if I somehow end up on the skadden / fkks jury selection, my life will finally be complete
Scruffpuff
There are so many vectors converging on that single point in time known as the Collapse of Star Citizen that it’s nearly impossible to track them all, but here you touch on two of them:
1) The game is already boring, and it’s already old. People are tired of Star Citizen. No matter what they try to add, it will be the same non-game generic garbage (non-game generic high-fidelity garbage to be sure) and the game is already doomed to the scrapheap, regardless of completion status. Just not enough people give a fuck. I’d compare it to Second Life, a game so niche and so insular that I have to check Wikipedia every few years to find out if it’s still a thing. Star Citizen is consigned to the same fate at best. There’s just no remaining interest in this title outside of the people who are already enslaved by it.
2) Related to above, too many excellent, functional, infinitely superior space games for those players who might have been interested in what Star Citizen promised, if only Star Citizen hadn’t simultaneously promised everything and nothing at the same time. “You can be a space farmer!” “Cool, how?” “Buy this module!” “How does it work?” “No idea. Buy it.” Star Citizen would be shit if it existed in a vacuum - but in a crowded market, it’s an industry-wide joke, poised to become an even better-known joke far outside the industry.
I can’t possibly stress this enough, and the evidence backing this assertion is literally everywhere - in every CIG broadcast, in every fan stream, in every screenshot: Star Citizen is not a game in development. There is literally not even the basic starting building blocks of a game or a plan for a game. Star Citizen has nothing but graphical assets and motion capture. We’re 6 years in and nobody on the planet, least of all at CIG, knows what this game is.
Pingpong ball bug
There is a bug where character data gets corrupted in the serverside database and turns the player into a pingpong. CIG found a manual fix.
(tweet summary: As a one-time courtesy and the get you back into the ‘Verse, we’ve reset your account. You should now be able to log in and continue playing as normal. You will have lost any progress you’ve attained)
“As a one time courtesy for our buggy as fuck game fucking your character, we’ve decided to take pity on you and allow you to play. Notice we said one time - meaning if our shit fucks up again, tough titties.
P.s. All your ‘progress’ in our ‘game’ has been wiped. Lol
Virtual Captain
What the fuuuuuck? “one-time courtesy” You know this is impacting hundreds if not thousands of users right? You’re going to fix them one at a time if they beg enough as a one-time favor? HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Take the google form feedback and triple the absurdity every second.
G0RF
Revisiting the run-up to 3.0’s launch, there is just so much bullcrap in the public record. Some good transcript potential here and there.
YOUTUBE: Live from the Gamescom Showfloor, Day 2
Erin Roberts gets asked about the depth of subsumption in 3.0 - Myre from Fortnightly Frontier poses a theoretical about his Bounty Hunter mission to assassinate a bad NPC who might be on a day night schedule of activity. Will NPCs be persistent? Or will they spawn to missions? Erin gives his “so on and so forth” as the handwavium begins.
Deejay goes further with questions about NPC assassination missions. (Drop a box on their head, DJ, that’s the preferred kill.) If he kills an NPC, will another shopkeeper come along and replace the deceased? Basically, yes “and so on and so forth” involving sheriffs and wild west towns and serious marines that will take you down for your crimes.
[Erin Roberts says players will be able to buy ships with aUEC in 3.0, er, 3.1 - Watch Lando nodding after Erin explains you’ll be able to buy ships with aUEC in 3.0. Then Erin and Lando both back off the claim with Lando making it explicitly clear that you will NOT be able to buy 3.0 with aUEC. ( Voice in headset - “No no no we’re not making ships purchasable with credit in 3.0 guys!”)
Classic.
Thoatse
This hits to the core of why I want to punch Star Citizen in the throat -it was exclusively supposed to not be another one of these generic pieces of shit for the unwashed masses and that is 100% the flag crobbler and co wrapped themselves in that got this project off the launchpad in the first place. ‘dust off ur joyticks’ ‘no guns follow the ship’ ‘no freelancer controls’ ‘no point and click’, ‘controls agnostic!’ and such were all actual answers given in official capacity to early worriers with enough foresight on the subject to ask specific questions to suss out this issue.
Around the 50-60 million dollar mark though they threw out all that ‘niche game to revive a niche genre’ talk and entered the ‘too big to fail’ territory and started selling mutually exclusive ~dreamz~ to the much wider/generic FPS crowd once sim whales were running out of milk. They have maintained the illusion they will one day make that flight sim (just wait till beta!) they sold to the delusionals still hanging on, all the while cementing everything in place that will prevent that from ever happening just like they did with VR.
As far as I can see, it’s literally the biggest bait and switch in the history of making games, at least to my autistic brain
The Titanic
The best parts will be the briefing rooms where you know there will be like 12 pilots in there, but nobody will ever comment on the fact the ship can only launch 2 fighters.
The whole password in the url thing is testament to the quality of CIG’s programmers and their code review process. Fucking highschool level programming mistakes on production systems, a class act all round.
2)
legatus is still less than my student loan balance after 8 years tbf
Jacopo Top Hat & Monocle: As part of their Dafne collection, Derion is proud to present their Jacopo line of accessories. Perfect for an elegant night on the town, this diamond-laminate monocle with tungsten chain and gossamer-lined top hat was commissioned in honor of the Port Retanus Metropolitan Opera House Quincentennial and features the latest upgradable optiVis interface for unmatched comfort.
Still amazes me they have a monocle reward tier.
I guess it just the ignorance of every party involved.
I really appreciate the titles given to the different backing tiers. It’s like being able to self-select your level of mental illness in the DSM without needing professional diagnosis.
3)
G0RF
[YOUTUBE: The Redacted Crew braces for yet another betrayal being telegraphed by CIG
We know that Star Citizen isn’t pay to win, but to an outsider it may appear that way. When someone hears that you get what is suppose to be the best heavy fighter in the game when you spend $10,000, it sounds pretty P2W to an outside third party.
Beer4theBeerGod
Years ago the F8 was a ridiculously secret ship, intended to be some kind of ultra-badass top tier endgame for Squadron 42. Now it’s just another punchline in the great joke that is Star Citizen.
Let this be a lesson to all of us. Err, someone help me out with a lesson here.
AHahahahah, I’m so fucking happy they are “selling” the F8 Lightning as a Wing Commander perk. That’s such a genius way to push their whales up to 10k a piece.
The only thing better is all the Citizen Cultists who are now defending it with “Oh well it’s not selling the Lightning, they are giving WC’s a civilian variant, it’s not the same at all”.
Right…….like the Super Hornet not being a military variant. Hey which ship has absolutely dominated the game now since it was flyable? I fucking love fanboys.
Beet Wagon
Lol, F8s are coming with LTI, which the Sabre Raven didn’t get because fuck you you only bought a hard drive.
But my sabre raven couldnt have LTI for “balance purposes”
4)
Beer4theBeerGod
Lol, just go there an click on the “Core Tech” features. They are so fucked, sooooo fucked.
Let’s see, so at the end of Q1 2018 they’re going to…
Implement Personal Weapon: Gemini R97 Shotgun (29 tasks)
Improve Netcode (10 tasks)
Optimize Performance (36 tasks)
Let’s be clear about this. They’ve put more thought into laying out how to polish the fucking helmets than they have for improving netcode. It takes the same number of tasks to implement a glorified off-road golf cart than it does to implement a multi-crew ships. They have 100 tasks to implement customization of characters but only 3 tasks combined to improve planetary generation, improve the flight system (their core gameplay element), and improve the user interface.
At this point anyone who reads that and doesn’t immediate register that it’s a giant pile of steaming bullshit deserves to be fucking scammed.
I was confused while reading the roadmap on the new website.
Any gameplay additions like mining, salvaging or repair are only described as “scheduled”. It is strange that no progress has been made, especially since mining was at some point even planned for 3.0. Do we have any more info on this because I find it really curious that they are just starting now
5)
Virtual Captain
Star Citizen in 20162017 2018
Winners: Ships
Losers: Everything else
No wonder:
Prepare for denied refunds.
Beer4theBeerGod
Of all the things CIG has done, this is the most significant. It indicates that what you are getting now is what you are paying for. No grand vision, no MMO, no amazing immersion into a massive open space opera. Just a shitty, barely functional arena shooter and an opportunity to buy more ships. 3.0 is the MVP.
Alpha PU is clearly being lined up as the MVP in this.
CIG/RSI: “But we’ve delivered it, you can use it NOW in the PU!”
Player: “But my character is stuck as a ball of light, I can’t do shit!”
CIG/RSI: “That’ll be a $5 fee to restore your account, thank you.”
Star Citizer is the best game ever.
The frames per second in Star Citizen are PILED HIGH!!!
Anyone seen this:
Worth Clicking:timestamped youtube link (1764)(video: TwichPAX parody featuring “Chris” talking about keeping kickstarter open indefinitely)
In other news, CIG has kicked out a new trailer for Star Citizen covering different aspects of the game. It’s eight minutes long and it’s not exactly a fair representation of what new backers will find. First of all, the alpha looks relatively smooth in the trailer but that’s not what you’ll get in the game currently. They’ve managed to avoid showing it running at 10 FPS, although you can see cutting away quickly from dodgy looking segments. It also looks super exciting and stacked full of content that’s ready to go, but let’s face it, the Alpha is still a shell of a ‘game’.
It’s actually a shame CIG have released this, while I understand they need more money, it’s just not a fair representation of Star Citizen currently. Considering people have to pay to play, it could be considered false advertising. Take a look…
No RSI booth or presentation at Gamescom this year
A genuine shock. Sounds like pulling cinematics guys off actual game development to work on dazzle demos is not in the cards this year. Very curious.
Chris appears on the refactored Reverse the ‘Verse
G0RF
I’m very curious what the reactions will be from the chattering classes. Redacted, Captain’s Table and Relay all will surely have things to say. I suspect we will hear lots of resigned sighs.
I am very excited about Chris being Lando’s guest on RTV tomorrow. It’s been too long since we’ve been able to gather at the knee of his Excellency and bask in his benevolent wisdom.
G0RF
How telling that Chris is paying such close attention to various discussions in the community right now. He used to ignore it and considered complaints “noise”.
YEAH on the VR FRONT, um, you know, the game’s very much built to be VR FRIENDLY because, you know… like al-um… almost all the UI is DIAGETIC and the stuff that isn’t we’re putting more into being DIAGETIC and we wanna improve the whole DIAGETIC FEEL… ah… so… ahh… you know… our biggest HOLDBACK on the VR is really just we’re still doing so much base level REFACTORING and the ENGINE and the RENDERER will, you know, be starting on you know, the X… the VULKAN, the X12 kinda REFACTOR as well, a-and we’re doing so much OPTIMISATION that we sorta feel like, ‘we’ve gotta get that done… FIRST’, and… get the base level engine stuff more like FINISHED, not constantly working REFACTORING
And then we’ll… we’ll PUT VR…
Cos we had actual, you know, VR support quite a while ago but again as we CHANGE stuff it BREAKS and then your engine team, you go, ‘are they gonna go fix the VR stuff? Are they writing that new… that new… you know like the PROCEDURAL PLANETS that EVERYBODY can experience’, and… so that’s always been… that’s kind of what’s happened in those situations
But once all that stabilises of course we’re gonna go and get that supported and when we’re building things, you know, we’re aware of like I said the DI… putting everything in the world itself, ah… which is quite friendly for VR or… you know… and moving your head around and TRACKING the same thing it’s like… we track… ah… your HEADLOOK and actually, you know, I… I’d thought that we’d turned it on in 3.0 but it will be something that you can disconnect your LOOK from your AIM… as a PLAYER… ah, you know the AI can already do that…
Cos that’s also something that’s potentially useful where you’re… you know… you’re a CERTAIN way, you don’t have to look around to like move your gun to look at it
‘Star Citizen’ to Refocus on VR Support in Early 2016
The status of VR integration is that we’ve been pretty busy with getting [Alpha] 2.0 [out] and we’re trying to get 2.1 so I would say we still have some stuff to integrate from the most recent CryEngine drops. They’ve been actually doing quite a lot of VR, I’m pretty sure you guys have noticed that they’ve completely doubled down and they’re all VR now.
So there are some updates on VR that we need to integrate in. It’s a little more complicated because we’ve changed the engine so much, we’ve changed the rendering pipeline to enable us to do a lot of things that we need to do so it’s not very easy. Nowadays we’ve diverged from CryEngine where we don’t take regular updates from them any more although we will cherry pick certain features that maybe we’re not working on that we think would help out well and VR is a good example of that.
So it’s really just a matter of getting some engineering time in the Frankfurt team. The Frankfurt team… [includes many of] the guys that originally did the VR work at Crytek so they know it pretty well but I would be expecting it to get up to speed with the most recent [VR] stuff sometime early next year.
TL;DR:
2016:
Frankfurt team will be up to speed on VR integration after we integrate new CryEngine updates into the base engine.
2018
We’ll put in VR after we integrate Vulkan and X12 refactors into the base engine.
I’ve transcribed Crobert’s mind during that interview:
Reading some Reddit comments from citizens reminded me of a pretty classic experience I had with this type of person.
I met this guy who told me he had been spending months designing a game. It was gonna be like Oblivion (this was before Skyrim had come out I think) but way more detailed, skill-based, other jargon (think “fidelity”), etc., i.e. the most Perfect Open World Sandbox Game Ever. He was super into the idea that every single action would be based on and/or influenced by your stats. So, for instance, a character with high Strength would probably open doors faster or something dumb like that.
He finally showed me the stuff he had actually written, and…. it was just pages and pages of lists of actions and the stats you’d need in order to do them. Like, your character can do a Cartwheel! It’ll require 10 Strength and 12 Dexterity! There was nothing about what a cartwheel would do, why you’d want to do it, or anything like that. Nothing about what your goals in the game would be. Just hundreds of random actions and some made up numbers next to them. In his mind, this was the real meat of designing an epic game. It just needed some graphics and stuff slapped on.
Like with shitizens, I couldn’t deny he had clearly enjoyed his time “designing” that game. I’m just glad he wasn’t paying anyone to enable his fantasy.
Voice in headset - “No no no we’re not making ships purchasable with credit in 3.0 guys!”)
No RSI booth or presentation at Gamescom this year
