Star Citizen crowdfunding passes $700 million, 12 years after development began and still without a release date
Star Citizen crowdfunding passes $700 million, 12 years after development began and still without a release date
Cloud Imperium Games' sci-fi space sim and RPG Star Citizen has passed another major crowdfunding milestone: $700 million. The latest $100 million has been raised in less than a year as well.
Chris Roberts' vacation fund has reached a new milestone. 
With your help we can get this up to 1 billion, which will ensure that Chris gets to visit more places and can enjoy more of the local cuisine. Oh, yeah, and it helps the game get finished sooner, of course.
In other news, they finally reworked the game's UI after 12 years of R&D, and it now looks worse than it did before. Progress. 
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I know a few rubes that have donated multiple times and won’t shut up about how great the game already is in its current state.
I've watched a few recent gameplay videos and ngl they made a pretty cool engine. The "game" is basically still in the tech demo phase but it's pretty cool tech, I hope somebody actually makes a game out of it some day.
Definitely not $700 million worth of tech but oh well.
I don’t think any part of that studio is $700 million worth of tech unless you count all the toys the CEO has been buying himself for 12 years.
The kind of game Star Citizen claims to eventually be fundamentally doesn't work. An open world space sim is a concept that sounds cool in your head but if you think about how it would actually play, it's simply not good. Space is impossibly large and 99,99% empty. Even a single planet is way, way, waaaayyyy too big for an open world game, and Chris Roberts hilariously promised 100 star systems at one point.
Star Citizen, were it to ever come out, would first and foremost be a fast travel simulator. Sitting in loading screens waiting to be teleported to the 0,01% of the ingame world where there are actual things to do and see. Flying through space in your starship would be fun for a few minutes before you press the warp speed button to get to your destination already. Because again, space is empty. There's nothing there. Planets would either be desolate wastelands or contain a single activity hub where 100% of players are at any given moment.
There is no way to do the scale of space justice. Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA 5 are gigantic games and each take place in a single city. You can run across all of WoW in a couple hours. Star Citizen would, at best, have the same amount of content as those games but spread across 100,000,000x the surface area. Flying your ship around would become very old very quickly.
Elite Dangerous literally has a whole 1:1 scale galaxy you can explore and it kind of works. Sure it's a pretty niche game and not for everybody but people are having fun with it.
Elite also lets you fly from point to point if you really really want to and it is indeed terribly boring and impossibly long without some sort of FTL
Or even FTFTL. I remember travelling for two hours to a star system because it wasn't far enough for fsd (big one) and I ran out of fuel
The running joke of getting players to go to the one space station in the Proxima Centauri system to get a free spaceship. You drop in near Proxima A and need to fly to Proxima B, the other member of the binary system. But it's like a four hour trip with the in-system FTL maxed.
I really, really, really, really genuinely love how Outer Wilds solved this problem by just making the solar system 30 km big. Like you can just fly wherever you want. It's so good. By the way, play Outer Wilds.
Star Citizen, were it to ever come out, would first and foremost be a fast travel simulator.
That could be even worse. Once upon a time there was a game called Naval Action, where you spend hours trying to travel because the travel was slow and there was no option of fast travel. Like it could take literally hours of real time.
I enjoyed naval action for a bit. I was really into age of sail at the time though. I'd read some Jack Aubrey and then get my ass whipped by some Dutch bastards
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Nah it's a bit more complicated than that. They completely revamped the rendering and netcode to support seamless transitions between space, ground, building, ships etc. What they managed to do with the engine is not easy at all. None of it excuses the blatant grifting tho, just saying some of the devs did pretty cool things there.
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That's a door
Have you ever actually done 3D game development? I promise it's not really that simple. Not everything about this game has to be complete shit just because the owner of the company is a grifter, they definitely hired talented people to do the work even if the work is ultimately a scam.