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.
I have actually met a star citizen guy IRL. Deeply embarrassing guy. He works in tech as a product manager and is a new landlord who loves to talk apropos of nothing about how nice he was to his tenants during covid.
fundraising idea: establish a front organisation which appears to be a game developer making a wildly unfeasible but tantalising MMO; funnel 90% of donated proceeds to underground anti-imperialist cells across the west instead. based on Star Citizen, the gamers will never realise where their money is actually going
What I hate about this is how cliche the premise is. Why couldn’t they make it into a cowboy bebop-type jazzy dystopian hell instead of an annoying ultra serious MUH MEGACORPORATIONS!! dystopian hell
Something like Cowboy Bebop would require a lot of effort to make every area unique and characterful, while making things generic will be easier to copy-paste.
Tech bros are libertarians.
Also IIRC it's supposed to be more "muh spacerome", which is probably worse.
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.
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.
You have to respect and be disgusted by a grift this successful. Normally you'd have to scam a dozen or so VCs to get that much money, but doing it to more or less regular people is some next level manipulation.
Back when I craved for a super cool spaceships game where capitalism unfortunately survived and moved into space I played Elite Dangerous, which I got for free and enjoyed every fucking minute of it.
imagine paying for this garbage game "star citizen". Citizen of my dick and balls.
From what I've seen, even with all the problems it has Elite is still way better at being a game than Star Citizen. Watching people play it just looks so fucking boring and full of time wasting busy work walking back and forth. Elite at least lets you do everything from the cockpit in case you're not the kind of person that gets off on IMMERSION.
I liked it a lot, it is a good game to jump in, fly around for two hours and come back the next day or something. I liked it more since I have my own flying stick, the flying was smooth and fun. My only big issue was the "now what?", after completing a few missions, buying a new ship I didn't really know where to go. I guess I should have looked more into joining the Fuel Rats. Maybe one day.