2011 Started development ... They had 32 people mid 2013.
Look at those headcount and tell me seriously when the development really started.
We are talking about big SP game and most ambitious MMO mind you.
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Eurogamer: "Star Citizen does not convince as a game"
- Thread starter benzopil
- Start date
Look at those headcount and tell me seriously when the development really started.
We are talking about big SP game and most ambitious MMO mind you.
Maybe when the poster meant was they are trying to do too many things, maybe prioritize a few things over the many things they seem to be spread across. Maybe focus on a tighter (perhaps even finished) package instead increasing the scope. All the components that came after the initial pitch should have been updates/free DLC (gasp).
This could not be done. They had to make the technology they did first with release of PTU 2.0 and now 3.0 to start working on factually game and content.
Doing the big tech overhaul after launch would not be possible or almost not possible. Just look how Elite struggles with expanding their core due to being already developed (finalized from the tech and content perspective).
This is exactly what SC's detractors are complaining about, though. Realistic wind simulations should not be part of an initial release. Nor should a fish tank with moving fish, or the drink mixer. These things won't make the core gameplay more fun, they're just gimmicks designed to sell ships.
There is no tight design and no core loop, and there won't be one - at least not in Star Citizen. It's a sandbox MMO, a more hands-on Eve Online, and that game has no core loop either. It doesn't need one. It needs plenty of toys, a robust featureset and solid mechanics. Things that clearly aren't there yet, but that can probably be attributed to the fact that the engine is still in heavy development. CIG hopes they can finish the core engine this year, but we know how reliable their estimates are, so who knows? It's not even a proper MMO yet, and it won't be until Object Container Streaming is fully implemented (which is currently expected to go live in Q3, but again, CIG and release estimates).
Scope Creep the game. Just reading the proposal hurt my head, then they added more and kept doing it. This "game" is going to go down as on of the industries biggest failures IMO. And the sad thing is logically you could tell it was going to go this way very early on.
But there is precedence of this occurring outside of Elite, which you've mentioned. And by much more mature studios with experience. I'm really not seeing what makes this such a special case other than you simply stating it is by typing up a laundry list of stuff, that again, feature creeped there way in and was NOT part of the initial scope that was sold to us.
Question: How are they going to be paying for this absurdly long dev cycle?
170 million dollars is an gigantic amount of money, but it won't last forever, and after over 5 years they're pre-alpha on one project and alpha on another. And I can't imagine those pretty assets or Mark Hamill are cheap, on top of having to pay the employees.
170 million dollars is an gigantic amount of money, but it won't last forever, and after over 5 years they're pre-alpha on one project and alpha on another. And I can't imagine those pretty assets or Mark Hamill are cheap, on top of having to pay the employees.
What are you talking about even sandbox games have a game loop, the only difference is it takes a little longer for the loop to appear. Nevertheless, you didn't really say anything about the fact that the guys are wasting money and time on gimmicks.
In any case feature creep is a sign of a terribly managed project.
Several people have said this... Do you really believe there will never be another space sim game whether this fails or succeeds?
Hey, remember back in the late 90's when Grim Fandango killed the adventure game genre? Yeah, the adventure genre never returned after that, right?
Wind simulation affects atmospheric flight model.
Drink mixer or moving fish tank is solely artist driven content, it does not take any time from gameplay programmers, designers etc. Different people work on different things.
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Its simple, if they released SC with instancing like they first wanted, with planetary location being just CryEngine levels and no 64 bit precision and then created a lot of content designed around.
Imagine the cost of converting it to planetary system and 64 bit precision.
Thats just one example. Another would be the way they had to reengineer a lot of aspects of ship for Items 2.0 as those were not interactive enough to make very systemic gameplay around them.
They would have to rework most content, rework a lot of core technology after launch, so with migration in mind.
Add that players would except content updates and patch, so CIG would have to work on update to the old technology and at the same time try migrate to the new technology.
Well yes and no. You also have games like Warframe which are constantly expanding, refining and even totally redoing aspects of their game well beyond the initial scope of the game. Its not always a success but they are constantly iterating on the game and enlarging what it is. I also realize Warframe is a much smaller game in scope compared to SC but its not impossible for games to evolve quite a bit from what they started out as.
They will just add more crap people can buy and they will buy it.
If they sell the right things people will invest another 100 Million rather quickly as it seems.
Excuse me, but Elite Dangerous is crazy big and awesome.
At some point, GTAV is another behemoth's level game as well. Or Witcher 3.
Warframe is mostly iterating in terms of content, not core technology. Its a different one.
Its almost the same as what SC will be doing by adding content, so they have 3 moons and an asteroid and they will add additional planets, space satellites, player driven structures, procedurally done space stations, expand the on-site mission, derelict sites etc.
SC will be expanding in Warframe way and thats their plan for now and after launch, but its different from making core tech and core asset changes. Its more in way of trying to rework GTA V into Minecraft like voxel based technology for example.
Adventure games don't need a sizable budget to be good, and the indie scene is more than capable of creating great adventure games. Meanwhile, there hasn't been a single space sim that has scratched the action-adventure itch that games like Wing Commander, Freespace, Independence War, Freelancer left decades ago. There's the Egosoft X series, which are quality games, but are more like business simulation Tycoons that happen to be set in space.
Recent space sims are all either very small in scope (indies like Everspace or Galaxy On Fire) or rely on procedural generation instead of hand-crafted content (see: Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, Evochron). Trying to create a hand-crafted universe like Star Citizen is doing inherently costs more time and money.
If Star Citizen fails completely, I'm pretty certain there won't be another big-budget space sim for a very long time, if ever. It'll be a genre that has proven itself not worthy of investment.
He changed his mind. I don't really see the scandal. I change my mind about games ever other day.
That piece makes it sound like there's even less to do than NMS.
It's fundamentally impossible to create a fully hand crafted space sim due to the scale required, even SC uses procedural generation heavily.
And let's not forget they're now promising fully procedurally generated cities, spanning entire planets. With procedurally generated interiors. Including shops, markets and residential areas.
What could go wrong?
Let's be fair. The procgen interiors are limited only to important buildings.
I actually think the tech is extremely cool, but that's SC's main problem: it's a bunch of cool tech and...not much else.
So, in other words, the space sim genre is not dead? Since you can rattle of a list of several recent games in the genre? Whether they are small in scope doesn't matter, since their very existance proves that the genre is not dead.
I'm a big fan of Elite since the first days, but they haven't delivered a fraction yet of what it was promised, and hinted, during the kickstarter. 4 years later we are still waiting for the EVA, a compelling mission system and something that isn't just a korean grind game.
The scope has been greatly reduced and all the silence around the project isn't reassuring at all
The framerate tanking that hard with just 50 people online on the lowest settings is concerning for sure. I wish the game all the best but I don't see this being much more than what NMS was at launch.
Not really. The scope of the game has gotten out of hand by now, but their proposal for the game way back in their initial Kickstarter was perfectly reasonable and not much different from Freelancer, which was entirely hand-crafted. They chose to up the ante with to-scale planet traversal, which is what really requires procedural generation.
Okay. So they straight up lied in their pitch then. They said the game would be done in 2014. According to you then development didn't seriously start until say June 2014. So they started "real development" according to you, 2 years late. So off their initial projections Squadron 42 should of been done in 2016 or the end if you delay it the same amount. I am not saying that it's taking too long per say, just that they straight up can't figure out a date to save their lives. They never deliver what they say they will, when they do. That's not fans expectations, thats shit they straight up tell us.2011 Started development ... They had 32 people mid 2013.
Look at those headcount and tell me seriously when the development really started.
We are talking about big SP game and most ambitious MMO mind you.
Really. What's the core loop in Eve Online then? Because I've been playing the game for quite some time now and wouldn't be able to tell you. Is it space combat? Lenny was a banker and never even left a space station, yet he was the richest man in Eve and orchestrated the biggest war the video game world has ever seen. He never engaged in PvP, didn't run missions, didn't mine, and didn't lead a massive alliance. Some of the most influential Eve players, especially diplomats, strategists and alliance leads, don't even need to log in to "play" the game. In a true sandbox, you create your own loop using the tools and concepts provided by the game, and the "core loops" can be vastly different between players. It's like Lego. You could follow the instructions, or throw them away and do whatever you want with the bricks you have.
Also, to adress the "feature creep", CIG hasn't added any major new features in years. The last big one was procedural planets, and that feature was already planned for a post release update and got moved forward when Foundry42 Frankfurt managed to get the basics up and running much faster than initially anticipated. Which led to delays, but was done to ultimately save development time. And a lot of the gimmicks mentioned in random design documents are not actually being worked on and are just "maybe at some point in an update after the game has been released" things. Even pets, a staple of MMOs and an early stretch goal, are currently a post release feature.
They have a lot of goodwill to make up. They squandered most of it with the absurd pre launch dlc schemes and for a random indie crew making their first game and promising the moon it's hard not to be skeptical
Yeah it's solely artist driven content, except for you know, it still needs to be coded in the game to work etc.
It's not a waste of man power specifically, but it's a waste of money when the resources can be put to better use.
Or the artists can just work on another ship sale. That seems to always come out on time.
I'm fully satisfied with the product. Features removed? Yes. But an otherwise solid, polished product with hundreds of hours of gameplay.
Meanwhile SC sat in limbo and currently seems to be bordering on catastrophe.
https://www.polygon.com/2014/6/24/5...-votes-to-keep-stretch-goals-as-funding-sails
We kind of voted for them to keep going. The players told them to keep expanding the scope of the game. We could have told them to stop in 2014, but fuck that. I want a game that is on a grand scale.
A game that might not actually come out. This game is what.....5-10 years from an actual functional release at this point, which they will need to spend time, reworking the graphics because they will be outdated by the time it actually comes out.
Grand scale is fine but people paid for ambition and have yet to get anything closely resembling what they paid for.
And thats the issue with no publisher and just crowd funding shit. Players want everything possible. Which is not possible. That's why you need someone at the top going "We need to slow down and get a working product and then continue"
Although, they may never need to put out an actual product because people keep throwing money at them anyways.
We can talk a lot about history, but definitely we can say that they didnt lied.
CR was definitely overly optimistic about december 2014, even if take into account thats this date was solely for S42, being development mostly with investors money (original pitch).
They then got almost unlimited funding, so they started to work on SC at the same time as well, which of course slowed down S42 development. Then they also had to start doing public builds (due to SC) that also takes an additional development time.
But the biggest cause of a lot delays were two things, setting up the studios and not too great contractors which work were not up to the quality or even metrics a lot of times.
Another cause of a big delay (probably the biggest), with decision I and probably most SC community agree, was push for procedural planets tech as this is a game changed for the project, but also enormous core technology/design change and reason why they so struggled with 3.0.
But its for the better, the game will be way future proof and simply expansive due to this tech.
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How do you even calculate stuff like that or come to those conclusions.
The roadmap for this year is clear - finish stanton system, polish the core technology and core gameplay mechanics. And that would be already enough to have a real game.
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That game is so crazy ambitious, reading all the stuff it promises is mind boggling. And even if they deliver on the features, I have a feeling that it might not be as much fun to actually play as we wish it would be. But I would love to be proven wrong in this case.
The monthly thread where people come out of the woodwork to shit on a game they literally know nothing about! Oh, and we have the typical posts calling the game a shitshow, vaporware, and my favorite ones - calling the Star Citizen community on this forum a cult full of crazy people. Thread about TLOU 2 being a mess gets locked because "all games are a mess during development!" but Star Citizen, a game with a much bigger scope and bigger development team is perfectly fine to be called a shitshow and vaporware for the sole reason it's in development and not all the features promised have been delivered on by the time that people with virtually no interest in this game other than complaining about it or laughing at it, want it by.
I would love to have a constructive conversation on this forum about Star Citizen, Daedardus made a great post in this thread that criticized it but backed it up with an informed opinion. Sadly, every single thread (outside of our OTs thankfully) devolve into "OMG SCAM GAME NOT OUT LOL, DRINK MIXING MINIGAME LOLZ, CULT OF CHRIS ROBERTS GIVES ANOTHER 1K FOR JPEG LMAO!"
Oh, and if I do point out flaws in an argument, or claim that something is not true, well, goalposts change and my opinion is invalid because I follow the game and bought ships therefore I am a cultist who just wants to rope more people into the CR scam/pyramid scheme.
The article is right, there's not much to do, and there are massive performance issues that are embarrassing which they need to fix. I did play around 100 hours of 3.0 and had a lot of fun with people from our community here, but that got boring eventually. That being said, anybody who followed the game knew beforehand that this is not a patch that delivers a lot of content for you to do! They made it clear what this patch brings from their production schedules, we knew this is largely a foundational patch. It'll give us some basic missions to do, some cargo trading, moons to land on and explore, some new landing zones, a couple of mission givers, outposts to trade at, new armors and weapons, new ships, and some other things - and that's it. The article is criticizing the game for something it never promised to be at this point. It's almost as if it isn't finished or something!
Does that mean the game is immune from criticism - hell no! I think the performance issues are embarrassing, if I was CR, I would have included a lot more content to actually do and less places to visit - meaning I'd have different priorities. That being said, I am not disappointed because I knew exactly what this patch would bring because I follow the game!
Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 doesn't convince as a game:
I agree, this version of the Alpha doesn't nearly resemble the game it's envisioned to be. Yet, it's not supposed to, they know there's nothing to do, they know that the performance is bad, these things are not lost on them. That's why the first two major patches of the year are specifically addressed to fixing the performance issues and bugs, and adding more occupations and gameplay! If these things are not fixed within the next year, I would be beyond disappointed - but I have enough reason to believe they'll deliver those aspects like they eventually delivered 3.0. I wouldn't have released 3.0 in the state it is now, because I knew articles like these were coming. People expected things from this patch that we simply weren't going to get. This is an alpha, they are not shipping with this level of content or at this quality, this game is in heavy and active development with 450+ developers and cannot be taken as a final product.
Then again though, I wonder if anyone actually cares about all this. The game continues to have a strong following that's growing with every year, even on this forum I've been seeing faces that I haven't seen before in our OT's and the subreddit is very active. The game continues to make over 30 million a year, they have a passionate and supportive community that actually follows the game and holds CIG accountable while remaining realistic about what a video game company can do in a certain amount of time. Articles like this just don't matter to the SC community, because we already know there's nothing to do and we didn't expect much out of it. It was a foundational update and it's fun to play with friends for a week or two, that's about it.
The majority of random posts on this forum will just say this game is a scam, laugh whenever there is a failure or bad article, call us cultists and move on with their lives. When something good happens, they ignore it and aren't happy for the game or the community that supports it. There are people who of course are just "interested" in the game and "just sharing their opinions" without visiting the OT, asking the community itself about the game and looking to be informed by the people who actually play and follow this game. The author who wrote the article itself admits to not following it closely.
As a community here? We know what to expect to a certain degree, we roll with the punches. We follow the weekly updates to their internal development schedules, we watch the weekly studio updates, detailing what one of their 4 major studios has worked on the past month, plus a showcase on a feature update. We read the monthly studio report, a very detailed report that can take 10+ minutes to read, detailing exactly what every department in every studio has worked on (aside from SQ42 spoilers). We read the weekly and monthly newsletters, we play the game, we buy the ships when we like them. We are an informed community, we are the experts on this game on this forum, we know everything there is to know about this project and it's always funny to be lectured on something we've followed closely for years. There are times where we are disappointed, times where we are excited out of our minds, but we follow this project with the hope and belief that it will succeed based on the information presented to us. We are not mindless cultists, if we thought the project would fail we would get a very easy to obtain refund and move on. There is no reason why we would support a game that is going to obviously fail or is a scam, there is no sunken cost fallacy, we can get our money back at any moment.
We. as a community, set the scope by our funding of the game. We, as a community, hold CIG to the highest levels of transparency in the video game industry, in order to be able to support the game in good faith. We, as a community, know this game isn't a scam, vaporware, or a shitshow - this game is in development and will continue to be for years, we have enough reasons to believe it will be successful and that's why we support the project.
Chris Roberts himself, summed things up best around half a year ago:
TLDR;
I would love to have a constructive conversation on this forum about Star Citizen, Daedardus made a great post in this thread that criticized it but backed it up with an informed opinion. Sadly, every single thread (outside of our OTs thankfully) devolve into "OMG SCAM GAME NOT OUT LOL, DRINK MIXING MINIGAME LOLZ, CULT OF CHRIS ROBERTS GIVES ANOTHER 1K FOR JPEG LMAO!"
Oh, and if I do point out flaws in an argument, or claim that something is not true, well, goalposts change and my opinion is invalid because I follow the game and bought ships therefore I am a cultist who just wants to rope more people into the CR scam/pyramid scheme.
The article is right, there's not much to do, and there are massive performance issues that are embarrassing which they need to fix. I did play around 100 hours of 3.0 and had a lot of fun with people from our community here, but that got boring eventually. That being said, anybody who followed the game knew beforehand that this is not a patch that delivers a lot of content for you to do! They made it clear what this patch brings from their production schedules, we knew this is largely a foundational patch. It'll give us some basic missions to do, some cargo trading, moons to land on and explore, some new landing zones, a couple of mission givers, outposts to trade at, new armors and weapons, new ships, and some other things - and that's it. The article is criticizing the game for something it never promised to be at this point. It's almost as if it isn't finished or something!
Does that mean the game is immune from criticism - hell no! I think the performance issues are embarrassing, if I was CR, I would have included a lot more content to actually do and less places to visit - meaning I'd have different priorities. That being said, I am not disappointed because I knew exactly what this patch would bring because I follow the game!
Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 doesn't convince as a game:
I agree, this version of the Alpha doesn't nearly resemble the game it's envisioned to be. Yet, it's not supposed to, they know there's nothing to do, they know that the performance is bad, these things are not lost on them. That's why the first two major patches of the year are specifically addressed to fixing the performance issues and bugs, and adding more occupations and gameplay! If these things are not fixed within the next year, I would be beyond disappointed - but I have enough reason to believe they'll deliver those aspects like they eventually delivered 3.0. I wouldn't have released 3.0 in the state it is now, because I knew articles like these were coming. People expected things from this patch that we simply weren't going to get. This is an alpha, they are not shipping with this level of content or at this quality, this game is in heavy and active development with 450+ developers and cannot be taken as a final product.
Then again though, I wonder if anyone actually cares about all this. The game continues to have a strong following that's growing with every year, even on this forum I've been seeing faces that I haven't seen before in our OT's and the subreddit is very active. The game continues to make over 30 million a year, they have a passionate and supportive community that actually follows the game and holds CIG accountable while remaining realistic about what a video game company can do in a certain amount of time. Articles like this just don't matter to the SC community, because we already know there's nothing to do and we didn't expect much out of it. It was a foundational update and it's fun to play with friends for a week or two, that's about it.
The majority of random posts on this forum will just say this game is a scam, laugh whenever there is a failure or bad article, call us cultists and move on with their lives. When something good happens, they ignore it and aren't happy for the game or the community that supports it. There are people who of course are just "interested" in the game and "just sharing their opinions" without visiting the OT, asking the community itself about the game and looking to be informed by the people who actually play and follow this game. The author who wrote the article itself admits to not following it closely.
As a community here? We know what to expect to a certain degree, we roll with the punches. We follow the weekly updates to their internal development schedules, we watch the weekly studio updates, detailing what one of their 4 major studios has worked on the past month, plus a showcase on a feature update. We read the monthly studio report, a very detailed report that can take 10+ minutes to read, detailing exactly what every department in every studio has worked on (aside from SQ42 spoilers). We read the weekly and monthly newsletters, we play the game, we buy the ships when we like them. We are an informed community, we are the experts on this game on this forum, we know everything there is to know about this project and it's always funny to be lectured on something we've followed closely for years. There are times where we are disappointed, times where we are excited out of our minds, but we follow this project with the hope and belief that it will succeed based on the information presented to us. We are not mindless cultists, if we thought the project would fail we would get a very easy to obtain refund and move on. There is no reason why we would support a game that is going to obviously fail or is a scam, there is no sunken cost fallacy, we can get our money back at any moment.
We. as a community, set the scope by our funding of the game. We, as a community, hold CIG to the highest levels of transparency in the video game industry, in order to be able to support the game in good faith. We, as a community, know this game isn't a scam, vaporware, or a shitshow - this game is in development and will continue to be for years, we have enough reasons to believe it will be successful and that's why we support the project.
Chris Roberts himself, summed things up best around half a year ago:
TLDR;
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If they paid the staff 50k per year based on 270 staff that would equal 13.5 million in salaries per year. They could easily last 10 years, which is likely when the game will officilaly release. No producer or project manager means in theory they could keep adding stuff while asking for more money.