Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K
Star Engine Tech Demo (Star Citizen 4.0) No Commentary CitizenCon 2953 4K
Since I haven't seen anyone post this, I thought I'd share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.
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Ok, I know we love to shit on that "game", but that video in and of itself left me speechless.
More remarkable to me as someone who plays and enjoys SC is that it's finally overcoming the gamer groupthink, not a rare feat.
People had all kinds of false notions about the project passed to them by people who make money off negativity or have an incentive for SC to fail, but it's just not working any more. Ironically, those same content creators and journalists are now trying to save their credibility by pretending they were onboard the whole time.
It's all a bit annoying as a long time backer, but if it means some relief from the ridicule and gaslighting it'll be nice.
It's objectively a good target for ridicule that the game has raised enough money to make the next Grand Theft Auto off of a strange and exploitative business model, been in development for over a decade, and still has no release date. At the same time, there's more game in that public alpha than a handful of fully released products, so calling it a scam never made sense.
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It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game. The rest of the industry is encroaching on it, and it's ridiculous there too. Right now we're looking at a AAA industry that's taking about 5-6 years to make a game, and everyone knows that has to come back down somehow; the ones that go longer than that are Prey (2006), Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good & Evil 2, etc. Not a great track record.
the business model was no more “exploitative” than something like Apex or PubG that make literal billions yearly off cosmetics
Those are bad too. In different and sometimes arguably worse ways. But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU. That, of course, makes Star Citizen an easy target once again.
People have their ego wrapped up in the criticisms about the game, they don’t like the idea that they got duped into hating on something by people who profited off their rage. People need to stop trying to save face; they were wrong about Star Citizen and SQ42.
I saw a trailer for this game with Gary Oldman in it 8 years ago. 8 years. They cast a lot of fan favorite actors that were already, let's say, of an advanced age, and I'm betting one of them dies by the time Squadron 42 comes out. I'm looking forward to playing Squadron 42, but if it takes you 8 years from the time you had something to show for your work for that single player mode to come out (which can and should be smaller in scope than an MMO and have none of the CI/CD restrictions that a live service game has), then you can bet your ass there's something to criticize there. At the very least, project management. And it's totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn't exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.
It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game.
Ok, so I point out that it's two games, give an example of another game that took ten years on it's own with half the features and you just ignore that like I said nothing. This is not a good faith conversation and it's honestly really irritating.
Right now we’re looking at a AAA industry that’s taking about 5-6 years to make a game
And no one has made anything close to what SC or SQ42 are offering, because it takes a ton of time and resources. There's a reason everyone's blown away by these recent demonstrations and announcements, because it's a quantum leap. The suggestion that one should expect that to happen in 4-5 years is ridiculous, this isn't a COD reskin. If that were true we would've seen a game like SC already, but no one has attempted it. Even a huge AAA title like RDR2 took 8 years and it's nowhere near the scale of these games, that's not a sign it was mismanaged, it's a sign that RDR2 was really labor intensive to create.
But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU.
If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that's not exploitive. It's not a tech demo, CIG is not angling to "sell the engine and run" or whatever other conspiracies people have come up with over the years. The devs are not on yachts drinking champagne. The money has gone into the games, you can go look at their yearly financial statements; CIG has been delivering on the the game and pledge perks consistently as fast as they develop those features and assets.
And it’s totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn’t exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.
It's not, because we're all getting exactly what we paid for. And even you get to benefit from the foresight and investment of backers. The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they'll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it's a scam and now it's suddenly "Well of course it's was never a scam, no one would actually think that." It's very frustrating.
I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there's a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it's doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective. What we can actually play and get hands on is a game that, after all this time, has some rough technical performance and plenty of bugs, paid in exchange for features that offer only diminishing returns as you expand the circle of the game's audience out further from the people looking for the strictest simulation. Starfield couldn't get 60 FPS on console, even skipping 80% of the minutiae that SC is targeting, and Red Dead Redemption II also took flak and criticism for how the game felt to play for prioritizing a lot of simulation-y things as well. Those games aren't immune to criticism either, and they were able to come from teams who had successfully built acclaimed games in the past, iterating on them.
Also, that "8 years" is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that's reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2012 with a CG trailer, but I distinctly remember a Giant Bomb interview with a CDPR designer in ~2014 ahead of the Witcher 3's launch. Of course most of CDPR wasn't working on Cyberpunk yet. Jeff Gerstmann asked what Cyberpunk was looking like at that time, and the CDPR rep just responded that it was a stack of design documents a foot high off the desk.
If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that’s not exploitive.
It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don't even know when you'll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it's priced to cash in on whales. At least it's not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.
The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they’ll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it’s a scam and now it’s suddenly “Well of course it’s was never a scam, no one would actually think that.”
Don't attribute to me what others have said. Plenty of other people have called this a scam, but right at the top, I said that never made sense to me. Maybe a few weeks ago, I said something right here on the fediverse that someone interpreted to be too positive about Star Citizen, and the next response was to ask me how much I paid into the game. Those people probably haven't changed their minds. I am not them. I think for myself. That is not me gaslighting you. It's me having a different opinion than someone else you spoke to.
I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there’s a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it’s doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective.
You're the one making statements about it taking too long in a general way, comparing it to "normal" industry timelines (or as you imagine such timelines would be, if they existed as a standard).
It's not subjective that the scope and detail of features in SC and SQ42 have not been seen in another game. My opinion on that has nothing to do with it being "up my alley". At most you can find games that have perhaps one or two features that already ship with SC, and usually to less detailed degree (ex. Elite Dangerous with its planets and instanced landing zones). Nothing compares, even in it's unfinished state.
Also, that “8 years” is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that’s reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player.
That's fine if you want to imagine this, but it's not something you know. And it does nothing to undermine the point that highly complex games take a long time (especially when you're working on other highly complex games at the same time). CIG started literally from scratch, so I'm not sure why you're willing to factor these excuses above for an established studio like Rockstar, but not factoring in the time to literally build a studio from the ground up as a justifiable reason for why something might take a long time. You're just repeating a trope uncritically.
Polishing and performance in a game do not happen until the last leg of development, CIG has tried to keep SC Live as performative as possible within reason, given the constant changes and placeholder technology coming and going, but it's under different priorities from a feature complete titled so the degree that they can achieve this varies depending on what they're shipping in a given patch. Which seems fair to me; we get to play and experience the things we bought as they're being built, and in return we except some jank here and there for the time being. That's more honest than getting a supposedly finished game like Cyberpunk and it being a complete mess.
You say there's diminishing returns, but as someone who actually has played the game for years, the return on features is growing, not shrinking -- all the features are beginning to culminate into more than the sum of their parts and systemic cohesion is forming in some very compelling ways. Performance has also been steadily improving. It's not just these random bits and bobs stapled together, that's part of the "tech demo" misinformation people just won't let go of.
It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don’t even know when you’ll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it’s priced to cash in on whales. At least it’s not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.
The reason pre-ordering games is often exploitive is because some game studios will hype people up and then not deliver on what they promise (ex. Cyberpunk). CIG has been delivering. Exploitation would require that people were somehow deceived or taken advantage of.
Every dollar of the couple hundred I put into the game over the years I did so having it fully communicated to me what I was getting into and what I was actually paying for (not a ship or an item, but the continued development of the game). If people can't be bothered to read the plain language disclaimers that come up at every stage or the many posts and comments across the Internet from other backers setting expectations for people, CIG can't be the ones blamed for that.
Am I saying the industry should all be kickstarters? No, because it's definitely something that is prone to abuse and is unreliable. But what we see is that Chris Roberts was *not *out to pull a fast one, he was not out to wring money out of people they didn't have and get rich quick. He wanted to build a game that was impractical to make within the industry model, and we all wanted it to. Stop trying to make it out like we're rubes who got a fast one pulled on us, that's very cleary not the case; we were right to trust Roberts and CIG and we are getting our money's worth.
You misunderstood what I said by diminishing returns. They're clearly important to you. The further away you get from that level of hardcore enthusiast, the more like you're going to find people who don't find those features to be important compared to a game that runs better and with fewer bugs, let alone how they affect the actual game design. No game is immune from criticism, and people can and will criticize it for all of these things and its business model. If I'm a person who paid $45 because I wanted to play Squadron 42, which at the time I believed was a game releasing in 2016, how do you expect me to not criticize them for taking 7 more years and still not having it done when it's a much smaller scope than the MMO that they're building?
Stop trying to make it out like we’re rubes who got a fast one pulled on us
Once again: I did not say this. You are arguing with me about things other people said. Argue with them.
I don't think it's about loving to shit on something, you can only get burned so often with overhyped games, i rather have the game speak for itself when it's released.