So that reclaimer ship is playable, for some people I guess. Walkthrough/verbal fellation video here. Kind of looks like they’ve hacked it into the arena commander map instead of loading it in the main game. Commentary below:
0:44- So about half of the ship is the landing gear. Deploying it immediately breaks the particle effects on the engines.
1:27- Oh they’ve started adding “Auto-turrets” since it became apparent that nobody will ever crew turrets on their ships. I wonder if they’ve actually got the turrets working? My money is on no.
4:00- Massive salvage arm! Doesn’t work. But it’s gonna be really cool!
5:00- Tractor beam operator seats! Don’t work.
6:00- Scanning station! Remote Turrets! Don’t do anything. . An engineering station! Doesn’t do anything. But look at all those particle effects in the grinder!
–I’m beginning to detect a theme here. –
7:15- Escape pods, that don’t work
8:35- Drooling over detailed wires in the elevator shaft. I honestly do not understand how any of these sperglords can give a shit about the fidelitous loose wires when nothing on the ship works. He shows off the turret access ladder- “Unfortunately I can’t go in it right now”
9:30- Gravity generator, I guess this makes the goo.
9:50- “This is the drone room. Now they don’t have the drones in here yet…” OH YOU DON’T SAY. Look, an operator seat for a thing that isn’t in the game! Thrilling.
Anyway this goes on for 30 minutes but I’m bored now. Fuck you, Star Citizen.
I also love how they justify all that fog and shit in the air with the justification of “it’s like Aliens!”. Explicitly stating something exists because it looks like something out is not a justification, it’s a declaration that you are creatively bankrupt.
Also I’m the grinder/crusher/melter/sparker thingy that grinds/crushes/melts/sparks while nothing is in it.
Sarsapariller
I can’t understand how anyone is satisfied with these releases. Six years in, and they’re still kicking unfinished assets out the door. Look at all of their big ships, some of which have been out for years now- Caterpillar, Starfarer, Redeemer- and not one of them, not one of them, has any of its unique mechanics implemented. There’s no indication that they’ve made progress on them at all. They’re not even trying! But somehow you still get guys wandering the empty nonfunctional halls, dreaming about how cool it will be to operate a junkyard crane in space.
Beet Wagon
I don’t think the people who are being honest with themselves are satisfied. But you also have to remember these guys have been so content-starved for so long that even the tiniest morsel is enough for them to latch on to. Besides, it obviously doesn’t offer any benefit to voice your dissatisfaction.
lol just met a guy who worked on SC and literally quit because his conscience wouldn’t allow him to continue to take a paycheck from marks
— Jared Huckaby, Prefers to Like Things (@discolando) March 24, 2018
I love literally everything about this poster
The number of colours that the text has..
The glorious use of word art distortions and angles and all kinds of things to give it more pep.
The excitingly stretched Star Citizen watermark.
The mysterious light box that covers only the bottom half of the poster and bisects the times while tastefully leaving only a sliver of the sponsor logo exposed.
The military-style 24 hour times.
The fact that this is inaugural.
Derek Smart
G0RF
Chris has never really known what he wanted the Star Citizen experience to fully be besides BETTER THAN EVERY GAME EVER and he’s lurched from one incoherence to the next “selling the narrative” (and illusion of coherence) through highlight reels the whole time. He focused on selling compelling moments that are unburdened by constraint and disconnected from a design vision for the comprehensive play experience.
Pat Roper was obsessed with Activision how was inspired by their success and their ability to out to Atari at their own game and he felt that he could outdo Activision after all how hard could it be
Activision had 26 million in sales its first year so Apollo would have 27
Activision had a campus with 7 buildings each 7 stories so Apollo would have 8 buildings of 8 stories
you can find tons of more examples in other news pieces CR has done.
More lethal fps than call of duty.
better than elite dangerous.
etc..
Cr is always looking at competition thinking that he can do that better and bigger.
Scruffpuff
The Swiss have this wonderful convention for numbers separators: 1’234’567.89. As for whether it is a preference or not to use , or . - it is not a preference, but the actual standard for number formatting. It is also annoying as a programmer to handle the different standards - the Indian one is odd (separation is not by thousands but another system), and then there’s the Swiss one I mentioned at first. If you’re making financial software you better not interpret , and . the wrong way, as the consequences can be pretty severe.
You’ve giving CIG ideas how to get out of refunds now.
“Oh, we refunded your account.”
“Yes I see a credit for $1.60, but I gave you guys $1,600…”
“REFUND SUCCSSFL”
An alpha is supposed to be feature complete. Period. And what I mean by “feature complete” is “core gameplay systems are all present.” Not a few. Not most. ALL. Now, maybe you only have a couple levels done. Maybe your boss fight mechanics are overly simplistic. Maybe your art assets are placeholder. Maybe you need to hire some hotshot to write genius-level shaders to bump the graphical fidelity, or pull in top-level artists to build production-ready models. But the purpose of an alpha is to experience the philosophy of your game and answer one question: “Is this fun or not?” Is this gonna work? Will this foundation support the weight required for a memorable experience?
If Chris Roberts truly was the visionary he says he is, Star Citizen would be fun already. It would be obvious.
But Alpha isn’t a terminal state in development, and that’s why the term is confusing. If the answer to “is it fun?” is demonstrably “no” or even “not quite,” you need to figure out why and iterate. That might mean tweaking existing systems, scrapping some, adding others, or (most likely) some combination of those. But when you say “We hit alpha!” you are saying “This is the game! It will be longer than this, but if the game is to be good and fun, you will feel it, now.”
This is where your code, your process, and your culture dictates your game’s success or failure. If you have talented managers and engineers, they will have already designed the game in a way that’s iterable. Changing code is destructive. Re-doing models is destructive. These activities all have a time-cost. If your code is a messy, incomprehensible, tangled, panic-ridden, crunch-driven, tightly-coupled acid trip, where “everything’s like, connected man!” and touching one tiny part breaks the whole machine, you will fail. Straight up, you’re done. What you got is what you got. This is the point at which publishers pull the plug on failing projects. Your first shot at it was way off, and it’s clear that starting over would be faster than fixing this mess. And I’m telling you right now, Star Citizen is a perfect diamond bullet of engineering failure in that regard. You’re seeing it play out in real time. That fact was evident to anyone with experience in this industry as early as 2015.
When I heard Illfonic on ATV, visibly and audibly dejected, week after painful week making no progress after months-long merge-hell, I knew that Star Citizen was a complete failure, because how did they get there? I knew CIG would go dark on Star Marine, because how could they possibly be honest about their complete project management incompetence and uphold “the vision” that fueled their very existence? And whaddya know, CIG went dark.
I’m saying this as a means of strengthening your thesis that CIG is doing things backwards. It’s very evident to me that CIG still has absolutely no idea what the game called “Star Citizen” is supposed to be.
The tragedy for me, and what makes this so hard to stomach, is that CIG is literally exploiting every heartless technique in the book to trick people into giving them more money, just so they can continue to fail at everything they attempt.
Edit: I think most of the confusion around the term “alpha” comes from this era of “early access.” If you’re playing an “early access” build of a game, you are playing a pre-alpha build, by definition. It’s just that “pre-alpha” has a slightly negative connotation that roughly approaches “early” which, in turn, implies “we’re not quite sure just what the hell we’re doing yet.” This is not a scary word for developers, because they spend almost the entirety of their professional lives in this state. But it’s scary to paying customers. I love early access, because to me, it’s fun to participate in the process. When I worked in this industry, I was a part of both successful and horrible games, and from that vantage it’s endlessly fascinating to watch the humanity (of both developer and consumer) behind the immensely complex process of building a technological work of art. When it comes to Star Citizen, the entire endeavor: manager, engineer, HR rep, executive, backer, fan, media representative… ALL of them, almost without exception, are worthy of ridicule and scorn. This is, beyond any doubt, the worst game development project I’ve ever seen.
