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Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he's done throughout his career - the only thing that's notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It's entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn't bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn't even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
Chris Roberts is still rich, and could probably retire right now without worrying about anything. He could tank the company, and he wouldn't care.
When has any really rich person ever gone "you know what? I actually have enough now..."?
Wozniak is probably the most famous example. He recognized the corrupting nature of money, decided he had enough, and stopped to live in comfort and occasionally work towards causes he finds important
Lots of people have done the same... But if they're rich and still chasing after money? They'll never stop
And then, compare it to No Man's Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.
I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man's Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.
Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.
NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn't call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems
All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won't be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.
Edit: clarity and conciseness: added "originally" to the end of the last sentence.
Yeah, Star Citizen is the world's most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It'll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a "complete game" state.
I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.
Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.
Who'd'a thunk?
Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never "release" a finished game, you're not going to be blamed for "bugs" while still collecting money on in-game purchases.
There's a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It's been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.
Why would there be? Seems to work really well this way. Just keep milking the idiots of their money.
I've genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There's just no actual focus on getting the game done.
We have a saying here that translates to something like this: "perfect is the enemy of done". Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.
Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn't just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.
I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.
They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.
You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.
The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.
Damn. I had really hoped my grandchildren would get to play Star Citizen in their lives.
yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore
Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they're still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they're going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1
Next it’ll be 1000 star systems while we’re still waiting on Squadron 42.
Fun fact: If you take the year, add two, you'll get the current planned release date for sq42
This isn't dependent on the current year
Yeah no shit
Is anyone really surprised?
I do think they will at least release Squadron 42, but the main game is never coming out.
I never fell for this, and I'm laughing at you if you did.
They got my $40 in 2012. I absolutely loved the Wing Commander series; Wing Commander II was an embarrassingly important part of my adolescense, I love space sims, and still had fond enough memories of the name Chris Roberts that I didn't think he'd blatantly lie and steal from me.
How people are still giving these clowns money I have no idea.
One of my ex coworkers has spent somewhere in the ballpark of 12k. He sells, flips and trades rare ships to sell back to people after the exclusivity of the ship has expired. He's made like 4k. I don't understand gaming anymore.
That's not gaming anymore than people buying toys, leaving them in their boxes as an "investment" are into playing with toys.
Meanwhile the rest of us are buying games, playing them, enjoying them, moving on to other games and so on.
and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.
sorry I meant durrrr
Dull surprise.
Star Citizen sounds right up my alley in terms of game content and play, but I will never touch it due to the business model they've chosen.
If they finished it they’d have to find a new revenue stream.
Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.
Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
OK. Never played SC so honest question here; What is wrong if the game is technically not complete? I mean the way I thought is that this means that it keeps evolving and expanding so new content and features become available as the game development progresses. What am I missing? Is this a similar situation to the Eve Online BitterVets?
It was kickstarted a decade ago with release dates which they’ve never kept thanks to a constant modification of what a release looks like - namely splitting the MMO-like Star Citizen out from the single-player blockbuster Squadron 42 - as well as scope bloat. A lot of people originally kickstarted the game (mostly for what we now call Squadron 42 + some multiplayer thing) but now a decade on, the MMO-like Star Citizen is seemingly the priority project and most of the people who are currently funding the game are primarily interested in that.
After hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it seems clear that Squadron 42 in particular is in development hell as it still can’t seem to make it to market. Star Citizen, while playable, teeters back and forth from basically unplayable to playable and all “progress” is subject to wipes.
Instead of focussing on getting the core of the game finished and THEN expanding it they do it the other way around.
For example the mining loop now is broken again, people bought mining ships and vehicles with $$ and they are completely unusable. Not to mention all the bugs and instability. I hope they succeed but right now things are not pointing to something enjoyable within the foreseeable future at all.
They consistently make promises for things that will exist in the future, which then takes them years beyond their expected timeframe to achieve, or just never do them because some other past promise or promise they will make later makes an original promise either totally unworkable or wildly different.
So, so many missed deadlines, which uh, actually were just aspirational.
And... this is a game that sells you ships, gear, for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of real world dollars.
Some crazy promise will be made and oh, turns out that means we have to rework something like half the game's systems to support that, but also they're adding new content constantly that is always in some limbo state between following the old system's paradigms and attempting to follow the new system's paradigm.
What you end up with is a constant state of everything being a bit broken, and a lot of stuff being completely broken.
Its less like a released game getting DLCs and more like an alpha test that just never ends.
Which, again, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.