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

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 ;)

That wasn’t my intent at all. As you can see from my follow-up response, I was honestly waiting for his response because I was puzzled by his statement and thought that I was missing something in what he was thinking. Apparently I wasn’t. shrug

Some bugs.

Well that’s true. But honestly, had they focused on the core parts that were needed for SQ42, it would have a greater chance of release. But SQ42 doesn’t sell JPEGs. Star Citizen does. So they had to focus on that.

Also, SQ42 is just an afterthought/bonus to backers seeing as most of them were already entitled to it anyway. It’s precisely why CIG split the games into two - an act that got them sued by Crytek - because it was the only way for them to get “new” money for it, having already spent the money that backers poured into CIG for that specific game.

EDIT: It’s that quest for “new” money that had them introduce the concept of warbonds too in order to get new money from backers who were just melting inventory to buy better ships. This whole thing has turned out to be more about making money than about making a game - of any kind.

Sq42 only could possibly work, but what do you do with the huge empty cities and planets they created? And SC would have to be scoped down to around 20 players per instance. What a waste.

Well to be fair, all of the planetary scenes and stations they’ve since added, were sufficient to build SQ42 around if you think of them as “levels” as in other games.

Well, despite everything, they did get someone to make a really nice web page to sell jpegs.

Figure they could work with Displate to make some cool posters on the wall.

350m in funding to make 3d rendered pictures on metal plates… sure, why not.

Isn’t the content for SQ42 mostly done? All those videos of Mark Hamill (and whomever) doing their movie shots? Seems like that could be a pretty large sunk cost at this point with no ROI in sight.

Hey, just like Fallout '76! Well, that has 24 players I think.

I think the cutscene stuff with the actor motion capture is done, well at least filming definitely is. Whether the cutscenes are actually done, who knows. There is certainly hot debate on how much other SQ42 content is done. I’d say not that much. Too much would likely be reliant on SC content - locations, star systems, planets, etc.

I think at this stage, if a significant portion of SQ42 was done, they’d show it. "We don’t want to spoil the story’ is just them hiding behind the fact they don’t actually have anything significant to show.

At this stage, it’s been years since the Gary Oldman teaser trailer - that is probably on the cutting room floor now as their tech has evolved and driven a desire to re-render or edit it.

I keep coming back to money laundering. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to me. I just can’t otherwise understand how even a passionate user base could be throwing 2m at this in a day.