I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding.
This thing is a scam, and you're all being taken for chumps. The only worse fraud than SC is buying Fatalities on Mortal Kombat.
There is this tiny company called Nihon Falcom. They make this game series called Trails that I adore. they have like three programmers work on each entry.
In the time since Star Citizen was announced they have released:
as well as a bunch of ports of older games to modern platforms and localizing them to the west. All of these are worth playing and some of these were GOTY material for me.
Its good to quantify how much time has passed, and how much you can get done with a smaller budget and focused scope.
Do you play indie games? They seem to be exactly what you're describing.
that's a fucking thing?!
It's now a season bundle. But it was $10 per fatality x 3. One for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. That was a total of $30 for a whole minute of cut-scenes. They successfully Overton it, apologized and now it's $10 for the three scenes. But yeah, now buying Fatalities is a thing, look forward for your Easter Fatality edition and an extra Bunny skin version for only $4.99.
This project is baffling
don't judge until you've seen the dynamic cloth physics! that is what everyone wants, right?
I’ve been part of some amateur game dev projects and SC has the vibe of an amateur project where the devs are constantly focusing on whatever catches their fancy at the moment, going back and tinkering with things they’ve already made, and sort of aimlessly scope creeping. There’s nobody to strongarm them into writing, much less following a game design document.
All of that is intuitive to me to understand.
Then there is “the dream” that is being sold to people who want this type of game. That level of very specific fandom is also easy to understand, at least from a distance. People get super into all kinds of games and spend outsized amounts of money and time.
Star Citizen is like the perfect storm of these elements.
After a decade and an astronomical amount of money spent, this thing is still in pre-alpha. People have left school, got married, have kids, played and forgotten No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, and now Starfield, and there is still no Star Citizen.
It's time to accept that Star Citizen will NEVER be released, because what Chris Roberts is selling is "dream as a service" which can be anything you want it to be, and one that never has to end for as long as the "game" is still in development.
The moment an actual product is released is the moment the flow of money will stop.
I once saw a comment on a SC update video from a guy who claimed to have backed up SC as a teenager, went to college, entered the industry, was part of a team from start to shipping a video game. twice, and still SC is in pre-alpha. He said that now as a veteran of the industry he realizes that SC is a scam. Like, 99% of the stuff they hyped as their envelope breaking new tech for video games, has already been done by dozens of games at a fraction of the cost.
Yeah, server meshing at the scale they did it has been possible for years. The issue is overlapping it at the planetary and multi system scale for hundreds of thousands of people and all of their inventory objects simultaneously.
They essentially just handed these objects to a master server that has to monitor all of them, instead of having each client server doing it individually. It's like a backup technology that can respawn all tracked items in the event of a server failure. They've basically just added redundancy. I don't foresee performance being improved when this overlord monitoring server inevitably gets taxed to capacity tracking everyone's shit.
That's not entirely true, if they ever went full release there's still a fuck ton they can charge players for and milk. It's just their Kickstarter that won't make money anymore.
That being said you're correct, they've essentially pioneered the concept of "Game Development as a Service" in the same way live service and early access games are doing now regularly.
Personally even if SQ42 launches I don't think they'll get the persistent universe up to their original vision for another ten years. They absolutely aren't going to hit their 100 solar system metric from the 2011/12 era. I'd be surprised if there ends up being more than ten at launch, but it would surprise me even more if the game ever has an official launch at all.
What's most likely is that this game will remain in early access Alpha forever, allowing it to shield itself from criticism while taking it's sweet time constructing the game they said would release back in 2016 originally. That will allow them to justify keeping the Kickstarter open forever while also spending most of their time creating and selling new ships in a game that doesn't even have gameplay loops for most of them. Then they'll occasionally drop a new star system or loop to keep the hopes of players up.
This new dynamic server meshing technology they just showcased (at the tech demo level of complexity) is their only hope for making the game playable. The performance of the game isn't due to stress on your rig as much as networking latency because their servers are overloaded. If they can scale it to the planetary, and eventually multi system level, then they might have something worth picking up. I'm not going to pay for it until that game exists, though. Which it probably never will.
Wait, people are still dumping money into this?
I think it has turned into a sunk cost fallacy for so many now. They put so much money into it they can't afford for it to fail/not continue.
This is just like EVE Online for me - I am more interested in reading about the drama than the actual game itself.
Star Citizen is only available on a single platform too. At least Cyberpunk was multiplatform.
I dont have the energy to care about this game, just like I dont have the energy to care about George RR Martin or Patrick Rothfuss never finishing their products either.
Writers, no matter how good, are just regular people. I have much higher expectations and not as much patience towards a game studio with infinite money and no released games whatsoever in over a decade.
I finally tried this game and holy shit is it terrible. The UI is janky and unintuitive. The movement is slow and stiff or sonic on crack and nothing in-between. The frame rate is terrible even on a decent machine with appropriate settings. Just overall a bad experience. I don't care if it's still "In development" get your fundamentals right before you go adding more shit.
People think you can slap on an "in development" sticker to anything and absolve it of all criticism.
Scam Citizen still hustlin
JFC, I guess there's a lot of suckers in the world
You don’t understand they released a cinematic trailer of slow moving scenery only shots that makes it game of the year.
I am not proud to say I was an original backer, but luckily only for like 25 bucks.
It became clear after a year or two it was vaporware. even if a product ever comes out it'll not be what I backed originally, which was Privateer TNG. So I stopped following the game, never played any of the tech demo's and just shake my head warily when I see news articles like this. Bernie Madoff is in jail for basically the same thing. How can people still support this travesty.
It's depressing to know that it's actually apparently more profitable to never really release a game than to release one and it be moderately popular
Isn’t Star Citizen that grift game?
Public broadcaster radio just struggled to raise $500k for charity, and then get to see this bullshit.
I think I've reached the point where no one will be able to convince me that Star Citizen is not a money laundering front.
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