Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
The feature creep never ceases to amaze
PentA game
What feature creep? This is all stuff they setup for squadron first and are just moving it over now.
Seriously. When do the lawsuits start? 🤦🏼♂️
Pfft. Y’all deserve each other. 🤣🤌🏼
Lawsuits for what? They never promised any customer that they would immediately deliver a working end product. As far as I can make out, they offer early access to an in-development product, with your purchase going toward funding development. It’s more akin to a donation with strings (access to the product).
Yeah. It’s not like they defrauded a government out of tens of millions of dollars (looking at you, Ubisoft)
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I’ve literally never paid for Star Citizen. Not sure how I’m supposed to be a sweaty fanboy…
It’s a large scoped game, and from what I’ve seen, they’ve slowly been turning it into an incredibly feature-filled game that goes beyond the scope of what most other games deliver.
Please stay civil, thank you.
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Why don’t you show us all how it’s done, chief? Since you’re such a legal expert and all…
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Bahaha SC defense squad arrives to justify their ship purchases
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Why do people criticizing a scam make you so insanely mad? Reminds me of the folks still shilling GME false hope.
Lmao because morons like you keep calling it a scam despite it making massive improvements. They could have cut and run 40 million dollars ago. You just want something to hate on and it’s genuinely pathetic.
You want an actual scam game to bitch and moan about? Go winge about The Day Before. That one actually took the money then shut down their studio like proper scammers. Don’t see them sticking it out while crybabies write up shit like you every 4 months when they get bored.
I’m sick of literal children saying “Don’t release the game if it’s not done! We’re tired of buggy messes!” then a week later saying shit like “Wow this game is still in development? They should release it already wtf.”
You gonna join the losers that made death threats to the Cyberpunk 2077 team to release their game early? Fuck off. The only people still crying about Star Citizen are the ones that bought a ship to find out their garbage PC can’t even run the game or worse - they’re console owners.
My hardware is twice as powerful as anything that existed when the game was supposed to release. Still runs like dogshit. I log in once a year to see if the game is still trash. The game is still trash. It’s not a literal scam, but it might as well be because Chris Roberts hasn’t been able to actually complete a game since Wing Commander. Which I loved, and unfortunately that spurred me to flush $40 in the toilet.
Almost like it was being developed not for the day it began development but for the future when they intend to release it. Almost like optimizations are the last stage in development.
You’re a fucking moron just blabbering about shit you don’t understand and I’m glad you can’t do anything but whine and piss yourself about how your $40 hasn’t given you the best game your little brain could conjure up. It’s been a decade. Grow the fuck up.
tl;dr
go back to reddit lawl
I own an Xbox and have zero interest in playing Star Citizen. Still gonna tell everyone it’s a scam and all your bitching can’t change a thing about it lol
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That boot must be fucking golden!
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Get over that chip on your shoulder. Did you not even read the comment you’re replying to?
I did and it was as worthless as yours. It set out to have an extremely wide scope. It’s not feature creep if it’s intended from the fucking beginning.
imagine paying pcgamer for an advertisement like this to shout about dynamic crosshairs and backpack reloading like its fucking 1998.
Worse than all that, it’s a fucking space sim. Why are all these space sims wanting to add FPS?
Because you can get out of your ship?
You’re right, getting out and moving around and hoping into the pilots seat of your ship is cool and I love to see that stuff. However, I don’t know why it always has to tip toward violent encounters instead of just having the ability to feel immersed in a space ship or station.
This is what killed Starfield for me. My character is a down on his luck diplomat who cares for his retiring parents and has to take up a mining job…
Nope, murder hobo. Literally in the tutorial.
I have to agree. Games tend to resort to violence immediately now, no need for justification. I didn’t imagine Starfield would be a shooter at all in fact. Ultimately it was almost exclusively shooting
And a terrible one!
I get the desire to compare the two games but Starfield tried too hard to color inside the lines by giving a story and lore while simultaneously trying to make an open ended sandbox which gave us neither. There’s a LARPing town of cowboys with dirt roads existing a few minutes from a hyper advanced planet with platinum roads and somehow they haven’t made contact? The cowboys haven’t progressed their dirt and wood town despite being in spitting distance of a planet of machines that could fabricate advanced tools in seconds?
Star Citizen seems to take the Dark Souls approach of light narrative, heavy world building, “go learn the world by experiencing it.”
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted here…
But I would honestly say that the only things I liked about Starfield are the things you’re kind of dismissing. The story and ambiance pieces worked really well, and I ONLY wanted that part.
Every time I had to do anything space travel, combat, space combat, or inventory management, I died inside.
I also felt like the cities and locations were tiny and didn’t feel lived in or real. Basically the immersiveness of the game which thrives on immersion was not handled well so I was left with a terrible shooter.
Well the story held the game back because the game wanted to be more open than than the story allowed and vice versa where the game held the story back because a lot of areas were underdeveloped or don’t make sense with where they are for the sake of the story they wanted to tell. It felt like two conflicting ideas at the core which ended up with what we have.
Why are cowboys within trading distance of a future tech planet? How have they not interacted to a point where they don’t need dirt roads? The only answer seems to be for the sake of being neat and is baffling. Empty planets being explained as being on purpose to ‘get more joy out of discovering ones with things on it’ and just… it was astoundingly average and competes for the worst Bethesda game against 76.
Bethesda excels at world building and it was disastrous to watch them fail at that.
Because an FPS avatar is the body many people are most used to inhabiting in game worlds.
If you want people to feel immersed in an environment, you have to give them the virtual body they’re used to.
Like imagine you’re playing Battlefield 5, and then UFOs land and you go on a big space adventure. If you’re not still able to pull out that tommy gun and fire rounds the same way, your body feels different. It doesn’t feel like you’re there.
FPS is the biggest genre with the most resources in it. That makes it a standard for virtual environments everywhere.
That’s the entire thing they’re doing. The violent encounters are being planned for, obviously, but they’re not a requirement.
Star Citizen’s approach seems to be to add the ability to do as many things as possible while giving you the option to define how you want to interact with them. Of course, you’re probably going to have to defend yourself from the stray pirate or bandit with whatever you end up doing but that’s par for the course.
You should be able to avoid violent encounters but yeah you would be limiting where you can go.
That’s the ultimate goal though. Just last night I flew from a mining outpost on a moon to find resources, scanned a whole bunch, pulled out of my ship with a mining buggy, mined a bunch, and then logged out from my bed within the ship. 0 combat. That’s a life they want to have possible and I’m all for it! lol
I think it’s just that fps stuff sells and all the COD kiddies wouldn’t look at SC at all if they didn’t focus on pewpew everything. Hell they have a cargo ship that has an advertisement of it shooting its guns …lol ffs why? It’s just marketing bs.
It’s not a space sim.
It’s a life sim set in space.
Chris won’t stop until ShowerTech™ is in the game with realistic health debuffs so there’s a consequence when you don’t do the maintenance gameplay loop on your ship’s bathroom.
I wish that was entirely a joke.
But Star citizen has always had FPS missions as a core gameplay aspect, and it’s really one of their main selling points. In no other game can you walk out of a mission, into a ship, hop in the pilot seat and go from the ground to orbit with no cutscene and all of it under player control. The amount of crazy shit you can do just because your character can leave the pilot seat is ridiculous. A month ago I teamed up with some dude who did bounty hunting. He EMPd the other player, had me EVA over to their ship, shoot open the airlock, and gun down the target, all so his buddy could come over and harvest the ship for resources to sell. The emergent gameplay, even though the game can still be very rough, is a really cool aspect of what they’ve made.
I admit, I was a backer of the original campaign for Star Citizen. However, with the dev cycle what it is, I think I’ll be a grandparent before the game releases from early access. Last time I played it, it was a buggy mess, with only combat, and was not fun to me. I also admit, a lot of my angst comes from the way Elite: Dangerous tried to make FPS combat, etc., a thing. As someone who plays that game to explore, that entire DLC, as well as the alien shit they added, was part of system I had no interest in and, in my opinion, has further led to the downfall of E:D, a game that has been waiting for atmospheric landing, etc., but still, years later, barely has non-atmospheric landing.
I get the desire to walk about your ship, have carrier ships you can walk around with other players, and space stations you can visit actual NPCs in. However, if I wanted to shoot stuff, I’d play an FPS. I play E:D to explore and get that fear/anxiety/dread I only ever feel watching American politics. Just not my game play when I wanna just chill and narrowly avoid crashing my ship while exploring!
I think some of them want players to be “pirates,” so they give them the tools to do so.
I’m only speaking from experience in other space games I’ve played.
That’s a cool aspect of it, no doubt, I just wish it took a backseat to the core game play. We have so many FPS games, but not many great new-gen space sims.
And if this space sim can create perfect FPS experience, now you’ve got all the FPS money funding the development of a space sim.
See how that works? Markets create synergies and non-zero-sum games. In this case, putting the limited resources for the space sim into FPS elements makes new resources available.
But that’s never how these things go. They put so many resources into FPS aspects that they almost entirely abandon the space sim. Just look at E:D for an example. They dedicated a whole DLC to walking around your ships and then threw ground assault missions into it.
The immersion from being a part of the world, walking around and experiencing stuff is neat and immersive. If the focus was on that stuff first and FPS second, cool, but that feels rarely the case.
Thanks for the comment!
Yeah, whenever I get in contact with another vessel my instincts tell me to board and start blasting
LOL. I totally thought these were internal names for novel features from the headline🤣
Just in time to never be released!
Scope Creep: The Game
Yeah you just had to ignore every piece of information from the founder and developers that it would be a highly ambitious game and that they were unsure themselves where it is they wanted to stop.
But that’s not as fun to talk shit about.
At this point I have genuinely have no fucking idea what the game is about
It’s about taking money from people who like spaceships.
Everything lol
It’s supposed to be a “space life” simulator so you can basically do just about anything
Sir it’s in the name. Star Citizen. Citizen of the stars. It’s pretty clearly aiming to be what Starfield completely fucked up on.
A space game with as few restraints and as many possibilities as they can do. An Elite Dangerous with a much broader scope.
Releasing soon ™️
Can go buy and play the game right now but I guess that’s not released enough.
Sure its playable but the game is still (and i think always will be) lacking the VAST majority of features they’ve been talking about for more than 10 years.
The last one that’s missing is IIRC Jump-points and they’re adding that within 3 months. They’re still fleshing out salvage and the dynamic economy stuff, but the initial implementation is there.
If I’m wrong though I am all ears.
Real soon ™️
It’s already in active player facing testing so yeah. Normally when they bullshit they don’t have players testing the feature.
Like what? What features specifically have they been talking about (for more than 10 years) which have yet to be implemented? Most of the core systems seem to be there, just seems like they’re polishing up what’s already in the game.
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It works like a charm, too. ™️
Just because you can log in and do what 3 missions doesn’t mean it is a game.
Considering it was supposed to be released in 2016 and it is still an ALPHA is fucking stupid. It has been nothing but a glorified tech demo
Since you’re replying to every comment I’ve made - Alpha still doesn’t have a set meaning. It changes between people who use it.
Logging in and doing the content you couldn’t do when you originally bought it still means it’s progressing and yes, it qualifies as a game no matter how mad that makes you.
What part of “it’s still being fucking developed” keeps getting past you bud? “It’s just a tech demo, it’s not a complete game” - no fucking shit. You being pissy that it’s not done as fast as you want it is entitlement and you should really grow the fuck up.
No, I wanted the promises made to be kept ya tard. I was promised a game at least 5 times.
Go cordless Chris Roberts balls a bit more
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The people who whine about this game are just fucking dumb. Gamers are some of the worst entitled pricks.
I could have sworn when I pledged in 2014-2016 (can’t recall at the moment) I pledged cause Squadron 42 was hyped to be released in a much shorter time. I’m not complaining, I spent some more cash on it, but I thought I was going to get a fancier single player space game before now. I loved Wing Commander as a kid, even had to get a tech to figure out the highmem.sys and possibly other optimization in the windows .bat files to even play so wanted to play the newest of Chris Rpberts.
Of course maybe I misunderstood at the time and it wasn’t supposed to be coming that soon, which is why I’m not bothered even if it passed, I think they are trying but got into feature creep. I haven’t logged on in over a year now but I keep an eye on things to try when it seems interesting and get use out of my HOTAS.
Cool, too bad it’s one of the worst pay to win games. Last time I checked you had to pay real money to buy in-game stuff and the prices were by no means pocket change.
It really isn’t though. For one you don’t “have” to buy anything except a starter package for $45, everything else is optional if you want to support development. There also isn’t really a “win condition,” there’s PvP, but it’s not like ranked matches or whatever.
Also those people buying the largest most expensive ships are going to be in for a rude awakening. You will have costs for managing ships that currently isn’t in the game, but when it is I imagine the big spenders will bankrupt themselves (in game currency). There’s also the fact that ships larger than a one seater will need crew so you can’t really do much with them on your own.
The prices of ships can be absurd, but I think the people that buy them are just shooting themselves in the foot. I’ve been a backer since 2014 and aside from the starter ship I only bought one “extra” cheap shuttle because I love having access to it through any wipe even though I could earn it in game fairly quickly.
“Last time I checked”
Damn, as of years ago you’ve been able to buy new ships with in-game currency. You’re not even keeping up on the game you’re bitching about. Sure you can always buy better ships with real money, you can have whatever reservations you want about that, but calling it pay to win seems like a stretch. Elite Dangerous has long proved space battles are often a skill issue.
It’s meant to be an “everything” game.
Chris Roberts has always had the ambition for a space sim where you could truly do anything, but never had the resources to actually create it.
So what is Star Citizen supposed to be?
An open world sandbox where you, a citizen of the stars, can choose to be Whst you want. A space trucker? A pirate? A bounty hunter? A smuggler? These aren’t new things in the space sim genre, but Star Citizen wants to make these aspect less like a game and more like a life sim.
So instead of clicking a few buttons to fly your spaceship, your character wakes up in bed, has to manually walk over to the ship hangar (maybe take the train there, if you’re on the city planet. Yes, the train runs on a schedule), manually access the hangar via elevator, climb into the ship, activate the ship, request take-off from control, wait for the hangar doors to open, and then you fly your spaceship.
This level of granular detail is meant for every aspect of the game and is the reason why Star Citizen will never get done!
Wait did they still not release this game
It’s playable if that’s what you mean. It’s still “early access” though.
Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.
When did they ever “release” it without saying its also early access?
edit - assuming downvotes are cause of a misunderstanding. im not defending early access or star citizen. I am just saying I do not recall them “backpedaling” to early access. I thought they had always advertised it as early access. Which itself is shady af
What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.
Maybe because development has a high ongoing cost that they do not have any other product to take up? Star citizen has a fairly large scope, and the fact that they have even gotten to the point where a fairly high number of gameplay loops are fully integrated is quite impressive. If you look at their ship designs, for example, you can see just how much care was put into a lot of the designs (see the architectural reviews, for example)
Star Citizen has raised more money than the budgets of GTAV, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 COMBINED.
The only people defending it now are those so deep in the sunk cost fallacy they can’t get out.
Edit: the total budget for StarCitizen so far is equivalent to the nominal GDP in 2023 of Sao Tome & Principe
I’ve spent $49.99 on it. As a space sim fan, it’s one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had in a game. Blows Elite Dangerous out of the water in terms of seamlessness. If it was better optimized it’d be one of the only things I’d play.
I’m not trying to you’re wrong about anything. But for a certain customer, it’s already a pretty great experience.
And it’s much better than any space sim game developed by Sao Tome & Principe in 2023.
Checkmate, atheists.
Yeah, maybe. But it’s also ridiculous, finish what you have instead of constantly bolting on scope to keep the sales treadmill running.
Of course, it’s a business first and foremost. And if that’s what people gladly pay for, no fault in pocketing the money I guess.
Except scope hasn’t really changed in years? I might be wrong since I’m not trawling through every single piece of content released but I’m pretty sure most of the expansions are related to CIG figuring out details of already promised features.
I’m sure someone following the game closer can provide more details on that.
“Playable”
for the record I paid for this and am watching with hopeful eyes, but please stop pretending that being able to launch the game and walk around is playing
Playable in very loose terms. I booted it on a decent rig (13700k/32gbRAM/3080ti), after ~10min of loading screens I finally got my ship onto the pad and tried to take off from the planet; half way into the burn out of the atmosphere, I clip out of the pilot seat, through the whole ship and start free falling back to the planet while my ships continues to burn away from me…. I alt+f4’d and uninstalled that hot garbage.
Calling bullshit on this. Have a very similar rig and I load into the cities within a minute or two, and if I spawn on my ship or a station it’s faster than that.
Nope. Never will.
I hear it has the same release schedule as Half Life 3, Knights of the old republic remake, and Road Runner vs. Acme.
Even more fascinating, people are still chucking money at it. Because apparently too many ran out of other things to waste money on. Entirely.
I mean… it should given the playerbase has thrown a billion dollars into it.
No no, it should release immediately despite being incomplete because people are throwing tantrums.
It should do a Cyberpunk 2077 because that went really really well for CDPR.
I “bought” this game when I was in high school. I’ve graduated high school, college, and I’ve been in the workforce for 7 years. Still no game.
So yes, they should figure out this game is going to be, set a launch date, and work towards that schedule. This forever-in-development thing they have going on is ridiculous.
Edit: Alright, it’s not fair to say “still no game.” There is a game you can download and play, but the question I have is does it have all the bells and whistles you expect from a complete game, or is it a technical demo with some game features? See my other comment in this comment chain for why my opinion is what it is.
This forever-in-development thing they have going on is ridiculous.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, 8 years. The typical game development cycle. For Star Citizen, the well known highly ambitious game. You people can’t even wait until it takes them longer than a typical fucking cycle to bitch and moan about how long it’s taking. Fuck off already.
Go play it and tell me there is no game there. You already own it. So install it and find out.
“Still no game” see, this bad faith shit you do is just chef’s kiss. You can go play it right this second. Their updates to this point are open to play. Right now. “Still no game” isn’t just dishonest it’s a fucking lie and you keep saying it.
They don’t have to set a launch date, they don’t have to put down in writing for you what the game is going to be, and they have roadmaps and are updating the game constantly. You are owed fucking nothing more than what you’ve been given and you throwing a tantrum about it isn’t just frustrating, it’s childish.
If you don’t like the development cycle, move the fuck on and stop bitching about it. You have a life, right? 7 years in the workforce. Play a different game and stop letting this one live rent free in your head. As a grown man, that should be pretty easy. Let the developers decide what they do with their game and if you don’t like it, nobody is making you play it. Nobody is making you keep up with it. And the constant posts of people bitching and moaning “Why isn’t it out yet? Fuckin’ scammers >:(” drive me up a fucking wall.
It’s been a decade and people still rage bait this game.
Here I’ll add some context
It is pretty easy not to think about this game, it does not live rent free in my brain. I bought the promise of a space ship over a decade ago when there really was no game. The “game” then was here is your spaceship in a garage, stare at it and marvel. That was the whole game.
Over time i’ve seen bits and pieces of it in my feed, I remember when they added being able to fly the spaceship, idk when that was, but again that was the whole game. You could see pretty space but still no substance.
That was really my last experience with it because I think somewhere around this point is probably where I started working full time and stopped really following game news.
Flash forward to today I see this post to see the game is still a work in progress, I shared my opinion.
So if there is a decent game by now with a plot that would be great, I would give it a shot. But if it’s still just a fancy tech demo where you can run around for a bit but there’s really nothing to “do” then I’ll wait another decade.
So far it’s just about amassing money, nothing more.
Last I checked it’s still an ALPHA. World of Tanks was at least a working beta since it was released in 2010.
Okay, why is that a problem that it’s “in alpha”? These are made up fucking terms that change meaning based on the people using them.
It’s been an ALPHA since I first play tested sometime in 2016. In that time Halo Infinite released with a more polished game than this shitty tech demo
8 years of development. Oh no. That’s the average range for a normal development cycle.
Fuck off with this stupid shit already.
I still can’t play the one I actually bought, Squadron 42, so no there’s no game. There’s a live demo for star citizen but nothing but promises for the one they said would come out first
So this hyper specific thing that they changed focus from is why you shitcan the entire rest of the game? The story driven campaign that takes a lot more time and resources you’re upset about taking time to develop? Like come on man. This really is Cyberpunk all over again. Just let them work. Go play Helldivers 2.
Yes me pointing out they still haven’t done the part I paid for is shit canning the game. I’m sorry I don’t want to just play a tech demo while I wait for the game.
Also bad analogy as cyberpunk was playable and launched
Notice how “Squadron 42” has a different name than “Star Citizen”? You bought the tech demo for a module of a larger game when you could have waited because clearly you’re not interested in the tech demo. Development isn’t a straightforward process and you had to know that going in. Sorry you think there’s “no game” because the section you wanted isn’t done yet. You’re just wrong.
Cyberpunk released nearly unplayable under the pressure of people threatening to kill the developers for pushing back the release date too many times. Almost like they shouldn’t have put a release date. You seem wildly uninformed about both games.
I bought 2 ships in 2014… Your point is fucking moot
They don’t seem well in the head with their blind devotion
That means literally fucking nothing to the comment you’re replying to.
The phrase “AAA game/developer” has lost all meaning for me over the years. I just can’t drop the clichéd $60+ on these titles anymore, especially with quality and support waning. I don’t see this game being any different; the writing’s on the wall.
Well, see, with Star Citizen, you buy it to have an unreleased game that will allow you to buy a ship for 8000 dollars that you can… stand around inside of and look at.
Seriously, This is peak gaming… how can you losers not understand how great this is?! /s
This game is 45 dollars. It always has been. Support for it has only increased over time. Also I really don’t look at CIG as a AAA dev, whomever said that forgot what a Kickstarter/self funded game is.
For those wondering about why such basic features are mentioned here it’s because work on Squadron 42 (single player part of the project) moved to the polishing stage and everything created for it is being ported back to Star Citizen (multi player part).
Is it worth an article? It is if you’re interested in the game, I guess?
Is SC a perfect project? Of course not, far from it. I do find it interesting however how… angry it makes people and how much they want it to fail. Yeah, I know $1000+ packages and so forth (not needed if you just want to play the game btw).
For those interested in actually checking for themselves whether it’s a scam or not, there are free flight events multiple times a year - you get to see the current state of the game with everything good and bad it entails. Surprisingly enough, they tend to bring in more players every single time.
Just because the product they are making is quality does not mean it isn’t a scam. The game was supposed to be released a decade ago now. They said they had the entire single player finished and ready in 2014. The things they have made are impressive, sure. But after that amount of time its looking more and more like they lied about how ready things were to get more funding, and have been doing that for a decade now.
It’s not that they lied about it being complete, it’s that they entirely changed the scope of the game around 2014ish. If I remember correctly they even had a poll asking the community if they’d rather wait for planetary landing which was originally not meant to be in the game.
The original game was freelancer 2.0. you don’t land on a planet, you get into a cutscene and then appear in “New Atlantis” (yes I’m referring to star field, that’s not a city in SC) then as the story goes a developer made a tech demonstration they called “pupil to planet” showing the ability to continually zoom out from, you guessed it, looking at a pupil and going all the way to space with no loading screen so the had to essentially rework the game from the ground up. The story and a lot of the assets/voice work, etc was all done and “ready” for what that game would have been, but since the change they now had to rebuild a lot of the systems and make new systems for the way the game works now. That’s just squadron 42 (the single player game) star citizen the MMO has always been a bit on the “back burner” waiting for SQ42 to complete.
Now that we’re past all that, and just this last weekend SC had a majorly important tech test that seemed to go very well, they’re putting the last foundational pieces together so they can actually complete the game.
If anyone wants to say it took too long, I’m with you. I backed in 2014 and thought “damn, answer the call 2016? That’s a long ass time.” but to say it’s a scam? They’re the dumbest bunch of scammers in the entire history of scamming, Nigerian princes and all, if this is supposed to be a scam.
I absolutely agree with this point. I think CIG’s inability to openly communicate when things go bad is a big reason for the scam allegation (that and loooooots of issues with planning, especially early on). I see it’s as a serious problem for a project that presents itself as “open development” (which it is, don’t take me wrong, but not as much as it should be).
I think both CIG and players underestimated how long it takes to build a company, tech and two big budget games at the same time. It’s 100% on the devs to realize and communicate that, which they failed to do.
For better or worse, S42 is officially in its final stretch. Is it really? Transfer of people towards SC seems to confirm that but we’ll see when the game finally releases. When that happens we’ll also see whether game taking this long was worth it.
I thought that they halted development on squadron 42. I will be curious of what comes out after 10 years at the very least
On the contrary, the last few years were pretty much fully focused on Squadron, with SC being maintained by (almost a) skeleton crew - hence the slow updates.
Now updates are seemingly picking up, though it’s early to say for sure since we only got one quarterly patch so far, with next one probably targeting April-May (depending how porting some of new additions goes).
They didn’t, they just had a big announcement on October that SQ42 is “feature complete” and that it’s entering the polish phase which is why they moved devs back to SC. The remaining teams stay on SQ42 as so-called “strike teams” to polish and tweak tech.
Source: I follow the development way too much, send help lol
If SC simply showed their original roadmap and timeline, it would speak to itself if it is a scam or or not.
As someone who bought in from the start (when everything was bundled), the argument of “not a scam” fell through when they started to hide their original roadmap.
Just to clarify, which roadmap are we talking about?
- The changes to the release view from last year or so?
- One from CitizenCon after addition of full planet exploration?
- One from the early days where SC was suppose to be a prettier Freelancer with planets separated by a loading screen and consisting of a small hub for activities?
I’d like to make sure which one we’re talking about.
Edit: I’d also like to add, how far are we going with people being scammed?
I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?
I can understand this view for early backers (I’m one of them) but what about people who decided to drop money on the game in the last 2 or even 5 years? Were they also scammed despite hundreds of articles about delays, issues and thousands of people yelling about a scam every time SC is mentioned?
Maybe, maybe not, but is entirely possible to be scammed while also being in a position where you should have known better; the two are not mutually incompatible.
Of course, but I think it’s a bit harder to defend this accusation with all of this info available and the ability to try the game for yourself for free. The latter is what I’d suggest to anyone interested in the game, even if they aren’t worried about wasting money anyway.
Yeah it’s honestly pretty fun, but there were juuuust enough performance and stability bugs that I gave up and returned it. I think it has potential and I’m glad someone is doing this.
Which is why I appreciate them doing free flight events. They don’t present the game in the best light a lot of the time but it’s a great way to test if the game is for you in it’s current form (or even in general). They are also a good way to prevent new players from feeling scammed so there’s that.
I feel like a lot of us backed and stayed with this project despite all of the issues exactly because they’re trying to do something no one else is willing to risk. It’s a rough road, full of mistakes and delays but they’re sticking with it, which is more than many people expected.
Is SC a perfect project? Of course not
Lmao nobody has ever asked or thought of that question
Some people think trying to “defend” the project means I completely agree with how and what is being done so I’m just trying to cover my bases.
I do find it interesting however how… angry it makes people and how much they want it to fail
Star Citizen is an example of excellence, and excellence always attracts haters.
Eh, let’s not act like CIG is completely blameless in all of this. They made a lot of mistakes along the way and SC is still far from what they promised it to be.
They’re getting there, but it’s a slow process.
Why do laser weapons have recoil? Don’t ask. “I think you need recoil in order to balance the game and make it fun for everybody,” explains Greim.
photons have momentum
barely… when’s the last time a ray of sunshine slapped you across the face
So you say, but it does make me flinch when it suddenly hits.
Every morning.
Just the other day. I went outside and SLAP it was all sunny and nice instead of grey and drab.
10/10 slaps, would get slapped by the sun again.
But if I shot that raynof sunshine in auch a way that it killed someone I would be okay with assuming there would be more force than just a standard ray
Okay I did some math. If the gun shot a single photon with all the energy of a .50BMG from an M2 heavy machine gun, it would have about 1.2e-4 Ns of momentum. For reference, the bullet it’s compared to would have 38.3 Ns. So the photon has about 32000 times less momentum than a bullet. Do with that what you will.
I still haven’t figured out why
The root of the problem is that you think of momentum as being defined to be the product of something’s mass and its velocity, but this is actually only an approximation that just so happens to work extremely well at our everyday scales; the actual definition of momentum is the spatial frequency of the wave function (which is like a special kind of distribution). Thus, because photons can have a spatial frequency, it follows simply that they therefore can have momentum.
Something else that likely contributes to your confusion is that you probably think that where something is and how fast it is going are two completely independent things, but again this is actually only an approximation; in actuality there is only one thing, the wave function, which is essentially overloaded to contain information both about position and momentum. Because you cannot pack two independent pieces of information into a single degree of freedom, it is not possible for position and momentum to be perfectly well defined at the same time, which is where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes from.
Why they have momentum or why laser weapons would have recoil?
It would make sense IMHO if it’s to create airflow for cooling
There’s no reason for that to be a directed force, just suck in air from multiple directions and eject it in multiple directions to cancel out all net forces. Or ramp it up slowly so it isn’t so jerky. But even if it’s set up in the worst way possible, the forces will be significantly less than shooting a relatively massive bullet.
I’m no psysicist, but I suppose you would create more heat energy, than you’d be able to dissipate anyway
Nah, active air cooling is a thing that computers have been using successfully for decades. It does create more heat overall, but it moves heat away from the parts you don’t want to melt.
Even liquid cooling or phase change cooling relies on air cooling eventually, those techs can just move heat quicker to a temporary heat reservoir that is then air cooled. If the cooling on the reservoir is slower than the heating, the cooling system will eventually saturate and fail to continue cooling the heat source faster than the reservoir cooling.
Even liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling does this, it just dumps that heat earlier when the N2 or CO2 is condensed. And for those, you either have limited cooling time or need to top up the coolant as it evaporates.
Edit: not sure why you were downvoted… Your assumption was wrong but IMO worthy of discussion.
Why they have momentum since they don’t have mass
You know that old E=mc² equation? That’s actually only the simplified “rest” half of it. The full equation that relativity gives us says E²=m²c⁴+p²c². Meaning if it has energy, it definitely has mass (m), momentum (p), or both.
For a massless particle like a photon, that means E=pc, and its momentum is proportional to its energy and therefore frequency/wavelength.
Weird math bullshit.
But in essence, because they carry energy they must have momentum. It’s why they can impart momentum on what they hit, because momentum must be preserved.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-physics/chapter/29-4-photon-momentum/
Procedural recoil? So basically, random recoil you can never learn the patterns for?
I think so. Which is more realistic of course. But also a weird way to out “random recoil”.
Well, procedural when applied to generation of scenery/galaxies etc means to create the exact same thing using random values that are the same random for everyone. It just saves on storage.
But, I cannot tell you how this would apply to recoil. It would only make sense if there were an absolutely huge number of possible weapons.
Nah, cause it could be a procedure like
- x is between 1 and 5
- recoil = Right*x + Up*4x
So you can learn to resist the average recoil
How about they bring development time and costs to AAA standards?
Those are already in the AAAA standard that Ubisoft pioneered with Skull and Bones.
I heard they’re skipping this generation to go straight to 5A
And bring down the scope and depth? What’s the point? If you want a one-shot cinema game, go get you one. They’re a dime a dozen.
This would have been so exciting like 9 years ago when they first released the FPS thing. I would also be excited if they said the game is fun now, instead of some random superficial animation thing that probably doesn’t add much to the gameplay.
I love the idea of this game, but even after a few years I lost hope. I can’t believe it’s still in development like 10 years later. Does anyone know if it’s more playable now? They had some ship racing and the FPS thing before, why haven’t they just thrown together a basic world yet?
Edit: it sounds like they have thrown together a basic world. Maybe it’s worth another try now? Can you have fun for more than a few hours and actually accomplish meaningful stuff?
They’ve had a “basic world” for a long time at this point, unfortunately it still doesn’t go beyond “tech demo” levels of development.
Squadron 42, their single player game set in this universe, is supposedly nearly completely finished and coming “SOON™”.
If Squadron 42 actually releases it would mean Chris Roberts has finally managed to start and finish a project without a parent company ordering him or taking away the project from him.
What the defense squad doesn’t get here, is that when people ask if it’s done they are asking if Squadron 42 is done, and it’s still not.
I check this game out once or maybe twice a year which is more than enough imo. There are plenty of people playing this daily though who apparently can cope with all the bugs and crashes.
It’s a grift, a scam, a goose that’ll lay golden gameplay eggs just so long as those whales keep dumping more money on the project.
Oh shit. I think it was literally 10 years ago I ‘pledged’ the base game (Aurora Mr). It still has less hours than Microsoft minesweeper, which let’s face it is a banging game.
Same. I don’t even remember what ship I ordered.
I liked the game, when it was advertised as a moddable singleplayer game with drop-in drop-out co-op. As well as moddable multiplayer you can host yourself.
Now, I don’t have any interest it whatever that cluster fuck has become.
This is all just stuff they’re porting over from Squadron 42 now that they were able to move those devs back to SC. I have no idea why this deserves it’s own article.
They should be bragging about the 400 player single shard test they just finished.
Oooooo 400 players… Wow… That’s unheard of… For cereal
400 on a single shard (server) that actually quite a lot. It is far far easier to just throw a bajillion different servers at the problem and only have a relatively small player count per server. Having 400 running smoothly on a single server is a very impressive optimization achievement
Have you ever heard of CCP? This small game called EVE Online? They’ve been doing this for the better part of a decade
Correct and eve has been very impressive with its per server player counts as well. It’s a completely different type of Beast mind you, trying to keep that many players synchronized over something like a first person perspective real-time movement game is a completely different ball game from keeping spreadsheet simulators synchronized.
Still a very good achievement of optimization regardless but definitely a completely different ball game from synchronizing a first person type content where the players are free to just move in whatever fucking weird ways they want rather than linear vector paths
Yeah eve handles it by slowing down time in-game. So each player has less actions for the server to handle per cycle.
Every game has their way of handling it. Cig is doing it via the replication layer and dynamic meshing. IE multiple servers talking to a “boss” server that scales based on needed load without Eve’s crutch of time scaling. Totally different technologies.
Eve’s solution worked based on what they had and needed at the time, but it’s old hat now.
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It never ceases to amazing me how angry people get when a game isn’t perfect and bug free. We want more and more content and graphics with the same amount or less resources, all the while refusing to pay any more for it.
I miss the days when people were happy with n64 and ps1 graphics. You didn’t need a team of 200 people to put out hyper realistic graphic open world games that people would still shit on.
Sheesh, I’m glad I’m not in this industry.
I’m on the other side of the fence here, amazed that people still bat for a company that can’t deliver a product after what, 10 years past the first estimate release date?
I’m not on any side of the fence. I just see these posts shitting on games all the time, and get tired of seeing them. If you don’t like a game fine, don’t play it. But making games is hella difficult. I make indie games in my spare time, and I can honestly say, just making a single player game is hard, let alone a multi-player game, or anything realistic. Like Jesus, if you have such a huge problem with these games, go make a better one yourself.
I agree with you for most games, people are picky and don’t understand the challenges. But this game solicited donations 10 years ago, people bought into the vision, and they were wildly successful, I think they raised $600M, which is like the most money any game has ever raised?
And despite that, 10 years later, it’s still mostly just a tech demo (edit: perhaps I’m wrong? Maybe there is $40 worth of playable content. See discussion in child comments, I haven’t tried this myself in many years, out of fear of being disappointed again). They are focused on adding cool but superficial animation things, rather than just making a fun playable experience.
If they were focused on making a fun playable (but possibly buggy and limited) game then it would be different. But instead they seem to be chasing random superficial features like projecting your face from your web cam onto your character. It feels like they are not seriously committed to making even an early access game in a reasonable timeline.
If this project was funded by some billionaire who wanted to spend 30 years to make the most amazing MMO ever with a ton of never before seen features, then that would be fine. But instead normal people chipped in $40+ to fund this game, and the developers don’t seem to be prioritizing actually making a fun playable game. It’s barely beyond a tech demo even 10 years later (edit: maybe this is not completely accurate). It is reasonable to assume that the management of this project does not care about making a playable game, they can work on whatever fun features they want, they’ve already made a ton of money.
edits: perhaps I’m wrong about the state of the game. I haven’t tried it in a while. I’ll have to give it another try.
I agree that the project has fallen victim to arguably the worst example of scope creep to ever plague the gaming industry, but it’s much further along than “barely beyond a tech demo”. I know people who play several hours a week and say they’re having a great time. There’s definitely a full game in the alpha, but it’s far from polished or finished.
To your point about feeling different about the slow development if it were funded by a single investor rather than crowdsourcing: what’s the difference? Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI. Isn’t that all that matters with an investment? I’m not sure why it would be better if it was just a single investor being happy rather than a million investors being happy, even if it is all just delusion.
TL;DR: I may be mistaken about how playable it is, I’ll have to give it another try. Thanks for the reassurance. I haven’t tried it myself in many years, and have only relied on articles like this to hear about the progress. Perhaps I’m biased since the comments always love to hate on Star Citizen and few people are defending it. RE single investor: if everyone who paid money for it was happy then yeah there would be no difference. But I think a lot of people paid money expecting a longer gaming experience within a few years, and instead it’s taken a long time and they’re still focusing a lot on cosmetic things rather than gameplay and content. IMO gameplay and content should be the top priority, and cool visual stuff can come later. But if piracy/mining/exploring planets/missions can actually provide ~10 hours of enjoyment without being seriously hindered by bugs, then I’m totally wrong and should update my comment.
Thanks for the info, perhaps I should update my comment. It was barely beyond a tech demo when I tried it so many years ago, but it does seem like it’s added a lot since then (and I’ve only learned about it after digging in more today). I’ve seen some comments in this post that said there isn’t much to do besides walk around and look at stuff, which matches my experience many years ago, but perhaps it’s not really accurate anymore. Some articles have talked about piracy and mining actually being viable as ways to make money to get a better ship. If those are enjoyable and not severely limited in content and so buggy that progress is hard, then I’m totally wrong and can maybe say that 10 years later my return on investment is adequate :) , and maybe in another few years there will be even more content and give me something more like ~10+ hours of enjoyment.
I know people who play several hours a week and say they’re having a great time. There’s definitely a full game in the alpha, but it’s far from polished or finished.
This is actually really reassuring to me, I’ll have to give it another try.
Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI.
Perhaps the people you’re talking to about it now are somewhat skewed towards people who still enjoy it for what it is now. I’ve almost forgotten and wouldn’t think to mention it to most people, but I paid $40 for it around 9 years ago, because a friend mentioned it to me and it seemed like such an amazing idea. It showed so much promise, the racing seemed fun and complex, and later I tried Squadron 42 and felt like I could see the vision coming together. But then after not trying it for a few years, I keep hearing more of the same thing: new cool superficial feature, but still lacking in significant enjoyable gameplay. I am actually kind of scared to try it again and be disappointed in the lack of content.
I realize too that Squadron 42 is apparently a fairly long and mostly finished experience? That alone might be worth $40, though I do think 10 years is a little long to wait for that. I’ll concede that they do seem to be delivering on some of the hype, it just takes way too long, and I’d rather they prioritize on something simple but playable for long periods, versus cool immersion and fancy animations and concepts.
Perhaps a lot of the people who enjoy it now enjoy the kind of role playing aspect of getting in a ship with friends and walking around exploring? I would enjoy that somewhat too, every few years, almost like a really advanced VR chat, I guess. But my friends have lost interest in this due to the never ending development cycle. And I would hate to be the one to say “hey guys let’s try this out again, it’s way better now”, and then have everyone be disappointed when someone gets stuck in a wall or the content seems really limited.
Anyway to summarize: perhaps I’m wrong, maybe the game is worth $40 now and I’ve just been biased from people loving to hate on a game that they haven’t even tried. I’ll have to give it another try.
I think it’s worth a try if you haven’t played in several years! There isn’t a lot of gameplay if you don’t have a ship geared towards combat/mining/cargo, but those contracts are pretty fun (there wasn’t a huge amount of variety, but still several hours of gameplay). I will admit that all my evidence of player enjoyment is anecdotal, but it was a bit shocking to me to hear about how much fun friends were having when I keep seeing so much hate towards the game online. I’ve gotten a couple ships as gifts from friends/family, but my PC hasn’t ever been beefy enough to run the game at a stable frame rate (I’ve since upgraded so it’s probably time to try it again ¯\(ツ)/¯)
Awesome, thanks! It’s nice to hear a perspective that is different from the mainstream. I’ve also been limited by my PC for a while, but I’ve upgraded since I last tried it, so hopefully I’ll have more luck this time.
Every person I know who’s spent money on star citizen seems happy with their RoI
Every person you know personally? Most comment sections I’ve seen discussing Star Citizen seems to have at least one or two people who are unhappy with their roi. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve been able to get my full money’s worth yet. I think I will some day, I know it’s more than a tech demo, but the gameplay isn’t quite there yet and the game is still really buggy and unoptimized.
If they can release Squadron 42 this year or next, I think that’d really start to turn things around for them more than anything else
Let’s be honest the people who would defend their ROI have lost interest in defending it to the unwilling. Star Citizen has become a cat call to all the haters whenever it’s posted in general gaming (namely r/games and c/games now) communities. The only way the narrative changes is by showing not telling, and that only happens with further polishing like this article is covering, and in future release.
There is a reason they’ve successfully increased pledge numbers year over year, you just don’t hear from people outside that community due to this stigma that’s not worth bothering to explain.
Homie you’ve been able to fucking play it for a decade. If you haven’t figured that out yet, you’re the problem. If they said they released it years ago and called these all “updates” you’d have nothing to bitch about and that’s why I fucking loathe people like you. It’s not “officially released” so it’s a scam, it’s disappointing, it’s whatever the fuck else you can dredge up to downplay the fact they’re still fucking developing it like any other active game. Even Elite Dangerous still drops updates and it predates Star Citizen. You people are impossible to please and it’s exhausting. Move the fuck on.
you’ve been able to fucking play it for a decade
tech demo out = game is playable, unbeatable logic
If they said they released it years ago and called these all “updates” you’d have nothing to bitch about
It’s not about what the developers say the state of the game is, it’s about what’s actually out and playable - and for Star Citizen, last time I checked it’s some barebones version with one planet, bajillion missing features, 200000000$ ships and in general a buggy mess
You star citizen fans are insufferable. I get spammed with these videos, ads and articles hyping up the game for being the best thing ever, always claiming the next update to be some gamechanger but it’s still the same unfinished garbage. Love how every time someone mentions the absolutely disgusting monetisation, it goes in one ear and out the other.
Now get back to licking chris robert’s shoes, you’ve missed a spot
At this point I think they just want the game to be done
Fucking why? You can buy a ship for $20, go download the game, and play it this very second. The fuck does the “1.0 release!” title do differently? Give you full license to shit on how it’s now out and xyz isn’t done?
The people concerned about it releasing are the same ones who will bitch about it releasing ‘too soon’. Fuck em.
