November 2019 Set 2
You don’t license an engine when you build an MMO. You especially do not license an engine when building an MMO that is supposed to be the world’s first AAAA game and will do things MMOs have never managed to achieve.
They have to build their own engine. Period. There’s no other way around it. Buying an engine is a waste of money because you’re going to throw it all out and start over anyways.
Step one of SC should be building a proof-of-concept engine and demonstrating to investors that the tech is plausible and a vertical slice can be playable and fun. They skipped that by marketing direct to consumers, who don’t know how to do due diligence.
Everything about the project after that is lies.
They have Crytek and they have some ship models that render nice in Crytek. They have fucking literally nothing else. They have made zero progress towards the SC MMO they have promised.
Say what you will about Musk, at least a couple of his spaceships progressed beyond the jpg stage.
The first 5 years saw Chris, Sandi and Co. being fearlessly unhinged in all they said and did. Every week saw some new stupidity uttered on 10ftC, or ATV, or RTV. It Chris saying one week only Rockstar could compete with them, Sandi dropping donuts on the desks of obese subordinates on low-carb diets, dudes shooting ATVs stoned with weed right out on the desk, and the unending stream of release date and feature claims (for Star Marine, Squadron, Alpha 3.0, etc.)
Despite the trainwreck that was all of 2017, Chris still kept a pretty steady pace of brags and self-owns right up through the middle of 2018’s “I absolve myself.” Then after being on better behavior a short stretch, he chose to paywall CitizenCon and created an absolute firestorm of general gaming works disgust and backer fury. It wasn’t the first time he’d done either, but it seems it was the first time he actually decided to course correct.
That debacle set the stage for what has become a very glaring public retreat. Sandi bounced by year end, Chris switched to quarterly appearances (with cautious language and no dates), they handed the officiating duties to Lando on his newly dimlit sets, and they’ve pretty much officialized their retreat.
The Roadmaps are served up and make obvious their incapability. Backers see it at unprecedented transparency, but the story they tell is that they’re transparently dysfunctional as a studio. Even when making attempts at modest projections, they fall short of them quarter after quarter, release after release.
In doing all this they have made official what we said of them for years. The heresy is now canon, and even Chris himself seems to believe what he forcefully denied only a few years back. And the net result of this full throttle retreat has been a lot less funny to watch and chronicle.
Having said that, it’s an intriguing change all the same and begs a lot of questions. What, really, has humbled Chris when catastrophe after catastrophe in the past forced no self-reflection or course correction? We can only speculate, yet I’m of the belief that some of it was externally forced upon him. Even if there’s money enough to last them a couple more years, and maybe in a couple years they’ll find even more, he’s acting like a guy under the gun and on borrowed time. He’s acting like a guy afraid to make embarrassing mistakes. He went from carefree and chest-pounding a few years back to cautious and camera shy now.
It’s both boring and fascinating. Boring because the mistakes are less frequent and absurd, intriguing because he’s finally acting like a man genuinely worried about something.
If and when that something arrives, the pace will pickup, although it might be less funny than we might hope. Sooner or later, what for so long looked like the longest running comedy in gaming history might finally become the tragedy its always truly was. The alternative is that Chris delivers twin masterpieces with Squadron and Star Citizen, saves PC gaming, redefines the space sim and movie game, and CIG joins the company of Rockstar and CDPR as “greatest studios of a generation.”
(And that would be pretty hilarious, really.)
I was trying to get some formation flying done with my brother when he crashed. Since he stayed on the server, I took some pretend picts of a formation. Just pretend the engines are on.
So today marks a kind of interesting departure in their ship sales. Specifically, the “Argo Mole,” this new mining ship that they’ve launched after bumping all the other ships from the release schedule for this quarter.
Short version:
Four years ago, they sold this. The Orion, a multicrew mining ship with a whole bunch of hand-waving and dreams.txt about having a crew of 6 or whatever people scan, detonate, and harvest whole asteroids to scoop the good bits out of them. It never materialized, of course, but people still paid 600 or whatever dollars for this ship.
Today, they are selling this. The Mole… a multicrew mining ship for 4 people. Same exact purpose, same crew capacity, but now they actually know how mining works in their game (you shoot a laser at a rock, go figure) and so they can design “Multicrew” gameplay around it. It turns out that the multicrew gameplay is just a bunch of suckers on turrets and one guy driving, but that’s pretty advanced for CIG.
So- this is the first time I can recall that one of their dream ships has basically been completely overwritten by reality. Naturally they haven’t acknowledged this in any way, and the remaining fans don’t really seem… conscious enough to notice. No doubt someone will bring it up at some point and a CIG lackey will say something like “Oh no the Orion is for a totally different type of mining,” but the case remains- they are gradually going to replace shit they actually sold with shit that can be practically implemented, while still lying to the backers about whether or not they’re even working on the thing they charged six hundred dollars for.
Somewhere buried in all of this greed, hubris and incompetence, is a doable concept of basically a bigger budget Elite Dangerous with deeper/more varied gameplay, a lot more handcrafted content, better graphics, larger scale player interactions and maybe some light FPS stuff. But they would have needed a custom engine and a clear vision/leadership from the start, and with the Crobbler that was never possible.
The move to LA pretty much declared Chris and Sandi’s real intentions of using their crowdfunded windfall to buy their way into Hollywood, and killed any chance of getting a decent game.
Trip Report: Expo Hall Day 4
[…]
I see a real person! I know he’s real because he moves impossibly. Like a film with every other frame cut out, this man tears around the hall at breakneck speed, changing direction with all the suddenness of a UFO in some grainy home movie. I follow him, for I know not what else to do. He has a backpack from Death Stranding. I wonder if I should buy a Playstation. In any case, we both climb into the back of a MISC Freelancer that is on display here. It takes me several tries to awkwardly jump up the back ramp - my compatriot made it look so smooth and easy but I can’t seem to make it work. Clearly he has done this before. We fiddle with things. He climbs into a bed and I power up the spaceship, wondering if it’s possible that someone screwed up and let an ounce of fun into this game. Could it be? Will they let me take off? No, unfortunately there is nothing for me to do but fiddle with buttons. I get up and wander off. My friend is standing in the open side hatch, staring out at the convention hall. I stand behind him. He tries to back up, but I am blocking his way. He turns around and for a long tense moment we stand face to face. I notice he is wearing the funny Halloween helmet that made everyone so mad. Somewhere in the back of my ruptured mind I realize that this means he is a subscriber, one of the lucky few to part with ten or twenty dollars a month so that Jared can have a job. He is getting angry now, but I refuse to move. I fear we are going to come to blows, but then, humbled, he squats down and exits using the ladder. I am proud to have defended my section of the beach, but the ship itself reminds me that it alone is King. It mashes me in the door as it closes, shoving me back inside. For a moment, I hoped it would kill me.
[…]
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Quick ‘un…
[timg]https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DeliriousScaredIndiancow-max-14mb.gif[/timg]
I mean, when you promise single player questlines that tie into an mmo that features 10,000 real time player battles, with various trades from medic to merchant to mercenary all being equally important, with hundreds of systems to “organically” explore and the selling of secret trade information to navigate the ‘verses secrets, with you being able to build your own colony or fleet to control sectors of space, with the ability to turn the real time combat mmo into a real time strategy game with large scale first person combat battles happening while capital ships bombard planets while smaller ships fight off bombers and landing crews, all the while you are talking to people using an RSI branded camera over FOIP while using the RSI joystick, as you are welcomed aboard your capital ship by a bevy of realistic npcs all with their own backstories and needs and are mixed seamlessly with your real crew of players who can communicate across a 50 person ship without issue or spamming “MY ASS NEEDS CHRIS ROBERTS” because as you know everyone loves to roleplay a stoic crewman standing idly by their station for hours on end doing absolutely nothing but saying “aye cap’n” because god knows the news ship outside might broadcast a negative thing and then your reputation in the ‘verse will be severely impacted, meanwhile the vanduul fleets are slowly amassing and maybe the other aliens, the banu and whatever the fuck the others are, have meaningful languages so OF COURSE they are super important and you will obviously be able to interact with them in meaningful ways, but you have to be careful you don’t upset the delicate balance in the ‘verse because that will have serious impact for your character, including personalized quests and factions, not to mention the guild system that isn’t even in the fucking game right now, you can’t even chat with your fucking guildmates, sure, yeah, all that sounds fucking incredible, by which I mean not fucking happening because its just a “HOLY SHIT WOULDN’T A GAME WITH EVERY POSSIBLE CONCEIVABLE FUCKING MECHANIC BE AMAZING, HOLY SHIT FRED WE SHOULD DESIGN A GAME THAT JUST DOES EVERYTHING, EVERY IDEA FRED” that every single fucking teenager has every dreamed up and it doesn’t ever fucking work because a game of that scale would take at least several hundred million dollars if not a billion and a team so passionate and insane that would be their goddamn lifes work and it would be unending and tiresome and probably for a fucking demographic of insane space nerds who would never, ever give you enough money to ever make such a thing fucking feasible
but yeah man, sure, I love the “idea” of star citizen
if I was a fucking moron
People look back with fondness when they think back on the hobbies they used to enjoy. Nobody looks back with fondness on the times they got scammed. They are going to look back with shame at all the warning signs they blew right past. All the circle jerks about exploring a living, breathing universe will be seen like people already planning how they’re going to spend their Nigerian prince millions. They’ll have to face the people that were warning them for years and have to face the repercussions from being arrogant little shits to everyone voicing criticism. All their heroes in the story of Star Citizen will become the villains and all the trust and adoration of Chris will turn to hate and scorn. You can’t gather with your friends and reminisce about the good old days of Star Citizen, you’ll have to move on to the other games you were shitting all over and they won’t be as good as you used to imagine Star Citizen could have been. Your real life friends that you tried to sucker into buying in will remind you at random intervals about the time you got sucked into a space MLM and almost got them involved.
CIG will get 2 seats on the board, rising up the total number of directors to 4. Getting 50% of the seats on the board with buying 25% of the shares, not bad.
Can’t wait to see the names of the new directors that are gonna pop up on the Canadian commerce registries.
Why I don’t care what CIG does with my money
Since 2012, CIG has contracted other developers, built multiple studios in the US, UK, and Germany, and increased the size of the development team to around 500 people. They didn’t get all of this from day one. They didn’t even get all of this year one. Unlike most high budget published game developers, they have had money trickle in week by week, month by month, for the past seven years.
Ah yes, a mere trickle of an average of $2.9 million a month. How could anyone develop anything on such a meagre budget!?
I just don’t get why they’d need to get closer to Turbulent when they have a ten person marketing genius team already in the form of Sandi?
The post where I summarize the show that summarizes the presentations that summarized the last year of work by CIG!
In this week’s episode:
Jared mugs at the camera, skip skip skip
Oh okay they’re just replaying the space colonoscopy video from the convention, but they have devs talking over it so it takes five times longer
This is almost a game mechanic in that it is a link between one solar system and another, except the other solar system isn’t ready to show
They took a 2 minute loading screen for a zone that doesn’t exist yet and made an 11 minute video about how they built it
That’s all for this week, Jared says some more bullshit