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

Bollocks. Everything they’ve done, has ALL been done before. Trying playing games and you’ll see.

I really don’t know what about the game right now or on their next couple years of roadmap can be considered next-gen at all.

They have some higher polygon assets but I think that the engine itself is really showing the fact that it’s last gen.

The ‘universe’ is still a single solar system run in 50 player maximum instances.

There’s no persistence of the universe state. It just boots up fresh in the instance.

Player/Ship persistence is minimal when it works.

Missions are, at best, 20 year old bog standard mmo fetch quests.

AI is really bad for ships and humans.

None of the aliens are in the game.

None of the capital ships are in the game.

Leaving aside all the bugs and missing features, I literally can’t think of a single thing in this game that hasn’t been done in a finished game.

Saying that they will someday deliver revolutionary things doesn’t mean that there’s anything in the game that is actually new.

^this

From what I can tell of this fiasco, whatever level of ambition and innovation might have legitimately been present at the inception eventually degenerated into cynicism and outright lying. The way money is being handled, the way fund raising is handled, the way backers/fans are manipulated–this speaks to a level of mendacity that makes any good they may have intended hard to believe.

Putting aside your asshole condescending tone, which games, specifically, that feature the tech and possibilities as what is shown in the DF video?

Yes, I know QT3 is one of the most vitriolic communities when it comes to SC. Not that lot of the vitriol is unwarranted. But I still love the ambition on display, specifically the combination of scope and fidelity.

yeah, I’ve been waiting patiently as well. Not too much hope, though I admit I haven’t logged in for a couple of years (did some asteroid field dogfighting in one of the alpha releases way back when), but this thread has been worthless (as, admittedly, have the dev diaries) with regards to any in game/release info as yet. I’d love a thread dedicated to where the game actually is, rather than all the external info/gripes/lawsuits/you-name-it meta discussion.

Here’s the most balanced one I’ve found that’s recent:

A problem with games that are in development for this long is that the tech changes so much in the time they’re gestating that even if most things go smoothly, by the time they come out they are already behind the curve. Even if the design was so forward-looking that it’s still innovative, it’s nearly impossible to keep updating the tech so that the finished product still feels contemporary and takes advantage of state of the art gains in areas like UI, quality of life, etc. much less graphical advances, etc. At least, that is what it seems like to me.

Then there’s the sheer insanity of acting like a timeframe this long is somehow acceptable in any shape or form for a game development project. Not to mention the way it’s been monetized, and all the business shenanigans (which if even half of what is alleged is true seem to be pretty damning). I mean, hell yeah, the concept of Star Citizen is breathtaking, no doubt about it. But to me the scope was and is so far beyond what is actually possible at this point, much less seven years ago, that it seems to move from the realm of exciting ambition to reckless waste of resources.

They did already change engines (and got sued for it), as I recall.

Pretty sure me and my college buddies displayed a similarly incredible level of ambition when, drunk, we made plans for “the greatest game of all time,” which was to be an MMOFPSRTS like a cross between Eve, Planetside and that game whose name I can never remember where a player is like a general but the units are actual other players.

We got almost as far toward realizing our ambitious plans as the SC crew have theirs.

It’s certainly ambitious - “achievement” I suppose depends on what you mean by it, because they haven’t achieved much. It’s the kind of detailed, half-finished thing any major developer could make in 7 years if they had hundreds of millions of dollars, and no meaningful deadlines they cared about meeting.

The reason I first fell in love with Star Citizen was because of the idea of an Eve Online, but with that added detail of landing on planets, and walking around, and cutting edge visuals, and copious detail. Like a future world simulator, where anything is possible like Eve, but with the immersion and direct input of a first-person perspective.

The reason I soured on it years later, is because it became increasingly clear that the focus on new details and new systems just kept coming, as delivery dates for every aspect of the game kept slipping into the horizon. That is not remotely normal in game development, and where it is, it universally points to serious development problems.

With their current cash burn rate, it’s a virtual certainty SC never sees release as a finished product.
But hey, I’d love to be wrong. They already got my money years ago, so getting an actual return on that investment would be a welcome surprise. I’m just no longer a starry-eyed optimist about it, because they have earned nothing less than pure cynicism.

It’s kind of convoluted. They are still off the same basic CryEngine branch as they started with (3.6 I think). They are claiming that they can switch to Amazon Lumberyard license which is also based off CryEngine. Regardless of if that is contractually allowed (in court now) from a technology perspective it’s the same old engine.

Savage. I liked that game.

What gets me is that neither of those engines is suited for what they’re trying to do. So what I’ve always wondered was what reasoning they used when choosing it. What was it about that engine that made Chris Roberts sit up and say, “CryEngine is the best engine for this game!” I’m sure he must have explained it at some point, but I sure missed it.

I think they’d have made much more progress by now if they’d just let some of their programmers develop a custom engine. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, all these years later, hindsight being 20/20.

Crytek did the videos and stuff for the Kickstarter in return for the project using their engine.

An achievement in modern games parlance is something like “looked at the achievement list” or “started a game”. I think they probably qualify for one of those.

It’s quite simple. Roberts has always wanted the best-looking games, going way back to Wing Commander and Strike Commander. CryEngine was one of the best looking engines at the time. There was minimal consideration for anything else.

There’s no 7 year anniversary of anything. No 1.0 yet. Jack shit has been accomplished.

Yes, after battle everyone’s general. Back in 2011, what engines were available? Unreal 3 was unusable for large streaming open world with dynamic ToD, Unreal 4 was years away, Unigine was (and still kinda is) unproven (no games shipped), Unity was unusable for this kind of game.
Warhorse were faced with the same decision:

http://web.archive.org/web/20180225010250/https://warhorsestudios.cz/index.php?page=blog&entry=blog_009

And also chose Cryengine, despite it not being designed for RPG. There was nothing better available.

Building custom engine is a possibility, but I do not blame these companies for not wanting to reinvent the wheel (particularly Warhorse guys were fed up with problems they had with custom tech on Mafia 2 development - that game took 8 years to make).

Yeah, engine choices and tech stuff can be a matter of choosing the best of the available options rather than the one true ring, for sure.

A game like Mafia 2, though, doesn’t have to live up to unrealistic expectations like Star Citizen, nor were Warhorse claiming to be the second coming of Game Jesus.

That’s because you’re not thinking like a ptw game developer whose goal is to get whales to pay enormous amounts of money for digital assets of no real value.

Their achievements in that field are truly revolutionary.

I blame them. Reinventing the wheel is painful, but trying to run your boat on wheels is even more painful.

Elite Dangerous which happened around the same time used a custom engine and was fine because they can retain talented developers and a culture of shipping software.