Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'
Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'
One day before CitizenCon 2024, Tom Henderson posted an expose on Cloud Imperium Games that doesn't paint a pretty picture for Star Citizen.
Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he's done throughout his career - the only thing that's notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It's entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn't bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn't even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
And then, compare it to No Man's Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.
I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man's Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.
Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won't be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Who'd'a thunk?
Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never "release" a finished game, you're not going to be blamed for "bugs" while still collecting money on in-game purchases.
There's a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It's been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.
I've genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There's just no actual focus on getting the game done.
We have a saying here that translates to something like this: "perfect is the enemy of done". Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.
Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
Damn. I had really hoped my grandchildren would get to play Star Citizen in their lives.
yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore
Yeah no shit
and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.
sorry I meant durrrr
Dull surprise.
If they finished it they’d have to find a new revenue stream.
Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.
Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
OK. Never played SC so honest question here; What is wrong if the game is technically not complete? I mean the way I thought is that this means that it keeps evolving and expanding so new content and features become available as the game development progresses. What am I missing? Is this a similar situation to the Eve Online BitterVets?
It's still around?
I remember when Star Citizen first popped up, and it makes me feel old.
What's the latest build weight in at?
It's so many gigs, it's not even worth trying every so often. Every time you load it, gigs to download.
Glad I only ever spent the initial $60
The first big disappointment was the end of the funding rewards. Is any of those original rewards even noticable? Oh yay a fish! And a 42 towel to look at!
Aside from the content of the article.
Do we ban any sources in this community? Wccftech is a well known click factory that fluctuates between clickbait, reposts with zero useful additions a'la chatgpt, and outright lies from their 'sources'.
Most tech communities / subreddits that ban their content seem to benefit from it.
In another timeline No Mans sky was called Star Citizen and StarField was cancelled.
I was hoping there to be a conspiracy story behind it but the crux is they don't understand the concept of MVP or made anything before.
Squadron 42 is feature complete and is in optimization and polish phase. 30-40 hour campaign. It looks amazing. This was released this weekend, played live not prerecorded.