that money doesn't dry up, the game has no reason to ever be finished.
The Forbes one from years ago that really provides nothing but speculation? The continued and evident advancement of the project and the studio has debunked the assertion. You don't fabricate...
The Forbes one from years ago that really provides nothing but speculation? The continued and evident advancement of the project and the studio has debunked the assertion. You don't fabricate 1,000 employees.
Because what I see as someone who plays the game and follows the project is steady progress, to say it could be faster progress because money is being siphoned off secretly to buy yachts and champagne is a positive claim of malfesance that requires actual proof, not interviews from a decade ago, not opinion pieces.
The game started development a decade ago. Articles covering its development, as well as the finances of the game's designers, are as much relevant now as they were previously....
The game started development a decade ago. Articles covering its development, as well as the finances of the game's designers, are as much relevant now as they were previously.
Derek Smart is notably not a trustworthy source. Basically any other source is more reliable. He has personal beef with Chris Roberts and a history of just making stuff up with regard to SC. I'd...
Derek Smart is notably not a trustworthy source. Basically any other source is more reliable. He has personal beef with Chris Roberts and a history of just making stuff up with regard to SC.
I'd recommend you source the claims from elsewhere.
That link was mostly a glib comment regarding the "buying yachts" quote; I did a "chris roberts yacht" search on the Googleweb and that's where I found it. I feel like my point stands...
That link was mostly a glib comment regarding the "buying yachts" quote; I did a "chris roberts yacht" search on the Googleweb and that's where I found it.
I feel like my point stands independently of Derek Smart's page - if your project started a decade ago, the finances within that time frame all matter.
Do note that a scam doesn't have to actually make money for it to be a scam. That said, if they aren't making a profit, they wouldn't be making the game in this fashion. If they are getting...
Exemplary
Do note that a scam doesn't have to actually make money for it to be a scam.
That said, if they aren't making a profit, they wouldn't be making the game in this fashion. If they are getting funding from sources outside of Kickstarter, then why are they continuing to take money (upwards of $40,000 in some cases) from crowdfunding?
They aren't making the game out of the kindness of their hearts, as a non-profit venture.
Starfield took $250 million and 10 years to make, but it was not crowdfunded. It was privately funded in a manner that meant they had to create a final product, or else face their investors. Kickstarter is not an investment platform, and the people funding Star Citizen are not investors. They have no legal or corporate protection.
PubG and Apex Legends are complete games - they do not advertise themselves as being in alpha. They create additional content (as many live service games do), but they also do not require you to pay money to participate. That's a whole other ethical dilemma unto itself, but at least the games are feature-complete. Star Citizen is not.
The actual profit for something like Star Citizen is in vacuuming up as much money from crowdfunding as possible, then shipping a broken product when the money dries up. It hasn't yet, so they haven't shipped the game.
Chris will wait until he is forced by circumstances to release the game, just like every other game he ever made. That could be the money drying up, or various lawsuits in the EU putting the...
Chris will wait until he is forced by circumstances to release the game, just like every other game he ever made. That could be the money drying up, or various lawsuits in the EU putting the project under threat, or just plain public opinion finally snapping his own excessive ego.
I think the maximum hilarity might be what happens if the game gets so far beyond the bits people have paid for as to render their purchases meaningless or ineffective. Star Citizen might be the first MMO to ever launch in a fully-mudflated state, because they cannot wipe out the 'beta' and start fresh without invalidating all of the purchases. That's a unique circumstance no other MMO has had to deal with before, far as I know. How are new players going to feel if the existing pre-launch group has already paid-to-play their way to the top of the game's power and economic curves before launch? It seems a little risky to me.
Chris Roberts' house cost USD 4.8 million in 2018. A company doesn't have to be profitable to pay good CEO salaries to you and your family. Add to that all the amenities owning a large...
Chris Roberts' house cost USD 4.8 million in 2018. A company doesn't have to be profitable to pay good CEO salaries to you and your family. Add to that all the amenities owning a large multinational company give you that aren't easy to quantify in money. If you think Star Citizen is a large scam or an ambitious project is more a matter of opinion, but that there is little financial incentive for Roberts to actually have a realistic timeline for finishing the game is a fact. Actually it would require a serious restructuring and/or downsizing of CIG if Star Citizen released tomorrow as it's entirely unclear what the revenue streams of a finished game were.
Another fact is that CIG and all its assets could be liquidated tomorrow and there's nothing anyone could do about it. We're approaching a billion dollars in funds for a project that has no external controls whatsoever. A small non profit that gets a thousand bucks in donations has much stricter controls than this crowdfunded behemoth.
Add to that that all the timelines and deadlines and promises about the game so far vanished and now the official policy is to not even guess at a development timeline.
Add to that that there were repeatedly conflicting statements about what exactly a finished game would entail. It's over thing to have a clear vision about an ambitious project that might need never become reality, but Star Citizen doesn't even have that.
Add to that the proficient marketing surrounding the game that might be considered predatory with people "playing the CCU game" and feeling clever about saving twenty bucks on buying a three hundred dollar ship that isn't released yet.
Anyone who's considering adding money to Star Citizen should be made aware of all of these facts. It still might make sense to get an account, it might even make sense to "buy" an expensive ship. But people should see this side of things, not only the shiny videos on YouTube.
How Starfield could have taken that long and cost that much is absolutely baffling. My only guess is that it went on so long that they had to resort back to something easy just to ship it and stop...
How Starfield could have taken that long and cost that much is absolutely baffling.
My only guess is that it went on so long that they had to resort back to something easy just to ship it and stop the bleeding.
Or, the alternative is that even something "simple" like Starfield from an established studio is more challenging and time consuming to develop than most realize. Let alone a seamless MMO with no...
Or, the alternative is that even something "simple" like Starfield from an established studio is more challenging and time consuming to develop than most realize. Let alone a seamless MMO with no loading screens, more complex feature set and a large singeplayer campaign to accompany it.
It's interesting how people talked about Starfield as the Star Citizen killer in the lead up to its release, but now that it's come out the attitude is that it also must've been poorly managed or something, rather than people admitting Star Citizen is taking an appropriate amount of time given its complexity and ambition. I really am kind of at a loss how to address that.
I understand why Star Citizen has burned so much money. They set out to make something very ambitious and haven't given up on that. Starfield though? It's not that content rich and it's certainly...
I understand why Star Citizen has burned so much money. They set out to make something very ambitious and haven't given up on that.
Starfield though? It's not that content rich and it's certainly weak in its features.
I don't see how 250MM is possible without significant mismanagement.
These development timelines are always a little bit misleading. This game did not spend 10 years in active heavy development, that likely did not start until after they shipped Fallout 76. 95% of...
These development timelines are always a little bit misleading. This game did not spend 10 years in active heavy development, that likely did not start until after they shipped Fallout 76. 95% of the labor that went into making Starfield was probably in the last 4-5 years.
I don't feel productive making this comment - but this was obvious as early as around 8 years ago. They're never going to release a full "game" because they can not possibly live up to the hype...
I don't feel productive making this comment - but this was obvious as early as around 8 years ago. They're never going to release a full "game" because they can not possibly live up to the hype and could never utilize their budget effectively. The game they want to build and that people expect from the budget can not be made with the ways humans organize in development teams today. Maybe future technology or superior organizational systems can make it happen.
I heavily played for about 12 months, I joined an Org and bought a few ships. It is, in some ways, an incredible, breathtaking game, unlike any other I've ever played. The role playing potential...
I heavily played for about 12 months, I joined an Org and bought a few ships.
It is, in some ways, an incredible, breathtaking game, unlike any other I've ever played. The role playing potential of a space [whatever profession you want] and living a live with a ship to call home is awesome.
The persistent universe with no loading screens means you can see a ship in atmosphere while taking a train in the city, run to your hangar, climb inside a highly detailed ship and take off with semi-realistic physics, and meet up with the ship you saw and then together fly out of atmosphere into space. 0 loading screens.
At the same time a battle can be happening in orbit that has been going on since you woke up in your bed in the city, and you can join it. Every player is "together" in the same sandbox, there's a guy in a distant outpost mining asteroids, there's players delivering cargo, there's players shooting each other and NPC's in bunker missions.
It's great, the gun play is good enough as an FPS game, the dog fighting is fun and immersive as a flight simulator, the ships are very fun and cool to explore and use.
But the criticism is also true, they can't deliver on anything. They waste time developing new ships to pump out sales, rather than work on core game technology, ridiculous bugs, or gameloop/mission content.
There's a real sense that it will never release, so much time has passed that the bar keeps moving, by the time they freeze things and release something, others may well have done a better job at many of the things the game wants to be.
Is that a solvable problem? That limit sounds like a bandaid solution to the fact computers aren’t good enough yet. I’ve played games with up to a thousand players in a single instance, and oh boy...
Is that a solvable problem? That limit sounds like a bandaid solution to the fact computers aren’t good enough yet.
I’ve played games with up to a thousand players in a single instance, and oh boy do you need to crank down the settings if you want to maintain frame rates. And even then, it has players and vehicles stop rendering past a certain distance to preserve resources in the larger battles, which can sometimes mean frustratingly dying to an enemy who isn’t rendering on your local client.
I believe in another decade of development (they’ve had one already, what’s one more?) that home machines and servers will be powerful enough to justify increasing that cap per instance. I just don’t think it’s viable yet.
It's actually not solvable for a simple reason - every player adds more bandwidth requirements to the system. It will always scale past the point where any network technology can pump that much...
It's actually not solvable for a simple reason - every player adds more bandwidth requirements to the system. It will always scale past the point where any network technology can pump that much data around.
The only game to ever get around it is Eve Online, which is the only MMO where every single player is active on the same worldspace. Eve cheated their way around the problem with TiDi - as the number of players in an area grows, the clock in the game slows down, even as far as 1/15th real time, placing the game in slow motion. This of course gives the network the time it needs to pump the data around and maintain the persistent universe. That's the only 'solution' to this problem that really works.
There are only three options. Reduce the amount of network overhead per player, divide players into multiple manageable worldspaces, or slow down game play to a point where the network can cope with the total overhead. Most MMOs use a combination of these to give the illusion that they can handle thousands of players - get every player on a WoW server to all visit a single zone on the same day and it will take down that server before even a few percent of them show up, guaranteed. This is not a problem that faster computers will ever help to solve, because it's not about the CPU, it's about the network.
I feel like I should also point out, since we're talking about Star Citizen, that this particular specter is precisely the kind that can kill your MMO on launch. When you leave beta and thousands of new people show up doing thousands of things at once, the quality of the code will receive the harshest field test there is, and it is notoriously difficult to nail this down in testing before launch.
Do notice that they're talking about having many players on one server, and not necessarily having all the players in the same spot You can easily have thousands on a server, but they are...
Do notice that they're talking about having many players on one server, and not necessarily having all the players in the same spot
You can easily have thousands on a server, but they are generally not in the same spot.
A hundred is low for a finished game, but it's not really that surprising for a game that is sill technically in a pre-alpha state which hasn't reached minimum viable product status yet....
A hundred is low for a finished game, but it's not really that surprising for a game that is sill technically in a pre-alpha state which hasn't reached minimum viable product status yet. Optimizing for the network, and just plain optimizations in general are usually at the tail end of the dev cycle, because until you're close to the finish line you don't really know what your requirements are or what kind of tricks you'll be able to use to slim it all down. You'd change something in the game and have to do the optimizations over again, so they come last, which incidentally is why so many buggy triple a titles get released - when you rush it out the door, odds are good the optimizations got cut.
I remember when Rift launched playing the beta. The network code was in a pretty awful state there, the point of the beta was to beat it up and shake out the flaws. A couple months later at launch those issues were gone... but they did have to cut down on the number of players per server and several of the advanced mechanics for zone-based events. They worked a bit too well and drew in veritable flash mobs of players... and they were glorious chaos. It was a bit disappointing because they didn't quite reach the level of multi-player interaction they had been aiming for. The beta was actually more fun than the finished game for me because of that. It had almost recovered the feel of Everquest which itself capped out at about three hundred players in a zone at once. Not bad for a '90s game in retrospect.
In your WoW example there, the 'same spot' actually is the same physical server - you want all the players near each other to be on the same physical hardware because it makes for fast updates... sending all that data between physical servers is just adding more pain to your update problems. In WoW a 'zone' is a physical server... or several, if those zones aren't busy you can share them. The players on one server in Orgrimmar aren't on the same physical hardware as the players in The Undercity even though WoW is telling you they are both on the same 'server' - they aren't talking physical hardware, just a virtual definition of a few thousand players. Each dungeon instance is also its own thing on its own physical server. WoW is very good at splitting things up but maintaining the illusion that it's all one universe.
I guess the issue is that given the time, finances, and monetization of Star Citizen, not many people are willing to be as tolerant with it as they are with a regular alpha game. I'm thinking of a...
I guess the issue is that given the time, finances, and monetization of Star Citizen, not many people are willing to be as tolerant with it as they are with a regular alpha game.
I'm thinking of a server as an abstract construct, not the actual hardware, in the same way that a mind is not the same as a brain, but rather a model the brain stages. A "realm", if you will.
WoW's realm capacity in 2004/2006 was up to 3000 players without sharding. That's quite a bit more than 100.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just the same thing we see with Baldur's Gate 3. If Star Citizen launches and is a success, that's very, very bad news for a lot of other games because it will raise...
Sometimes I wonder if it's just the same thing we see with Baldur's Gate 3. If Star Citizen launches and is a success, that's very, very bad news for a lot of other games because it will raise people's standards. For some reason this seems to terrify developers and publishers. I wouldn't put it past some of them to pay for a few hatchet job articles now and then - though Chris' own 'marketing' of the game is certainly also to blame for the high expectations. He's always been more than a little hyperbolic, and he has several failed projects on his resume that never appeared. I'd hesitate to call it a scam, though - unlike those failed projects, there actually is a game appearing out of this mess. The problem is, it'll never ever be 'done' until something finally forces him to release it. That's just his style.
It would indeed be nice if the ones making Star Citizen were truly invested in making it. The ideas are all fine, wonderful even. But cons and cult always starts by telling what you wanna hear.
It would indeed be nice if the ones making Star Citizen were truly invested in making it.
The ideas are all fine, wonderful even. But cons and cult always starts by telling what you wanna hear.
Doubly so for a cult with a massive sunk cost fallacy. I'm just going by his track record - I could have written how this would go on the day the game was announced as a kickstarter because he's...
Doubly so for a cult with a massive sunk cost fallacy. I'm just going by his track record - I could have written how this would go on the day the game was announced as a kickstarter because he's done it before with every single game he's ever made. Hype, delay, expand, hype, delay, expand, over and over - and if he doesn't get his way, he walks from the project.
His reputation is on the line this time though. If this game doesn't pan out he's finished as anything but an indie game developer working solo. Considering how badly he wants to make space games and films, he'd better deliver if he ever wants to do those things in the future.
It's also why MMO's generally have very stiff mechanics, and rely on cooldown-based hotbar combat with auto-targeting. You don't really see MMO's sporting hundreds of players with visceral hack...
It's also why MMO's generally have very stiff mechanics, and rely on cooldown-based hotbar combat with auto-targeting. You don't really see MMO's sporting hundreds of players with visceral hack and slash or first person shooter combat, because these kinds of systems require significantly more bandwidth per player and more aggressive client-side prediction to feel responsive.
Star Citizen wants to be an FPS and a space combat sim, so their scaling troubles are going to be much harder than your typical MMO.
If it wasn't really showing its age now, I'd love to recommend the only MMOFPS that I know of, Planetside2. Combined arms (meaning you can have infantry fights but also a bunch of tanks and road...
You don't really see MMO's sporting hundreds of players with [...] first person shooter combat
If it wasn't really showing its age now, I'd love to recommend the only MMOFPS that I know of, Planetside2. Combined arms (meaning you can have infantry fights but also a bunch of tanks and road vehicles, and also a bunch of aircraft from agile fighters up to beefy transport planes) in an open world of approx 8km by 8km playable area, and up to 800~900 players in a single instance.
It's got very little "progression", almost every weapon is a sidegrade to the others, which on the one hand means you're sort of on a level playing field with the veterans of the game, but on the other hand they will have so much more practice that you're just gonna die a lot when you first jump in. Like, a lot a lot. The game is also forgiving about deaths though, there's no penalty at all, and it takes often less than 10 seconds on the death screen before you can respawn (even less if a friendly medic revives you).
But yeah, the thing I need to really emphasise for people thinking of trying it out: it's a shooter game, so you can bring across your existing experience and muscle memory, but unlike almost every other shooter game, you will die a lot and it will not matter. That's tough to un-learn when so many other shooter games have such penalty for death.
Also, I imagine this is the sort of thing that future networking technologies can't really solve. Sure, networking technology can get better. But whatever new computer technology that allows that...
This is not a problem that faster computers will ever help to solve, because it's not about the CPU, it's about the network.
Also, I imagine this is the sort of thing that future networking technologies can't really solve. Sure, networking technology can get better. But whatever new computer technology that allows that improved networking will also allow for increased graphics, game complexity, etc. If people were content to play a game with 1990s-era graphics and game mechanics, you could probably have millions of people play that game simultaneously, on a single instance, using modern networking technology. But there aren't millions of people who would want to play such an anachronistic game, so it would be a pointless exercise. New technology improves network capabilities, but it also increases the per-user demand on the network.
That wouldn't work either. I don't care what the game is, it's the scaling that kills it dead in any era. Let's say you have ten players. Your character does something. Packet goes to the server,...
That wouldn't work either. I don't care what the game is, it's the scaling that kills it dead in any era.
Let's say you have ten players. Your character does something. Packet goes to the server, various processes and databases are updated, and then the update goes on to those other nine players and back to the player who caused it. Worst case for your latency is ten players doing something at once, ten packets go in, and unless you are a freaking genius about your code, one hundred packets go out. You've got to send the updates to everyone.
Now imagine this with a million players instead of ten. Too many updates, too many packets of data. It's not even about the bandwidth at this point. The latency is now shite, and while TiDi is a solution, I doubt anyone playing an FPS like Star Citizen is going to enjoy being in slow-motion mode the instant you get more than fifty players in the same space. That's the real problem... each update to the game space made by each player must also be sent on to every other player and it has to happen at an acceptable latency.
That's why everything gets 'sharded' in modern MMOs. If you isolate which players need to send updates to which other players, and which ones don't, you can avoid that self-induced denial of service attack on your own game servers. If you want all players interacting at once, you can't do that anymore, and you end up at the center of a packet storm that will vaporize your routers, switches, and pocketbook once your ISP sends you the bandwidth bill.
A good way to do this for a game like Star Citizen would be to have all the players in a single ship during a space battle be in their own instance. What happens inside that ship isn't important to anyone outside of it, so that data is 'local' to the ship. When another ship fires a cannon through the first ship, that's an update you have to care about, so you propagate that event into the local ship space. That's an example of how you can cut down on the latency issue. There tricks that can be played to ease the pain somewhat, but they only get you just so far no matter how good they are - and most of the tricks that companies come up with to do this are considered trade secrets.
Ultimately, this led to HUGE problems in Mythic's WarHammer MMO. They didn't want ganking/one shotting a thing so they made just about everything a DoT ability. Imagine 50 people in a fight each...
Let's say you have ten players. Your character does something. Packet goes to the server, various processes and databases are updated, and then the update goes on to those other nine players and back to the player who caused it. Worst case for your latency is ten players doing something at once, ten packets go in, and unless you are a freaking genius about your code, one hundred packets go out. You've got to send the updates to everyone.
Ultimately, this led to HUGE problems in Mythic's WarHammer MMO. They didn't want ganking/one shotting a thing so they made just about everything a DoT ability. Imagine 50 people in a fight each using 2 or 3 different DoTs. In Dark Age of Camelot (Mythic's much older other MMO) you could have fun in grand fights of 300 vs 300 vs 200. Warhammer Online essentially turned into a DDoS-fest if it was even 15 vs 15.
When it was released in September 2008 it had sold a million copies and had 800,000 subscribers. By December of the same year they were down to 300,000 subs. That's how bad the lag was in fights assuming you were one of the few that didn't get dropped from the game.
I have fond memories of RvR in DAoC. Their choice of three factions instead of two, competing capture the flag style to lock down territory and artifacts with each other for realm-wide bonuses...
I have fond memories of RvR in DAoC. Their choice of three factions instead of two, competing capture the flag style to lock down territory and artifacts with each other for realm-wide bonuses that applied to all of that faction's players was a stroke of genius. It guaranteed that the dominant faction would always be attacked by the other two, which kept the PvP fresh with constantly changing circumstances. Really good design choice.
It was a pretty awesome sway of elf-correcting when 1 faction got too powerful. Another genius move they did was not allowing you to understand anything said by characters of the other realms so...
It was a pretty awesome sway of elf-correcting when 1 faction got too powerful.
Another genius move they did was not allowing you to understand anything said by characters of the other realms so there really wasn't a way to trash talk opponents in the game.
I'm very suprised I haven't seen the 3-way system in more games (actually none come immediately to mind).
That’s pretty close to how their server meshing plan is going to be. They’re going to be using dynamically instanced shards that can shrink and grow depending on player density as players group up...
That’s pretty close to how their server meshing plan is going to be. They’re going to be using dynamically instanced shards that can shrink and grow depending on player density as players group up and move apart.
A lot of larger ships lack interior windows specifically to enable this future splitting of the interior of the ship with the exterior, so jimmy doing repair work in engineering doesn’t need to get packet data from Jonathan the fighter pilot’s rudder taking damage.
It makes me wonder how optimized Amazon's Crytek-derived Lumberyard truly is. I'd have serious reservations about putting the server infrastructure for this into the cloud, because at best the...
It makes me wonder how optimized Amazon's Crytek-derived Lumberyard truly is. I'd have serious reservations about putting the server infrastructure for this into the cloud, because at best the cloud service is optimized for generic MMOs, not your MMO. There are massive performance gains (50% at the least) to be realized by optimizing the design of the physical server cluster to precisely match the requirements of the specific game code running on it. I'd be surprised if Amazon employs a devops team that can manage that level of design synergy. They strike me as too big to care that much, and if they did do it, I expect they'd charge out the nose for it.
I distinctly remember participating in a world PvP battle around Tarren Mill with at least a hundred players, and that was nearly 20 years ago. Learning that, 20 years later, Star Citizen limits...
Most MMOs use a combination of these to give the illusion that they can handle thousands of players - get every player on a WoW server to all visit a single zone on the same day and it will take down that server before even a few percent of them show up, guaranteed. This is not a problem that faster computers will ever help to solve, because it's not about the CPU, it's about the network.
I distinctly remember participating in a world PvP battle around Tarren Mill with at least a hundred players, and that was nearly 20 years ago. Learning that, 20 years later, Star Citizen limits its instances to the same number of players is kinda disappointing.
Not making any judgement here, I would have expected some advancement in that time span, but I guess it's effectively not easily solvable, and probably not needed; 100 players at once in your immediate surroundings is probably more than enough in any situation.
If it helps, I’ve personally seen larger than 100 servers. I think it’s from 100-180ish depending on the server, but I’ve definitely seen a 200 person server every once in a while. Every time they...
If it helps, I’ve personally seen larger than 100 servers. I think it’s from 100-180ish depending on the server, but I’ve definitely seen a 200 person server every once in a while.
Every time they optimize the network, they increase the server cap to add more players instead of just having better server performance. We had 50 player servers for about 4 years, and then about a year ago they made them 100, and a half year ago they bumped it up further.
MMORPG servers can have thousands of concurent users. I play World of Warcraft with those numbers without an issue on a fairly weak machine. This is a solved problem.
MMORPG servers can have thousands of concurent users. I play World of Warcraft with those numbers without an issue on a fairly weak machine. This is a solved problem.
Being online in the same game but in a dozen+ different zones is not the same as thousands of concurrent players all in a city capital. That is why MMO protests tell everyone to go to one...
Being online in the same game but in a dozen+ different zones is not the same as thousands of concurrent players all in a city capital. That is why MMO protests tell everyone to go to one spot/zone/city.
EVE Online has 1 game world. Every player to ever play the game has played in the same universe. When I played it, it was pretty normal to have 30,000+ concurrent players online. They have over 5000 solar systems and an additional 2500 wormholes in the game. They do this by putting clusters of solar systems onto a single server blade and hide loading screens behind the gate warp mechanic. Certain systems (like the main trade hubs) run on their own server blade with no other systems.
In the case of giant, collossal battles they'll reinforce the node (put the system on its own special beefier server blade) and still have to slow down the game clock (Time Dilation or TiDi) where 1 second in game can be literal 30-60 seconds in real time (think purposeful lag so the network packets can all catch up). In the "Massacre at M2-XFE" they had over 1300 Titan class ships alone (Titans are the largest, most expensive class of ship in the game that takes multiple months of real time to build). While the most expensive fight that I know of in EVE, it was only the 3rd largest fight at the time. It was a slideshow not a fight, per se
I feel like the degree to which World of Warcraft separates players into instances and regions shows that it's not a solved problem, and in fact while you can say there are thousands of concurrent...
I feel like the degree to which World of Warcraft separates players into instances and regions shows that it's not a solved problem, and in fact while you can say there are thousands of concurrent players (across how many servers, regions, and instances?), your machine is rarely rendering more than a hundred at a time even in the busiest areas.
If WoW had all those players in a single, continuous world without loading screens, and that a player on the top of some mountain could actually see and interact with players in a city on the other side of the world, that would be a much stronger argument. But they've put lots of little tricks and mini loading screens in place to hide the fact that they're instanced.
They have 1000+ employees and these things can happen in parallel. It's definitely all slower than any of us ever wanted it to be, but it is a slow crawl. PES was a major stepping stone that took...
But the criticism is also true, they can't deliver on anything. They waste time developing new ships to pump out sales, rather than work on core game technology, ridiculous bugs, or gameloop/mission content.
They have 1000+ employees and these things can happen in parallel.
It's definitely all slower than any of us ever wanted it to be, but it is a slow crawl. PES was a major stepping stone that took years of foundational development to prepare and it still took them longer to implement it than their worst public statements. That does leave two more major technical hurdles for the game to be realized, static server meshing and dynamic server meshing, but they are on the path.
My interest waxes and wanes from time to time but ultimately there are a lot of other good games to play out there. My view is when it's done it's done.
I look at it like any other game. I'll take it for a spin a couple of months after release when the worst of the bugs are ironed out, if it makes it that far. If I like it I'll bring over a guild...
I look at it like any other game. I'll take it for a spin a couple of months after release when the worst of the bugs are ironed out, if it makes it that far. If I like it I'll bring over a guild of a couple hundred people who will be relieved not to be playing yet another fantasy-styled MMO.
World of Warcraft took seven years to develop, and WoW is a joke compared to what Star Citizen is attempting to accomplish. The total dev time for Star Citizen should be about the same as the dev time for a complex MMO... plus the dev time for a good flight simulator... plus the dev time for a first person shooter... plus the dev time for a decent single player exploration-style space game. That would put it over twenty years total, by the way. Ten years and the whole thing is still a bit janky... but it's there, and it kinda works at least well enough to see it all coming together. I'd say they are ahead of schedule and also that most of the hard stuff is behind them. :P
That math doesn't add up. You develop those things in parallel and while applying multiple systems in one game would add development time compared to them released as individual games (because...
The total dev time for Star Citizen should be about the same as the dev time for a complex MMO... plus the dev time for a good flight simulator... plus the dev time for a first person shooter... plus the dev time for a decent single player exploration-style space game. That would put it over twenty years total, by the way.
That math doesn't add up. You develop those things in parallel and while applying multiple systems in one game would add development time compared to them released as individual games (because those systems need to work in tandem), and ramping up the production takes more time because of bigger team(s), that doesn't mean the development time is 1+1+1. It never is because modern development is so complex, but especially in a case like this.
Besides, afaik they've thrown away and started fresh a couple of times which, while not unheard of, isn't the standard and tells about development problems (what kind of problems, you can guess).
But they also have something you can play, it just seems like they're tacking on more stuff to keep the boat from reaching the harbor. I hesitate to call it a scam or grift but it's a unique way to keep the ship moving with perpetual crowdfunding.
If they ever release the game from early access, that will give people a solid target to criticize and selling dlc to a flawed game is much harder than selling more features to in-development game now that they have established an audience.
Actually, it does add up. Developing them in tandem means now you need 4x the number of developers to do it in the same time frame - the code complexity doesn't magically go down, in fact it...
Actually, it does add up. Developing them in tandem means now you need 4x the number of developers to do it in the same time frame - the code complexity doesn't magically go down, in fact it multiplies the overall complexity and gets much worse.
We're three years past the time it takes to develop a game like World of Warcraft, and people think it's taking too long, despite it being orders of magnitude more complex than any other game ever attempted in the entire history of the industry. It is four games (five if you count S42) that are traditionally separate genres rolled into one - the last time that happened was Spore, and we saw how that went. Frankly, those people who thought it would be done in anything less than a decade had unrealistic expectations and don't know much about game development. If I had to pin down a release date I'd wager on 2027 at the earliest, and that's assuming nothing goes wrong... like changing your core game engine not once, but twice. :P
This saga is going to go on for several more years before there's a released game. If you think people are angry about it now, just wait, it'll get much worse.
This article is not written very well nor is it terribly informative There have been so many exposés about Star Citizen's development, broken promises, and lack of accountability with its funding,...
This article is not written very well nor is it terribly informative
There have been so many exposés about Star Citizen's development, broken promises, and lack of accountability with its funding, it's genuinely interesting. I can't think of another project with investment, not just in games but in general, that has been allowed to perpetually expand its own deadline and scope without having to answer to anyone in any meaningful way. They do release new content, and they do inch closer and closer to promises they've made before, but by the time they deliver on one promise, a thousand more have sprung up, and each one pushes the potential for Star Citizen to be a released piece of media further out. It seems like fraud, where they do just enough work to not get sued.
It's getting there; another few years and it'll have surpassed the length of time for Duke Nukem Forever between announcement and release. For posterity's sake: http://duke.a-13.net/
It's getting there; another few years and it'll have surpassed the length of time for Duke Nukem Forever between announcement and release.
I think the biggest problem that the company had in general is being self-funded. When you're a developer working directly with a publisher and you have milestones to meet it's a whole different ballgame. If you don't meet those milestones, you don't get any money. That right there will keep your project on schedule. If, however, you're funding it yourself, you don't really have anyone to answer to except yourself and you can quickly lose sight of just how much money is going out the door."
I stopped really caring about this game a long time ago, but I'm intrigued about what happened to the Squadron 42 single-player game? If I remember rightly, there was a trailer featuring some big...
I stopped really caring about this game a long time ago, but I'm intrigued about what happened to the Squadron 42 single-player game? If I remember rightly, there was a trailer featuring some big names, but then nothing since. Did it get completely scrapped or is it just delayed?
The general pitch was that S42 would essentially be the 'training level' of the game, presented as a single player experience, that would get you up to speed on the lore, universe, mechanics, and...
The general pitch was that S42 would essentially be the 'training level' of the game, presented as a single player experience, that would get you up to speed on the lore, universe, mechanics, and let you get comfortable with it all before you jumped into the full MMO. That's honestly not a bad way to go about it.
The trouble here is that Chris Roberts is the undisputed king of scope creep. I'm old enough to remember playing Wing Commander when it was a shiny new 486 game and GPUs hadn't even been invented yet - it was the same story then as now with both Wing Commander and Privateer. New ideas and new features and new plans were undoubtedly heaped upon S42 until it collapsed under its own weight.
They've been really tight lipped on it and it always feels like it's two years away. Honestly it sounds stuck in development hell. There was a leaked footage roll last year of SQ42 that was pretty...
They've been really tight lipped on it and it always feels like it's two years away. Honestly it sounds stuck in development hell.
It seems there are people having fun with it and enjoying being on the ride of the continuous development it has. I think anyone who isn't interested in it at all now and is wondering when it will...
It seems there are people having fun with it and enjoying being on the ride of the continuous development it has. I think anyone who isn't interested in it at all now and is wondering when it will suddenly become "done" and interesting to them isn't the target audience of it, at least not right now. I don't like how articles often paint it as a scam for not being done yet as if the people who like it are nonexistent or are wrong about liking it and have been tricked.
Obviously there are also a decent fraction of people who funded it a long time ago early on before the development style was apparent who expected a different development style and timeline and want a refund, but being an early supporter of anything comes with risks like this and it doesn't seem like the money is being fraudulently used for purposes besides the game and it seems like those users are offered refunds anyway.
Yeah the focus on "release date" at this point is a bit meaningless. The game is, for all intents and purposes, out. It will continue to have content releases. This is the live service, Game as a...
Yeah the focus on "release date" at this point is a bit meaningless. The game is, for all intents and purposes, out. It will continue to have content releases. This is the live service, Game as a Service model that many games, enjoyed by many players, have. There will be no clear defined "release", just a continual trickle of content.
Except crucially, star citizen is not a subscription model, unless something changed. As it stands, you have an OOM more ships unreleased than released, and that model must continue, for them to...
Except crucially, star citizen is not a subscription model, unless something changed. As it stands, you have an OOM more ships unreleased than released, and that model must continue, for them to have funding. It's a ship jpg ponzi scheme.
games as a service as a model is fine, I think the friction comes from people saying "you can't accuse them of a bad or unfinished or buggy product because the product isn't out yet" The language...
games as a service as a model is fine, I think the friction comes from people saying "you can't accuse them of a bad or unfinished or buggy product because the product isn't out yet" The language around it is that it isn't yet a complete experience, or the experience they intend to deliver, yet we expect other games with live service models to at least have base functionality and features, with the expectation of more content in the future. MMOs typically have an entire complete campaign or experience before seasonal content starts being added for additional cash.
It's precisely where Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium wants it to be.
It's effectively printing money right now. There is no reason for them to ever "complete" it. They have not been incentivized to complete it, nor do Roberts/CIG seem to have any desire to rein in their ambitions to actually release a functioning game.
They aren't making a profit off the game, you only have to look at their yearly financial reports. Basically all the money goes directly into the development.
A few things to consider; Starfield, a single player, took ten years and 250 million dollars. Star Citizen is two games of comparable size and a live version being maintained, and they began a studio from scratch.
Also consider that relatively simple games like PubG and Apex Legends make over a billion in profits each year. It makes no sense to still be calling SC a scam in light of the fact that there are much easier and faster ways to make money than burning it all on a giant project like this. The actual profit comes when a game is feature complete.
These articles are trotted out every year because of Citizen Con, I have no idea why a certain demographic of people have made it their life's work to try and undermine this project.
Large, complex games do take a long time to be developed. That is to be expected. The accusations of "scam" start when you sell a 40k ship package for a game that doesn't really exist.
There are maybe a handful of people who have spent that much and it's not people who are in dire financial straits. It's made clear from start to finish that when you pay for more than the base $45-50 that what you are paying for is direct the funding of the game (which has over a hundred ships delivered at this point) not that those ships have some inherent value in and of themselves. The ships are simply a perk for literally donating money so that the game can be made to exist.
They aren't tricking people into thinking the product exists when they spend that money, and they have proven that they aren't just taking the money and running. It's simply not a scam, the most you can argue is that it's taking a long time for them to deliver what they promised but even that doesn't hold much water in light of how we see clearly now that far less complex games have taken a comparable development time.
The minutiae of the definition of what is and is not a "scam" is not something I am equipped to discuss. I would just argue that when an unreleased game sells a 40k package, it is reasonable to expect such accusations to occur.
And unreasonable to expect people to keep leveling those accusations after years of them being demonstrated to be false.
If someone sold you a car for 40 grand, took your money, then gave you a picture of a car, would you not feel that's a scam?
I would sure hope they give me a picture of a car as part of the transaction, otherwise I’d have no clue what I’m buying! /s
As long as they’re working on the car and sending me progress, I think it’s not a scam. I do think that each time they decided to increase the scope of the car, and change the model to add more wheels/windows/seats there should be some sort of warning sent out to people who are waiting for that particular car, but it doesn’t seem like that’s exactly a scam. I paid for a product, they’re making the product. If you consider “a ship” the product like in your case, then they’ve delivered plenty of ships so that gives me a good idea of how long the rest will take.
If you think “the game” is the product, then I have great news: it doesn’t cost $40,000, it’s actually only ~$40ish dollars. And you get to use it in the meantime, so you’re free to play it and refund it if you don’t like it, same as any other game really.
I am allowed in the factory, I see the car being built, even test drive and enjoy it.
I pledged for one ship and I have it in-game, right now, as well as permanent access to a continued and increasing stream of the features CIG promised. All the other ships I bought with in-game currency. I gave the pledge not because of the ship, but to support the project, if it were about the ship I could've simply waited for the ship after it was released and made available with in-game credits (they all are eventually).
None of this was unclear to me when I pledged. The ships themselves have no inherent value, and they were clear from the start that every ship would be earnable in-game.
So I got much, much more than a picture. The tired jibes about "jpegs" are worn out.
What if an unreleased game that’s still in active development has an option for you to contribute $40,000 towards its continued progress, and in return you get a shiny item in game? And would it be perceived as more or less of a scam than the ability to contribute $40,000 and get nothing for it in return?
I guess I’m asking: are the semantics an important distinction to the actual transaction that’s happened?
I think it's less about semantics and more about the "contract" between the buyer and the developers.
If the player thinks the purchase is a support of development, knowing fully the game might fail and never release, it's a totally different case than if the player thinks they are buying an asset woth $40K in a fully functional game.
I've never heard about anyone suing them for this, so I'd argue the people who bought this package knew what they're signing up for.
People were suing and getting their money back. That's why the shop page now has clear disclaimers and a refund grace period, which it hadn't before.
Can you source that? I found only 1 lawsuit that wasn't successful
Well, you have every right to ask, but that was a report from a user posted on spectrum which got deleted which I saw via wayback machine, linked from the refund subreddit, which is a very unhappy place to be and search.
It was a complete guide for UK users who gave money in the early years to use the local equivalent of small claims court to get their money back citing the 2016 release date. And it added up, back then a release was promised and not delivered.
I since got over my curiosity for Star Citizen, and the people I played with online are all in hiatus, too, since the persistence patch completely broke what gameplay there was.
Yes, I would say that, in most cases, semantics actually is highly relevant.
The game's purpose is to enrich Roberts and his family and friends, it's why the company is so nepotistic in it's leadership, it isn't built to turn the mind of profits a FIFA or whatever does for EA, also, those are functional companies.
Star Citizen is a scam in the same way NFTs were, when so much of their cash flow is tied to pledges for ships that don't exist in the game, may not ever exist in the game, and the obsession with having all of these huge variety of ships for gameplay loops that aren't in the game, aren't on their timeline, and arguably, may not even be fun! They have sold many times over $100s of dollars of ships that are meant for mercantile, research, exploration, just huge lofty goals of gameplay that hasn't materializes in any form. It is quite literally a development ponzi scheme, and I'm sure their average cost per user is considerably higher than other triple A games (eg:$70). I'm not saying that there isn't a game at all that people can play, there is, but the entire concept of star citizens PTU and the idea of an active in game economy doesn't make sense, will never make sense. It has sold itself to pay to win whales while simultaneously saying "oh it isn't necessary just play the game and you can buy an Idris with credits" that won't jive with the people who paid $500 for an Idris, it never will, and it'll never make sense with so many ships if they are easy to obtain, people will flock to the biggest, most meta ship they can, and then the entire sim aspect breaks down. Like GTA when every NPC and player is in a Bugatti. It's why the capital ships aren't in the game, it's why cooperative is limited to moving crates around or being in a turret. It makes no sense. Elite Dangerous has a bunch of piecemeal gameplay loops tacked on to one another over time and it shows, many are disconnected and most people will simply focus on what gets them the most money, that again breaks the sim aspect they are shooting for. A game economy is inflationary to the extreme, I dunno man, if you take a step back you've got a tech demo that is missing 90% of what is promised and they keep making new.promises, that sounds like scam to me, complete with FOMO pledging of ships, LTI swaps, and a grey market for whales who are bailing on the project. It's IRL economy is more sophisticated than the one in game.
A positive claim that requires you to provide proof that the financial reports are a lie. Until then it's just a baseless assertion.
Except that gameplay has emerged in "any form". Cargo, bounty hunting, missions, racing locations and events, salvage (which I noticed everyone suddenly dropped off their list of things people said will never come) etc. Physicalized cargo and persistance has enabled legitimate piracy and boarding. Along with recurring in-game events like Jumptown that have provided a lot of sandbox activity. They just released a lot of improvements to the Arena Commander and Racing modules in the game as well. And on the horizon is the next actual system along with the first stages of server meshing to support it.
As far as undelivered ships, they delivered over a hundred. They just released the Hull-C, which was one of their most technically difficult ships as it extends and retracts to take large amounts of cargo. The reason there aren't large capital ships in game for players themselves is because those are the most complex assets in the game. Since not every feature is finalized, many of the oldest ships have required some retrofitting to catch up. To release one of the largest ships of the game before the features are more complete would mean double the amount of rework. But as we see larger ships like the Hull-C being released, it indicates pretty clearly that the game is nearing a more complete state. The capital ships will be the last additions to the game for good reason.
The arguments you are making were relevant perhaps seven or eight years ago, but they are not at this time.
Yes, I'm aware of the progress made and my points still stand. How long did it take from the pledge to the Hull-C releasing? Almost the entire development length? Or the banu merchantman et al. These huge expensive ships people pledged for years ago that never materialized, the ship or the gameplay. There is exactly how many environments in the game compared to what was promised?
It's inexcusable, whether or not the alpha is functional as a game you can dick around in. Regardless of if the game releases at some point or not. Answer the call 2016 right? Hilarious. You didn't address my point of how many ships have been sold to fund previous pledges to even get added, or all the work redoing their engine (all to continue clipping through your ship every quantum jump), redoing models/balance/net code.
The long and the short of it is that scope creep, absurd, literally insane attention to detail for shit that will never impact gameplay (toilets, coffee machines, bartending AI!!) has mired the project, and it's funding being dependent on the live service which takes resources simply to maintain, increasing the development costs and timelines. It's a black hole of dev work.
No...they don't. I literally just addressed you claims. Now you're shifting the goal posts from "nothing has been delivered" to "it took too long" even though I already addressed that point in my first post.
I don't know why you're so emotionally fixated on trying to ignore the reality that the game has been proven to not be a scam, but an earnest and succeeding effort. You need to stop. You can make assertions about "development blackholes" all you want, it won't make it true. There gas been no "feature creep" since 8 years ago when they recieved the large influx of money and mandate to expand the game. Everything since then has been with the goal of researching and developing those features and systems.
Correction: The company isn't making a reported profit right now. Note that for many many years, Amazon did the same according to their books, everything was "reinvested". And yet the boss owns gargantuan yachts, surprising if the company seemingly made no excess profits, right?
Chris Roberts is living exactly as large as the idea behind the game intended him to. It's his company and his project, and it feeds him a continuous stream of money. It's the perfect solution for him.
Mate. Seriously. "Undermine the project"? There's nothing I could undermine about it that Chris Roberts hasn't done already himself, in far better. And let's not kid ourselves: The only thing keeping Star Citizen from being long released are the people continuously dumping money into it, which makes it far more profitable to be working on it than releasing it. As long as that money doesn't dry up, the game has no reason to ever be finished.
That's an accusation that requires proof. Show me Chris Roberts "yacht" and any proof that he's hiding money or this is simply wishful thinking.
There are plethora reports that they're mismanaging funds and how he's living lavishly.
The Forbes one comes to mind, but there's more.
The Forbes one from years ago that really provides nothing but speculation? The continued and evident advancement of the project and the studio has debunked the assertion. You don't fabricate 1,000 employees.
Because what I see as someone who plays the game and follows the project is steady progress, to say it could be faster progress because money is being siphoned off secretly to buy yachts and champagne is a positive claim of malfesance that requires actual proof, not interviews from a decade ago, not opinion pieces.
The game started development a decade ago. Articles covering its development, as well as the finances of the game's designers, are as much relevant now as they were previously.
http://dereksmart.com/2018/12/star-citizen-a-new-dawn/
https://i.imgur.com/AZUC5XD.png
Derek Smart is notably not a trustworthy source. Basically any other source is more reliable. He has personal beef with Chris Roberts and a history of just making stuff up with regard to SC.
I'd recommend you source the claims from elsewhere.
That link was mostly a glib comment regarding the "buying yachts" quote; I did a "chris roberts yacht" search on the Googleweb and that's where I found it.
I feel like my point stands independently of Derek Smart's page - if your project started a decade ago, the finances within that time frame all matter.
Do note that a scam doesn't have to actually make money for it to be a scam.
That said, if they aren't making a profit, they wouldn't be making the game in this fashion. If they are getting funding from sources outside of Kickstarter, then why are they continuing to take money (upwards of $40,000 in some cases) from crowdfunding?
They aren't making the game out of the kindness of their hearts, as a non-profit venture.
Starfield took $250 million and 10 years to make, but it was not crowdfunded. It was privately funded in a manner that meant they had to create a final product, or else face their investors. Kickstarter is not an investment platform, and the people funding Star Citizen are not investors. They have no legal or corporate protection.
PubG and Apex Legends are complete games - they do not advertise themselves as being in alpha. They create additional content (as many live service games do), but they also do not require you to pay money to participate. That's a whole other ethical dilemma unto itself, but at least the games are feature-complete. Star Citizen is not.
The actual profit for something like Star Citizen is in vacuuming up as much money from crowdfunding as possible, then shipping a broken product when the money dries up. It hasn't yet, so they haven't shipped the game.
https://www.denofgeek.com/games/star-citizen-report-money-chris-roberts-scam/
Chris will wait until he is forced by circumstances to release the game, just like every other game he ever made. That could be the money drying up, or various lawsuits in the EU putting the project under threat, or just plain public opinion finally snapping his own excessive ego.
I think the maximum hilarity might be what happens if the game gets so far beyond the bits people have paid for as to render their purchases meaningless or ineffective. Star Citizen might be the first MMO to ever launch in a fully-mudflated state, because they cannot wipe out the 'beta' and start fresh without invalidating all of the purchases. That's a unique circumstance no other MMO has had to deal with before, far as I know. How are new players going to feel if the existing pre-launch group has already paid-to-play their way to the top of the game's power and economic curves before launch? It seems a little risky to me.
Chris Roberts' house cost USD 4.8 million in 2018. A company doesn't have to be profitable to pay good CEO salaries to you and your family. Add to that all the amenities owning a large multinational company give you that aren't easy to quantify in money. If you think Star Citizen is a large scam or an ambitious project is more a matter of opinion, but that there is little financial incentive for Roberts to actually have a realistic timeline for finishing the game is a fact. Actually it would require a serious restructuring and/or downsizing of CIG if Star Citizen released tomorrow as it's entirely unclear what the revenue streams of a finished game were.
Another fact is that CIG and all its assets could be liquidated tomorrow and there's nothing anyone could do about it. We're approaching a billion dollars in funds for a project that has no external controls whatsoever. A small non profit that gets a thousand bucks in donations has much stricter controls than this crowdfunded behemoth.
Add to that that all the timelines and deadlines and promises about the game so far vanished and now the official policy is to not even guess at a development timeline.
Add to that that there were repeatedly conflicting statements about what exactly a finished game would entail. It's over thing to have a clear vision about an ambitious project that might need never become reality, but Star Citizen doesn't even have that.
Add to that the proficient marketing surrounding the game that might be considered predatory with people "playing the CCU game" and feeling clever about saving twenty bucks on buying a three hundred dollar ship that isn't released yet.
Anyone who's considering adding money to Star Citizen should be made aware of all of these facts. It still might make sense to get an account, it might even make sense to "buy" an expensive ship. But people should see this side of things, not only the shiny videos on YouTube.
How Starfield could have taken that long and cost that much is absolutely baffling.
My only guess is that it went on so long that they had to resort back to something easy just to ship it and stop the bleeding.
Or, the alternative is that even something "simple" like Starfield from an established studio is more challenging and time consuming to develop than most realize. Let alone a seamless MMO with no loading screens, more complex feature set and a large singeplayer campaign to accompany it.
It's interesting how people talked about Starfield as the Star Citizen killer in the lead up to its release, but now that it's come out the attitude is that it also must've been poorly managed or something, rather than people admitting Star Citizen is taking an appropriate amount of time given its complexity and ambition. I really am kind of at a loss how to address that.
I understand why Star Citizen has burned so much money. They set out to make something very ambitious and haven't given up on that.
Starfield though? It's not that content rich and it's certainly weak in its features.
I don't see how 250MM is possible without significant mismanagement.
These development timelines are always a little bit misleading. This game did not spend 10 years in active heavy development, that likely did not start until after they shipped Fallout 76. 95% of the labor that went into making Starfield was probably in the last 4-5 years.
I don't feel productive making this comment - but this was obvious as early as around 8 years ago. They're never going to release a full "game" because they can not possibly live up to the hype and could never utilize their budget effectively. The game they want to build and that people expect from the budget can not be made with the ways humans organize in development teams today. Maybe future technology or superior organizational systems can make it happen.
What?
I assume they meant they don't feel productive saying it and got autocorrected.
I heavily played for about 12 months, I joined an Org and bought a few ships.
It is, in some ways, an incredible, breathtaking game, unlike any other I've ever played. The role playing potential of a space [whatever profession you want] and living a live with a ship to call home is awesome.
The persistent universe with no loading screens means you can see a ship in atmosphere while taking a train in the city, run to your hangar, climb inside a highly detailed ship and take off with semi-realistic physics, and meet up with the ship you saw and then together fly out of atmosphere into space. 0 loading screens.
At the same time a battle can be happening in orbit that has been going on since you woke up in your bed in the city, and you can join it. Every player is "together" in the same sandbox, there's a guy in a distant outpost mining asteroids, there's players delivering cargo, there's players shooting each other and NPC's in bunker missions.
It's great, the gun play is good enough as an FPS game, the dog fighting is fun and immersive as a flight simulator, the ships are very fun and cool to explore and use.
But the criticism is also true, they can't deliver on anything. They waste time developing new ships to pump out sales, rather than work on core game technology, ridiculous bugs, or gameloop/mission content.
There's a real sense that it will never release, so much time has passed that the bar keeps moving, by the time they freeze things and release something, others may well have done a better job at many of the things the game wants to be.
But it's not every player in the same sandbox. It's instanced: "servers". Currently the population is ~100 per server.
Is that a solvable problem? That limit sounds like a bandaid solution to the fact computers aren’t good enough yet.
I’ve played games with up to a thousand players in a single instance, and oh boy do you need to crank down the settings if you want to maintain frame rates. And even then, it has players and vehicles stop rendering past a certain distance to preserve resources in the larger battles, which can sometimes mean frustratingly dying to an enemy who isn’t rendering on your local client.
I believe in another decade of development (they’ve had one already, what’s one more?) that home machines and servers will be powerful enough to justify increasing that cap per instance. I just don’t think it’s viable yet.
It's actually not solvable for a simple reason - every player adds more bandwidth requirements to the system. It will always scale past the point where any network technology can pump that much data around.
The only game to ever get around it is Eve Online, which is the only MMO where every single player is active on the same worldspace. Eve cheated their way around the problem with TiDi - as the number of players in an area grows, the clock in the game slows down, even as far as 1/15th real time, placing the game in slow motion. This of course gives the network the time it needs to pump the data around and maintain the persistent universe. That's the only 'solution' to this problem that really works.
There are only three options. Reduce the amount of network overhead per player, divide players into multiple manageable worldspaces, or slow down game play to a point where the network can cope with the total overhead. Most MMOs use a combination of these to give the illusion that they can handle thousands of players - get every player on a WoW server to all visit a single zone on the same day and it will take down that server before even a few percent of them show up, guaranteed. This is not a problem that faster computers will ever help to solve, because it's not about the CPU, it's about the network.
I feel like I should also point out, since we're talking about Star Citizen, that this particular specter is precisely the kind that can kill your MMO on launch. When you leave beta and thousands of new people show up doing thousands of things at once, the quality of the code will receive the harshest field test there is, and it is notoriously difficult to nail this down in testing before launch.
Do notice that they're talking about having many players on one server, and not necessarily having all the players in the same spot
You can easily have thousands on a server, but they are generally not in the same spot.
100 players per server seems awfully low.
A hundred is low for a finished game, but it's not really that surprising for a game that is sill technically in a pre-alpha state which hasn't reached minimum viable product status yet. Optimizing for the network, and just plain optimizations in general are usually at the tail end of the dev cycle, because until you're close to the finish line you don't really know what your requirements are or what kind of tricks you'll be able to use to slim it all down. You'd change something in the game and have to do the optimizations over again, so they come last, which incidentally is why so many buggy triple a titles get released - when you rush it out the door, odds are good the optimizations got cut.
I remember when Rift launched playing the beta. The network code was in a pretty awful state there, the point of the beta was to beat it up and shake out the flaws. A couple months later at launch those issues were gone... but they did have to cut down on the number of players per server and several of the advanced mechanics for zone-based events. They worked a bit too well and drew in veritable flash mobs of players... and they were glorious chaos. It was a bit disappointing because they didn't quite reach the level of multi-player interaction they had been aiming for. The beta was actually more fun than the finished game for me because of that. It had almost recovered the feel of Everquest which itself capped out at about three hundred players in a zone at once. Not bad for a '90s game in retrospect.
In your WoW example there, the 'same spot' actually is the same physical server - you want all the players near each other to be on the same physical hardware because it makes for fast updates... sending all that data between physical servers is just adding more pain to your update problems. In WoW a 'zone' is a physical server... or several, if those zones aren't busy you can share them. The players on one server in Orgrimmar aren't on the same physical hardware as the players in The Undercity even though WoW is telling you they are both on the same 'server' - they aren't talking physical hardware, just a virtual definition of a few thousand players. Each dungeon instance is also its own thing on its own physical server. WoW is very good at splitting things up but maintaining the illusion that it's all one universe.
I guess the issue is that given the time, finances, and monetization of Star Citizen, not many people are willing to be as tolerant with it as they are with a regular alpha game.
I'm thinking of a server as an abstract construct, not the actual hardware, in the same way that a mind is not the same as a brain, but rather a model the brain stages. A "realm", if you will.
WoW's realm capacity in 2004/2006 was up to 3000 players without sharding. That's quite a bit more than 100.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just the same thing we see with Baldur's Gate 3. If Star Citizen launches and is a success, that's very, very bad news for a lot of other games because it will raise people's standards. For some reason this seems to terrify developers and publishers. I wouldn't put it past some of them to pay for a few hatchet job articles now and then - though Chris' own 'marketing' of the game is certainly also to blame for the high expectations. He's always been more than a little hyperbolic, and he has several failed projects on his resume that never appeared. I'd hesitate to call it a scam, though - unlike those failed projects, there actually is a game appearing out of this mess. The problem is, it'll never ever be 'done' until something finally forces him to release it. That's just his style.
It would indeed be nice if the ones making Star Citizen were truly invested in making it.
The ideas are all fine, wonderful even. But cons and cult always starts by telling what you wanna hear.
Doubly so for a cult with a massive sunk cost fallacy. I'm just going by his track record - I could have written how this would go on the day the game was announced as a kickstarter because he's done it before with every single game he's ever made. Hype, delay, expand, hype, delay, expand, over and over - and if he doesn't get his way, he walks from the project.
His reputation is on the line this time though. If this game doesn't pan out he's finished as anything but an indie game developer working solo. Considering how badly he wants to make space games and films, he'd better deliver if he ever wants to do those things in the future.
I understand his reputation is on the line, bit it's just too much money.
Richard Garriott went down that road for much less.
It's also why MMO's generally have very stiff mechanics, and rely on cooldown-based hotbar combat with auto-targeting. You don't really see MMO's sporting hundreds of players with visceral hack and slash or first person shooter combat, because these kinds of systems require significantly more bandwidth per player and more aggressive client-side prediction to feel responsive.
Star Citizen wants to be an FPS and a space combat sim, so their scaling troubles are going to be much harder than your typical MMO.
If it wasn't really showing its age now, I'd love to recommend the only MMOFPS that I know of, Planetside2. Combined arms (meaning you can have infantry fights but also a bunch of tanks and road vehicles, and also a bunch of aircraft from agile fighters up to beefy transport planes) in an open world of approx 8km by 8km playable area, and up to 800~900 players in a single instance.
It's got very little "progression", almost every weapon is a sidegrade to the others, which on the one hand means you're sort of on a level playing field with the veterans of the game, but on the other hand they will have so much more practice that you're just gonna die a lot when you first jump in. Like, a lot a lot. The game is also forgiving about deaths though, there's no penalty at all, and it takes often less than 10 seconds on the death screen before you can respawn (even less if a friendly medic revives you).
But yeah, the thing I need to really emphasise for people thinking of trying it out: it's a shooter game, so you can bring across your existing experience and muscle memory, but unlike almost every other shooter game, you will die a lot and it will not matter. That's tough to un-learn when so many other shooter games have such penalty for death.
Also, I imagine this is the sort of thing that future networking technologies can't really solve. Sure, networking technology can get better. But whatever new computer technology that allows that improved networking will also allow for increased graphics, game complexity, etc. If people were content to play a game with 1990s-era graphics and game mechanics, you could probably have millions of people play that game simultaneously, on a single instance, using modern networking technology. But there aren't millions of people who would want to play such an anachronistic game, so it would be a pointless exercise. New technology improves network capabilities, but it also increases the per-user demand on the network.
That wouldn't work either. I don't care what the game is, it's the scaling that kills it dead in any era.
Let's say you have ten players. Your character does something. Packet goes to the server, various processes and databases are updated, and then the update goes on to those other nine players and back to the player who caused it. Worst case for your latency is ten players doing something at once, ten packets go in, and unless you are a freaking genius about your code, one hundred packets go out. You've got to send the updates to everyone.
Now imagine this with a million players instead of ten. Too many updates, too many packets of data. It's not even about the bandwidth at this point. The latency is now shite, and while TiDi is a solution, I doubt anyone playing an FPS like Star Citizen is going to enjoy being in slow-motion mode the instant you get more than fifty players in the same space. That's the real problem... each update to the game space made by each player must also be sent on to every other player and it has to happen at an acceptable latency.
That's why everything gets 'sharded' in modern MMOs. If you isolate which players need to send updates to which other players, and which ones don't, you can avoid that self-induced denial of service attack on your own game servers. If you want all players interacting at once, you can't do that anymore, and you end up at the center of a packet storm that will vaporize your routers, switches, and pocketbook once your ISP sends you the bandwidth bill.
A good way to do this for a game like Star Citizen would be to have all the players in a single ship during a space battle be in their own instance. What happens inside that ship isn't important to anyone outside of it, so that data is 'local' to the ship. When another ship fires a cannon through the first ship, that's an update you have to care about, so you propagate that event into the local ship space. That's an example of how you can cut down on the latency issue. There tricks that can be played to ease the pain somewhat, but they only get you just so far no matter how good they are - and most of the tricks that companies come up with to do this are considered trade secrets.
Ultimately, this led to HUGE problems in Mythic's WarHammer MMO. They didn't want ganking/one shotting a thing so they made just about everything a DoT ability. Imagine 50 people in a fight each using 2 or 3 different DoTs. In Dark Age of Camelot (Mythic's much older other MMO) you could have fun in grand fights of 300 vs 300 vs 200. Warhammer Online essentially turned into a DDoS-fest if it was even 15 vs 15.
When it was released in September 2008 it had sold a million copies and had 800,000 subscribers. By December of the same year they were down to 300,000 subs. That's how bad the lag was in fights assuming you were one of the few that didn't get dropped from the game.
I have fond memories of RvR in DAoC. Their choice of three factions instead of two, competing capture the flag style to lock down territory and artifacts with each other for realm-wide bonuses that applied to all of that faction's players was a stroke of genius. It guaranteed that the dominant faction would always be attacked by the other two, which kept the PvP fresh with constantly changing circumstances. Really good design choice.
It was a pretty awesome sway of elf-correcting when 1 faction got too powerful.
Another genius move they did was not allowing you to understand anything said by characters of the other realms so there really wasn't a way to trash talk opponents in the game.
I'm very suprised I haven't seen the 3-way system in more games (actually none come immediately to mind).
I can't think of any myself. I wonder if it would work as well with a number higher than three.
That’s pretty close to how their server meshing plan is going to be. They’re going to be using dynamically instanced shards that can shrink and grow depending on player density as players group up and move apart.
A lot of larger ships lack interior windows specifically to enable this future splitting of the interior of the ship with the exterior, so jimmy doing repair work in engineering doesn’t need to get packet data from Jonathan the fighter pilot’s rudder taking damage.
It makes me wonder how optimized Amazon's Crytek-derived Lumberyard truly is. I'd have serious reservations about putting the server infrastructure for this into the cloud, because at best the cloud service is optimized for generic MMOs, not your MMO. There are massive performance gains (50% at the least) to be realized by optimizing the design of the physical server cluster to precisely match the requirements of the specific game code running on it. I'd be surprised if Amazon employs a devops team that can manage that level of design synergy. They strike me as too big to care that much, and if they did do it, I expect they'd charge out the nose for it.
I distinctly remember participating in a world PvP battle around Tarren Mill with at least a hundred players, and that was nearly 20 years ago. Learning that, 20 years later, Star Citizen limits its instances to the same number of players is kinda disappointing.
Not making any judgement here, I would have expected some advancement in that time span, but I guess it's effectively not easily solvable, and probably not needed; 100 players at once in your immediate surroundings is probably more than enough in any situation.
If it helps, I’ve personally seen larger than 100 servers. I think it’s from 100-180ish depending on the server, but I’ve definitely seen a 200 person server every once in a while.
Every time they optimize the network, they increase the server cap to add more players instead of just having better server performance. We had 50 player servers for about 4 years, and then about a year ago they made them 100, and a half year ago they bumped it up further.
MMORPG servers can have thousands of concurent users. I play World of Warcraft with those numbers without an issue on a fairly weak machine. This is a solved problem.
Being online in the same game but in a dozen+ different zones is not the same as thousands of concurrent players all in a city capital. That is why MMO protests tell everyone to go to one spot/zone/city.
EVE Online has 1 game world. Every player to ever play the game has played in the same universe. When I played it, it was pretty normal to have 30,000+ concurrent players online. They have over 5000 solar systems and an additional 2500 wormholes in the game. They do this by putting clusters of solar systems onto a single server blade and hide loading screens behind the gate warp mechanic. Certain systems (like the main trade hubs) run on their own server blade with no other systems.
In the case of giant, collossal battles they'll reinforce the node (put the system on its own special beefier server blade) and still have to slow down the game clock (Time Dilation or TiDi) where 1 second in game can be literal 30-60 seconds in real time (think purposeful lag so the network packets can all catch up). In the "Massacre at M2-XFE" they had over 1300 Titan class ships alone (Titans are the largest, most expensive class of ship in the game that takes multiple months of real time to build). While the most expensive fight that I know of in EVE, it was only the 3rd largest fight at the time. It was a slideshow not a fight, per se
I feel like the degree to which World of Warcraft separates players into instances and regions shows that it's not a solved problem, and in fact while you can say there are thousands of concurrent players (across how many servers, regions, and instances?), your machine is rarely rendering more than a hundred at a time even in the busiest areas.
If WoW had all those players in a single, continuous world without loading screens, and that a player on the top of some mountain could actually see and interact with players in a city on the other side of the world, that would be a much stronger argument. But they've put lots of little tricks and mini loading screens in place to hide the fact that they're instanced.
They have 1000+ employees and these things can happen in parallel.
It's definitely all slower than any of us ever wanted it to be, but it is a slow crawl. PES was a major stepping stone that took years of foundational development to prepare and it still took them longer to implement it than their worst public statements. That does leave two more major technical hurdles for the game to be realized, static server meshing and dynamic server meshing, but they are on the path.
My interest waxes and wanes from time to time but ultimately there are a lot of other good games to play out there. My view is when it's done it's done.
I look at it like any other game. I'll take it for a spin a couple of months after release when the worst of the bugs are ironed out, if it makes it that far. If I like it I'll bring over a guild of a couple hundred people who will be relieved not to be playing yet another fantasy-styled MMO.
World of Warcraft took seven years to develop, and WoW is a joke compared to what Star Citizen is attempting to accomplish. The total dev time for Star Citizen should be about the same as the dev time for a complex MMO... plus the dev time for a good flight simulator... plus the dev time for a first person shooter... plus the dev time for a decent single player exploration-style space game. That would put it over twenty years total, by the way. Ten years and the whole thing is still a bit janky... but it's there, and it kinda works at least well enough to see it all coming together. I'd say they are ahead of schedule and also that most of the hard stuff is behind them. :P
That math doesn't add up. You develop those things in parallel and while applying multiple systems in one game would add development time compared to them released as individual games (because those systems need to work in tandem), and ramping up the production takes more time because of bigger team(s), that doesn't mean the development time is 1+1+1. It never is because modern development is so complex, but especially in a case like this.
Besides, afaik they've thrown away and started fresh a couple of times which, while not unheard of, isn't the standard and tells about development problems (what kind of problems, you can guess).
But they also have something you can play, it just seems like they're tacking on more stuff to keep the boat from reaching the harbor. I hesitate to call it a scam or grift but it's a unique way to keep the ship moving with perpetual crowdfunding.
If they ever release the game from early access, that will give people a solid target to criticize and selling dlc to a flawed game is much harder than selling more features to in-development game now that they have established an audience.
Actually, it does add up. Developing them in tandem means now you need 4x the number of developers to do it in the same time frame - the code complexity doesn't magically go down, in fact it multiplies the overall complexity and gets much worse.
We're three years past the time it takes to develop a game like World of Warcraft, and people think it's taking too long, despite it being orders of magnitude more complex than any other game ever attempted in the entire history of the industry. It is four games (five if you count S42) that are traditionally separate genres rolled into one - the last time that happened was Spore, and we saw how that went. Frankly, those people who thought it would be done in anything less than a decade had unrealistic expectations and don't know much about game development. If I had to pin down a release date I'd wager on 2027 at the earliest, and that's assuming nothing goes wrong... like changing your core game engine not once, but twice. :P
This saga is going to go on for several more years before there's a released game. If you think people are angry about it now, just wait, it'll get much worse.
This article is not written very well nor is it terribly informative
There have been so many exposés about Star Citizen's development, broken promises, and lack of accountability with its funding, it's genuinely interesting. I can't think of another project with investment, not just in games but in general, that has been allowed to perpetually expand its own deadline and scope without having to answer to anyone in any meaningful way. They do release new content, and they do inch closer and closer to promises they've made before, but by the time they deliver on one promise, a thousand more have sprung up, and each one pushes the potential for Star Citizen to be a released piece of media further out. It seems like fraud, where they do just enough work to not get sued.
I think its time to admit that star citizen has taken the crown from duke nukem forever.
It's getting there; another few years and it'll have surpassed the length of time for Duke Nukem Forever between announcement and release.
For posterity's sake:
http://duke.a-13.net/
Plus ça change.
Terrible article. And why is a quarter of the text in bold? It caused havoc on my inner monologue.
Also, why there no mention of No Man Sky in the article? Did author forget about it or just don't know.
I stopped really caring about this game a long time ago, but I'm intrigued about what happened to the Squadron 42 single-player game? If I remember rightly, there was a trailer featuring some big names, but then nothing since. Did it get completely scrapped or is it just delayed?
The general pitch was that S42 would essentially be the 'training level' of the game, presented as a single player experience, that would get you up to speed on the lore, universe, mechanics, and let you get comfortable with it all before you jumped into the full MMO. That's honestly not a bad way to go about it.
The trouble here is that Chris Roberts is the undisputed king of scope creep. I'm old enough to remember playing Wing Commander when it was a shiny new 486 game and GPUs hadn't even been invented yet - it was the same story then as now with both Wing Commander and Privateer. New ideas and new features and new plans were undoubtedly heaped upon S42 until it collapsed under its own weight.
They've been really tight lipped on it and it always feels like it's two years away. Honestly it sounds stuck in development hell.
There was a leaked footage roll last year of SQ42 that was pretty impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aD_TdBnUrI
It seems there are people having fun with it and enjoying being on the ride of the continuous development it has. I think anyone who isn't interested in it at all now and is wondering when it will suddenly become "done" and interesting to them isn't the target audience of it, at least not right now. I don't like how articles often paint it as a scam for not being done yet as if the people who like it are nonexistent or are wrong about liking it and have been tricked.
Obviously there are also a decent fraction of people who funded it a long time ago early on before the development style was apparent who expected a different development style and timeline and want a refund, but being an early supporter of anything comes with risks like this and it doesn't seem like the money is being fraudulently used for purposes besides the game and it seems like those users are offered refunds anyway.
Yeah the focus on "release date" at this point is a bit meaningless. The game is, for all intents and purposes, out. It will continue to have content releases. This is the live service, Game as a Service model that many games, enjoyed by many players, have. There will be no clear defined "release", just a continual trickle of content.
Except crucially, star citizen is not a subscription model, unless something changed. As it stands, you have an OOM more ships unreleased than released, and that model must continue, for them to have funding. It's a ship jpg ponzi scheme.
games as a service as a model is fine, I think the friction comes from people saying "you can't accuse them of a bad or unfinished or buggy product because the product isn't out yet" The language around it is that it isn't yet a complete experience, or the experience they intend to deliver, yet we expect other games with live service models to at least have base functionality and features, with the expectation of more content in the future. MMOs typically have an entire complete campaign or experience before seasonal content starts being added for additional cash.
Super mismanaged game. Allowing scope creep to take over. Need better project management.
3 words: Sunk Cost Fallacy