So wait, they paid for Gary Oldman just to mocap him?? All the range and expression?
All I can do is chuckle.
Perhaps a back handed compliment…
This thing has all the trouble and misadventure of the Apocalypse Now shoot, but none of the brilliance. Great entertainment.
I doubt anyone buying that 15,000 pledge is doing it for those ships. They just have money and want to support development. Like Notch kickstarting 10,000 to some of his favourite projects. I doubt he even used the perks it have gim.
In the Strike Commander materials, Roberts wrote about watching the documentary Hearts of Darkness and relating to it. I remember CGW putting in on a list of top vaporware games, even though it eventually came out.
It would appear that one of the Escapist sources was right about spending money on big name talent: Oldman’s definitely a name actor.
I don’t see Oldman coming cheap…
Always roll my eyes when I hear about “big names” in a game. Like thats what you need to lend legitamicy to it. Look at the money Bungie wasted on Dinklage for Destiny. There are plenty of quality voice actors who would do a fine job. Just another case of Robert’s being the kid in the candy store with a mom who won’t say no.
Agreed. Voice actors have really come a long way in video games. Though I still have a soft spot for Wing Commander III. At the time, following the story with Hamill, Wilson, John Rhys Davies and Malcolm Mc Dowell was spectacularly different and fun.
Also, it makes for a nice change from Nolan North voicing every game. :)
Wendelius
Did I miss something or was the Gary Oldman cinematic it?
Is there even a scripted demo of a mission from SQ42 that I can watch? Otherwise I’m not sure how this makes 2016.
I also thought the SQ42 speech was pretty bad (I do appreciate the stupid attempt to justify the bad camerawork showing they were camera drones :P) but whoever was expecting something else other than bad writing and amateur directing has no memory (and yet that game manages an enjoyable storyline, somehow). That was also not exactly a good game gameplay wise, yet somehow I remember it. In a way we will always remember Star Citizen regardless of the game now.
The main issue I have with all this is that I don’t yet see this is undoubtedly a troubled development process. Yes, there are hints that there might be problems, but nothing I find incontrovertible yet. Basically I don’t yet know if everything we are hearing is due to real problems or due to the unusual nature of the funding tied to a business model that -understandably- is rejected by many (I frankly hate it and will probably just play the SP campaign).
This isn’t quite right. They where kind enough to put an updated ship matrix in their webpage showing status of production for all the ships. Not counting variants, there are 13 finished and flyable ships, 3 ships that are hangar ready but not yet flyable, 11 in-production ships and 5 in-concept only ships.
I am pretty sure the tutorial you can play now is going to be the SQ42 tutorial, or at least heavily similar. There ought ot be a YT video of it somewhere.
They got 2k new backers in the 12 hours since the announcement (and half a million dollars). This keeps funding faster than pretty much any game kickstarter and it’s been almost 3 years since funding started… I don’t think we will ever see anything like this again, even if the game is a success.
JD
1789
Yeah, and the few soundbites you can hear in the making-of videos sound trite, too. I don’t think the Wing Commander games having hammy writing is a valid excuse here or something.
This comment from Gary Oldman was so on the nose, but not for the reason he intended: “From what I gather, Chris [Roberts] is a bit of a George Lucas with this sort of stuff.”
I had to laugh, too. Someone needs to bring Oldman up to speed on which comparisons are not going to go well for sci-fi fans these days.
So it wasn’t just. I first thought: Wait a second - did they use Gary Oldman’s likeness, but had someone else voice that character?
I had tons of fun reading the live comments on the SA forum yesterday, that’s all I can say.
Let’s say the popular opinion was negative. Yeah, let’s say that.
You mean that forum comments were jaded and snarky about an onstage presentation? I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you.
Or to put it in context, for every 2 comments on that forum during and after the presentation, they got another $50 (at least) new backer. I wonder what the upper limit for a space combat game is in terms of sales. This thing has shattered my previously guessed at number. They could be very close, or there could be half a million potential backers out there…
Has anybody else taken a look at the starmap they posted? That’s a pretty neat web app. The more I look at the project, the more it reminds me of a multiplayer Privateer (and there is also a similitude to Privateer 2 in terms of ambition -and how that project turned out at the end, maybe-).
meeper
1793
If only that were true. Speaking as someone who ran an unexpectedly successful web-based game years ago that heavily featured micro-transactions, for every rich whale, you’ve got one who is cashing out retirement savings, not paying tuition, or skipping mortgage payments in order to contribute. This sort of thing is like gambling to a lot of people in their inability to rationally regulate their own spending.
I’m all for people making their own decisions, but goddamn if some of it doesn’t make me sad.
(edit: it’s probably not quite 1:1, but that doesn’t make it any better)
They pulled in a little over half a million yesterday.
Catching up the flurry of media coming out of the Citizen Con and highlights people here have been kindly filtering out for those with little patience for “fanfests”…
Well, they did a Winston Churchill right there
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Winston Churchill speech before the Commons, May 13th 1940
You can see that they badly mangled a quite stirring exhortation. I personally find more stirring the “We Shall Fight” one, but that’s me :)
“We shall fight defend our colonies, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the jump points, we shall fight on the space stations, we shall fight amongst the gas giant clouds and asteroid belts, we shall fight on the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Which would have been corny - I am no writer - but at least follows the spirit of the original.
I do agree it was terrible, and the backstory totally derivative from the Wing Commander backstory, which totally excited my 14-year-old imagination. Almost 25 years later, well, I am more of a sybarite.
EDIT: I don’t think that the British MP’s found Mr. Churchill address a matter of cheer and 👏, given that by that time the Germans had already broken through Sedan and were racing to the Channel… while the British Army and the best of the French Army were in danger of being surrounded and annihilated.
Oh yes, the backstory is totally a Wing Commander universe reboot. They don’t even try to hide it. I suspect the Vega system is going to feature heavily in the “plot”.
At this point they may be better off showing nothing. Otherwise they spoil the illusion for their gullible investors.
There you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB3XvwWMsEc. This is the heavily scripted tutorial which is most likely going to be the SQ42 tutorial. This is actually playable on my computer now (it’s released, not just shown on a show).
19 mins in is the asteroid racing segment, which shows off the coolest part of the current combat model, imho, the ship handling.
Edit: The pew pew I can play mixed with the walking on the ship sharaleo links to makes me think this could be a cool, if horribly written game. Definitely gets the WC feel right.
There’s this towards the tail end of the event - https://youtu.be/_5sRUYwgWGI?t=6151
It’s basically the intro to Halo where the first thing you do is take a tour though the Pillar of Autumn to the bridge to meet the captain. But no space combat, nor examples of anything that has been worked on, mission wise.
And there is this, which is a preview of the PU stuff (and I gather this is what is coming with SC Alpha 2.0) - https://youtu.be/_5sRUYwgWGI?t=1550
And regarding the stuff that matters… that was indeed a carefully choreographed demo, but it looked to me totally like the real deal. It is the first time I have seen everything to start to come together into a cohesive whole. And what I saw was just GREAT. How well is going that to work over the real Internet and not a LAN connection, remains to be seen :) And probably I will need a new computer to get all that shininess rendered at a good frame rate on my screen.
Leaving aside the writing on Squadron 42 - which is going to be bad from the looks of it, but since I will not be bound to a chair trying to justify to myself why I spent 20$ real life bucks on watching an awful movie, but rather, pressing ESC to skip inane dialogue and going for the pew pew right away - this is shaping up to be quite awesome.
The more MMO-like elements of Star Citizen still look to me like they’re in the land of the Wishful Thinking/Ain’t Gonna Happen Any Time Soon/Where Unicorns Poop Ice Cream, yet paraphrasing one of my favorite excerpts from A Deepness in the Sky
[…]I was born in a civilization of castles and cannon. I’ve lived a long time - not counting coldsleep - and I’ve seen a lot. Since the Dawn Age, we humans have learned a little here, a little there - but mainly we’ve learned of limits. Planetary civilizations rise and fall. At their height they’re wonderful things, but there is so much darkness […] So I gave up my dream, the dream of my whole life… and then I looked around. Here at Arachna, we have finally found something from outside all our limits. It’s a tiny glimpse shreds and dregs of the greatest glory.[…]
Even a Bohemian Interactive kind of "game", where basically you’re set up against “scenarios” like the one they demoed in the presentation, would be quite awesome, very much like the “shreds and dregs” the character from the novel talks about. But who knows how long can it take… maybe we need to go into cold sleep and wake up to a brighter new world. Or we wake up to realize that we’ve been “reassembled” after our starship got too close to a black hole…
I could see that there’s indeed a Vega system, that how not, lies right across a straight line between Sol and the nearest Vanduul world… I can totally see that becoming the physical place of Star Citizen’s version of Elite Dangerous CQC spaceship pew pew orgy.
