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What do you think of star citizen?
I bought a starter pack in 2015, played a few dog fights and races at 25fps, and then forgot about it. I reinstalled it today and was amazed at all the progress. There's some really cool stuff, like having your own expressions mapped onto your characters face with a webcam, or how you can get on your ship, jump to another planet, descend through the atmosphere and land at a camp, get out of your ship, and go inside, all seamlessly with no load screens.
The game looks fantastic, and runs a lot better too (I did upgrade, my pc, but not that much. I have a ryzen 5 2600 and a radeon 570)
Do any of you play? What do you think about the game?
It's a non product. It's an eternal overpromise full of feature creep that won't ever release, by the guy who was fired from the original Elite (not E:D) for going far over schedule twice because of feature creep.
As they work on new parts, the stuff they made way back in 2013 is already obsolete. It's also worth reminding that they also changed engines a while back, and that's a lot of rework, no matter how good you and/or your existing codebase are.
Unlike most people that share my view, I don't think they're scammers, but I don't believe they'll achieve their goals due to sheer technical infeasibility. Most of it being problems you can't just throw money at either.
Just like there are only so many things you can actually accomplish in a day, there's only so many things you can accomplish with a game.
It's cool to think "oh hey wouldn't it be cool if I could do this" in the scope of a game, but any good piece of artwork has scope. For example, a painting has a subject and a style and a distinct palette of colors and a message it's trying to get across. And when many artists work together we might get a mural where these styles interplay with each other and new art is born, but this mural is laid out on a canvas of a distinct size and only has so many artists.
The development of this game is like an ADHD kid constantly distracted by anything new, bright, colorful, or entertaining that captures their attention - they spend lots of resources focusing on that new object, but are just as quickly pulled away to another new bright possibility. It's a beautiful mural but it's a mural in progress on a blank slate of infinite size. If the creative mind behind this art doesn't stop to consider what has been painted and where he wants to direct his resources (as even if he had the entire world at his disposal they would still be limited), it will forever expand yet never finish.
He's definitely not a scammer but I don't believe he's ever going to set limits on his creativity in order to deliver a finished product. Perhaps he's scared that it won't meet his expectations or his artistic creativity will be stifled by placing artificial limitations - who knows?
What boggles me about this behavior is that this is an MMO. You get it done and then spend the next twenty years building shiny distractions inside it, that's kinda the business model. At some point you have to push it out the door and see what the fuck you've actually got. It's better to develop it while it's being played, as the social dynamics of the game aren't something you can realistically plan for. It's got to get beyond the seed community of hardcore backers to answer that question.
I figured if anything would kill them it would have been finishing the core engine that can handle the transitions from flightsim/fps/planet/space/social without loading screens and somehow tie all of those world spaces into something cohesive enough for real interplay between them. They've actually done the hard part.
I'm curious how they'll be handling networked play, though. When fifty thousand players all show up to the same worldspace and begin interacting it's going to run up against the physics of networking, there are limits. Time dilation works for Eve but it's not going to go over so well in a realtime combat/cockpit/fps game that's geared for twitch. You could cut time by 2x, maybe even 4x, but nobody is going to like being locked in 8x+ bullet time.
This isn't entirely accurate. They changed engine to Lumberyard from CryEngine. Lumberyard itself is a fork of the same version of CryEngine that Star Citizen was already being built on. According to Chris Roberts:
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/364217/lumberyard-for-those-interested/p1
I share some of @Kiloku's view, to some extent. They're not scammers, they've just gotten extremely unrealistic and full of themselves over time, and started to themselves believe a hype the (extremely toxic) community created for them.
I backed about ~$3000 into the project, most of which I made back through clever resales. I did so because I fully believe CIG brought a lot of good in the gaming community. They're extremely transparent, and were so at a time that transparency in gaming studios was not the norm. They published a lot of fantastic content (art, videos, etc) and I think all in all the money, overall, went to good use… BUT, they have completely lost track of the goal of publishing an actual game, aka "Priority #1". They are holding off for the perfect game, with the perfect tech, etc as if all this is really achievable.
In the mean time they've also set up a fairly perverse incentive structure where their business plan kinda falls apart once the game is released. This is the part that worries me most, which they have not addressed.
I recently let them know about all these issues in a concierge ticket and asked for a full refund of all my pledges except the base one, with the primary highlighted concern being: "Focus on releasing the game".
They'll get there, and I don't think it's a "non product", but they're setting everyone up for failure. In any case, one thing I no longer want to be a part of is the atrocious community and atmosphere around the game. Between the SomethingAwful influence, all the drama surrounding the pledges, all the armchair gamedevs, all the people who hate the game just to have something to hate, etc… I just can't. This game has been ruined for me, not by its creators but by its shitty, shitty community.
I backed during the Kickstarter. I subsequently gave them a lot more money, to the tune of about $700. I requested (and got) a refund about 18 months ago for the following reasons:
Their senior people kind of seem like dillweeds.
The usual feature creep reasons.
I was sitting there, thinking back, and the Kickstarter annoyed me more and more. In retrospect, it's clear that they had no intention of building a game of any kind with that money, and simply used it to build and prime the money engine that their website has become.
This sort of game holds less and less interest for me as I age and my interests broaden. My personal view is now that it's something of a sad pursuit.
I glanced at the Star Citizen subreddit. I emphatically do not want to play an online game with that community or anyone like them. It's a sick cult filled with addle-brained misogynist weirdos who think that this ratfuck of empty promises constitutes an identity. And some of them, I assume, are good people.
More broadly, I have poor impulse control and should not have spent that money in the first place, even if the game was great. So that one's on me. (I do wonder how much of a market they will find beyond people who've already bought in.) I think they will eventually release a product, if at the behest of their new investor if nothing else. If it's good, great. Job done. I'll pick it up on sale. For the time being, I'll fulfill my switch-flicking ambitions by getting more DCS addons.
What new investor?
This guy and his son's movie production company apparently kicked in $46m to get 10% of Cloud Imperium.
People are far too political over it. It's not a scam, and it's not the second coming of christ. It sits somewhere in the middle.
The game may or may not be good eventually. I try it every year or two to check progress. It still isn't to the point of impressing me (framerate is atrocious), but it's clearly being developed and they might get there eventually. Ultimately, I hope they do. More space games are in my interest, as they should be for other space fans. But in the mean time I can still play Elite Dangerous and other cool games while waiting.
Not much else to say.
Framerate actually got quite a bit better near the end of the year. You may want to check back a little bit ahead of schedule to see the difference.
It's gotten really good. When I first installed it, way back when, it ran like shit and had very few features. Hell, you couldn't even fly your ship yet. Now it looks amazing, it runs pretty darn well, and it feels like the game is already beyond what I expected from it.
Between SC and Elite, my space sim itch is being scratched.
Is it better than Elite: Dangerous?
It's better at some stuff and worse at others. They are both good.
I'm beyond excited for the game. I've been following it ever since the Kickstarter but only just now pledged for the game right after last year's CitizenCon because I feel like they are finally starting to get on track with development and it has become much more playable. The feature creep is real with the game but I think they are finally beginning to hold back and look toward actually finishing their product. It's been a great year for Star Citizen. I know a lot of the early backers are pretty jaded about the time it has taken to finish the game as well as the issues during development which I totally understand but I think they are finally getting on track.
I'm running an i5-6600K CPU, 16 GB RAM, 1070Ti video card, and an M.2 NVMe SSD drive to run it and it's been great with the new updates.
The potential for highly immersive VR in this game is exciting, since 'sitting in a chair' naturally dovetails with 'sitting in a cockpit'. Easier for your brain to fool itself. Frankly, I'm bored to death with fantasy-based MMOs at this point, and first person shooters don't thrill me like they once did either. I still enjoy flight sims. Combine them all into one game, though, and you've got my attention.
Given most MMOs take 5-7 years to finish, I wouldn't expect to see a MMO of this scope without seven to nine years of development. I honestly don't know where people who were expecting it to be done in a couple years got that idea from. MMOs are no joke, there's a mountain of logistics issues supporting that sort of game that do not exist in other games. Trying to combine multiple genres into one engine and make it an MMO makes it easily the most ambitious game ever attempted.
It's been 7 years and they have a cohesive engine functioning with all the basics and actual content. Seems like it's right on track for a 2019/2020 release to me, and that's exactly what I was expecting. I'll certainly pick up S42 on release and probably rebuild my gaming rig with VR/cockpit controls just for the final game.
I promised myself Spore would be the last game to get a nickel from me in pre-order or based on promises. I'd play the hell out of a finished Star Citizen, but I will wait until I can buy the final product.
At this point its less a game and more a kind of cryptocurrency you can only buy into rather than out of and doesn't provide any tangible benefits whatsoever... this is the best part of the whole thing, watching people realise they've been conned and start whining.
I bought a starter package probably around the same time as you and have been popping back in occasionally over the past few years.
I truly appreciate what they're trying to do in a world of cookie cutter annual releases and remasters and look forward to full release to really dive into it. That said, it will never live up to some people's expectations. I visit the subreddit occasionally and I agree with what is being said here. It's becoming almost cult-like.
That said, the game is kind of fun at the moment (especially with friends), but only if you drop money beyond a starter ship.
I've watched many of their videos out of interest in the technical details.
I don't know how much of what they've done is really groundbreaking. But I really enjoy the spoonfeed explanations about how various systems worked.
There aren't many games that are that transparent. Everyone else seems to bemoan whenever they add some unnecessary feature, but I love it!
Also of course the idea of space sims is cool to me, but I don't have much skin in the computer game game.
As a side note: This is one of the first tildes threads I've seen that's provoked a strong difference of opinion from the community. Interesting to see how much like Reddit this plays out...