This project is baffling
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.
Think part of it is that Chris Robert’s comes from a time when games couldn’t be patched.
No, there’s really no excusing this game’s development. If anything, Robert’s should have learned from Freelancer to have a tight core product that’s actually shippable.
At this point Internet nerds are locked into throwing money at Star Citizen’s development, making it the closest thing humanity has achieved to a perpetual motion machine.
I have a friend who is obsessed with it. I asked him if it was a money laundering scheme. He agreed its the most likely situation.
I literally cannot think of a worse way to launder money then an extremely high profile public crowdfunding campaign.
That and they release their financial reports every year…
The people in this thread are astoundingly hateful idiots that are just doing the groupthink thing to be part of a group that lets them feel “smarter than you.” It’s really disappointing to see this every time star citizen is mentioned, but I’ll just continue to enjoy it and then welcome all these people when it’s completed as they suddenly stop hating on it because it isn’t fashionable anymore.
I’m convinced they made the game as a side project to their true goal of inventing dynamic server meshing.
We are talking about Chris “feature creep” Roberts here, though. The guy can’t stop himself from retasking a team with yet another “immersive” thing they need to waste their time on.
So who knows. Could just be bad management, but I wouldn’t put it past them to be doing this so they can license and sell the engine or something. That is, until other developers snipe their employees and use their knowledge to develop server meshing themselves.
A few of my guildmates play SC as well and they try to get other people to play, but every time an open period happens, the servers always shit the bed with instability and the play experience for the new player is awful.
It’s so funny trying to hear them rationalize bad servers and inability to do basic things as just part of the experience.
to be fair, its issue is that they literally have a whole flood of people trying the game, like 70%+ is people just trying the game then
don’t judge until you’ve seen the dynamic cloth physics! that is what everyone wants, right?
I paid for star citizen a decade ago and honestly enjoyed it enough for about 2 days. It always felt exciting to see how ahead they were of early Xbox 1 / PS4 games in their scope with volumetric effects etc.
The trouble is, 90% of their innovative content has been long overtook by general game progression, they’re making a game that could have probably launched with the PS5 and been innovative and are already falling behind there. I genuinely believe that they were Innovating their game slowly over time and there were amazing things in the works, but they missed the moment that it was exciting and new by so many years.
I actually will only play a game with realistic sweat and tears. Oh, they are hard at work on that?! Well FINALLY, I’m SO fucking glad. Thank you SO much, Robert’s Space Industries. You guys are definitely NOT complete hacks.
