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.
It’s so frustrating to see people in this thread posting objectively false statements about SC. Yes, it’s behind schedule and yes it suffers from scope creep. But it’s not a scam and it’s not vaporware. People who give them money know exactly what they are getting into. You can buy a ship now and fly it immediately. You can spend hundreds of hours in the game in it’s current state. Even pointing out that it’s playable gets downvotes.
The state of Star Citizen is right now is on par with a lot of games on “release.” This is as much an insult to the gaming industry in general as it is a compliment to Star Citizen.
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.
