The title for this thread is just what I want out of it - to see lots of spaceship porn and bitch about all the broken promises.
Just wanted to chime in and say don’t stop posting Wendelius! Your posts are great and pretty much the only current info on the state of Star Citizen as a game. I for one also enjoy the shit-posting about Star Citizen as a product but after…11,640 posts that material is a bit stale (though I appreciate those who try!)
Actually if you just buy the intro pack Star Citizen probably isn’t too terrible of a product. So I guess it would be more the meta-aspects of it that deserve all the shit, like the marketing and never ending development.
Just another voice saying that I’ve enjoyed your posts as well @Wendelius. I feel like you’ve got a balanced view of the experience and that seems pretty rare. I’m not a fan of their marketing approach and struggle with the ethics, but it’s been great seeing someone enjoying playing the game.
I am interested in it mostly in the context of a software project with a massive head count and budget that promises so much and delivers so little and as a company that seems to put more effort in marketing ships than the game. This is a company that has been claiming at various times to be months away from release over 8 years and then just not delivering the vast vast majority of the things and pretending that they never made the promises. This is not a Dwarf Fortress style creation on an open ended basis. This is Answer The Call 2014.
I’m not particularly interested in the game as it exists now. If people enjoy what is there then that’s perfectly fine by me (not that my opinion should matter there).
If someone keeps going on about how they are just finishing up the final touches of colonizing Mars and selling Mars mansions then I don’t really care if they also have trailer homes available in Wyoming today.
There’s a game there and it’s fine but it’s a tiny tiny fraction of the game they are selling and deceptively marketing at massive price points. And there’s no indication that they have any idea how to get from the hacked to hell 15 year old FPS cryengine setup they have now to 100+ star systems, NPCs so realistic that you can 'Agent Smith’s in and out of them, capital ships with larger crews than a current server cap, the single player game they supposedly were releasing in 2014, etc etc etc.
Look at the amount of shitting on the Cyberpunk over in that thread for over promising. The Star Control threads are hard to summarize but they are highly critical over years of a game that was fully finished and released. We’ve had a pretty spirited criticism of Battle Brothers over it’s writing in the past week. This thread isn’t a unicorn of criticism.
Well, that’s part of the issue. I feel like that view is seriously outdated. Sure there are plenty of ships not yet in the game (though some coming this patch and others later this year. It’s a steady flow). But there are actually plenty more ships in the game.
I did a quick count at lunch (so apologies for inaccuracies). The definitive list of ships is here:
It scrolls on and on and on…
And it can be summed up roughly as:
- Total ships and vehicles in game or in concept
- 171 ships + vehicles all models included (including Nova Tank and Hercules C2/M2 which are in this month’s patch but still show in production in the matrix)
- 88 distinct ship / vehicle high level models
- In concept / Production
- 44 ships / vehicles all models included
- 27 distinct ship / vehicle high level models (i.e. the Constellation range has 2 of its 3 ship models in game, 1 in production for example. All 5 “Hull” ships - Hulls A through E - are still not in the game and those who bought those can only look at the pictures).
So the vast majority (127 out of 171) of ships and vehicles are available to fly or drive in game. That’s not a whole lot of jpegs, is it? And it’s plenty to try out.
But the humour hasn’t really changed.
Is this really true? From what I had read the JPEGs were just JPEGS, that most of them weren’t even in the game in any way. That’s why they’ve been such a joke - people spending tons of money on ships that don’t exist (and may never exist in the opinion of many people). Has that changed?
Also, I enjoy your posts even if I think the development process is a joke and a semi-scam. I hope you keep posting - the game looks amazing even IMO if there’s not much of a game there. I am glad you are getting some enjoyment out of it.
Looks like I was answering your question right before you asked. I must be psychic. :D
Thanks for the info, but I’m not certain that really answers the question I think many of us have. Assuming your number are true, the questions I have would be the following:
- Of the completed 121 ships, how many were sold as JPEGs?
- Of the uncompleted 44 ships, how many were sold as JPEGs?
I’m assuming that a certain number of ships came with the game and don’t need to be bought separately with cold hard cash - but maybe I’m wrong? That’s the real question - how far have they come on ships that they sold to people separately. That would tell me the real progress they’ve made on this issue.
Ships do not need to be bought with cold hard cash as such. Though, to play the alpha, you should really get a game package and starter ship. Hence the price range I was quoting. But as others have mentioned, it can be even cheaper during sales.
I think the answer to both questions is exactly the same (unless I misunderstand what you are asking). When I backed the game during the Kickstarter, my rewards were jpegs. Those clearly were delivered over the years, hence my screenshots now that I’m playing.
All (Actually, there might be some exceptions for a couple of military ships I think? not sure) ships can be or will be buyable in the game. They usually become available in the game 1 patch (quarter) after they come out of the test server.
Of those ships, I’m pretty sure (but could very well be wrong as I didn’t follow that closely) that all or the vast majority started life as concept ships (jpegs) you could buy at a reduced price with lifetime insurance for real money.
So there is no real distinction between the 2 groups. People who decided to buy ships did so to support the game. And the majority of those has been delivered as complete products you can explore / admire / drive and fly in game with more scheduled this year.
But for players playing the released game (please consider I inserted the relevant caveat here about it coming out :) ), they will just be in-game ships they can earn through playing if they so wish.
Were you asking about another distinction? It’s all the same production pipeline.
But does it really? From 2013 the
As for our major stretch goals, the $13 million objective is now in sight:
$13 million
- Additional flyable ship class: frigate
- Command and Control Center – Supervise the battle from the deck of your Constellation, Idris or destroyer (class TBA) with advanced C&C packages that allow you to tie all of your ships together and assume central command from the 3rd seat.
A lot of the ‘flight ready’ ships are missing a lot of the mechanics that would actually differentiate them from any of the other ships. Without the marketed differentiating mechanics are they actually complete?
Sure. Engineering consoles, weapon racks, food dispensers and component repair are not functional either. All those things are usually modelled and accessible in the ship but do nothing. If you place the bar for a ship to be available to have all the functionality of the final game available even though we are in alpha, then you definitely have the right of this argument.
That said, those things evolve as well. Since last month, I can fly my Constellation and undock my snub fighter then dock it back to the ship once I’m done flying around. The changes to inventory coming soon-ish mean the weapon racks will become useful. And so on.
Doesn’t change the fact the ship is modelled and flyable. But you are right they aren’t feature complete. I didn’t mean to imply they are.
And to a larger point, the fact that they now have a very large count of ‘flyable’ ships in the game is because they have continued to add on a ton of new ships/vehicles/tanks that weren’t from the original large scale pitch of the project. While the fact that they just added those tanks to the game is progress on a certain level, the fact that they decided to announce, sell, and add tanks into the game years past the kickstarter goals is not progress at all on the big 100+ star system game with giant capital ships and all the various promised mechanics like command and control capabilities.
They haven’t delivered any of the capital ships or mechanics in a decade but they are selling the dreams of The Krakken with its multiple shops living inside basically a floating city.
From my skeptical viewpoint, a large part of the “progress” lately is a lot more about what they can shoe horn into what they have vs actually making progress on all the big pieces. The Idris has notoriously supposedly had one room left (the missile room) for literally 5 years, so much so that CIG even jokes about it. Yet they finally spawned a few into the game for a special event and players were able to clip into it and see that it was missing the interior so it was some kind of hack to show progress for something that they can’t get to work so how good faith were their comments about being close in 2016? This is the constant refrain. Everything is just about to fall into place when X is done in 6 months.
Agreed. We are back to fundamental features still being in development, the game’s expanding scope, it not being close to completed and all those valid discussions.
But jokes about jpegs?
I mean, are they still doing it? Taking “preorders” for ships that exist in only jpeg form so far and who knows when they’ll be available to fly, let alone “feature complete?” If they are still doing it, the joke has as much currency as it ever did, in my view. If they are no longer doing that, then who even are they?!
Oh yes. I don’t know what the last concept ship to come out for sale was. Probably end of last year before I started playing? But I do expect another concept ship to get released at some point. It might not have the same frequency as earlier on in development though. It’s hard to me to compare as I wasn’t following then and I don’t want to mislead.
The last big “dreams” concept ship that they released was in November 2019, the Kraken Privateer:
The Kraken is a protector and a beacon of freedom in a too-often cruel universe. For those tasked with safekeeping Citizens unable to protect themselves, the Kraken is both a sanctuary and a self-contained war machine ready to take on the most daunting adversaries. Drake has thrown out the rule book to redefine private-use capital-class ships, attack carriers, and the very nature of personal freedom. It’s nothing if not a testament to the empowerment of the people.
So it is in theory a capital ship/aircraft carrier/market place/top secret black market place. That’s a lot of value for just $2k!
Will the shops be visited by NPC customers?
Yes. It’s envisaged that NPCs will make up 90% of the universe. They’ll be able to land and traverse locations with various routines and will provide the backbone of the wider economy.
Just because the AI has spent the last 10 years standing on tables doesn’t mean that they won’t soon be driving the economy with complicated behaviors.
This ship also isn’t even on the roadmap anywhere.
Around this time, they pivoted marketing towards hyping up and selling new ships that were ‘straight to flyable’ when they were put on sale. Of course, this required them to not actually tell anyone that they were developing these new ships instead of any of the previously announced ones in complete contradiction to all their comments about being all about transparent open development.
A lot of the current ships/vehicles have been related to mining (there’s a $55 mining dune buggy and a separate $75 2 person mining dune buggy for instance) since that’s something that they have an initial start of a system working for. Which is fine, but in 2015 they released a $575 ship with a detailed mining career guide:
That ship is not in the game nor most of the mechanics or career things listed.
And this is why all of the comments about jpegs and stuff are still amusing to me. It’s got little to do with the very small scale things that they are releasing now vs the big huge dreams they spent a decade selling that they have just abandoned for push trolleys:
Hahahhaha all that and “integrated motherboard audio”. Hhahahahaha
Ceterum autem censeo digital storm aventum x.
That is essentially what happened. A friend of mine is an attorney who is also a pretty serious action gamer. I was asking him about upgrading my computer and he gave me some good advice. Then I asked him what he was using and he said, “dude, you kinda don’t want to know.”