As someone who follows the community of SC, it behaves a lot like any insular community does - the extremely unhappy and unsatisfied people become estranged if they aren’t outright pushed out as “haters” or whatever, and every time there’s a bad news drop (such as the recent roadmap thing) you get a brief outburst of a lot of pent up frustration before it eventually dies out through a combination of the cultists eventually getting their messaging together and batting it back and many more simply trying to recontextualize or compartmentalize the news in a more “positive” light. The negative heat burns out quickly, and you return back to the usual threads about the latest ship being released or whatever.
No community is a 100% monolith, which is quite frankly a given. We all know that. And when people refer to the “cult”, they aren’t referring to literally everyone who has backed the game. They are referring to the very large and loud contingent of copium addicts who will stand for that shambles of a project until the end of time, as well as the people who will offer a pathetic throat clearing of general criticism about delays or whatever (so as not to seem like a total fanboy) before getting back to the all important work of defending it as “something that’s never been done before” or insisting that it’s simply because Chris is a perfectionist, or that we all should’ve known we “backed a dream” instead of a tangible product that was supposed to be delivered on a halfway-reasonable timeline.
The fact that the funding (allegedly) is INCREASING says it all about who outnumbers who in the Star Citizen community.
Some of us have been on this trolley since the beginning - backed in the very early days - and watched the shitshow of broken promises and false statements as they happened, not as some abstract meme compendium on the internet years later to roll your eyes at.
Exactly this. The idea that the community at large are in any was close to rebelling or holding them accountable is silly.
Roberts literally proclaimed back in the day that they were going to treat backers like their publishers, and since then has spent years doing anything but. And the community was there to overwhelmingly excuse it every step of the way, while disillusioned people like me simply quietly left “the community” with our money still in Roberts’ possession.
We, the Developer, intend to treat you with the same respect we would give a publisher.
Yeah, one can read that phrase in a variety of ways. ;)
And it’s hard to argue that CIG has respected their player base so far. How many promises have they failed to fulfill? How many delays did they have at this point? How many changes have they made without considering what the community wants?
At some point they must realize they can’t go like that forever. Question is, what are they going to do then?
There doesn’t really seem to be any indication that it can’t continue to go on for a very long time. There’s apparently enough money between the players who enjoy the current sandbox environment and the players who are still confident in the delivery of enough of the promised features to continue to buy new concept ships and pay subscriptions.
My cynical take of things like eye wetness technology videos is that they are unneeded work items to show progress specifically chosen to be something that doesn’t require actually solving any of the many technology problems but there’s clearly a segment of people out there who view it as significant progress towards making the game that they want to play. And importantly to CI those are the people who give them money unlike me.
So as long as those two general groups of people see value in the project I think it will just continue to float along. CI has long ago stopped even giving any release dates for anything and the people contributing to the project are fine with all of the delays* and I don’t see how the 15th delay of Salvage or 90th delay or re imagining of what Server Meshing means would cause anything to change.
* By fine I mean that they continue to participate/fund so even if they voice displeasure they don’t see them as a big enough reason to exit.
What galls me is that they can do something like, say, have SQ42 slip from months from release to six years later with no date in sight and have one of their senior QA people claim they’re able to play the entire game to completion back in 2016… and just give no explanation at all for what happened (let alone a plausible one) beyond some weirdly defiant nonsense about not releasing anything “before it’s ready” - which apparently is a sentence that’s supposed to make backers clap like seals for their integrity, despite it explaining absolutely nothing.
And some of the cultists even run with this bollocks, bringing up ridiculous outliers like Cyberpunk 2077 as a disingenuous cautionary tale of not doing things Chris Roberts’ way, as though those are your options.
As Lantz brought up the Salvage module, which has repeatedly showed up on their roadmap as imminently being ready for four fucking years - have CIG ever given any in-depth explanation as to why it keeps falling off? We’re to be treated like publishers after all.
Four years isn’t “oops this needs a bit more polish” territory. It’s “you could make an entire AAA game from start to finish” territory. But this shit just gets treated like it’s the normal travails of game development, and passes without comment from the studio.
This is exactly what it is. It’s overly long, technical breakdowns of minor improvements meant to sound like impressive progress to undiscerning listeners. Every one of their communiques is full of items like this.
This week’s Inside Star Citizen has got a sprint report on ships in the pipeline. And some look very good.
The 2 that stood out to me are:
The Drake Vulture: 6’30 into the video. This is the first salvage gameplay ship and is entering final art. I love the look of the modules where the salvage will be stored. Salvage is indeed the gameplay loop that is ever upcoming and is ever pushed back. Though I believe we are still promised manual salvage first this year, then the Drake vulture in the following patch.
The Hull C: 8’50". If I wanted to be a giant space trucker escorted by my organisation’s fighters, I’d be drooling all over that ship. MISC (known for the classic Freelancer) makes absolutely awesome industrial / utilitarian ships that fly like big trucks with poor visibility. But it’s part of their charm. And the interior of the Hull C is pure MISC.
Also, to answer @ShakesMcQueen , yes, CIG tend to give explanations as to why salvage is de-prioritised / pushed back when they delay it. It does feel like it’s reliant on technology that’s not ready and they have been struggling to get the mechanics defined and implemented in a way that matches what they envision. Doesn’t soften the blow for those waiting for it though. It’s certainly one of the points of contention with backers and one of those things that sows doubt in the community.
Either way, this week was a fun episode. Worth a watch if you have 10" to spare. It does show jpegs if you really want some material to make a joke about too! ;)
ISC episodes alternate between fluff and more in depth look at development closer to the core. There is obviously a team working on character models. And while eye wetness has made for catchy snarky headlines in articles, it’s obviously not all they are working on. The team who works on character models is hardly in a position to implement back end technologies for server meshing. CIG is not a “20 people who do a bit of everything” company by a long stretch.
But yeah, last week’s episode was not really one that brought anything exciting to the table.
You know, the saddest part of the whole thing for me is that CIG actually has a lot of talented people working there, particularly so in the visual side of things. Those trailers are pretty awesome, and they also have great engineers trying to fight insurmountable odds (like a hostile engine) to implement a game that can’t possibly exist. In a way, I fear CIG will turn out to be a bit like Theranos… An impossible dream, dreamed by a troubled but charismatic individual, that some talented people actually tried to make real… until it all broke down.
And I may not respect Star Citizen the project, or the way CIG (and Chris Roberts) approached the whole thing, but I do have a lot of respect for many things their technical staff achieved. If only in the right hands… this could be something special. :(
Hahaha, oh man. I hope I have a judge as…sympathetic as you at my trial! Holmes seems like a psychopathic grifter; Roberts may have delusions of grandeur but I don’t think he’s in the same league at all.
I was going for a description that could apply to them both, really. I know they’re not in the same league, but then my analogy would fail and I didn’t want that. ;)
They’ll give a quick reason for why it falls off a particular alpha release, but they’ve never said anything about how the module has shown up on the list of modules for imminent release to the public alpha since 2018.
It’s not a situation of them saying “we are strugging to define the mechanics therefore we’re going back to the drawing board and project it’ll hopefully be ready in two years maybe”, or something like that. It’s literally slipped off their list of things listed to be released FOR THE NEXT UPDATE several times over four years. What is it even doing there if you’re allegedly struggling to define core mechanics? How are you still struggling to do that after four years?
This is what I mean when I speak of an explanation. Anything can slip from one alpha update to another - delays happen, and cutoff windows are a thing. Four years of it - and this is just a single example feature, keep in mind - speaks to far more serious project management issues. And then keep in mind that it also means all of the dependencies for that module are ALSO encountering the same problems.
The vending-machine usable used in the eat-and-drink NPC flow progressed throughout February. This behavior allows certain NPCs to try to steal items from the usable and get frustrated if their attempt doesn’t succeed. The team also added malfunctions that cause items to not be delivered. Vending machines currently have a placeholder Building Blocks UI that changes whether the NPC is buying or attempting to steal.
During February, a new animator was trained and worked through several increasingly complex scenes. They began with relatively simple finger polishing work before moving onto more involved mess-hall and tram scenes.
The wider team undertook a comprehensive review of chapters one and five before prototyping new animations to meet the latest direction.
The Weapons team continued to work on the extinguisher required for fire gameplay.
Lastly, the team continued to refactor some of the engine’s main header files.
