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:
- The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails 2012
- Ys: Memories of Celceta 2012
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2013
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II 2014
- Tokyo Xanadu 2015
- Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana 2016
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
- Ys IX: Monstrum Nox 2019
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II
- Ys X: Nordics
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.
Trails into Reverie is not worth playing. Cold Steel was iffy. Trails is a shadow of its former self.
I play mostly smaller games, and am very patient with my gaming habits. Haven’t bought a AAA game in a very long while. Still follow these kind of news because they trend set the whole industry and encroach everywhere with bad practice as big publishers represent the majority of the industry releases and also the grossest revenue.
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 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.
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’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
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.
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.
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.
Wait, people are still dumping money into this?
It released years and years ago. You realize that, right? That it’s playable… and people like it?
No it entered into alpha about 10 years ago. Not even beta, it’s alpha, there is barely any gameplay to it.
I’ve seen grey box proof of concept pieces with more functionality
Uh oh looks like you are not following the hive mind of the sub! It’s sad but funny how little people know about SC but still insist they know its a scam when all they know is what they read from hit piece articles. I can’t wait for sc 4.0 server meshing is such a game changer
how dare you come to our echo chamber with your “facts”, we need to repeat the clickbait headlines and nothing else!
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.
Why is it so hard for people to imagine that there are players who like the game as it is and see value in buying ships? After 10 years of development, people have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into.
As a day 1 backer i would like to offer my sincerest apologies.
