Posted on December 31, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 14
Posted on December 31, 2017 | written by GOONRATHI
December Set 14
Bootcha
Terrible decisions are a part of Chris Roberts history…
WHICH YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT IN THIS VIDEO WOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Worth Clicking:
(video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Chapter 2: The Mythological Roberts)
Bootcha
Used Car Rental Salesman chat
There’s a quite bit more to that story than what I mentioned, and it’s a lot more depressing and sad. And more than two sources have confirmed most of the details of that sad unspoken tale.
What I said was consistent with what they said. However, yes, I should have explained that beat better.
I was looking for something not the whole sad story, not a casual “oh and here he’s a car salesman”, and not “oh and here he’s a car salesman here’s what I think about that”. I’ll have plenty of time for opinions soon enough.
Bootcha
I hope this video is everything you dreamed it would be.
Worth Clicking:
(video: Sunk Cost Galaxy - Chapter 3: The Gang’s All Here)
G0RF
Squadron never should’ve tried to be more. It was only ever something the minority of a 700,000 member customer base wanted. And most are owed it now for free anyway.
When I picture the Squadron 42 of the original pitch, and the Squadron 42 spec’ed to the probable market size for a PC-exclusive indie space dogfighter in 2014, I picture a much leaner work that hits the nostalgia notes really hard but isn’t trying to best AAA standards across multiple game genres while also delivering the biggest moviegame in history. Whereas Star Citizen’s success seems defined by ship monetization, Squadron’s can and should’ve been in beautifully packaging up an old school nostalgia trip. It can’t possibly ever compete with Star Citizen as money printing machine, but could’ve been a good will cementer for the olds and gateway title / loss leader for that subset of younger gamers who want space pewpew for Pros. If done right, it could’ve won their hearts then turned them over to Star Citizen to win their spaceship dollahs.
Ace Combat games move in the ~1M unit range (including console sales) with dogfighting, missions and a dollop of animated scripted stuff. 6-7 hours for a single player campaign. Barring a Star Wars tie-in for consoles (like a Tie Fighter reboot), it seems to me like the market for a single-player PC only dogfighter title is a six-figure number. And again, CIG may have captured the majority already.
More than anything, SQ42 needed to be a great branched mission dogfighter + Mark Hamill nostalgia vehicle that felt familiar and fun. Chris had the team to do it. And it could’ve achieved that with a structure / scope more akin to Starlancer — a virtual carrier home-base with limited player ambulation, a briefing room, much of the cinematics piped in as video news broadcasts or HUD-delivered companion clips, etc.
Such choices would’ve been both note-perfect on the nostalgia front yet far easier on the production front. It could’ve avoided the exacting cinematic demands of a AAA title like Battlefront 2 using the structural cheats inherent in a game like Starlancer and seemed authentically old school while doing it. A win win for players and developers who know only too well the big bucks are in high-poly, higher dollar spaceship presales.
But then (surprise) Chris started yammering and yammering and somehow:
We’ve got a really big story arch so we’re going to split it into a trilogy like Wing Commander 1/2/3, that kind of thing. So Episode 1 is what people will play this year and has the equivalent of 70 Wing Commander style missions…
… We’re thinking it’s like 21 chapters or so, and each chapter is a segment of missions…
…So, it’s about the equivalent of about 70 missions Wing Commander style and we think it’s about 20 hours of gameplay…
…So, Episode 2 is “Behind Enemy Lines”, which I think that everyone that backed until like $6 million gets for free and then Episode 3 would be the year after. So we’ll have each one of these, each one is the equivalent of a huge triple A “Call of Duty” or better because we have a much bigger campaign.
Chris pushed expectations to “bigger than COD” levels and I’m hard pressed to believe the core backers of Squadron rest wanted / needed that. Even from the first couple of years of CIG material about Squadron, it sounded like they started with manageable targets and a familiar structure.
Yet the targets grew nuttier and nuttier as Chris’s gums flapped faster and the cash really started being lit on fire. Now it’s got to have AAA FPS missions. Now it’s got 1st & 3rd person animations that don’t cheat. Now there’s no loading screens. Now it’s got a 1200 page script. Now it’s assembled the most prestigious Hollywood cast in gaming history. Now it’s 20 hours of in-game cinematics.
All that scope creep turned it into Mission:Unprofitable.
Then a funny thing happened after Chris spent all that time talking up _Wing Commander 5: The Bloatening_… The vengeful god of Irony sent an Aleax of Squadron as a COD game and nut-tapped Chris so hard he put Squadron in hiding for an entire year. (The Road to CitizenCon having been contrived in advance to create the illusion of a last-minute SQ42 debut postponement when it was a foregone conclusion Chris wasn’t going to show it in the run up to Infinite Warfare’s launch because …)
I’m strongly of the opinion that despite its “failure” to only move 14 million copies first year that Infinite Warfare actually helped force the full and permanent retreat of Sq42 from what was originally planned as a stand-alone retail release to what it appears to be in all but name today: DLC for Star Citizen. (Maybe the Crytek lawsuit was the primary driver but from Brian Chambers Batgirl comments, it almost seems like CIG thought their legal risks were behind them earlier this year.)
Whatever the primary driver, now it’s an open world “let’s put the space back in this space game” bloater damned to sharing the PG playspace, pacing, etc. with the money-earning monster that really was the only show all along.
All of those expansions / deviations from the familiar and conceivably very achievable introduced orders of magnitude greater complexity while actually reducing the chance of yielding lean, mean, retro-tastic fun, a reality made evident by the belated Squadron circa end-of-2017 reveal. Sooooo much time and space and possibility with so little to fill it or give it life or meaning thanks to Chris’s “vision.”
At this point, it’s hard not to wonder whether the real plan is to put in a good effortshow on the Squadron 42 appearances front even while its internally been consigned to the dust bin. This is of course and probably crap but the Coutts loan and Crytek lawsuit both put Squadron under unique outside duress, even while internal and external forces have long conspired to keep it constantly back-burnered. CIG testing of prospective demand via their latest mailing list signup is a suggestive tell and one wonders if, heading into year 6, they suddenly realized the marketing wisdom of a viability test for demand. Knowing that the majority of signups will already be owed the title for free, they may end up discovering only years late that a lean, mean retro-tastic approach would’ve been the smarter choice all along.Retro-tastic fun is the hip new trend with kids these days, anyway
I dunno, as always with the Crobbler there are two good explanations.
There’s the one where he knows he’s screwed and just wants to string it out as long as possible. That CIG has become an elaborate, legal way to scam shitizens by taking money for things they know they can’t deliver. They’re putting on a show with Sq42 because that’s the thing they can most easily produce more glitz fakery to sell more dreams. Star Citizen the online game has kinda run it’s course, they’ve gotten close to the MVP escape hatch.
And then there’s the one where he thinks he’s still a demigod producer of games and movies, and that he’s not the one that’s fucked everything up. In that version Crobbler has gotten frustrated by Star Citizen and is plowing himself into Sq42 because he wants some results dammit. But he is so terrible that he legit doesn’t know the difference between a scripted demo and a real game.
As always, the funniest thing is that these two possibilities are indistinguishable.
G0RF
[POLYGON: Star Citizen’s 3.0 update is finally here
Star Citizen, the ambitious collection of spacefaring games, has reached a major milestone. The latest update to the project’s online multiplayer game, the so-called “persistent universe,” represents the largest addition of new content in several years. It is now available to all backers.
The Star Citizen persistent universe (PU) is an online multiplayer game that includes space combat as well as first-person shooting. The latest update, called Alpha Patch 3.0.0, includes a number of new locations to explore, including three planet-sized moons, as well as atmospheric flight. From our preview in October:
The biggest selling point will be the procedurally generated moons, named Yela, Daymar and Cellin. The smallest of those moons will have a surface area of more than 851,000 square kilometers, which will dwarf the entire landmass of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim…. Players will be able to seamlessly enter their atmosphere from orbit and fly around unimpeded by loading screens or transitions of any kind. In this way, Star Citizen will leap-frog its closest competitor, Elite: Dangerous.
(Probably copy and pasted right from a Swofford email after the PayPal transfer cleared…)
The patch also includes many quality-of-life improvements, such as enhanced cockpit interaction for pilots, 20 new missions and AI for non-player characters such as shopkeepers. The full patch notes are available on the Star Citizen website.
The Star Citizen project began with a Kickstarter campaign in 2012. Since that time, it has become the single most-funded crowdfunding campaign of any kind, on any platform, for any thing. So far, Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) say they have raised more than $174 million, with at least $15 million of that rolling in since the first week in October.
**The project is not without its controversies, including several lawsuits.
At least two high-value backers recently asked for their money back. One tells Polygon that they’ve begun legal action to secure a refund of more than $25,000.** Both cite delays in the progress of Star Citizen’s single-player game, called Squadron 42. That project, which has been sold separately since February 2016, features the acting talents of Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill and Gary Oldman among others.
**Crytek, makers of the CryEngine which the Star Citizen games were originally built on, is also suing RSI and CIG for copyright infringement while implying that its executives behaved unethically during and after negotiations.
It’s important to note that this Alpha Patch 3.0.0 is still just a tiny fraction of the promised feature set for Star Citizen’s multiplayer game. Neither the multiplayer nor the single-player Star Citizen games have had a release date of any kind since 2016, a fact that Roberts himself regularly acknowledges.**
Way to bury the ledes.
And get out of here with that leap frog bullcrap. The game with 3 moons in one star system of a planned 100 compared to the one with a simulated galaxy… The game with only combat and cargo mechanics compare to Elite’s full suite of space sim essentials… The game with 15FPS on monster rigs next to the one that delivers 100+ And VR in ultra on equivalent rigs… The game in pre-alpha after five years next to the one released and continuously expanding… The game with no real A.I. yet versus one that’s had it since pre-release… The game facing lawsuits from multiple corners and with no transparency to backers versus the one with quarterly financial disclosures to the public… The game pitching $50 to $100 protection racket land claims as yet not in game vs. one that sells cheap cosmetics for those inclined.
Yet “Star Citizen leap frogs Elite because no loading screens.” Yeah, okay man. Whatever you say, ye paragon of games journalism.
Watch Montoya skillfully destroy MassivelyOp’s contributors and their weak arguments against Star Citizen.
Part of my daily routine is smack down some anti-Star Citizen snowflakes, then eat a T-bone with some Miller lite. Stop judging me! I would like to make a correction! Not all the stretch goals are complete! Pets? Some landing zones.. they are way off. I apologize for making a factually incorrect statement. When somebody says something as fact, but it is not, they should apologize and make it clear that they realize what they said was wrong!
SARSAPARILLER DESTROYS AGEING SHILL WITH VIEWER COUNT IN THE TRIPLE DIGITS
Is it really “Destroying” if you have to declare victory in the title of your video? I mean, their arguments still stand and their predictions for the next year will be verified, or not, in the fullness of time. How about destroying them by making some competing predictions and seeing who’s closer to being right? I wonder what kind of expectations you had for Star Citizen at this time last year- because their expectation for SC in 2017 was “Most likely to flop.”
Derek Smart
He’s a moron, and a coward. This is the Shillizen who backed out of debating (he would have been crushed, of course) me live on GameTalkLive a few weeks ago.
They’re all doing disaster control, following the 3.0 disaster release.
I left him a message. I’m probably getting banned.
Were you drunk when at 11:05 you claimed that they had met every stretch goal?
I can’t watch Montoya, it’s painful. Darwin would be fascinated by the declining numbers of Citizens, survival of the dumbest.
(video: WTFo steals a ship but can’t get out because the doors are locked)
Beer4theBeerGod
Ben Lesnick, Developer.
Years from now, when Star Citizen comes out is but a forgotten memory, this line will still make me smile.
The Titanic
Star Citizen wants to be an mmo, of which they have no groundwork set. They are significantly longer away from anything close to Elite for this feature alone. They can, of course, dump the mmo aspect and make it a small-scale arena game with friends, but I have a feeling that would be hugely negative for them at this point.
People are buying Star Citizen the mmo, with very expensive ship pre orders. There are delusions of it unseating Eve as the defacto space mmo. People put lots of dollars down to be space aces with Firefly and be like Han Solo while getting a big jump on the space poles who will join with Aurora packages.
Star Citizen, to be realized even at half of what was promised, needs to be a literal technological evolution. Just getting my NPCs aboard a star liner on a ship flying through the middle of a space war outside where marines are shooting other marines inside those ships and you can watch all this happening through the windows of your ship into the windows of another ship… is a monumental networking achievement. It can probably be done in a single player game, but add in the mmo factor and everything goes to hell pretty fast.
CIG needs too guys working on these problems, who can do more than hold up their hands and shout “meshing technology!” Somebody actually needs to build this stuff.
And this isn’t even taking into account AI or physics simulations everywhere, even at a very arbitrary and basic level. Hell, just getting a physics ball to roll the same way for everybody over a network can be a challenging thing.
I think you’re easily over a decade away from seeing even a rudimentary version of what’s been promised to gamers. The demos would need to stop happening, because it’s not actually making a game. The motion capture would need to stop because it’s useless right now, and will be outdated years later when this is able to actually release. All the “fun stuff” that doesn’t involve being neck deep in really complex code and creative solutions needs to stop. Chris Roberts would need to show real progress instead of pretending to make progress.
But that won’t ever happen, because funding would dry up. That SC is always (current + .1) versions away to meeting everybody’s wildest dreams is what keeps it all alive.
So I recently got a new computer and I got Star Citizen, my frames were ok in the hangar but when I played in the SC Universe thing it was unplayable, it took a year to get out of the bed alone. So I was wondering if upgrading my RAM from 8GB to 16GB will help as long as moving the game onto a SSD.
While I definitely have doubts about it, Star Citizen's more... outspoken detractors are at the point now of claiming that people livestreaming the game are somehow faking what they're showing.
I have never seen a single person here or anywhere else say this. Not even Derek has said that people livestreaming are faking it. No one needs to say this, it’s fucking broken garbage that runs, but on a wing (commander) and a prayer. I get that there’s trying to be mature on the middle ground but holy shit guy we are 170 million into a game that only on rare occasions lets you put down a box.
Scruffpuff
So my wife has caught up with the thread. She was only peripherally aware of this whole debacle through me, but for some reason she had time on her hands while I was at work, and she dove into the terrible secret of space.
She made two points.
Point 1: This has nothing to do with a space game. In her words: “I watched Chris Roberts, and he’s a dork. He’s a dork’s dork. He looks weird, he sounds weird, he’s overweight, clumsy, and socially awkward. But he made a game, made millions, got the “girl” (such as it is), has tons of adoring fans, and now he’s taking on the establishment. Everything he’s doing is the wet dream of every geek in the world who’s considered themselves a hopeless underdog - if he can do it, so can they! And for that reason, they have to believe he can do this. Because if it turns out Chris Roberts lied - if he is a fraud - then that means he’s not one of them. And that means there’s no hope for them: to make the money, get the girl, and get acceptance. They’ll stay in the bottom of the social bucket for the rest of their lives. So they believe.”
Point 2: Derek Smart is the hardest thing about this whole thing to believe. She was ready to believe that an autistic guy who got lucky decades ago and bought his own press came back to delude himself and others to the tune of $175 million. Easy to swallow. That thousands of fans are ready to doxx and kill anyone who disagrees with the commitment of that fraud - no problem - easy to believe. What she can’t believe is that one man, who has nothing to do with this, decides “I’M GOING TO BURN THIS ALL DOWN” because of a very minor slight from the con artist, and has tirelessly committed literal years of his life with no rest to doing exactly that, like a down-syndrome terminator.
G0RF
this is all so great.
Your wife is dead-on about Chris’s appeal to the fanboys. For the older ones, the ones who upon whom Wing Commander made so powerful an emotional impact due to the timing quirks of their own young, “I want to fly spaceships and have adventures!” impressionability and Chris’s serendipitously timed arrival at exactly the right studio and exactly the right moment, there’s an additional element of deep emotional gratitude. The longing to see this fun wizard of their childhood thrive because they’re thankful for the feelings / memories / escape his games gave them is reinforced and fortified by Chris Roberts’s accessibility and personal affability. His availability to fans at these events rewards and reinforces that gratitude. His generosity of spirit in such instances is pretty real; you can see it in fan photos where Chris has HIS arm around the fans’ shoulders and the big goofy “meet my best bud” smile in the photos he’s taking with random customers. There’s an intimacy there that you’d never see with a lot of other big names in gaming and it’s meaningful. An ego-gratifying symbiosis with real power.
For Roberts, who really has had a roller-coaster life with seasons of famine and of feasting, having the reinforcements of rock star adulation is surely a balm for the soul. Given his wife’s own unmistakeable disinterest in the industry and her discounting of the significance of Wing Commander in its historical context, the deep admiring validation that erupts from the fanboys probably carries extra power. If there was a /fanboysmirin subreddit, Chris and the citizenry would dominate it from all the moments of earnest affection exchanged.
I don’t say that disparagingly, I think it’s actually something Chris does right and with largely authentic warmth. Shame about the lying and mercenary fleecing but hey, nobody’s perfect! :/
Good afternoon to all the SC fans furiously posting about some lone critic on twitter and Goons “ruining everything”
I want you all to know who you are railing against, at least in part. You should know that Goons are not monolithic in any real sense of the word.
Let me tell you a little Star Wars Galaxies story. I supplied bounty hunters with thousands of exploding droids optimized to knock out jedi because it was hilarious to watch people randomly get exploded by residential landmines.
We were very successful at humor. We made bank because we found funny ways to screw with other players.
With that as a preface, let me tell you God’s honest truth. You guys are not only hilariously fanatical about Star Citizen, you are also loathsome. You’ll probably even get a bunch of old EVE Goons planning poo poo for you if CIG ever decides to release Star Citizen the MMO-thing.
You are a wonderful bunch of targets. This is not going to change. This is something you should realize and see how it supports nearly all of the posting we do on our Stupid Crowdfunding Accomplishment Mausoleum subforum - you guys are worthy of our attention because you are remarkable sperglords. You deserve to be griefed.
We want to laugh so hard at the crushing of your dreams - either through the failure of CIG/RSI’s ability to stay open, or to finally get this pile out the door in a manner that can handle thirty or more players - because I want to buy in and make a business out of griefing every one of you until you quit in a snot-bubble-blowing rage.
I want the game to come out with enough mechanics to kick your ass. You should pray they bring back the PvP-slider idea.
We need a good laugh. Everyday Star Citizen still isn’t done is almost as funny as stealing your Mustang-LX-superhyper-variant.
PS> We do ruin everything - for laughs.
Beer4theBeerGod
The thing that blows my mind isn’t that there’s bugs– because the statement by itself “Alpha builds are buggy” isn’t wrong– it’s the sheer variety and critical nature of every single one of them. It is fucking rotten from top to bottom.
Exactly. This is not an alpha product. It’s not a product at all. It’s a collection of concepts loosely held together by prayer and shitty programming, and it has no hope of ever being anything near what Chris has marketed it to be.
He’s better off settling with CryTek, selling Squadron 42 as a standalone CryEngine product, and then turning around and making a completely new engine for Star Citizen. Actually the project would be better off if they paid Chris Roberts and the rest of the executive team $10M to fuck off and let actual competent developers finish the job (and by finish I mean start), but neither one of those are going to happen because it would require Chris to accept that he’s not the savior of PC gaming and is instead a walking punchline.
Remix!
lyrics if by some chance you totally ignored them the first time.
It’s a remix in the sense that I did it again slightly differently.
By slightly, I mean not very muchly.
Remember, its not paranoia if they’re out to get you.
It’s a new year. Let’s bring everyone really down. thatguy suggested this parody and suppled most of the lyrics.
Fitter Happer made today would just be a treated scream.
happy 2018 buster.
G0RF
I don’t know that I ever dropped this into the thread but in doing some hard drive clean-up I came back across it and figured it would be worth sharing. It’s an excerpt from a pretentious, unfinished multi-chapter monsterpost called “The Malaise” that futzed about with Social Science, Marketing Theory, and Fundamentals of Game Design. Much of which is common-sense to most here but still seemed worth putting down for the newer visitors.
This part, “The Chasm”, shameless archer-propriated Geoffrey Moore’s model of technology adoption from “Crossing the Chasm” towards gaming industry audiences / crowdfunded MMOs in particular. It’s just theorycrafted analysis with the power of CHARTS to lend the appearance of empirical rigor, but I liked parts of it.
Anyway…
THE CHASM
Cloud Imperium Games shattered crowdfunding records through the largesse of an oddball confederation of space sim enthusiasts, hardcore dogfighting fans, PC master racers, compulsive collectors, mid-life crisiseers, and gray market profiteers. In this peculiar strain of a technology adoption curve, they are the Innovators and Early Adopters – that early, energetic, bump on the port side of the bell.
A little over 750,000 strong by true count, they are the purest Star Citizens that will ever be. Longsuffering and generous, credulous beyond reason, they are devotees of Chris Roberts more than customers of Cloud Imperium at heart. And he has captured the most generous of them, wholly and devotedly, with fictions he himself falsifies constantly, would that they could but turn their ecstatic gaze from his imagined future to behold his factual past, from the honeyed promises of his lips to the clumsy works of his hands.
Yet however firm his hold over the Early Adopters, however efficient his methods for extracting the cash of the Innovators, they are but a fraction of the true potential market for an online game. Across the chasm lies the real prize, the mainstream gamer audience.
Less affluent, less tribal, the “the filthy casuals” of the Gaming MMO Mainstream number in the tens of millions. They have no nostalgic attachments to the halcyon days of Wing Commander; like as not they remember it as a crappy Chris Roberts movie than a pivotal Chris Roberts game franchise. Their tastes are fickle, their loyalties quickly depreciating assets that must be constantly renewed and are never fully owned. Most don’t even own PCs that could play a truly high fidelity game and never will. Many will play happily only on consoles.
Most are immune to Roberts’ lures for they hold firm to credos that reject them, “Avoid early access” and “Never pre-order.” They look askew at the cynical monetization tactics of AAA publishers who might seek $100 to unlock what they could easily deliver for free. They reject the “pay to win” models that enslave others then reward them with illusions of outsized power in MMOs.
The base tastes and playstyles of the “filthy casuals” who compromise the mainstream gamer population are largely held in derision and contempt by the population Roberts has amassed. Roberts himself has catered to their elitist self-narratives from the earliest hours of his pitch. Yet despite the lip service to the PC Master Racers, Roberts himself knows no such purism. He covets the mainstream masses across the chasm and expects them to follow in the fullness of time as they did before, when the PC Gaming market was young, minuscule and delighted with his offerings.
Roberts continued, “My gut sense is that 5 to 10 percent of your audience is going to back you early, and I think that number is variable based on the quality. When you do something really good, it’s a lower percentage; if you do something that isn’t so good maybe it’s 20 percent or 30 percent. I’m assuming if I deliver the game I think I’m going to deliver, if it holds up to the level of Wing Commander or Freelancer or Privateer, I think 10x would be a pretty conservative number. I think that would be right in there with what I did in the ‘90s. What crowdfunding has proven is that those people are still out there.”
Alas, if only the sound marketing instincts of his gut could prevail over the self-defeating impulses of his ego.
Putting aside their psychographic tendencies and preferred gaming platforms, there is a far simpler reason why Chris Roberts will struggle to capture the mainstream gamer market: they prefer games that are fun, and Chris Roberts is disinterested in making them.
Behold, his vision of “tactical FPS”, and consider how far short it falls not just of the modern FPS but of the earliest entries in the genre.
Behold, his attempts at a Space Racing experience, and what as busy misery of poorly thought out overdesign its race track is.
Behold, his notion of MMO Mission Design, which asks players to flip switches on and off in some parody of a game loop. Or his future vision of it, which demands 8 minutes of idle running or flying to achieve 20 seconds of hot switch-flipping action. A feature, not a bug, of a realism bias so pervasive that it all but eliminates the possibility of general purpose “get in get out fun” that defines most modern MMO successes.
The commitment to drudgery by design so typical of simulators and often especially Space Sims is the resignation to a niche, but in Chris’s case it may mean a vexing future spent staring hopelessly across the chasm wondering why he couldn’t cross it. A future frustratedly unaware that he himself designed it that way with misguided development priorities, poor game design choices, indifference to the mechanics of play and most especially hostility towards conventional definitions of Fun.
Object lessons abound in the gaming industry, would that he wanted to learn from them. There are studios aplenty who captured the Innovators and Early Adopters in their market yet took nothing for granted when it came to continuing growth. They saw themselves approaching the chasm and set about the difficult problem-solving effort to devise ways to cross it, even though doing so always costs you the good will and patronage of some of your purist early fans. Behold, the Price of Freedom.
Once these companies were fledglings, now they are behemoths. Rockstar declared from their very inception that their goal was to create games for more than nerds and kids. Valve saw the need for a user-friendly software distribution platform. Bethesda turned from the PC fantasy game enthusiasts to the console market with Morrowind and scored a top 10 seller, then captured even larger audiences with the streamlined Oblivion and Fallout 3 before creating a certified monster hit with Skyrim. Some in industry were shocked that a genre formerly assumed a fixed-cap niche could become a massive mainstream success, yet Bethesda didn’t cross the chasm by accident. They’d been building a bridge there for years.
So many of the giants of our time turned from to niches to riches because they saw as self-evident what Roberts still can’t discern; that the masses they desired would not be reached by fiat or accident. It would take humility, focus, years of purposeful bridge building, and no shortage of luck, because in the end the masses do not come easily like the niches so often do. If you want them, you have to go get them, and if you’re not bearing Fun when you try, then you shouldn’t even bother, because they sure as hell won’t.
Also no mention of many players being unable to launch the game and among those they do many play for hours on end without being able to complete basic fedex quests. No mention of frequent crashes which wipe out ships often meaning players with basic packages have to wait for a 30 minute timer to countdown to play again.
How dare you mock the joys of Chris’s Fedex quests; they completely leapfrog Elite’s!
I love the fact that I can post unfiltered SC gameplay and simultaneously be accused of being a paid RSI shill and Derek Smart troll.
The game speaks for itself right now, but different people are getting different messages.
I’m actually surprised that despite the myriad of bugs and performance issues it is stable and not crashing as often as it used to, which I guess is damming with faint praise.
**Chris awaits the accountant’s final measure of the books with trepidation. “You are bankrupt,” the account says slowly as he places a mug to his lips and sips thoughtfully. Chris’ face is aghast, all manner of horrors playing upon his features as the dreams shatter and everything turns to FUD.
The mug is placed down, and the accountant says, “morally.”
Chris wipes his face with flapping hands and rises to his feet, “So you’re saying we can sell the tanks? Is that what you’re saying?”**
“Did you hear that?” Derek asks, “I was right!”
A few moments as the warlord awaits a reply from the caverns.
“Did you hear that,” a voice calls, and the warlord broadly smiles as he hears, “I was right!”
Thus we have the most open blog development seen in it’s rawest form, endless, self sustaining, self serving, self parodying, self defeating, for all time. The only way we will get him free from those caverns is to lure him out with a visage of a clown which will interrupt the cycle…briefly.
“For wasting the time of everyone for a period lasting longer than two weeks, Mister Smart, I am hereby sentancing you to an unusual and perhaps cruel punishment. While you are indeed correct that Chris Roberts and those associated within him and his enterprise did attempt and in large parts succeed to dupe and con their audience, you have done much to frustrate those who would seek entertainment and satisfaction from this entire debacle. I sentence you to spend fourteen days in isolation, in a specially designed cell which has absolutely no echo and a gramophone.”
Derek blinks three times before the question is asked.
“What’s with the gramophone your honour?”
The judge smiles warmly, almost sympathetically as he leans in to explain, “How else are we going to play that broken record?”
With the increasing jank that Star Citizen piles on, it seems that we’ve all come full circle. It’s only fair.
Worth Clicking: (video: CHRIS ROBERTS’ DESKTOP COMMANDER)
complete #bullshit article !!!@elchapuzas you should be ashamed this was published.
(video: Cringy Concierge Citizen gets brushed off by CIG’s video producers and hates on Spectrum/CIG’s business practices)
Oh my god. I forced myself to listen to that whole thing and it was just one long cringefest. The face I created in my mind of what this guy looked like when he was making this rant are still making my sides hurt. HOW do you come across these things?
G0RF
Oh dear, Charlie Hall is taking a break from telling readers about how Star Citizen is leap-frogging Elite and actually describing his player experience with 3.0. It actually makes for good reading in places, though the deferential interjections seem tonally incongruent.
Easy on the big words there friend! Otherwise, when the paywall drops, the citizens are not going to be able to read and understand what you are trying to say.
I was watching a presentation from the some of the DICE artists and there was this slide.
I was going to make a line for star citizen but I have no idea how long it takes them to make an asset.
it’s exactly the same, but replace days with years
Same thing happened to me in a fully loaded Cat. While landed and shut down you could run trough the cargo compartments filled with cargo with 25fps… Once i went to flight ready, it instantly dropped to 5 as I opened the door to the first compartment.
Beet Wagon
Happy New Year, Goonailures. My gift to you is a(nother) bad video, featuring Kayak and dead-faced spacemans.
(video: Beet plays with doggo waiting for SC to load. Uninstalls after ship fails to spawn)
TheAgent
btw I spent today and tonight showing PSVR to people who have never, ever played VR and one of the gals on RE7 started freaking out and I was like “ok I got this, I beat this before” and I freaked the fuck out too because holy shit in VR that shit is fucking scary as hell
two of the people over used to work on SC but even after prodding would not say a single. fuckin. word about anything. and they were the ones talkin smack back at the fair just a few months ago. and my gal is so fucking sick of goddamn star citizen, so when I brought it up she’s like “why don’t you and chris roberts and derek smart all go fuck each other in the spa with your spaceships” and I thought to myself
hmmm, okay
so derek and chris, who I know both read the thread at this point (yes, chris roberts gets updates on this thread, seriously, no lols), let’s all go for a steamy interracial three way in my hot tub some night
TheAgent
fyi from what I’ve been hearing in hushed tones, chris is fucking livid with bootcha, beer and this entire thread
although weirdly not upset with derek anymore, so uh
take that for what its worth I guess
TheAgent
G0RF
I hope you can use a variant of the line ”People who buy lots of spaceships aren’t stupid.” in there somewhere. Ben Lesnick, Master of Ships.
theres a lot of benny in here
No joke its time to crowdfund TheAgent’s liquor cabinet.
One of the few expenses that can eclipse Roberts’ dreams.
…)
of course and probably crap but the Coutts loan and Crytek lawsuit both put Squadron under unique outside duress, even while internal and external forces have long conspired to keep it constantly back-burnered. CIG testing of prospective demand via their latest mailing list signup is a suggestive tell and one wonders if, heading into year 6, they suddenly realized the marketing wisdom of a viability test for demand. Knowing that the majority of signups will already be owed the title for free, they may end up discovering only years late that a lean, mean retro-tastic approach would’ve been the smarter choice all along. Retro-tastic fun is the hip new trend with kids these days, anyway
Remix!
