Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

Well, yeah. There’s fleecing to be done.

I mean do you think schemes like this just invent themselves?

Maybe we should torpedo this thread and start one called “The All Positive Star Citizen Opinions Thread” where we are only allowed to say nice things about the project and other people.

“Congratulations to CIG on passing the 350 million dollar, nine-years-in-development milestone!”

“Ship cockpits are incredibly detailed, and unlike other games, Star Citizen runs at a frame rate that lets me truly appreciate the work of the talented artists.”

“Derek Smart is a nice, highly-motivated man. I desperately hope I never do or say anything that could be construed as a slight against him because I believe that he does not hunt people for sport.”

“Star Citizen is the funniest game I have ever played, and it puts the Portal and Borderlands franchises to shame.”

Here I was thinking that anonymous sources meant that the story was false and/or lacked credibility. I believe the media would like to have a word with those people about that particular thought process.

Every single time I’ve cited anon sources, eventually the facts were revealed. In fact, recently, the whole “Squadron 42 is finished” debacle is now playing out. Back in 2016 when anon sources told me that it was false that it was almost finished, coming out in 2016 etc there are those who made the same claims that anon sources aren’t to be believed. CIG even issued press statements in an attempt to debunk that. Back then, sources had said the internal schedule stretched all the way to 2021.

It’s now 2020.

Back in Dec 2018 when they disclosed having raised $46m in investor funding for it, and that it was totally going into Beta in Q1/2020.

It’s almost end of Q2/2020 and it was since pushed back to “later in 2020”

It was anon sources who told everything I have written about in my blogs. Including the biggest one from 2015 shortly after my blog and The Escapist article: That they were in financial trouble. This fact was proven when they released their first public financial “brochure” in Dec 2018 which showed that they were in the Red since month one, were burning more than they were making etc. And then came the $46m investor bailout - which btw - sources told me about in Jan 2018 and which I wrote about. The deal closed in Summer 2018 and they didn’t disclose it until Dec 2018.

I could go on and on and on. But no, citing anon sources doesn’t mean anything. You choose what you want to believe and move on.

ps: The source who told me that CIG paid Crytek in the settlement, is a well-placed source. And eventually this too will be made public. Seeing as CIG has to disclose it at some point, I will be sure to write about it when it shows up in a filing.

Honestly, I always thought it was likely just vaporware until I started watching some of the videos that Derek posted. I know his intention was to point out bugs, but all I saw was this amazingly beautiful game where you fly through space and land on planets, with an insane amount of details (and some bugs). So it was actually Derek’s videos that made me think maybe it’s not vaporware, since they already have so much to show, even if it is buggy. It’s much, much more than just jpegs of ships.

But I’ve started to come around to your point of view now, recently, thanks in large part to this post:

That and Lantz’s posts above kind of point to the scope changes, and it makes me look at the bugs in the videos above in a new light. That it really is a hollow shell, and that it will never be finished.

Honestly though, just judging from what’s already there, what they really need is a good Producer who can limit their scope and buckle down and put out a product. They have a lot of great assets there, clearly, they just need to finish putting the actual game together.

The project is beyond saving. It’s not the sort of game that you can just toss in a new producer, limit the scope, and ship something. It’s too far gone and is irretrievably broken. It will remain so until the curtains come down. It’s why we as devs and publishers know when to pull the plug on a project that’s headed nowhere. Chris doesn’t have a publisher or investor to do that. Plus he has free money that allows him to do what he wants - with zero accountability. If he had a publisher or investor, this project would have folded in Q1/2016. Just like what their own financials show.

There’s no way to climb out of this much technical debt. It would probably be easier to start from 0 than to start from wherever they are now. This is like a case study in how stretch goals can harm development.

The best case scenario is that they buy Elite Dangerous and reskin it. Elite is reportedly adding an FPS mode in the next expansion. That would give them a playable base.

As I mentioned above the character faces and idle movements in that recently posted video with the great soundtrack and editing look really good. They’ve definitely developed a lot of stuff that’s pretty neat, they just seem incapable of focusing on an actual game rather than producing neat stuff.

It’s like the whole project is ADD. It reminds me of random hobby projects I do sometimes with no goal but just to learn some new technology. I build neat shit until I get bored. Half of it is incomplete since I got distracted by some other interesting facet of the technology.

I wonder if they’ll be able to package and sell of any of the working little bits they seem to have when the jig is finally up.

Along with the general fact that they are still running on a decade+ old small map FPS engine to try and make a space MMORPG with an endless army of recent college grads, the other thing is that along the way they have promised basically everything.

They have not promised a really good space game, they have promised Ready Player One’s Oasis.

There’s a reason that they don’t have Chris Roberts talk anymore, every time he did he "yes, and"ed every insane idea like a beginner improve class.

Yeah, the project management is just half of the doom. Trying to use a quarter inch wood chisel to carve Mt. Rushmore is certainly not leading them on a path to success. Either one alone would likely doom it.

Pray tell, what do they have that 1) hasn’t been done before 2) that experience devs couldn’t do - if they wanted it.

I’ll wait.

Speaking of free money, this just in

You are challenging me to demonstrate things I didn’t say over a statement where I say I wonder if something might happen? Okay, keep waiting then.

Well, unless I misunderstood you, the notion of “I wonder if…” implies that you were thinking out loud. So my response was in that same vein whereby I was asking you what “working little bits” you were wondering about and which led you to start wondering about that particular venture.

So I will just take your response to mean that you don’t believe that they do have any “working little bits” that they could possibly be able to “package and sell…when the jig is finally up”

I was going to write out some devil’s advocate nonsense about brainstorming how the game could be saved, but the more I thought about it, the less I believed in it. You’d need to change the scope completely (obviously), and you’d also need to redesign the whole thing from the ground up.

Imagine if they had positioned themselves as the opposite of Elite - where Elite is a mile wide and an inch deep, Star Citizen would be an inch wide but a mile deep. One system, absolutely packed to the gills with stuff to do. Each planet an earth-sized playground with all their terraforming, landowning, base-building dreams realized. Massive, procedurally-generated land masses littered with hand-crafted PvE adventures and quests. A player-run economy like Eve that makes everyone from the lowliest miner to the assembly station magnate a necessary and important part of the supply chain. Giant space stations in which you could walk around and see all the window-dressing nonsense like hot dogs and news broadcasts. All running on a gorgeous custom engine, developed to provide detailed visuals with high playercounts.

You could probably make that game for 350 million. Instead, they’re going to try and make it a hundred times over, with an engine that won’t cooperate, while expanding their scope with stuff no one asked for.

You are free to take my responses any way you want. I’m used to it.

If they switch focus only to SQ42 (which of course they can’t do), or perhaps spawned it off under a competent manager, it’s possible it would see the light of day. I wouldn’t place bets on it happening but it would be in the realm of possibility. SQ42 can be an actual finite game rather than the exercise in boundless scope creep that is the MMO.

So why would you end with a passive-aggressive stinger like that? That’s just going to put someone on the defensive and I’m sure you know that given how long you’ve been on the internet! With two syllables, we’ve gone from all having a laugh at the Star Citizen farce to the appearance that you’re calling someone out to defend something he probably didn’t even mean.

This is why we can have nice things, @dsmart!

-Tom

Totally doable. And I could make that game for $10m.

Right. But that ship too already sailed. Know why? Because SQ42 uses the same engine and locales as Star Citizen. It’s precisely why that smaller game still hasn’t been released.

True, but it’s not like there’s only one reason SQ42 hasn’t been released ;)