I don’t blame MoMA for not trying, though I disagree with the notion you could conceivably argue that the game’s development is in a good place right now in a way that would be even remotely convincing to any but the most blinkered of individuals. It’s fine to have faith in what’s being done (to a point), but even dismissing the arguments about the financials for CIG you can’t call what’s come out so far a positive sign of progress. There’s so many promises made about things to come in the future but the features that are in are so fundamentally broken it’s difficult to fathom how they’re just going to one day go “Oh look it’s all working now” simply because they’ve been adding stuff without fixing anything which is breaking things even more. This is the barest surface of the argument that the entire project is messed up.
It’s a game that at its core features travel from point A to point B as one of the things people will likely be doing the most in the game, and the game struggles with even managing that without doing something like violently ejecting a crew member into space, or mangling them for no reason, or the ship just plain fucking exploding for no reason. It’s a game where we’ve seen someone get out of their bunk, and with the goal of walking from point A to point B died in their doorway for no good reason at all. It’s a game full of doors, but the doors are either the greatest hindrance or bypassed by simply rubbing up against them till you clip through them. All of this at 15 to 20 frames per second on a good day when there’s not too many people in the server, which defeats the purpose of the game since it is at its core meant to be a game featuring degrees of socialising with other players in the form of alliances, trades and conflict.
What has been released at this point is just unacceptable when set against the metric of time spent on it. You cannot hope to convince anyone here that they’re being too harsh on this game and its developers when after so many years all they’ve done is just dump whatever they had at the time at people’s feet and ask for more money.
TheAgent
hello
The costs come in for the servers, the projected costs, if we do go ahead and release into beta next year [2018]. I don’t know specifics but I know it’s a lot. There’s been some ask for how we continue to pay for that upkeep since the original deal fell through.
I wasn’t exactly sure what they were talking about but no further discussion happened about that
Most of us feel subscription costs are the only way. There’s no possible other way to keep the lights on here. I know a lot of our backers will be upset but, again, that’s the nature of game development. Things change. Plans change. How can we cover support for a live game that requires hardware and software solutions still being developed? When the multiplayer blocks are still being built? There’s no other way, at least none that I can see.
free-to-play players
can access the game
cannot own shops / outposts / land / stations
cannot own ships or pilot ships
can crew for others / take on specific ftp missions with friends or others
have a total credit cap earned weekly
total credit cap
cannot craft items
cannot sell on the marketplace
no storyline content is available for f2p tier
citizen tier or citizenship
full access to the complete experience
can own buildings / shops / outposts / land /stations
has standard entry on markets and customer service queues
can create items
can sell on the marketplace
can see storyline content in SC
premium or commander tier
same as citizenship
has priority access on market lists (show up first)
priority access on CS queues
can ask developers in game about upcoming features
has additional storyline content via updates
priority choice of base (??)
additional higher tier called internally as royalty
invite only by dev choice
all content available
priority across the board
special irl and in game dinners and mixers with devs and staff
special promo skins
special bases / homes / outposts
Prices are being still being discussed.
Additionally, the more accounts you have with a certain level of status grant bonuses to credit production (?? no elaboration here) and your mission queue (?? or here).
f2p
$14.99
$39.99
$249.99
peter gabriel
Yeah I mean, the whole “CIG is out of cash, look at their burn rate vs. funding tracker!” narrative is just silly at this point. People have been theorycrafting their financial demise for years. Having seen behind the curtain of the oz-like financial engine that drives the software business, there is a no shortage of weird instruments, book-cooking, and raw venture capital available to the savvy CFO. The funding tracker doesn’t mean shit. It’s a marketing tool used to drive advertising and backer confidence. I mean, we all enjoy imagining CIG runnin plum out of cash and going tits up because they’re selling dreams of a game they can’t make, but the evidence suggests that CIG is financially sound, and I’ll continue to believe that until I see any compelling evidence to the contrary.
I would also like to remind everyone of this scathing Kotaku coverage of CIG’s land sale gaffe, which openly mocks Chris Roberts and CIG
Ahahahaha! Sorry, let me try that again. Yes that’s right stargazers, the good folks at Cloud Imperium Games never stop in their quest to bring you the galaxy’s greatest space gahahahahaha!
They’re selling plots of land for money! For a game that isn’t finished! And doesn’t have land claiming mechanics in it! You’d think that selling virtual land gets you somewhere near to the line of ‘money for nothing’ but how much more beautiful it is when the virtual land can’t even be claimed. It’s double virtual, what value!
Here’s how it works: you pony up £37.30 (a round $50) and get a wee beacon in return. This part is real. You stick that beacon in the middle of the land you want to claim and, if it’s not owned by someone else, it becomes yours. That bit is still theory. Those are some brass balls alright! All the vacuum of space does is make ‘em shine even brighter.
VictorianQueerLit
If you’ve got a problem with me saying “At the time none of us suspected things were as bad as he said”, then you just need to quote that bit and argue about it.
You could quote it properly too as that helps, this is referring to July 2015 when I don’t recall thread regulars talking about both the most senior producers about to walk, a few months before 5 members of the LA office got fired/walked, Star Marine got cancelled the Escapist ran their racist piece and Chris Roberts had his 8 hour meltdown.
I just deleted a brutal takedown because I’m picking too many fights all over the forum and don’t have energy for this one.
I guessed 3.8 million but them hitting 6 million doesn’t really shock me. There’s pretty obviously always been a strong core of people with more money than brains who view their purchases as helping development. This isn’t the first time they’ve managed to claw their way out of a hole like this. Everyone likes to remind Derek he’d predicted they’d run out of money a few years back, but then they managed to out-do themselves and suck people back in in no small part due to the PU, and even Derek admits he was surprised they managed it.
I doubt this is the last time they’ll do it, but looking at what they’ve managed so far it’s obviously not going to result in a game coming out. The only way the dream is going to die is if the dreamers die.
How dare you where did I put my brutal takedown I think I left it in my basement goddamnit where’s the light switch oh fuck bonk tonk crash bang thud crack pchunk creak.
Well this is me throwing my hands up in light of $6 million space dollah (allegedly) pulled in during a time when the project is technically and demonstrably a mess from start to finish.
It defies common sense and logic.
In terms of gameplay it is indefensible. In terms of technical achievement it is indefensible and unfixable. In terms of art it is all over the place, models can look stunning, planets look terrible, animation is janky and bad. Movement is bad. Physics are bad.
The only way I can understand it is to remove it entirely from the world of games and gaming. It doesn’t belong. It is not a game nor a demo of a game, it’s more like an interactive mocap session with QWOP style triggers of canned actions.
It’s designed that you can clunk your way around and the resulting images onscreen may create something that afterwards you can sit closed eyed and piece together your own mini-drama of what happened.
It evokes the idea of a game without actually being one. It puts you in the mood for the game it is trying to be without ever becoming it.
The only way it ends is if whales stop wanting what it wants to be.
The game is only one component of what these guys are buying into here, and it clearly, obviously is NOT the most important thing to them.
That’s why you guys are always wrong about CIG predictions. You think people with fresh, cold, critical eyes are looking at this. You don’t understand the citizenry like I do. They bought into a vision and the fact that the game is bad now is ancillary because it will be good in the future.
I’m just trying to avoid having you guys end up like the goon bitcoiners who’ve been doing the whole “its gonna collapse next month for sure” for like half a decade now.
Star Citizen is strong. This shit will last til 2020 at least.
CIG only ever gets in “trouble” with the community when they fuck with the spaceships. All manner of bad things can happen with the project but the only time its not swept under the rug is when it fucks with spaceships. Because it fucks with the theorycrafting. FTR’s first negative videos were about how CIG was fucking with the spaceships. CIG is learning not to fuck with the spaceships and negative threads are isolated or ignored.
So unless CIG is fucking with the spaceships there is 0 cause for concern funding wise because the actual game is ancillary to this whole endeavor for at least the next 1 year or so. They’ve had a 5 year ride so far.
It really is running on faith at this point.
And faith is defined as “Belief despite the absence of evidence”
The weekly AtV is like the weekly church service that reassures the faithful that their beliefs are valid, that they are part of a community of like-minded individuals and that if they keep believing and supporting the project financially they will be rewarded when the long awaited game is delivered.
There are even annual holidays (Gamescom/Citcon and the annual sale) that give the faithful a chance to congregate in-person and maybe even have an audience with their High Visionary to further reinforce their faith.
And just like with any faith group, when the promised Day of Deliverance comes and goes, they go back to introspection - how did we fail the project, how could we have misinterpreted the signs of it’s Deliverance, and look to the High Visionary and his acolytes for guidance on how to continue their part in the work to move toward Deliverance Day. And the answer is “Buy more - spread the word - suffer not the heretic”
This game will never come out as an official release that you can purchase from anyplace but Robert Space, at least not before 2942.
A bunch of leaked SQ42 audio:
<[All links are 404 now. DMCA Takedown?]>
Virtual Captain
TheAgent
additional higher tier called internally as royalty
CIG doesn’t have the servers to handle half of their existing customers, how the hell do they expect f2p to work out. Amazon lol.
TheAgent
the great thing is, as I grief, I’ll feel grief because I’ll be trying to ram someone off a platform at 7 or 8 frames a second
chris roberts has created a perpetual grief machine
his satanic masters will be v pleased
In many ways this thread itself is a continual grief machine.
These games were RELEASED after 7 years. We are going into year 7 now, so how close do you think SQ42 is to release?
Spore: 2000-2008 (8 years) …
This was Spore after 6 years. How much gameplay have you seen of SQ42?
Too Human : 1999-2008 (9 years)
Unfair comparison. Too Human development was on hiatus between 2000 and 2005.
“Development halted…in 2000. Prototyping for the game took place on the GameCube […] without any indication of future development being announced until five years later in 2005.”
Team Fortress 2: 1998-2007 (9 years)
Correction: 1999-2006 (7 years)
Valve halted the first iteration (1998-2000) because they wanted to use their new Source engine. It was then developed on the side and released in 2006
Prey: 1995-2006 (11 years)
THANK YOU FOR BRINGING UP PREY!!
3D Realms did Prey between 1995-1999, and it was full of technical problems, much of it was hacking the game to make things work instead of making the processes actually functional. They ditched the whole thing because it. didn’t. work. Now compare that to the problems getting to 3.0. Think loooong and hard about this.
Do you have any proof outside from Wikipedia that Diablo III development began in 2001? No. Someone tossed that in because that’s the last Diablo II release. Not one HINT of anything- not a rumor, interview, or forum post even mentions D3 development until 2007. It wasn’t even announced until 2008, and interviews with developers at that time state they were still working on classes.
Correction: 2008-2012 (4 years)
Duke Nukem Forever: 1996-2011 (15 years)
Do you REALLY want to compare SC development to DNF? If you do I’ll even dedicate a reply to comparing the two.
In comparison Star Citizen hasn’t taken long and has much more ambition in terms of scale and detail.
Star Citizen is now on year 7. 5 of those years, Cloud Imperium Games has had over 300 employees devoted to this one single game. As of today, December 3 2017 not one instance of gameplay for Squadron 42 has been shown. The core game still lacks functional features, while so much has been devoted to motion capture and selling concepts.
It’s not a huge deal that the game is now into year 7, however the game is FAR from release, and given the current rate of work shown I can’t see it happening anytime in the next few years without either cutting many features or the unlikely case that they have a ton of stuff done and are simply hiding it.
“FUD sippers”.
Garcon! Bring me a glass of the vintage 2013 FUD, warmed before a fire and barrel-aged in fine oak casks. And make sure it’s the 2013, I want to savour the aroma of crazed org tactical manuals without any bits of Starfarer floating in it.
Then bring me a snifter of backer tears and a small tray of savoury Cymelions. I shall retire to the Calling Room.
Star Citizen: MAXIMUM FIDELITY
Unverifiable Anecdote Time: At one point in development, CIG was taking the thrust levels and X/Y angles of every maneuvering nipple on every ship, and sending that data over the network to every game client, and then letting each game client calculate how those values would result in movement for each ship. When I asked one of their CIG’s QA guys “why not just send data on where the ship is, which way it’s facing, and where is gonna be in the next tenth of a second?”, he admitted that they switched to that method after realizing that Chris’s preferred MAXIMUM FIDELITY method was just gobbling bandwidth.
Virtual Captain
Hi everybody,
I just watched a documentation about cathedrals and was baffled with how long the construction time of some of those has been.
Here are some building times of well known cathedrals:
Sagrada Familia (Barcelona - Spain) 133 years and still not finished
Notre Dame (Paris - France) 1163 a.d. - 1345 a.d.
Cologne Cathedral (Cologne - Germany) 1248 a.d. – 1473 a.d.
St. John the Divine (New York - USA) 1892 - still not finished
Washington National Cathedral (Washington - USA) 1909 - 1990
Now some of you might think “Star Citizen is not a cathedral”. While you are right on one hand you are also wrong on the other.
If you look at the scale that SC has and also look at the dreams that SC aims for, it should be seen as a “gaming cathedral”.
In my son’s social sciences class they got asked to give examples of out-of-the-ordinary internet communities for study (and the teacher asked them to please not pick 4chan). As the good boy he is, he mentions “the fans of that scam game, Star Citizen”, which was immediately met by “that’s not a scam! what proof do you have?” from someone in his class. Turns out he’s got a cultist in his high school class. I’m prepping him to mention Derek Smart in any remotely relevant context. This could be good.
That’s him, in the social sciences course.
ahem
Here is my report on the Star Citizen community of backers. They are the community that wrote this. I will read it to you verbatim, and let you decide.
Ortwin actually wrote about what they can get away with, a lot of it was focused on imagining future mechanisms that might eventually exist to prevent “plain abuse”.
Fahey, as many others before him, points to the inherent risks of crowd funding to badly burn backers as there is currently no ability for backers to distinguish “well-planned projects” from “disasters in-the-making.”
….
However, as many commentators have pointed out, if crowd funding is to mature as an alternative funding source for games of all budget sizes, it will ultimately need to include safeguards against insufficient planning or plain abuse.
…
On the other hand, if crowd funding is to mature as a reliable method for customers to support the development of a favorite game via an early pre-buy (as opposed to an enthusiastic donation with uncertain outcome), then this method will require a vetting process of the proposed project to ensure that the development and delivery is properly planned and secured for the proposed amounts. This could indeed be accomplished by completion insurance complete with experts who vet the developer’s schedule and budget, not unlike in the field of independent film production.
The collected funds should be handled by a collection agent or the insurance company itself, to be paid out pursuant to an approved cash flow. Any unforeseen changes in the development process would be reviewed and approved by experienced specialists who monitor that process - something very familiar in the film production process as well. The completion guarantor would assure that the project will either be delivered to the early buyers as promised, or return the funds. Based on the fees charged in the film business, the insurance premium for such a completion guarantee and associated monitoring would probably be around 5 to 7 percent of the development budget.
Sarsapariller
It really can’t be emphasized enough how bad the combat is right now. There’s a reason all of the posts on the subreddit, and all of the streamer videos, feature people just flying from planet to planet and loading/unloding cargo- you literally cannot fight in the current build of the PTU. Between super low framerates, input lag in the 2-3second range, and targets jittering all over the screen like coked up hummingbirds, it’s next to impossible to land a shot. Even if you do, some asshole at CIG decided to make combat more like Elite, I guess, which means your average engagement if you can hit the target will take 3-4 minutes just to do enough damage that they die. And there is literally nothing stopping them from ignoring you for the 10 seconds it takes to set a jump destination and fly away if they feel like they’re losing. Not that you could tell you were losing because, as far as I can see, the shield indicators don’t work and the damage states are broken as fuck. Missiles almost never hit, and if they do hit seem to do next to no damage.
I’m actually really excited for them to fix the FPS. The game is stable enough that it doesn’t crash very often already, and the only reason it is so riveting is because just fighting through the lag and low FPS to land on a planet feels like a real achievement. Smooth those framerates out and people are going to get tired of wanking over landing and go try to actually do things in the PTU, only to realize that literally every system is either a stubbed-in placeholder, or broken, or both.
Star Citizen Defense Playbook:
Timeline Criticisms
CIG had to build a company from scratch, including hiring, building studios around the globe, etc.
R&D doesn’t count.
All those games had engines already made. CIG is building their engine from scratch. It is called “Star Engine.”
Those other games actually started development and R&D way before those dates, don’t you know anything?
Star Citizen already has way more content than any of those games.
Star Citizen is doing something that literally no one has ever attempted before. Ground-breaking innovations take time.
Those games are bad because money-grubbing publishers forced them out the door before devs could make them into something good. Star Citizen doesn’t have publishers, and no deadlines, so this means Star Citizen will be better.
This new era of gamers are impatient little bitches. I don’t mind the wait, I have patience. I keep pledging so Chris Roberts will have as much time as he needs to recognize his vision.
Bugs, Lack of Content Criticisms
Star Citizen is more transparent than any other company, ever. You’re seeing how the sausage is made.
There is way more content than they are showing us because they don’t want to spoil it.
What are you talking about? I just spent hours playing the game it’s great/runs great/no bugs/perfectly smooth/amazing.
You obviously don’t understand game development. Bugs like this are totally normal for a game in this stage of development. Have you ever heard of Alpha??
Don’t be a part of early access if you can’t handle some bugs.
All of those things you just listed are on the schedule, they will be delivered in
They are doing a lot of the ground-work tech / pipelines that will pave the way for faster content creation later.
Oh, they already have the tech for , it’s not much effort to add.
Funding Model, Sales, Marketing Criticisms
Star Citizen is doing something different. They are bypassing the greedy publisher model only cares about profit and kills innovation.
Nobody is forcing you to pledge.
I backed the game because I believe in Chris Roberts’s vision, it’s the game I’ve always dreamed of playing.
All the ships that can be bought can be acquired in-game, therefore not pay-to-win.
The game does not have subscriptions. You can subscribe to help pay for weekly content which gives us insights into game development never before seen.
You’re not buying land! You’re buying the ability to claim land. Huge difference.
It’s not a scam. They have offices all over the world and the game is playable right now.
CIG is not in any kind of financial trouble, just look at the funding tracker.
General Rebuttals
Why are you even commenting if you hate the game so much? What kind of sad person just goes around tearing things down?
Oh look, another Derek Smart alt trying to spread lies and mis-information about Star Citizen because he’s jealous.
Known troll/goon. Downvote and move on.
How many AAA games have YOU released?
A backer looks out over the ramparts and tells himself what he sees is an organised, marching horde who all turn as one to mock him on the command of a hidden Dark Master. What he’s actually seeing is a load of entirely unconnected passersby suddenly staring at this guy and wondering why he’s wearing a clown suit.
Chris stated a couple of years ago that they had sufficient funds to complete the game. That negates the defense right there.
In the 90’s you could waffle on with bullshit and people would forget as time went on and when it came to calling a person on something it was near nigh impossible to find the info.
Fast forward to now and everything is recorded in triplicate.
And I’ll leave you with one thing to ponder. I know that Derek has stated that no-one will go to gaol over this, who knows, but have a look at the proofs of Fraud and see how many boxes you can tick.
Elements of proof:
Any act or omission
Including a misrepresentation
That knowingly or recklessly misleads, or attempts to mislead
A party
To obtain a financial or other benefit
Or to avoid an obligation
Derek Smart
ps: When I say that I’m going to see Chris Roberts go to jail if he doesn’t deliver this game, trust me, I will do it.
