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

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.

Right. How could these jamokes draw a new record amount of money recently 1) in the middle of pandemic and worldwide economic issues and 2) after 8 years of no game. I’m not in the game’s target market but it makes no sense to me.

There’s rumors that all the initial motion capture stuff had problems being used. Considering the fact that none of it is in the game maybe it’s true.

I think the ship sailed a long time ago on just getting a producer to put things in line and finish the game, if Roberts would even be capable of giving up that kind of control to a producer in the first place.

Even if you ignore all of the technical debt they’ve built up that is probably insurmountable, the problem is that Chris Roberts has promised the throngs of True Believers all kinds of things that are nowhere near finished over the years. Roberts promised 100 individual star systems in the game - are they even up to 15 total planets/planetoids yet?

Then you pile on all of the other new mechanics and modes he’s unveiled to keep that backer money enthusiastically coming in… what happens if he savagely curtails all of those promised things in order to finally “put out a product”? Backers will likely riot to cries of false advertising and broken promises. A dozen class action lawsuits will launch. The media coverage will be even more horrific than it is now. It’ll be a massive failure, and anyone who might’ve bought the game anyway, ALREADY bought access to it years ago. CIG already spent that money!

I think CIG will string this out as long as they can, because they know the shitstorm that awaits if or when they finally admit that the party is over. And as long as they keep finding new sources of funding, like they did with that VC money for “advertising”, they don’t have to.

But hey, maybe someone can scoop up the art assets during bankruptcy proceedings and eventually use them in a space sim with a half-reasonable scope, and a producer who can actually ship things.

I think it would be hilarious if Crytek bought the assets for a song at bankruptcy and included them with the engine or sold them as add on assets.

Wasn’t there a tie-in with Intel for some SSD storage ages ago for Star Citizen?

“You need the fastest IO in the world to load this pile of shit, Buy Intel”.

Guessing that these devices will be considered “Retro computing” by the time SC is out.

Sometime in the next, I dunno, five years, CIG will (with a heavy heart, obviously) announce that they are making the difficult decision to start SQ42 over from scratch. It turns out all their mocap was done with a certain level of fidelity, and technology has improved since then, and it wouldn’t be fair to the players unless they had the highest possible quality animations in the world…

Will that be before or after the UE5 switch?