Sterling has been told for years he should cover the project and has so long ignored it, though he was a natural guy for the job. But I expect he’s getting pinged a lot more now and will see the traction Bootcha’s increasingly getting, he will be dizzied and intimidated by the material already being collated into critique, will let out a big whiny sigh and be finally prompted to summon his schtick and shine his spotlight on the project in the not too distant future. I don’t think it will come out of eagerness for the job but more out of competitive defensiveness, a protection of his mindshare and brand. It just seems inevitable.
Bootcha’s latest video seems to be on a faster viewcount growth clip and will become his most popular entry I assume very soon. And that’s all via the grassroots — it hasn’t been plugged in to higher traffic feeds, yet it’s uniquely suited to. The inspired Tetris segment is pure goon showstopper — both hilarious yet unbelievably true. The Macrotransaction stuff feeds too neatly into “the big conversation” the industry and gaming press have been unhappily consumed with in the wake of Battlefront 2’s woes. And the sheer absurdity of Chris Roberts model of “the spaceship jpeg” as primary source of income for the biggest consumer funded gaming project in history makes loot boxes for shipped games look puritanical by comparison.
The AAA Dev and Publisher industry itself, much derided as greedy, will find much to laugh at in it and I’d not be surprised if the video finds special traction there. Very easy to picture that happening in email forwards, group texts, slack messages with the incredulous consolations of “Well at least we’re not doing that!”
Maybe I’m wrong about both and Sterling will stay quiet and the video top out soon but I dunno. It feels different this time.
Yeah there’s been some real displeasure in the Citizenry. So many refuse to even watch it or finish it but I guess that’s not too surprising. I was surprised that it didn’t get purged from the subreddit — it sure won’t be tolerated on Spectrum. Then again, moderator Dolvak is talking a lot more about CIG and accountability these days. I’d not at all be surprised if he laughed long and hard at the video and would resist demands it be removed.
The industry microtransaction backlash was so massive and still generates so much animated discussion. The shellshock is palpable. Yet as we’ve long known there is more and worse in Chris Roberts business model. It seems overdue for a big re-evaluation in light of the new reality.
Maybe it’s just a blip and the status quo just keeps on rocking. But I dunno, it’s getting harder to see how that happens in this current climate.
Derek Smart
(
*BREAKING*
Several at F42-UK (Star Citizen) left|on way out. Studios (e.g. Everywhere Games who use Lumberyard) aggressively recruiting - and have several agencies helping them staff 100+ positions.
CIG/RSI freaking out and offering a lot of incentives for people to stay.
tweet: Everywhere Games, who use Lumberyard are aggressively recruiting - CIG/RSI freaking out and offering a lot of incentives for people to stay.)
When Star Citizen has all the nails stamped into it’s coffin, it won’t have an effect on the broader gaming industry, it’s a multibillion dollar industry. So many huge ass companies have gone under it doesn’t register in this world, Nintendo could decide to move away from video games tomorrow and nothing will change.
Having said that, this game, Shroud of the Avatar and even the System Shock remake(plus a few others) are making gamers cautious of what to offer a few dollars to fund, cause lets face it, when you have a set of industry veterans basically lying their fucking asses off at the state of a project and milking the faithful into spending more money into a sinkhole, now you have to put blind faith into something you kinda seem interested in playing and hoping those people don’t spend it on hookers.
Hmmm I'm all for charging for cosmetic stuff as a means for revenue. Skins? Sure. ship exterior bits? Cool. Bobble heads? Ok. After all, someone has spent time designing them.
But £4 for what is basically dots of light.....well that could be considered as "nickel and diming" https://t.co/jN1jDd5w05
I’m worried about wall clipping in the final build / Squadron 42
I know many of you are worried about the FPS of the game itself, whatever the fuck that is, but let me assure you that we’ve got this ironed out. First we’re going to motion capture the IT guy laying cable, then we’re going to motion capture some people using the internet. We’re going to run these things together until the motion capture resolves the issues for us.
We’re pretty confident this is going to work, but the only way to realize that goal is to stay on top of the motion capture market pretty much to the brink of insanity and maybe a lot further. The only thing that’s going to really make this video movie happen is the motion capture, and the animation, and the intricate graphics.
This is our middle finger to all the lame, scared developers who are stuck in the box of “wah wah I need my low polygon assets to function because of my high network traffic load” and “wah wah I want my models to have proper lod and utilize normal mapping technology” and “wah wah I want my AI to be almost as smart as a real human but not quite because I’m too scared to actually do it” and of course my favorite “wah wah lets just use basic graphics and figure out how the game will play before we start in on making expensive models and animation.”
Well let me just tell you that your weak minded ways aren’t going to pull movies into the next generation of video computer technology. Your 1980’s think is gone, and this is the new fucking generation where Voodoo cards are here to fucking stay and I know you got run over at the pass there with your weak knowledge and fearful methods of not just doing it (lookin at you Rockstar you “almost as good as us” developers)!
So I’m happy to say that we’re going to motion capture bar and raise it as much as Roy can raise his arms because also fuck your IK bullshit in this real world. If a real person can’t do it it’s not Star Citizen. If it can’t be motion captured it’s not Star Citizen. If it is a game with depth and functionality it’s not Star Citizen. So get your heads out of your collective behinds and get ready for the motion capture event of this next upcoming decade because let me tell you how much stock CryEngine is going to be awesome in another 7 years when we can release a non playable (are you stupid? If it’s playable it’s not Star Citizen) demo your socks will be blown the fuck off.
We are motion capturing trees and water, and also blood splatters. Have you ever motion captured blood before? I think not because you don’t know how to develop games. So stand out of the way big companies and hold my fucking ping pong ball laced beer because we’re about to kill it.
So here’s our latest Jira roadmap:
2 weeks: Remotion capture internet traffic
1 month: Motion capture humans for their AI
1 month: Rework skeleton for motion capture 3.0
1.2 months: Motion capture all the missions of Sq42
2 months: Chump run
2.5 months: Motion capture motion capture because this is how you build a system smart enough to build itself with procedural motion capturing
3 months: Motion capture 3.1
3.5 months: Release all the video game movies and cash in
So there you have it. This is our roadmap and as you can see we’re releasing everything in less than six months. In fact by month 6 we’re releasing the first DLC pack that will connect your computer to your webcam so you can motion capture yourself watching YouTube videos of us watching our videos of our game in action. How awesome will that be?
Well you’ll know soon, friend. Because we’re doing it all here. We have the talent and the dubious and questionably legal shell motion capture studios around the world to pull it off.
So put on your ping pong balls and get ready to have your real balls blown away because this train can’t be stopped, it can only be… captured!
peter gabriel
G0RF
Anybody who can make it through the bootcha’s video and not have any idea what is being said or why what’s being said might be alarming should definitely load up on some more spaceships. I recommend the Endeavor with the Science/Research/Telescopic modules, then they should proceed in an epic hunt throughout Chris Roberts First Person Universe for a clue.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with you and have documented the matter pretty extensively. Chris Roberts generalized claims about his ambitious intentions are not a license to constantly offer dishonest guidance about his games, and yet he has.
I could cite dozens from memory. The Alpha 3.0 infographic provided about does a decent enough job of summarizing the manner in which that particular deliverable was misleadingly oversold at Gamescom 2016. What was claimed to include the whole of Stanton by December 2016 ended up 25% of Stanton a year later. It lacked many promised professions, did not include the “30 to 40 space stations”, and was missing 3 planets and 9 moons.
There are a few things here worth pointing out. The biggest is the claim that Squadron 42 - Pt. 1 would release by end of 2015.
Chris Roberts hadn’t even shot his motion capture yet. Then as now, they still don’t have robust combat AI nor any combat AI for ground-based FPS. The flight model is still under serious revision.
Yet he made that claim up on the stage at Pax East 3 years ago and looked right in the camera and repeated it again on 10 for the Chairman the following month, further adding:
”each (Squadron Episode) is the equivalent of a huge triple A “Call of Duty” or better because we have a much bigger campaign.”
Rather bold talk and aggressive timelines, and of course we see now that he was either intentionally misleading or completely delusional. Was there any apology when Q4 2015 came and went without a release? No, instead, there was a cinematic trailer boldly claiming 2016 would be the year of Squadron 42. This too shall pass and did. We were then told to expect to see a vertical slice of a game that was supposed to be done in 2014 & 2015 & 2016 at CitizenCon 2016. Do you recall what happened to that vertical slice?
In case you don’t, CIG can refresh our memories. They pulled the slice altogether, and we got an apology documentary a couple of weeks later that explained they couldn’t get a stable slice together despite two months of work on it.
January of 2017 saw the illusion of good news as Chris Roberts gave interviews suggestive that Squadron 42 was nearing completion for release in 2017. But alas, for the fourth year in a row, his guidance was wrong.
At the end of 2017, we finally at least saw that vertical slice we were supposed to see the year prior. It openly states that the game is in Pre-Alpha.
It was beautiful, had some nice cinematic exchanges, along with protracted five minute stretches where nothing happened. Given the incomplete state of AI in year 6, its probably not surprising that it’s hard to keep the pace up in the pre-alpha in between the movie like dialogue scenes. It’s a very safe bet that Squadron isn’t coming out this year either and indeed, not even Chris Roberts is claiming otherwise. After four years of being wrong, who can believe him?
As an aside, we also now have a frame of reference for what a “Call of Duty equivalent” campaign might look like because Infinite Warfare delivered what CIG Community Manager Ben Lesnick praisingly described as “like a modern day Wing Commander” experience a month after CIG failed to show their vertical slice.
There’s a tendency to make sneering dismissals of Call of Duty, yet as you know if you’ve followed the community discussions about that title, reactions were far more complex. Despite the anti-futuretech backlash that Infinite Warfare met with from day 1, the actual missions and campaign dropped jaws at Sony’s E3 reveal. Critics praised its World War 2 story in space straightforwardness, and the surprisingly moving and downbeat story conclusion.
I would hope after this in-depth history lesson you might better understand why it is I used the term “pathologically inaccurate” to describe their marketing. I recognize that many backers are happy to excuse this, happy to excuse the same handling of Alpha 3.0, happy to do the same for Star Marine, too.
Yet a high tolerance for inaccurate guidance shouldn’t be confused with the moral acceptability of it. There has never once been an apology for any of the aforementioned examples, yet if I were to treat another human being the way Chris has treated his backers I’d rightly be considered an unreliable flake unworthy of trust. It is unlikely you’d tolerate similar treatment from other products or services companies out there.
The contentiousness of Star Citizen debates is very much tied up in the collision of worldviews over the acceptability of such practices. Yet outside of the small bubbles where these debates rage, there are generally agreed upon notions about these matters. Most people looking at a project with a Troubled Development history and years of mismanaged expectations would not like race to the defense of the man primarily responsible for both. Particularly after learning he’s been given the largest independent game Development budget in history — $180 million. After six years and that much money, expectations should be raised not lowered in commensurate degree.
As the old parable goes, “to whom much is given, much is expected” and it seems to me, independent of whatever qualitative expectations might be merited, the right to expect honest guidance goes without saying.
So Crytek suing CIG for breach of contract is a ‘cash grab’, but CIG selling land sticks and tanks is perfectly ok because 5⁄11 tasks on a basic networking feature after 9 months is ‘progress’
Holy shit, 2014 onward got busy busy busyyy. I’m willing to accept the fact that back in 2012⁄2013 CIG and CRobblers may have genuinely had good intentions, but from mid 2014 onward looking at that…they just morphed into the black hole sucking up money and spewing out hype.
These vids are giving me some much needed closure. So brave onwards…
It basically is a Ponzi though. At some point, probably 3+ years and 80 million plus dollars ago, Crobberts realized that he needed A LOT more money just to deliver the absolute basics of all the shit he had already sold. Having to continue taking in more money to deliver to the previous “investors” is basically the definition of a Ponzi.
He didn’t set out to do this from the start but he absolutely realized it at some point during development. The honest thing to do would have been to explain the situation and throw yourself on the mercy of the backers (wallets) and hope they’d continue to fund you. And they would have. Maybe they woulda lost some income but there’s plenty of true believers and those wallowing in the depths of sunk cost fallacy.
But they didn’t do that, they doubled down on sleazy marketing 101 tactics and continued on business as usual.
I think it’s pointless to call it a scam because then you devolve into meaningless discussions of what exactly a scam is, but I also don’t think calling it a scam is incorrect.
I actually found out a buddy of mine briefly worked on this game. What’s sad is it really does have artists and coders working on stuff just they’ll never be able to live up to whatever croberts latest crazy promise is, and constantly have to start over again.
I didn’t pay much money for my ticket on this luxury cruise liner, and I’m not sure why some guy is pointing out that the captain keeps steering us back into that group of icebergs we passed earlier, but I’m sure there isn’t anything to be concerned about. I have a degree in sailboats after all, and I can’t see the port we left from so we’re making progress!
I only play the best game, Star Citizen
2018 is the best season yet.
Anybody who tries to defend SC by arguing it’s in ‘early development’ has no idea what early development is even supposed to look like. If SC was in ‘early development’ I’d expect things like untextured hallways and generic ship-boxes of various sizes. But I’d also expect there to be more development on the gameplay side of things - the FPS stuff would be further along, the ship abilities and differentiation would be in place, if only mechanically, a variety of mission types would probably exist, and there would be at least one example of each major gameplay loop in place to test its viability.
You don’t typically see massive poly models in a early development because of all the ways that can fuck with you. The fact that anybody thinks that’s a normal way to develop a game is ridiculous. SC has, at every step of the way, tried to convince people it looks like a completed game and that new features are being added. That’s not how development works.
The PU should be grey boxes in space pushing their promises to their limits for like a decade before you hire swathes of artists to contribute to your pyramid scheme. This is why SC looks, waddles and quacks like a scam or something effectively similar to anyone who has seen what it takes to ship polished technical products in modern content pipelines. which we now know thanks to SC, is a position it’s really easy to trick yourself into feeling like an expert about.
I think a lot of people grew up wishing game development is as easy as being an ideas guy who can simply throw money around and roll up your sleeves. So they project themselves and that belief into Chris. He makes it looks and feel so easy—and the results! All these polygons! Those dummies are fooling themselves for not literally SEEING all this progress.
The truth is there are real limits to what is possible both in consumer grade hardware and what kind of work your teams need to structure and in what order. Many a talented developers code themselves into corners by not having the project management discipline to not focus on the super fun flashy content. And it’s easy to!! Getting models in game and animated feels incredibly rewarding even when it’s just T poses. But you gotta solve the hard problems as early as possible, the ones your promises to backers depend on. Complex models, mocap and shaders have been solved problems for a long, long time. A huge persistent high fidelity multiplayer PU with “mesh networks” and “subsistence” and “no instancing” and “permadeath” and “insurance” and “prisoners” and “ai crew”—and tons more—are so, SO outside of the realm of Chris’s own expertise, but also what anyone ever has pulled off technically and actually had be capital F Fun, that it’s no wonder a community of train wreck witnesses like ourselves has formed.
SC has, at every step of the way, tried to convince people it looks like a completed game and that new features are being added. That’s not how development works.
This still blows my mind. How many years of development and they’ve been pimping polished, complete assets since day one?
You build gameplay first, then fill it with shinies. But I guess graybox doesn’t help sell JPEGs
Agreed
Like, why did they not make their flight model and capital ship combat four years ago …… why do you need a 700,000,000* ploy Idris model to do that?
Why would you want a 700,000,000* ploy model to do that with when you could have simple white low ploy white box models to sort that out with?
Chris Roberts is a scummy cunt who is NOT a gamer and only cares about himself.
Chris Roberts deserves what is coming to him. (totally bankruptcy for him and his family and hopefully jail time for him.)
*number out of my ass, I’m sure its way more but you know what I mean.
This is EXACTLY how it’s done in many of the studios that are continually successful. I personally refer to this style of prototyping and development as the “Nintendo Method”. That was the first time I had ever seen things done this way (and that was decades ago when a family member worked there) experiencing Miyamoto, Ken Lobb, and couple others in Nintendo during **Super Mario 64: built somewhere in the mid 90’s. It was just boxes, and there was a bunch of designers driving them around on flat surfaces, trying to tune the jump/air hang timing so it felt satisfying, and how bounce backs work when colliding with others. Jump/hang/bounce are absolute foundational pillars when making a new one.
Anyways, this method of finding your gameplay loops (metas, micros, etc.)and continually evaluating, tweaking, and adjusting them is (in my opinion) the way to do it. No one should be making any semblance of final content at this time. The art team should be extremely small (maybe an AD and a couple concept guys) and they’re just working on style guides and visual targets, while engineering and design are continually scrumming over loops, setting engine budgets for everything (with art etc) and developing the GDD so you don’t end of up with the perfect example of how to do it completely wrong on all fronts: Star Citizen**
It just mind-boggling how CIG approaches this, with finished game assets (that will have to be redone again and again, see item 2.0) but nearly no gameplay mechanics to speak of. How people cannot see how this evolved into a scam is beyond me. They have like, what, 50 devs, and like 350 artists?
**Yeah, sometimes we refer to this method of development as the “lightning strike”. It’s definitely the absolute worst way to do things and have any level of predictability for your game. Essentially you make a shit ton of hi-res art to wow the publishers and buy some time. Then, behind the scenes in the studio, designers are ripping their hair out, having nervous breakdowns, or quitting because they can’t find a way to shoe-horn design loops into finished art - and are being blamed for everything. And meanwhile art is screaming about not wanting to redo all their assets, so, design better figure this shit out with what they have.
All the while, the product director or EP is yelling at design that they better hurry up and figure this shit out, because they are now blocking the (too many too fast scaled) art team from moving forward on the schedule and the games phase gate dates are starting to slip, and the burn rate is hovering at 2-3+ million a month.No pressure lol
Why it’s called lightning strike is because on the rarest of occasions - the designers find something that suddenly feels really good and then the game is saved by that hail mary/lightning strike moment.**
Perfect lightning strikes are ridiculously rare, and hence when you see studios shut down all the time: They most often went this route, and never got the magical bolt they were hoping would show up. Or, they hit a lightning strike early, had massive success, and could never figure out how to repeat it. Rovio comes to mind, along with a handful of other places that are trying to make a followup to a single smash hit, but have yet to repeat their original strike.
