Posted on November 21, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
November Set 5
Posted on November 21, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
November Set 5
To be honest… And I’m saying this as a first-round crowdfunding contributor who has been following this project since its conception in 2011… You sound like someone in a cult. You’ve been promised so much, and there’s been so much hype, but all we have right now are a few tiny tech demos and a bunch of promises. This game was funded six years ago, has raised over $150 million, and still hasn’t been released, with no clear release date in sight. I’ve been watching the progress from day one, with so much excitement and eagerness. I’ve been right there beside you all, saying “when will it be ready?” and waiting to jump into my ship and sail the cosmos. But I feel… disenchanted. The hype train keeps on rolling, but they still haven’t stitched things together into a single unit yet. All we’ve had is a few simple tech demos. The scope of the game keeps changing, and new features are constantly announced, and it seems like development is charging forward… But part of me wonders if they’re just selling us smoke and mirrors and living easy on that $150 million.
So, I guess what I’m saying, is the thing I’m most excited for is to actually see this game get released, and to know I didn’t waste all that money all those years ago.
I can’t possibly say “this will be the only game I need” or that it’ll be “everything I’ve ever wanted,” because I honestly don’t even know if it’ll ever come out, and because I’ve become wary of all the hype and propaganda.
It feels to me an awful lot like religion… The church telling me “spend your life dedicated to our cause and tossing your money into our coffers, and you’ll have a boundless and beautiful reward when the rapture comes.” Heaven will be the “only thing I need,” and it’ll be “everything I’ve ever wanted…” Except I’ll never see it in my lifetime, and I won’t be able to call home after I’m dead to tell you whether it lived up to all the hype.
I feel jaded. I’ve lost faith in RSI just like I lost faith in Jesus. Thankfully, Star Citizen has the potential to actually be released in my lifetime and to prove me wrong, whereas Jesus can’t make the same claim. So, I guess I could say that I have more faith in RSI than I do in Jesus… But only a little.
I can’t wait for this game to be released. Not because I’m super excited to play it, but because I’m just so ready for the stress of waiting to be over. Even if it sucks and we’ve all wasted our money, at least we’ll have closure.
Beet Wagon
Star Citizen has the potential to actually be released in my lifetime and to prove me wrong, whereas Jesus can’t make the same claim
I rolled away the rock Ben after three days and it turns out Star Citizen was still dead, actually
Goon 2:5 And in the beginning of the ELE, all was good in the Star Citizen community. The whales were brought forth and did purchase of the jpegs in copious amounts. The people asked ‘Was Star Citizen good?’ and the Shills replied ‘Yea verily, for unto you a ship is born and it shall be called Idris and you will land the ship on many moons of your choice’ and the people were glad.
Goon 2:6 But in all the lands did a darkness dwell. For hidden from the people, a great untruth was lying. And people knew it not. The base god of the people had maketh a falsehood and had told the people that Star Citizen was good and that they should buyeth of it, and that he would finish it, in fidelity. The fidelity was to be good and the fidelity was to be real.
Goon 2:7 But lo, a great prophet came at that time and his name was Derek. Derek was the counting of his name and the people were mightily puzzled. ‘Derek’, they cried, ‘whence come thee to this land of darkness?’
Goon 2:8 And the Derek replied “Oh great people for whom doth thou not knowest the truth, verily this day an evil lies in the land and you can read about it in my July blog’. And the people did readest of the July blog and it took them many days for Derek was not light of typing.
Goon 2:9 But gradually the people knew of the blog and they knew Derek. But yet, there were those who had not taketh of the blogs and they were mightily afraid.
Goon 2:10 They had come from a far off place, a land where darkness walked in perpetuity, called r/ds. They greatly envied his genitals and spoketh about them in hushed tones.
Goon 2:11 “Oh Derek,” they cried, “Why are thy genitals so superior to ours?”. And Derek smiled on them and blocked them.
Goon 2:12 Then it came to pass, that the owner of the land of r/ds, a man called Jester, did tire of the people from r/ds, and closed off the land to others. Derek was mightily pleased and shouted gaily, “I closed those ass-clowns down.”
Goon 2:13 And the people from r/ds did gnash their teeth and wail epithets at the prophet and he smiled all the more.
Beet Wagon
after the exchange i had with the backers in the past few day i kinda dont even give a shit anymore. I think i will join you guys and discuss all that is to discuss and leave SC behind me.
Problem is even when i want to register i need to pay 10 dollars. Or do i understand something wrong?
I’m the man who put $250 into Star Citizen but can’t afford a $10 forums account.
Honestly it’s probably for the best, there’s no way in hell the thread doesn’t rip Fandred apart like a pack of dingoes with a fresh baby.
The Titanic
Fandred1 is learning that it’s not goons or Derek who make CIG look like a comedy and a bad studio, it’s CIG.
Pretty sure nobody here can wave a wand and say, “abracadabra, no progress for 6 years and no game to show for it, but tons of YouTube content and aimless merchandising!” Unless really Mel Brooks is here because he could probably do that. :)
I just want to see Fandred crossing the border like a proper Cold War defection. Huge concrete wall, rain-slick streets, signs in a strange Xi’an language, sinister men in trenchcoats giving the signal.
Then he’s over the barbed wire and running. Alarms blare and searchlights spark up, oh no! Gunshots ring out! Then the entire border guard force suddenly clip through their own guard towers and collapse spasming.
Derek and Beer adjust their long grey coat collars and smuggle him into a basement full of angry, dancing cats. They send the codeword - defector secure. Crack teams of refunders swing into action. By the next morning, Fandred’s been smuggled into Prague hidden in the bottom of a crate of Wing Commander memorabilia and his refund has been laundered through a dozen offshore investment accounts from Siberia to Madagascar.
Shhh, shhh, you’re safe now. Another freed from the long shadow of the Crobbler.
I worked at Cloud Imperium Games full-time (More than 3 years)
Pros
Really cool company to work for and everyone wants to talk to you about it. Have some great equipment especially stuff donated from Amazon.
Cons
My job wasn’t really needed at the stage in the project I was hired, and won’t be needed for quite some time. My advise was taken but not listened to, and more senior people were posted above me from other departments with absolutely no history of networking - like art / marketing
Well friend, that’s because Cloud Imperium Games isn’t a gaming studio, it’s a company whose core business model is now and has always been the marketing and selling of high-poly spaceship assets or even more desirably the promise of them. It is led by a troika of amoral family members who are hopelessly unfit to lead a 2017-era gaming studio yet uniquely gifted at rationalizing their opportunistic financial exploitation of a credulous customer base and considerably proficient at employing cinematic propaganda to achieve those ends. So effective have they been at the unthinkable that their core financiers are now more invested in playing a psychosocial game — that being one of ritualized anticipation of the next ship sale, the next fan conference, the next TV show — than in playing the previously promised actual game.
Had they been making that from the start, well, you might’ve been a valued employee rather than a whiny packet nerd forced to report to a management-tier compromised of a hangars-on society of longtime Hollywood cronies and even longer-time game industry friends from a bygone era in which the founder was relevant. Oh, and his wife, who lacks the talent to have even been either.
CIG are to an extent making Derek’s involvement and blogs about Star Citizen redundant, as they consistently continue to demonstrate ineptness, incompetence and greed all on their own.
The Titanic
This is hilarious because I’ve been saying in my blog about how CIG stopped caring about a year ago and here it is. You can almost pinpoint the exact spot where they gave up trying to make a game. :3:
VictorianQueerLit
You see if you consider having no direction, no plan, no goals and no destination to be “Trail Blazing” then they are in fact good things.
Sure you might be wandering into a million miles of wilderness with no supplies but if you tell everyone that you are blazing a trail then you are actually so admirable you are above all criticism.
Actually it’s more like they wanted to show everyone how cool the water slide was going to look so they could sell more season tickets, so they threw together some plywood they found in the garage and piled it up into precarious 5 story behemoths that were in no way riveted together, showing off what the BDWSE would look like by making the piles look vaguely water-slide-shaped and painted to look real pretty.
After the cash rolled in they decided that instead of building the real water slides, they would make intricate CGI demos of what the water slides would be like and make commercials about the water slides and draw water slides and show everyone the pictures so they’d buy more tickets.
Then one day a ticket holder noticed that they’d spent several thousand dollars on tickets but still hadn’t yet actually slid down one yet, so the water slide company figured SOMEONE should get to work on those slides so they sent a few guys over to the park to finish assembling the slides that were already precariously erected on the site, but because they weren’t screwed together yet, whenever somebody went up to the top to start work on fastening everything together, it would fall down, and then they’d have to rebuild the whole thing all over again, and the guy running the operation demanded that nobody use any rivets or screws or bolts until all of the slides were put up so every time someone started trying to rivet the things together, they would just collapse again.
Soon, it was apparent that they would need a lot more people to hold up all the plywood to get it ready to be bolted together, but a lot of people decided not to stick around because they had degrees in engineering and dreams of building great water slides and all they were doing were drawing pictures of swimming trunks, and were appalled at the shitty management at the waterslide company, and plus a lot of the plywood that fell down ended up being damaged and they had to keep buying more, until suddenly someone looked around and said hey we don’t have any money left because we spent it all on commercials CGI and broken plywood and we haven’t even thought about how we’re going to run water to the property, and build the pipes.
Somewhere along the line, someone bought advance tickets and he’d built some water slides in the past for very niche water slide enthusiasts, and looked at the progress that wasn’t being made and said, “You know, I know a thing or two about water slides and I don’t think they can pull this off,” and the the CEO of the BDWSE spent hours yelling, “fuck you fuck you fuck you you don’t get to ride ANY of my water slides here’s your money back,” so that guy has spent 2 1⁄2 years standing outside the water park complex with a bullhorn yelling, “YOU’RE NEVER GETTING THIS SHIT BUILT,” and meanwhile die hard fans of the water park who have been hit way too many times in the head by falling plywood have been chucking paper wads at him and built a rickety shack outside the waterpark where they put up a sign saying “THE GUY WITH BULLHORN IS A DOO DOO HEAD” and yelling about how great the waterpark is going to be while watching entire stacks of plywood collapse around them until the person who ran the shack decided to take the shack and go home and declare victory over the bullhorn man.
It’s more like that.
I could almost understand that mentality if CiG was marching in a straight line. With no plan, and grande nerd money, they might end up somewhere nice by accident. Heck, even a random drunken walk would get them further away from their starting position.
Either case would be better than walking in circles, retracing steps. Using a rope to swing across a chasm, only to trek back around the long way so they can retrieve the rope, then head home to get a better rope. The rope is too heavy, so they brought a ladder. The ladder is too short to cross the chasm. Stopping frequently to meticulously etch pebbles into detailed, microscopic figures. This one is a whale, that one a turtle, and those thirty-seven are busts of the crew members on the ship you’ll build after crossing the desert, to sail to El Dorado. The intrepid explorers start digging for the ores and the fuels that will make the sharper tools that will carve the even more lifelike figures, and for the gems that will bring them to life. The stones chip too easily, so the party moves on.
Wow, I can’t wait to trade all kinds of goods between Port Olisar and… uh…
Well anyway, I’m sure it will be amazing and not a boring tedious grind like Elite
The Titanic
The longer CIG keeps tugging people around by their noses, the more people will eventually widen up. I’d still like to think there are intelligent people out there, and some of them are caught up in this silly Derek war, but when it comes down to it, the product their defending isn’t getting better and the promises keep coming, and yesterday’s promises keep getting further back…
I don’t believe that people can be fooled infinitely. And I know some can, but not over something like a video game. Especially not where the biggest hype it generates constantly is “guess what you can buy next?!”
I think that as people “wake up” to the reality of the situation, they’re going to need to cope with it. Their first instinct probably isn’t going to be “wow I was really wrong and fooled!” It’s going to be more subtle, wherein they “saw it coming but decided to hold out for good measure” and “knew what they were getting into but hoped for the best”.
There will be lots of straws to break camel backs with, don’t worry. :)
If anything, we’ll have front row tickets to seeing lots of coping mechanisms at work over a fairly petty item. A video game isn’t really something somebody needs to have psychological help over, though it’s possible some people are getting close (some may already have passed it).
But I also think that CIG is taking such a long time to fail that it’s not going to be hard for people to unplug and come to terms. It’s not a sudden thing, but gradual. People will be fine, and at the end of it there will be new friendships and new jokes to laugh at. Eventually everybody splits up and CIG is a cornerstone of how not to crowdsource a video game, or possibly any product.
They have 68 vacancies on their website, they’ve been throwing up job ads on Glassdoor and Indeed.co.uk like crazy over the last few weeks, THEY CANNOT HIRE FOR SHIT and it’s completely obvious
Look at this - this is a single job listing for multiple roles, all posted today (Nov 20):
• Support the VP, Marketing on the coordination and execution of all global marketing initiatives.
Lead Character Technical Artist • Work in a team along with the Technical Director of Content, Character Art Director, Lead Technical Artist and Animators to ensure quality and performance are met across all character assets and their development processes
Gameplay Engineer – Service & Backend
Character Artist
Technical Designer
Network Programmer Location: Wilmslow, Cheshire – UK
The numbers will increase with the demands of the project, but currently we’re looking to hire upwards of 60 staff across multiple departments in our four international studios of Los Angeles (USA), Austin (USA), Manchester (UK) and Frankfurt (Germany). Some positions are not studio specific although others are; so if anyone is interested they should check out our website for further details.
If anyone who hasn’t done any research on the project then this always comes across the worst. Especially when we are so transparent in our development and have so much information readily available online. After those, people usually fall down due to poor punctuality, bad communication skills or a lack of confidence.
They threw up the animator vacancies on VFXexpress on November 1st:
They can’t even hire audio guys despite having vacancies listed for the entirety of 2017 - this is CRAZY. As well as advertising for audio people in the usual audio job sites look how completely desperate they are (posted Oct 13):
I can only speak for myself but I see a lot of people walking away from this project - both devs and backers. This is evidenced by:
the funding chart
the refunds sub
posts on Spectrum & SC subreddit
the state of production, ie what they are putting out to Evocati
the increase in job vacancies on CIG’s website
the increase in job listings sites being used by CIG
the increase in recruitment sites being used by CIG
They’re sunk.
Backers are leaving and getting refunds, staff are leaving and CIG can’t fill the vacancies, the funding is going down - there’s no other way to say it or interpret it, it’s clear and straightforward. You can draw a straight line through everything CIG have produced and said and failed at over the last 2 years to arrive at this point. It was inevitable and predictable and here it is right now. No surprise, no drama. Just another failed kickstarter that very few people outside of a shrinking subreddit give any fucks about.
That senior marketing role not being filled says a lot about Sandi, and the way the job description is written says even more about her. That’s another job you wouldn’t be able to do because of the incompetence and inexperience directly above you.
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this fucking sound design. like roaches in your ear
It’s fucking awful.
The static atmospheric audio sounds like an Amiga game, the little pulsing whiny noise is tiny and tinny and shitty and spiky, and the triggered jet engine sample phases with the atmospheric sound.
Not even amateur hour level, it’s pure crap.
Q: How’s the FPS lately?
A: I’ve been getting a wide range of frames lately. From as low as 7 FPS in a full server to 65 FPS in a fresh server, my average FPS is about 30 in a 60 player server. To me, that’s a significant improvement from 2.6.3.
Q: How are NPCs coming along?
A: They’re still confined to the player hubs, but they make the hubs feel alive especially Levski. The shopkeepers make comments while you browse and shop, and the space ATC guy sounds like a good guy to hang out with. NPC ships only appear during missions AFAIK. Miles and Ruto are at Levski and GrimHex, respectively, but they’re not enabled yet.
Q: How are the bikes and rover handling now?
A: The Dragonfly is working much better than the Nox lately, while the Ursa rover is much more stable than the bikes. The Dragonfly does better in off-road terrain while the Nox works best on smooth surfaces like the race track at Deakins Outpost. The Nox still tends to flip on its side and turning with the Nox is like riding a stallion without a saddle. There’s still the issue of collision with both bikes and the rover. With the bikes, hitting a boulder on the moon surface sends you flying into the air and flipping uncontrollably. With the Ursa rover, it jumps upward when hitting obstacles and flips over. Parking the bikes into ships is still tricky where they move erratically trying to conform to the larger ship’s internal grid. Parking the rover inside the Connie is less problematic than the bikes, but it tends to slip through the cargo bay floor when closing them. That bug needs to be fixed. With Patch X, the bikes can now strafe up and down and they automatically switch from hover mode to flight mode if you can get high enough above the surface.
Q: How’s ship combat? Did they really buff the Gladius?
A: With a “no PVP unless stated otherwise” rule in ETF and no combat focused testing yet, I don’t know. When CIG states we can test combat among each other and combat/escort missions are fixed, I’ll let you know. The Gladius does have 3x size 3 weapon mounts in 3.0.
