Looks interesting. I can't wait to play it in a couple of decades, after another 17 or 18 rounds of funding. We should really change the name of the Sunk Cost Fallacy to the Star Citizen Fallacy....
Looks interesting. I can't wait to play it in a couple of decades, after another 17 or 18 rounds of funding.
We should really change the name of the Sunk Cost Fallacy to the Star Citizen Fallacy.
Edit, because I feel bad that this is such a low-effort, snide comment, so here's a little context:
Star Citizen was announced on Kickstarter (Oct 2012) slightly less than a year after Skyrim was released (Nov 2011). Not like a Special Edition or GOTY, plain vanilla-ass Skyrim.
Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years to develop. Every indication is that the game was totally scrapped and started from scratch at least once in that time.
The span of time between the release of The Return of the Jedi and the release of The Phantom Menace was roughly 16 years.
You could buy two Boeing 777 airliners free and clear from the factory for what Star Citizen has raised in funding. That, or just about 4 Lockheed Martin F-35s. Maybe they'd give you a bulk discount.
The combined total budgets of The Witcher 3, Watch Dogs 1, Destiny 1, Halo 2 and Black Myth Wukong, including marketing and adjusted for inflation, is still at least $25 million less than the budget for Star Citizen.
While the additional context is appreciated because I can laugh it again, don't feel bad. At this point anyone that disagrees with your initial post is a lost backer.
because I feel bad that this is such a low-effort, snide comment,
While the additional context is appreciated because I can laugh it again, don't feel bad. At this point anyone that disagrees with your initial post is a lost backer.
I was more concerned about low-effort shitposting on Tildes than about hurting anyone's feelings. Mine was a pretty mild criticism compared to some out there.
I was more concerned about low-effort shitposting on Tildes than about hurting anyone's feelings. Mine was a pretty mild criticism compared to some out there.
I get the skepticism and complaints. They have certainly taken their time, and if they miss this self imposed deadline of 2026 for Squadron 42, I expect they won't have any goodwill with the...
I get the skepticism and complaints. They have certainly taken their time, and if they miss this self imposed deadline of 2026 for Squadron 42, I expect they won't have any goodwill with the backers left to burn.
I do appreciate the ambition, both with Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, and their fidelity. If/when it ever releases I'd love to see a retrospective on what changed and went wrong over the years, and (assuming it does release) how they navigated it and learned from past mistakes.
At least it doesn't appear to be a total rug pull scam. I still have no intention of buying in. The budget for it is comparable to Genshin Impact, the whole strategy of which is microtransaction...
At least it doesn't appear to be a total rug pull scam.
I still have no intention of buying in. The budget for it is comparable to Genshin Impact, the whole strategy of which is microtransaction hell, and I can't see how it could ever possibly turn a profit. That's bad news for a game with live service elements. It's conceivable they could launch and then close the servers two weeks later because they're half a billion dollars underwater.
From what little I know, it doesn't appear to be outright fraud, but the scale of mismanagement is truly staggering. Usually only governments under conservative leadership reach this scale of waste and boneheadedness.
I hope Roberts got his fill of sci-fi wall paneling, because there's no chance anyone will let him within a country mile of a director's chair again.
I don't like the label of scam for Star Citizen and I think it's unwarranted. Anyone that follows development can plainly see they are trying to develop the game they set out to make. There are...
I don't like the label of scam for Star Citizen and I think it's unwarranted. Anyone that follows development can plainly see they are trying to develop the game they set out to make. There are several factors that have lead to the long timeline, and some of them I don't think are the fault of CIG (Cloud Imperium Games)/Chris Roberts. Remember that they started with 13 employees and modest goals of launching a much smaller and focused game in 2014. No one could have predicted the demand or funding they received, and they have tried to make development costs match and grow with the amount they've received. How do you scope a game to make without knowing a budget? If the budget continues to grow, do you take the extra funding as profit or turn it back into development? There is and was a pretty dramatic increase to the games funding, which caused several changes in scope. Because of this increased scope, no technology existed to make the game, so they had to build it. R&D is hard and timelines are unknown. Overall, I think they've been pretty transparent about this process in regards to Star Citizen and not so great about Squadron 42 (the promised original 2014 release date, then the 2016 'answer the call,' and then years of silence following).
I've been pretty clear that I don't think it is a scam. I've said so repeatedly, in fact. However, just because something isn't fraud, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve scrutiny and criticism. Chris...
I've been pretty clear that I don't think it is a scam. I've said so repeatedly, in fact.
However, just because something isn't fraud, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve scrutiny and criticism. Chris Roberts and CIG massively oversold their capabilities and the scope of the project. If their initial pitch had come just a couple of years later, after numerous project failures, scams and disappointments had taken the shine off crowd-funded game financing, no one would've taken it at all seriously. I would even hazard to say Roberts and CIG are a small part of why that model has largely died out.
On the flip side, all the mania about this game did lead to a renaissance of sorts for the genre. Both the X and Elite franchises came back in a big way 'round about the time of SC's announcement, and for sure it had some influence on games like Star Wars: Squadrons, Everspace, Rebel Galaxy, and Chorvs (the name of which I will never not spell with a 'v' because I still think it's hilarious). While they weren't all home runs, they were worthwhile experiences, and I'm sure helped launch some careers.
But I dunno, man. $700 million dollars and counting. Twelve years plus. What happens if they just run out of money and can't finish the game? Are all these investors and would-be players with supporter-skinned ships going to be content with probably Squadron 42 and a Whitman's sampler of tech demos? Or will they hunt Roberts down and hold his head in the sci-fi bulkhead door to his office?
It all just seems like near-Greek tragedy levels of hubris. Real Euripides shit.
I think it's a rare case where bad management is rewarded if not incentivized. In a traditionally funded game all this scope creep, setbacks, reengineering etc would have people freaking out and...
I think it's a rare case where bad management is rewarded if not incentivized.
In a traditionally funded game all this scope creep, setbacks, reengineering etc would have people freaking out and breathing down the team's neck. In this instance, it just means that they can keep the gravy train rolling by pumping out a few more concepts of ships, etc.
And maybe somewhere in the back of their heads, they're performing the calculation that says that once this is released and finished there is no way:
The team stays the same size for maintenance and updates
This company is getting similar funding for another game or even making another game at all.
Other companies are eager to hire that dude from that team that took 20years and a billion dollars to make a pretty good game.
This kind of game would have never happened in a traditional funding model, that is part of why it has succeeded thus far. There is a clear desire for something like this to be made and played. No...
This kind of game would have never happened in a traditional funding model, that is part of why it has succeeded thus far. There is a clear desire for something like this to be made and played. No publisher wanted to risk it, so they tried crowdfunding it. The original plan was to raise a few million to then take to investors and publishers and say "Hey look, people want to play this type of game, fund me for it" but that became unnecessary with how much funding they received. Are they better for it? Time will tell. There's a point in which they can stretch the goodwill of the backers to and I think it's already stretched pretty far. Failing to deliver on their current 2026 goal would be pretty destructive to the project as a whole, and management appears to be aware of that risk.
And yes, that is a fairly normal cycle for game companies to grow and shrink as production finalizes and things are released. Keep in mind they are releasing "episode 1" of Squadron 42 and wanted to do up to 3 games total, and Star Citizen 1.0 is launching with 5 systems with the expectation to grow to 100 (or more). I'd expect them to keep a good portion of their staff on as they continue to build both of those up and SC continues its live service.
Continuous gameplay sections at 24:16 (turret section) and 50:21 (FPS section). Zero in-cockpit ship combat. Guess part of the early story is you earning your wings, or pay up for Star Citizen to...
Continuous gameplay sections at 24:16 (turret section) and 50:21 (FPS section). Zero in-cockpit ship combat. Guess part of the early story is you earning your wings, or pay up for Star Citizen to get a taste of that instead.
They really cranked up the post processing on this one. My eyes was starting to hurt trying to maintain focus because so many scenes were uniformly blurry like someone replaced the lens with frosted glass for a few seconds. An example is when they showed the Vanduul at 22:00 or whenever there's any scene with a ship moving. The ridiculously thick motion blur kicks in and just smears entire chunks of the frame.
More nitpicks and random thoughts with comparisons to Call of Duty campaigns, given the similarities in the cinematic corridorness of the demo:
Military science fiction in space are right up my alley since the Halo games and Infinite Warfare. While I like Andor and Dune, they're more ground-based and I've been looking for something with a little bit more war than recent Star Wars output, if this game ever comes out. A coworker recommended the Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas, might start reading that.
Trope of ships with capital-class weaponry in close proximity and not blowing each other up with friendly fire and the planet behind the fight left surprisingly intact, similar to the Earth cutscene in Mass Effect 3. I'm not expecting Newtonian physics in my Wing Commander successor, but some of the camera angles make it look like the ships are trading paint.
I haven't seen the live demo if they were talking in certain sections, but some of the cinematic corridor sections before the tutorial drag on with the player staring a bit too long to showcase the "background chatter while you walk by" feature. Which would be novel for anyone who still hasn't experienced a Call of Duty campaign.
Trope of holding fire until the enemy is at point blank range (while we already have modern combat beyond visual range). A chunk of the Vanduul fleet would've been cut down before they got real close unless this navy has zero long-range weapons and sensors, and you wouldn't get a cinematic turret section out of it. Complete opposite of my X4 playthrough helping Argon and Antigone hold back the Xenon, where Terran ships and tech are so powerful (especially the Asgard's main gun) that they can delete a Xenon fleet the moment they pop out of a jump gate.
33:33 - One thing Call of Duty campaigns do really well to sell this kind of setpiece is screaming or panicked lines over the comms before something happens. Here a capital ship casually blows up in front of you while comms are silent where it should've felt like a bigger deal. Like the kind of dialog that plays at 37:06.
This turret section is dragging on for waaay too long.
51:35 - More staring at "look at this scripted section we did". Another thing Call of Duty campaigns do well is it would either script this section while you're walking around (like when he crawls through the vents at 56:00), or keeping these sections really short and immediately returning control back to you.
57:40 - Good to see hot lead is still effective in 2945.
57:58 - I'm a sucker for animation detail like this in games, a quick button press when opening doors. Not Doom Eternal fast, but excused since you're not Doomguy.
Like the light puzzle elements of the zero G section. Also more staring at cinematic moments. "Get to safety" can wait.
1:05:22 - It ain't a space game if artificial gravity isn't intrinsically tied to oxygen systems.
That bridge fight looks rough. Also like hearing the no-nonsense Aegis Dynamics ship voice.
For the WW2 in space combat, I have to admit I'm still a sucker for that, even though it is extremely unrealistic and doesn't make sense even within the technology the games that do this present....
For the WW2 in space combat, I have to admit I'm still a sucker for that, even though it is extremely unrealistic and doesn't make sense even within the technology the games that do this present. I've thought it might be interesting to add a bit of lore where the jamming/defense tech has become so good along with offense that beyond line of sight doesn't work anymore, and you need good old manual aiming as all CPU tracking is perfectly disrupted through 'technology' . I even thought it might make for a really cinamatic battle, where the ww2 style space dogfight happens culminating in downing a specific type of ship, then instantly having your allies fire off a giant salvo from a capital ship and/or long range base that fills space with homing projectiles that instantly obliterate everything in sight to end the fight. This way you get the non submarine gameplay and still have some reasonably believable in game lore.
As for squadron 42 and me I hate to say that I'm still interested in playing something from them, however they won't see any cash from me until it's released, reviewed well, then on sale later on.
This is the intro/tutorial level to Squadron 42 and the general setting of the universe, so the first hour in supposedly 30-40 hours of the campaign. Some of their other promo material shows clips...
This is the intro/tutorial level to Squadron 42 and the general setting of the universe, so the first hour in supposedly 30-40 hours of the campaign. Some of their other promo material shows clips in the cockpit. In that sense I find the pop ups and turret gameplay acceptable, if boring.
Chris Roberts has always talked abut and aimed for a cinematic feel to the game, like WW2 in space or Star Wars, so that was pretty much a given. They deliberately slowed the flight model over the past year to bring combat closer in and stop the "shooting at HUD elements only" gameplay.
Looks interesting. I can't wait to play it in a couple of decades, after another 17 or 18 rounds of funding.
We should really change the name of the Sunk Cost Fallacy to the Star Citizen Fallacy.
Edit, because I feel bad that this is such a low-effort, snide comment, so here's a little context:
Star Citizen was announced on Kickstarter (Oct 2012) slightly less than a year after Skyrim was released (Nov 2011). Not like a Special Edition or GOTY, plain vanilla-ass Skyrim.
Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years to develop. Every indication is that the game was totally scrapped and started from scratch at least once in that time.
The span of time between the release of The Return of the Jedi and the release of The Phantom Menace was roughly 16 years.
You could buy two Boeing 777 airliners free and clear from the factory for what Star Citizen has raised in funding. That, or just about 4 Lockheed Martin F-35s. Maybe they'd give you a bulk discount.
The combined total budgets of The Witcher 3, Watch Dogs 1, Destiny 1, Halo 2 and Black Myth Wukong, including marketing and adjusted for inflation, is still at least $25 million less than the budget for Star Citizen.
While the additional context is appreciated because I can laugh it again, don't feel bad. At this point anyone that disagrees with your initial post is a lost backer.
I was more concerned about low-effort shitposting on Tildes than about hurting anyone's feelings. Mine was a pretty mild criticism compared to some out there.
I get the skepticism and complaints. They have certainly taken their time, and if they miss this self imposed deadline of 2026 for Squadron 42, I expect they won't have any goodwill with the backers left to burn.
I do appreciate the ambition, both with Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, and their fidelity. If/when it ever releases I'd love to see a retrospective on what changed and went wrong over the years, and (assuming it does release) how they navigated it and learned from past mistakes.
At least it doesn't appear to be a total rug pull scam.
I still have no intention of buying in. The budget for it is comparable to Genshin Impact, the whole strategy of which is microtransaction hell, and I can't see how it could ever possibly turn a profit. That's bad news for a game with live service elements. It's conceivable they could launch and then close the servers two weeks later because they're half a billion dollars underwater.
From what little I know, it doesn't appear to be outright fraud, but the scale of mismanagement is truly staggering. Usually only governments under conservative leadership reach this scale of waste and boneheadedness.
I hope Roberts got his fill of sci-fi wall paneling, because there's no chance anyone will let him within a country mile of a director's chair again.
I don't like the label of scam for Star Citizen and I think it's unwarranted. Anyone that follows development can plainly see they are trying to develop the game they set out to make. There are several factors that have lead to the long timeline, and some of them I don't think are the fault of CIG (Cloud Imperium Games)/Chris Roberts. Remember that they started with 13 employees and modest goals of launching a much smaller and focused game in 2014. No one could have predicted the demand or funding they received, and they have tried to make development costs match and grow with the amount they've received. How do you scope a game to make without knowing a budget? If the budget continues to grow, do you take the extra funding as profit or turn it back into development? There is and was a pretty dramatic increase to the games funding, which caused several changes in scope. Because of this increased scope, no technology existed to make the game, so they had to build it. R&D is hard and timelines are unknown. Overall, I think they've been pretty transparent about this process in regards to Star Citizen and not so great about Squadron 42 (the promised original 2014 release date, then the 2016 'answer the call,' and then years of silence following).
I've been pretty clear that I don't think it is a scam. I've said so repeatedly, in fact.
However, just because something isn't fraud, doesn't mean it doesn't deserve scrutiny and criticism. Chris Roberts and CIG massively oversold their capabilities and the scope of the project. If their initial pitch had come just a couple of years later, after numerous project failures, scams and disappointments had taken the shine off crowd-funded game financing, no one would've taken it at all seriously. I would even hazard to say Roberts and CIG are a small part of why that model has largely died out.
On the flip side, all the mania about this game did lead to a renaissance of sorts for the genre. Both the X and Elite franchises came back in a big way 'round about the time of SC's announcement, and for sure it had some influence on games like Star Wars: Squadrons, Everspace, Rebel Galaxy, and Chorvs (the name of which I will never not spell with a 'v' because I still think it's hilarious). While they weren't all home runs, they were worthwhile experiences, and I'm sure helped launch some careers.
But I dunno, man. $700 million dollars and counting. Twelve years plus. What happens if they just run out of money and can't finish the game? Are all these investors and would-be players with supporter-skinned ships going to be content with probably Squadron 42 and a Whitman's sampler of tech demos? Or will they hunt Roberts down and hold his head in the sci-fi bulkhead door to his office?
It all just seems like near-Greek tragedy levels of hubris. Real Euripides shit.
I think it's a rare case where bad management is rewarded if not incentivized.
In a traditionally funded game all this scope creep, setbacks, reengineering etc would have people freaking out and breathing down the team's neck. In this instance, it just means that they can keep the gravy train rolling by pumping out a few more concepts of ships, etc.
And maybe somewhere in the back of their heads, they're performing the calculation that says that once this is released and finished there is no way:
The team stays the same size for maintenance and updates
This company is getting similar funding for another game or even making another game at all.
Other companies are eager to hire that dude from that team that took 20years and a billion dollars to make a pretty good game.
This kind of game would have never happened in a traditional funding model, that is part of why it has succeeded thus far. There is a clear desire for something like this to be made and played. No publisher wanted to risk it, so they tried crowdfunding it. The original plan was to raise a few million to then take to investors and publishers and say "Hey look, people want to play this type of game, fund me for it" but that became unnecessary with how much funding they received. Are they better for it? Time will tell. There's a point in which they can stretch the goodwill of the backers to and I think it's already stretched pretty far. Failing to deliver on their current 2026 goal would be pretty destructive to the project as a whole, and management appears to be aware of that risk.
And yes, that is a fairly normal cycle for game companies to grow and shrink as production finalizes and things are released. Keep in mind they are releasing "episode 1" of Squadron 42 and wanted to do up to 3 games total, and Star Citizen 1.0 is launching with 5 systems with the expectation to grow to 100 (or more). I'd expect them to keep a good portion of their staff on as they continue to build both of those up and SC continues its live service.
Continuous gameplay sections at 24:16 (turret section) and 50:21 (FPS section). Zero in-cockpit ship combat. Guess part of the early story is you earning your wings, or pay up for Star Citizen to get a taste of that instead.
They really cranked up the post processing on this one. My eyes was starting to hurt trying to maintain focus because so many scenes were uniformly blurry like someone replaced the lens with frosted glass for a few seconds. An example is when they showed the Vanduul at 22:00 or whenever there's any scene with a ship moving. The ridiculously thick motion blur kicks in and just smears entire chunks of the frame.
More nitpicks and random thoughts with comparisons to Call of Duty campaigns, given the similarities in the cinematic corridorness of the demo:
Military science fiction in space are right up my alley since the Halo games and Infinite Warfare. While I like Andor and Dune, they're more ground-based and I've been looking for something with a little bit more war than recent Star Wars output, if this game ever comes out. A coworker recommended the Star Carrier series by Ian Douglas, might start reading that.
Trope of ships with capital-class weaponry in close proximity and not blowing each other up with friendly fire and the planet behind the fight left surprisingly intact, similar to the Earth cutscene in Mass Effect 3. I'm not expecting Newtonian physics in my Wing Commander successor, but some of the camera angles make it look like the ships are trading paint.
I haven't seen the live demo if they were talking in certain sections, but some of the cinematic corridor sections before the tutorial drag on with the player staring a bit too long to showcase the "background chatter while you walk by" feature. Which would be novel for anyone who still hasn't experienced a Call of Duty campaign.
Trope of holding fire until the enemy is at point blank range (while we already have modern combat beyond visual range). A chunk of the Vanduul fleet would've been cut down before they got real close unless this navy has zero long-range weapons and sensors, and you wouldn't get a cinematic turret section out of it. Complete opposite of my X4 playthrough helping Argon and Antigone hold back the Xenon, where Terran ships and tech are so powerful (especially the Asgard's main gun) that they can delete a Xenon fleet the moment they pop out of a jump gate.
33:33 - One thing Call of Duty campaigns do really well to sell this kind of setpiece is screaming or panicked lines over the comms before something happens. Here a capital ship casually blows up in front of you while comms are silent where it should've felt like a bigger deal. Like the kind of dialog that plays at 37:06.
This turret section is dragging on for waaay too long.
51:35 - More staring at "look at this scripted section we did". Another thing Call of Duty campaigns do well is it would either script this section while you're walking around (like when he crawls through the vents at 56:00), or keeping these sections really short and immediately returning control back to you.
57:40 - Good to see hot lead is still effective in 2945.
57:58 - I'm a sucker for animation detail like this in games, a quick button press when opening doors. Not Doom Eternal fast, but excused since you're not Doomguy.
Like the light puzzle elements of the zero G section. Also more staring at cinematic moments. "Get to safety" can wait.
1:05:22 - It ain't a space game if artificial gravity isn't intrinsically tied to oxygen systems.
That bridge fight looks rough. Also like hearing the no-nonsense Aegis Dynamics ship voice.
For the WW2 in space combat, I have to admit I'm still a sucker for that, even though it is extremely unrealistic and doesn't make sense even within the technology the games that do this present. I've thought it might be interesting to add a bit of lore where the jamming/defense tech has become so good along with offense that beyond line of sight doesn't work anymore, and you need good old manual aiming as all CPU tracking is perfectly disrupted through 'technology' . I even thought it might make for a really cinamatic battle, where the ww2 style space dogfight happens culminating in downing a specific type of ship, then instantly having your allies fire off a giant salvo from a capital ship and/or long range base that fills space with homing projectiles that instantly obliterate everything in sight to end the fight. This way you get the non submarine gameplay and still have some reasonably believable in game lore.
As for squadron 42 and me I hate to say that I'm still interested in playing something from them, however they won't see any cash from me until it's released, reviewed well, then on sale later on.
There's also the "helmet with interior illumination (because we paid for Cavill's face and we're going to get our money's worth)" trope.
This is the intro/tutorial level to Squadron 42 and the general setting of the universe, so the first hour in supposedly 30-40 hours of the campaign. Some of their other promo material shows clips in the cockpit. In that sense I find the pop ups and turret gameplay acceptable, if boring.
Chris Roberts has always talked abut and aimed for a cinematic feel to the game, like WW2 in space or Star Wars, so that was pretty much a given. They deliberately slowed the flight model over the past year to bring combat closer in and stop the "shooting at HUD elements only" gameplay.