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Star Citizen raises more than $1 million in four days following alpha 3.3 test release
- Thread starter CenturionNami
- Start date
The funny thing is, most Star Citizen haters never appear when stuff is shown. They only appear in articles and threads full of misleading information. They come there only to convince themselves that the project is going to crash or burn or something "dramatic" will happen.
I'm starting to wonder if it would be more profitable for the people involved to not actually ever release this game.
They thought they can do like Acti-blizzard. The community told them no.
The Star Citizen project doesn't follow the rules of a normal game project. They do things because they can. It might be crazy, but it's certainly different and in world of big publishers making bland reskins and games that play fundamentally the same as other games, this unorthodox approach is to be welcomed.
What they've shown so far had great potential. Those animations are top notch. Im rooting for them.
You're quoting the wrong person if you're asking me why a game wouldn't advertise itself. I'm asking the guy above me why he thinks the updates they put out aren't considered that, because they aren't exactly doing a huge amount of advertising beyond said updates.
Yea, a lot of shitposters like you are going to be eating a hell of a lot of crow.
I mean difference is nice and all, but when a $2,000 dreadnaught blasts my dinky starting ship day 1 we might have a problem.
Its not a race to who gets the biggest ship first.
I'm supporting this project with as much as I can for as long as I can.
There is no one else, and most likely never will be, that will try/is trying to build a game universe like CIG is.
This is our only chance to get something like this. And I for one, am not gonna let it pass.
How many people are going to enjoy the experience of being decimated by people just because they have a bigger wallet?
Might make good business sense, but it shouldn't be welcomed.
post like this are really laughable so what happens when it comes out?
Since this misinformation is posted again just a few post under my previous one I am simply going to repost what I stated before for clarity.
This entire post is filled with falsehoods.
1. There is no money spent on advertising Star Citizen/S42. The presentations are for backers only. When people share information it is not CIG commanding them to do so nor is CIG paying for it. The playable alphas and the information they have been putting out SINCE THE VERY START. Is because that is the promise they made with backers. Back when they had nothing more than hangers and talked about what was going to come in future, you wouldn't have called that advertising would you? Now that they are actually showing things current backers can get their hands on, it is a negative?
2. The more expensive ships can be considered status symbols for those who feel inclined to brag about fictional digital ships in a video game (I imagine those people are few in number) but for people actually planning on playing the game totally useless outside of group play. There is no "progression" via paid money, nor would you want to do that in game.
3. It is in alpha meaning it is not finished. There are bugs, so if you want to say janky that is fair but redundant.
4. There is no feature bloat all the things mentioned in game and on roadmap were planned as far back as 2014/2015. The only thing that has changed is the timing of base building and planetary missions because procedurally assisted generation of moons and planets were finished must faster than they initially envisioned.
I don't know why people continuously come into these threads misinformed, state things or "concerns" as if they are facts. It happens in every thread for years. This is one of those games that seems to irritate some people the more attention it gets and the more features get completed. The last 3-4 major tech breakthroughs that some stated would "never" happen, show a trend where people moved from vaporware scam, to there will be nothing beyond hangers, there will be nothing beyond space stations, to now the game will never be finished because moons, cities and truckstops are playable and more to come in short order. But if all the content they are showing is considered "adverts" and "maybe approaching something called finished in a few years" it seems they are doing much better than expected. I can't wait to see what baseless complaint that will be invalidated over time will show up next.
Pay-to-win what ? There is no end-game.
Basically, those who have put a lot of money into the game will be like the huge orgs that fight themselves in 0.0 in EvE Online while the others will be like the EvE newbies that are roaming in High-Sec.
Whales will "compete" against other whales and leave the other players having fun on their side.
I mean... The ships range basically goes from a moto-cross to a friggin thermo-nuclear aircraft carrier. Do you really think the guys in a capital ship will even notice the dudes in small ships ? No. Definitely not.
So i fail to see what equates to "winning". All there is to "win" is fun and the sense of accomplishement. Arguably, those that will start the game in huge-ass expensive ships from the get go will lose the fun you'd get of being able to get them ingame. So, you could even say that they paid-to-lose.
To be fair, I completely get the complaints and concerns around ships. But roles do need to be taken into account I agree. Ships have operating needs and costs, and a larger $2000 ship is certainly not coming after you or wasting it's time on you unless you're specifically doing something to inhibit what it's trying to do.
That being said, the "space race" aspect of Elite: Dangerous and other games where everyone is starting from the same line, is really cool as well, and something I would have preferred, but that kind of development wouldn't have been able to fund the kind of game I want. So... It's a trade off.
That being said, the "space race" aspect of Elite: Dangerous and other games where everyone is starting from the same line, is really cool as well, and something I would have preferred, but that kind of development wouldn't have been able to fund the kind of game I want. So... It's a trade off.
the people who bought the big ships won't be able to fly or man them on day 1. They need ingame ressources like fuel or a crew for that.
And i don't think that these peopple are stupid enough to fight in UEE space where they can easily get a pirate rank and shot down by the UEE Navy
I haven't been following any media about this game after seeing the initial ship commercials back in 2012 / 13. I thought it looked pretty cool but I have no interest in MMO's so I never kept up with the actual development. I did however keep following the discussion between the believers and the skeptics which provided a lot of entertainment. So from that perspective the game is already a success. A few days ago a one hour and half gameplay showcase from Citizencon appeared in my suggested video's on Youtube. Curiosity got the better of me but I was not about to watch the entire thing. So I skipped a bit ahead and saw the following. All quotes are paraphrased.
- A ship is flying over a wooded area.
- The ship clumsily lands, audience cheers and claps.
- The guy leaves the ship and chooses his equipment for his adventure, the equipment appears on the model, pretty cool.
- Guy starts walking around. "We are still very early days in development of our planet tech, soon we will have fauna walking around" Okay... "and there's gonna be a dynamic weather system and I'm looking forward to having a dense jungle planet". Why is the planet tech still in early days of development after six years? Shouldn't that be one of the priorities? And it seems like something that requires a lot of work. I guess dynamic weather system is mostly a cosmetic thing and can be implemented later on in development.
- He walks up to a crashed burning ship. "In the current build the fire does not damage you but it will. We will be measuring the heat and over a certain amount you'll get damaged, the fire will also suck oxygen out of the air, it's gonna be systemic. Not just fire also radiation and other hazard types we can think up." Sounds very complex, no wonder they can't show it yet after 6 years. I understand where the feature creep complaints are coming from.
- The guy awkwardly climbs on the ship. "So we have improved our mantling" Audience cheers! "Our locomotion stuff is stage 1 and we're working on it, you'll be able to do lots of stuff!" Traversal is still not finished? Shouldn't this be one of the very first things to lock in? How are your level designers gonna do their job if the traversal system is not in place?
- He walks along the top of the crashed ship and says he's gonna attempt to jump a hole in the hull. "This is like old skool platforming!" He fails. Audience cheers and laughs.
- He slowly walks back the same way up. Yeah the vaulting as it looks now looks slow and boring. He fails again.
- Third time he makes it, audience is going wild!
This is where I switched it off. I hate to throw myself into the fray like this but after seeing only these 10 minutes I don't understand how anyone can be anything but cautious about the prospect of this game ever doing everything the developers promise. I hope I'm wrong, because even though I'm not into MMO's and will never play the game regardless if it releases, a hallmark games like this is always exciting. For now I'm leaning on the skeptics side.
- A ship is flying over a wooded area.
- The ship clumsily lands, audience cheers and claps.
- The guy leaves the ship and chooses his equipment for his adventure, the equipment appears on the model, pretty cool.
- Guy starts walking around. "We are still very early days in development of our planet tech, soon we will have fauna walking around" Okay... "and there's gonna be a dynamic weather system and I'm looking forward to having a dense jungle planet". Why is the planet tech still in early days of development after six years? Shouldn't that be one of the priorities? And it seems like something that requires a lot of work. I guess dynamic weather system is mostly a cosmetic thing and can be implemented later on in development.
- He walks up to a crashed burning ship. "In the current build the fire does not damage you but it will. We will be measuring the heat and over a certain amount you'll get damaged, the fire will also suck oxygen out of the air, it's gonna be systemic. Not just fire also radiation and other hazard types we can think up." Sounds very complex, no wonder they can't show it yet after 6 years. I understand where the feature creep complaints are coming from.
- The guy awkwardly climbs on the ship. "So we have improved our mantling" Audience cheers! "Our locomotion stuff is stage 1 and we're working on it, you'll be able to do lots of stuff!" Traversal is still not finished? Shouldn't this be one of the very first things to lock in? How are your level designers gonna do their job if the traversal system is not in place?
- He walks along the top of the crashed ship and says he's gonna attempt to jump a hole in the hull. "This is like old skool platforming!" He fails. Audience cheers and laughs.
- He slowly walks back the same way up. Yeah the vaulting as it looks now looks slow and boring. He fails again.
- Third time he makes it, audience is going wild!
This is where I switched it off. I hate to throw myself into the fray like this but after seeing only these 10 minutes I don't understand how anyone can be anything but cautious about the prospect of this game ever doing everything the developers promise. I hope I'm wrong, because even though I'm not into MMO's and will never play the game regardless if it releases, a hallmark games like this is always exciting. For now I'm leaning on the skeptics side.
That's a fair take when divorced of all context.
The thing is, they aren't building something everyone knows how to build like a cinematic third person action adventure here. The systems need to work at a very different scale.
You can still certainly argue about their prioritization and management, but you are underselling what is actually going on on a technical level a lot.
The thing is, they aren't building something everyone knows how to build like a cinematic third person action adventure here. The systems need to work at a very different scale.
You can still certainly argue about their prioritization and management, but you are underselling what is actually going on on a technical level a lot.
You need to check up more then since they assume you know more about the game then above transcript.
Just look at the planet world tech, planet city tech, transition from planet to space and back.
Etc.
But you should always be cautions regarding these type of games (and funding model) but they have shown some impressive stuff.
It's just weird to me that they don't have a bottoms up approach so to speak. Get the basics in first like traversal and then move on to larger things.
But rewatching that segment now one of the guys says something like "The Frankfurt guys are doing good work on jungle planet tech" so I guess they have multiple studios working on different modules / tech. In that case it makes sense that the progress is not represented very well and it's reasonable to believe they are further along than they can show. However it's gonna be a hell of feat integrating everything into one working system.
But rewatching that segment now one of the guys says something like "The Frankfurt guys are doing good work on jungle planet tech" so I guess they have multiple studios working on different modules / tech. In that case it makes sense that the progress is not represented very well and it's reasonable to believe they are further along than they can show. However it's gonna be a hell of feat integrating everything into one working system.
Especially when the context is that it took three years (2013-2015) to even to point of demoing planet tech which until 2015 was not seen as possible until the Frankfurt studio with former Crytek architechts who came up with the tech of planets and city planets was even founded. Crowdfunded money helped enormously for CIG to expand and acquire talent (who make the game) between 2014-2016 especially.
Since 2015 there have been three demos of this tech which in 2018 has or is about to make it into the early access game. So it ain't like people who follow the progress and know of the context aren't seeing anything when two huge releases have come up with new system of quarterly releases.
You could say that CIG was established in 2013 on clay feet with the Austin studio whose showmanship was unparalled leading the effort. The next phase of hired contractors outside wasn't delivering either. But from 2014-2015 on the expanding studios in Wilmslow and Frankfurt have had their work force built around the core of Lego and Crytek games veterans. They have been running the show the last few years and I believe that crowdfunders have been happy with 3.X and Squadron 42.
Of course it helps that despite the years there is example no COD 4 to Fortnite as anyone else isn't really competing in the same exact space or has been in couple of decades. Even though there have been some space games with lesser features.
Since 2015 there have been three demos of this tech which in 2018 has or is about to make it into the early access game. So it ain't like people who follow the progress and know of the context aren't seeing anything when two huge releases have come up with new system of quarterly releases.
You could say that CIG was established in 2013 on clay feet with the Austin studio whose showmanship was unparalled leading the effort. The next phase of hired contractors outside wasn't delivering either. But from 2014-2015 on the expanding studios in Wilmslow and Frankfurt have had their work force built around the core of Lego and Crytek games veterans. They have been running the show the last few years and I believe that crowdfunders have been happy with 3.X and Squadron 42.
Of course it helps that despite the years there is example no COD 4 to Fortnite as anyone else isn't really competing in the same exact space or has been in couple of decades. Even though there have been some space games with lesser features.
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That's something people say a lot when it comes to systemic games like these. It's because that's the only way you can build a systems-heavy game in a reasonable amount of time. Everything has to be worked on in parallel.
Take your example, should traversal have precluded every other animation-based system from getting worked on? Should have flight been put on hold? Everything gets worked on at the same time because that's the only way you can get it all done in a reasonable amount of time and you need everything playing together before you can start tuning and making it polished/fun. Flight is also a prime example.
For your particular example, the thing that makes traversal more challenging than having the usual with sticky ledges and input responses is that 1st and 3rd person rigs are unified with a hugely impressive camera stabilization system. They have worked out the kinks behind responsiveness with so many animations blending at once a while ago but jumping hasn't really been looked at. Moving used to be much worse and having played those early versions of the game when 1st/3rd was all but figured out, I can tell you they've come a long way :).
There's so much history and technical background behind this project. A minority of posters know it and have the technical baggage to make sense of it which explains the whiplash you get when you get into these threads and have people not understanding the timeframe/context of the progress.
Warren Spector put it best when he said that there is no such thing as a gameplay loop in immersive sims and systemic games. He doesn't even want to hear the word "fun". It's about building all the systems and the "core gameplay" is what happens when the player pulls on a thread and the whole tapestry of the world reacts.
Oh boy, did anyone see what CIG did with the Kraken sale? A masterclass creating hype and a perception of scarcity for a digital product. Impressive from the VP of marketing!
The genuine concerns I see most people have, when they mention "pay to win/advantage", are related to wondering how CIG will balance the in game costs of the best ships, after people have shelled out literal hundreds and thousands of Real Earth dollars for them.
They've done the limited ship sales multiple times. The idea is that they intend to limit how many of the large, truly game changing ships exist on launch day of the game. They could sell as many as they wanted since it is just a digital good as you point out, but they want to have the various ship types be in some form of balance, based on their best guesses and their data of the amount and type of ships their entire backer population owns. So maybe they want 0.01% of the ship population to be the Kraken at most, and thus they set their cap to be that value.
It's absolutely used to create hype as well, but partly used as a game balancing mechanism and also to prevent singular whales from hoarding since there was an invite system along with the waves. The org I'm in had like 2 or 3 people buy them and it's nuts (though one of those was done via donations from a bunch of org members). Will be fun to be in a fleet with it though.
It's going to be a nightmare for CIG. I think once you convert in-game time spent playing to dollars, it is definitely going to significantly cheaper than what it costs today. After all, CIG has said multiple times the primary goal of the ship sales is funding further development and it's not purchasing a ship, rather funding development and getting a ship as a reward. But let's say that an hour of gameplay is roughly converted to $1 in the real world. There's no way in hell they would make people play for 1,400 hours to purchase a Kraken.
I do really, really, really hope CIG goes through on their promises and ends up stopping ship sales once the game launches and explore other ways of making money (whether it's cosmetics, optional subscriptions, etc). If they do that, it's going to be much easier to balance the economy.
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So out of all that I posted you still manage to push the idea of a "best" ship? Again the ships are balanced by solo/group play and also the cost to maintain and operate. A solo player should ignore a large multi crew ship and groups and orgs can have multiple people if not entire org ship in for larger ships. The balance is inherent to the amount of people that should be aiming for the ships as a group. That means maintenance and operation costs can be shared among group as well. A solo player trying this would waste time trying to get a large Multicrew ship on their own.
Especially considering that multicrew ships' effectiveness is likely dramatically reduced when you don't have multiple people crewing them.
That's why you should slap mass drivers on cheapo ships and swarm with them. :^)
will go down as the prettiest vaporware in history
if they take too much longer the rest of gaming will be so damn impressive people won't care and will stop supporting
if they take too much longer the rest of gaming will be so damn impressive people won't care and will stop supporting
How is it vaporware ?
Both games that are being made Squadron 2 and Star Citizen. Haven't taken any longer than any other big budget games.
Someone clearly doesn't know the definition of vaporware.
A game that is being advertised but will never actually finish development in regards to what has been advertised qualifies as vapor ware no?
I haven't played in quite some time, did a whole 3 hour session earlier and hosted on Twitch for people to check out. I completed a few missions, ran into some crashes, landed on planets and did various interactions with NPC's. There's a good deal of game in there at this point and it runs fairly smoothly up until I checked out this huge planetside mining base later on. I'm pretty impressed since last time I tried playing it was crashing constantly. Running a ultrawide 4k with a 1080.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/325633033
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/325633033
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Please point out how you know it will never be released. Or how it's taken longer than any other AAA games to develop.
The sheer fact that they have released an alpha and continuously update it with patches means it is not vaporware. Normally vaporware doesn't have a product (not even in part) to show at all.
Nice. The 300 series is up for a rework as well.
It is only going to get better.
If it was vaporware you wouldn't be seeing screenshots of someone playing it immediately after your post.
Ah, yeah I should've just googled the definition before speaking, I guess we will see if there is ever a technical release but people can definitely spend money so I guess it is technically available to buy lol
Development started 7 years ago at this point and it will definitely take many more years until it gets to the point of feeling remotely complete (at least up to the promises) from what I've seen and from the amount of times the dev said "Very early on". Basic movement mechanics are still janky or not in there yet, textures and other graphical assets still glitch, and the amount of locations/actual game is still very small compared to what they are apparently aiming for
Vapor ware if you consider an actual release necessary to be "purchaseable" you are right my bad. I think it will be an early access and if things slow down too much might do an official release making it a GaaS sort of situation until the rest of gamings more competent, efficient developers the games funding/dev cycle to shame and make equally as impressive stuff once the benchmark they are developing for catches up to current high end PC specs, we will of course, see. They aren't really on a good track if this is what they have done in 7 years is what I think maybe Im not their audience. Probably wont technically end up as vapor ware my bad, just incomplete
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I misunderstood the definition, just thought it meant a game that never actually is completed my bad, by the definition if it is purchaseable it is not vapor ware. I don't think they will ever complete their vision is all, but yeah technically it already is like an early access/GaaS sort of situation, just barebones and emphasis on the early despite having a very long dev cycle already. Like I said in my post above if they don't speed things up depending on the specs of next gen I don't think it will stay impressive enough for people to continue to fund it to completion but could be wrong
In regards to you purchasable point.
Chris said (during the road to release panel) that once they have server meshing complete. that he considers Star Citizen (the MMO) ready to go. A 1.0 if you will.
I mean in regards to the vaporware thing I was just wrong either way, but yes even more wrong lol. Still just given how much dev time there has been and how many promises they seem to make as opposed to actual function I don't see their vision being close to completed but we will see. Think other games will pass it up, it will loose support, and it won't be a very well functioning comprehensive, fun to play game but of course, wish them luck. Assuming that they are actually trying their best can't be mad that they just bit off more then they could chew if that is what ends up happening. Or development really starts to pickup and the game is incredible and I eat crow, which i what Id prefer given the amount people have invested
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Weeks ago, they had two guys showing "tarp physics". They demoed a plastic sheet draping over a spaceship a few times to show how it deforms and wrinkles differently depending how the tarp is dropped on the ship.
The video ended, but not before one guy said something like.... let's do it again. Who knows how many times they replayed that tarp demo.
And people were cheering. That's what it's come down to. People cheering any kind of progress.
You know, if the people paying are happy with what they are getting, I really don't see a problem with it. But hot damn that's a lot of money made for a game that it is still on alpha.
It was about cloth physics, and they showed a lot more than the tarp thing.
So what the extended video shows (I saw a clip of only the spaceship part) is basically the same thing, but instead of covering a ship with a wrinkly tarp, it's also characters with free flowing clothes.
Three cheers.