6 years ago I was 20 years old in college. I got so excited a new a mmo to play in space and drank the kool-aid. Dropped $150, played with my super cool ship in my hanger at 15~fps having a good time looking at all the details on my aegis gladius, watching the stairs come out of the ship and so on.
Eventually I could fly it, and it was cool but of course it was alpha and there was nothing to do except drink more kool-aid. More ships, more promises, more stars, more space.
Now, my same ship can land on planets, I can walk around and it's great. Honestly it's pretty cool. The only issue is now I am 26, married, spend 75% of my awake time working or with my wife. I don't want an mmo.
I am no longer the target demographic, and the majority of the early adaptors are not either.
No better way to rustle jimmies than to mention the likely truth that Star Citizen is vaporware and will never see the light of day. The more time passes the more likely that is. Anyone not invested in its success can look at the timeline of moves by the company up to now, the scope of the project and its bloat, and especially the CEO, and reach the same conclusion. Nonetheless, I expect to have this same argument with a starry-eyed dreamer 5 years from now.
I don't think it will end up being vaporware, but I do think it will end up like Duke Nukem Forever.
If you're not familiar with that tale: in the mid-90s Duke Nukem 3D was one of the biggest FPS games, and the developer was lucky enough to be independent so they kept most of the money from sales of it. They then used this money to independently develop the sequel: Duke Nukem Forever. It was going to use the Quake engine to be in full 3D, but then Quake 2 came out and they switched to that engine, then better engines came out and they kept switching. Without a publisher to force them to release they just kept re-building the game with more and more features on newer engines.
Eventually their hoard of money ran out and they went bankrupt. Their assets were bought out by another developer who took the work that had been completed on the latest iteration, quickly slapped it together into a semi-cohesive but shippable game, and shoved it out the door. We got Duke Nukem Forever in the end, but as a shadow of what was promised over the years.
I am not a hardcore supporter of Star Citizen, and I have not put any money towards the game. But I have played the Alpha during their free weekends, and they are slowly making me a believer.
I played a game with three of my friends where we loaded into a space station, jumped into a multicrew ship, and headed out to find our way among the stars. We were able to do things like jump out of the ship on EVAs into open space, jam speeder bikes into the back of other ships and drop them out over the surface of a moon, and generally do awesome (read: silly/idiotic) space adventure stuff.
It's not really a 'game' yet, but they are pretty clearly putting together some sort of experience that is very much playable. It's not enough to make me spend money, but it's closer than anything else I've seen in the genre for sure.
As someone who hasn't looked at it closely, does it still feel like a set of diverse tech demos or is it beginning to come together as a cohesive experience?
You start in a space station, you have a set of four ships you can take out to go explore -- a quick racer, a speeder-bike, a small multi-crew gunship, and a mining vessel. You can fly around a single solar system at super-light speed, doing missions, mining, pirate hunting, and generally doing space game stuff (like deliveries, commodity trading, etc.) The basic game loops are there, including player driven quests.
For example, I received a notice that a player had stranded themself on the surface of a moon with no fuel, and needed transport back to the station with some cargo. They were offering N credits. I accepted the mission, got a marker, flew out to the moon and rescued them. They turned in their mission, payed me my reward (I think this was automatic), and then went on their way (presumably to refuel their ship.) It was super slick.
You can buy upgrades for yourself and your ship, and you can fly from space station to the surface of planets with no loading screens or barriers. There's little to no consequences for failure, so that part still feels very demo-y. Lost a ship? Click the 'Gimme my ship' button back at the space station and wait 10 minutes.
It's still janky from a performance and stability standpoint, but it's a prerelease game, so expect that. (FPS stuttering, difficulty connecting with other players in my squad, etc.) Initial load times are very long, and sometimes UI elements don't work correctly.
Nope, just fat fingered that one while typing up my response. I'll keep you in mind if I need someone to check my posts for typos in the future though!
I personally still feel like it is a set of tech demos at this point. Star Marine could easily be built out into it's own game, but at this juncture is just a way to test FPS mechanics. Arena commander is a focused place to test dogfighting. The hangar is still totally disconnected from the "world", and mostly just a place for you to view your shiny bling.
Probably one of the biggest steps of "convergence" is on the roadmap, in that ArcCorp is currently a separate location from the persistent universe: You can spawn into it and walk around, buy stuff, etc. But the planet isn't in the persistent universe, you can't fly to it. The next major release, 3.4, is supposed to bring that really into the main "world" of the game.
Probably the biggest thing I feel holds it back at this point is that there really isn't a realistic sense of progression and accomplishment yet. There's some missions you can do, you can technically pick up some beta currency that isn't necessarily persistent between releases. Ship insurance times are extremely short, you'll get your ships back free by the same time tomorrow. You still can't get ships without real money, so there's nothing to strive to accomplish in the game at this juncture.
There's a lot of cool mechanical work, the universe is really starting to come together, but unlike other games I play, there isn't yet a "reason I need to go get on Star Citizen".
I think it’s pretty cool. I got the basic pack ($30) as a gift and I’ve had fun flying around in space. I’d probably be a lot more invested and defensive if I’d thrown $2,000+ into the project, though.
I was astounded when I learned that a bunch of my colleagues, fellow game developers with many years of experience and who have helped ship several AAA games, are big supporters of Star Citizen and have donated money to it on several occasions.
Personally, I think it looks really cool but so very optimistic that I wouldn't put any money towards it.
Considering games studios will spend ~4 years making an AAA game that they might only announce a few months before release, I don't think they're doing too badly. Latest public release I'm really impressed with -- seems like stuff is starting to get tied together really well, and it doesn't feel like a game from 6 years ago.
Even if they never officially release (which I guess could be considered "vaporware", although as you can already download and play it.......) -- it was a fun project to back for my $20 several years ago or whatever. When I see the arguments about how money's just going into the CEO's pockets? Yeah, and like the pockets of the employees at least three large dev studios across the world. I essentially bought one of them a nice meal.
I watched the game play demo they presented at the recent Citizencon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-fkMHOyswU). As I don't follow Star Citizens development closely, it was a fascinating view into that universe and the developers behind it. To me it felt they're getting lost in all the little details on the planets, instead of concentrating a bit more on the space and its use with space ships. After all, selling space ships is what they make a lot of money with.
They're talking about an incredible level of detail on the ground (e.g. a working subway system, physically correct ice cubes in drinks and plans to receive damage, when you're in a room with a fire, which consumes the available oxygen), but there was literally nothing about new stuff in space (or is that already completely done and working?).
Given their ambitions I hope they succeed long term and will continuously develop the game, similar to EVE Online.
That’s been one of my red flags too, the lack of significant progress on fundamental parts of the game, such as the flight model and even just the combat AI. Nevermind the parts that will require real groundbreaking work, such as the game-wide economy, AI, and shipmate AI. Nevermind the balancing work. That they’re even thinking about how ice cubes are modeled really seems to indicate that work is expanding to fill the time.
Expanding to spend the money that they've raised, perhaps? After all if they've already raised it, it doesn't really matter what they're spending it on. In normal game dev they would have to make a game that people wanted to buy.
As someone who does follow Star Citizen closely (but isn't a backer or otherwise motivated for the project to succeed), I couldn't disagree more.
They got "ships in space" working years ago. This release was celebrating their latest tech, "OCS," which is designed to reduce their in-memory working set. The big benefit of OCS? They're more than doubling the size of their world, adding a planet, gigantic new city, and three new moons.
Of course they're showing off planet-side content. They've had ships flying around in space for literally years now. The big new improvement to that (a new flight model) was demoed in a booth on the show floor, where people could experience it, not in the splashy keynote session.
MVPs are for testing product-market fit. CIG (the makers of Star Citizen) proved their fit long ago. They have a successful product that's about to cross $200 million in revenue. Now they need to turn that product-market fit into successful recurring revenue. And that requires doing something that captures the attention of a market that is notoriously fickle, negative, and entitled.
Immersive systems-based gameplay with things like physically-correct ice cubes is the niche CIG has chosen, and it's been their niche since the Kickstarter. Who knows if the excitement they've generated so far will last. But it's obviously done very well for them so far. It's no surprise they've doubled down on it.
I backed the game in the kickstarter, and I’m fine with logging in now and then to see how it progresses. The results they show are breathtaking.
And yes I understand that this is a game that might actually never make it, but the niche you mentioned is very close to a lot of people’s hearts. So we just keep hoping.
I cannot stop laughing at this. Meanwhile Elite Dangerous is iterating effectively. The difference in philosophy/approach between the two teams with somewhat similar end objectives is stark.
As someone who doesn't play but has watched it through its development, I feel like the developers have a fatal weakness for shiny objects (not that anyone needed me to tell them this). I'd be much more bullish on such an iteratively developed mega game if it started out focusing on an MVP and added stuff from there, instead of this discordant feature vomit. I don't think there's anything wrong with the iterative model for game development (even "boxed" games are doing it; see Overwatch, Diablo etc.) but it needs to be managed sanely and developers shouldn't be afraid to redo stuff when the standard changes or get too caught up in sunk costs.
Just look at Elite Dangerous or Rim World. Amazing, fantastic games that started off very primitive, with the core of the gameplay at least prototyped. And now, a couple to a few times a year, in both games, we get an update that makes it more awesome.
And those effects are compounded - both games are far superior than other games in their genres because they steadily improve and focus on the core gameplay features.
Elite dangerous has had a working game for 6 years and has released at least 15 pretty big updates (with another one only like 2 weeks away). Star citizen is focusing on ice cubes and the rest of the game isn't even really a playable game.
I feel bad for people who are thousands deep into SC.
Difference is that a lot of people don’t care about ED just because they released a flight simulator first. So for me ED will always just be that.
The promise of what SC wants to be is what is keeping people excited. 6 years in and the demos are still amazing. It’s nice to have a game to hang your hopes to.
If we actually get to play it one day I’ll br even happier :p
That's a really strange viewpoint to me. By that logic we shouldn't really care about most things because of what they once were.
The U.S. because it was an up-jumped violent militia.
Linux because it was some Finnish dude's hobby project.
Nintendo because it was just some family company that made playing cards.
Things evolve, improve, and become far more than their initial incarnation. And they may do so for decades. Bringing it back to space sims, I'd rather a solid playable base that can be continuously improved, than a series of half-playable cobbled together tech demos. But hey, only time will tell eh? Maybe I'll revisit this comment chain and feel like a fool in a year. Or 5. Or 10.
All this has done was to get Chris Roberts out of debt and now seriously rich, get his wife to star in a film next to Gary Oldman and give his brother a cushy job. Delivering a game at this point would be killing the golden goose. Chris is paying himself literally millions from your money and presumably laughing all the way to bank. He has nothing to gain from ending development as long as you're paying his exorbitant salary.
All this dough and no time to work on the Linux port they promised from a long-met stretch goal, or the only reason I originally backed it, something I now deeply regret.
There's a lot of negativity aimed at Star Citizen, but from where I stand they are the closest to building the game that a whole lot of people want to play.
Note: Closest != close
The idea of getting a crew together to fly a large spaceship around is a foundational piece of the sci-fi narrative -- from Leviathon Wakes to Firefly, Star Wars to Star Trek. We want to play those kinds of stories, but that's a challenging game to build. Star Citizen seems to be the first game to seriously try and build it.
Do I think they'll succeed? I'm not sure. Am I really, really hoping they do? Hell yeah.
It's a game where you and your friends play as the different officers on a Star-Trek like bridge, like Helmsman, Weapons and of course Captain. Use a large TV as the main screen and use your laptops for your station. It's really fun.
Most polished maybe. Space Engineers is like minecraft in space. Some friends and I have been messing around the last two weekends. We've mostly been concerned with getting our production facilities up so I don't know how well it supports multiple crew members controlling the ship independently (i.e., turrent control vs. pilot vs. whatever else)... but then again SC doesn't have that yet either, I think.
My little one-man indie open source space game supports multi-crew, pilot (navigator), turret gunner, engineering, comms, damage control, science (scanning) and game-master stations. It's called Space Nerds In Space. I also lack sufficient PvE content and PvP density, but I'm raking in $17 a month on patreon.
This looks really cool! How do you feel you currently compare to Artemis, the longstanding party in the genre? I have always been excited about these sorts of things, but don't have enough IRL friends usually that can tolerate this level of nerd, so haven't really tried this sort of thing. ;)
Hard to say as I haven't really played Artemis except once briefly a few years ago. It is indeed difficult to gather a crew. Some differences:
* SNIS is "properly" 3D, as opposed to the "submarine" style limited 3D support Artemis has.
* With the turret gun, SNIS feels a little more "millenium falcon" than "enterprise".
* Graphics in SNIS are miles better, but still no great shakes by modern standards (though the gas giants look awesome, if I do say so myself.)
* Artemis has a lot more mission scripts available. SNIS has a mission scripting system (Lua based), but there are not very many mission scripts.
* Artemis is more properly a game, while SNIS is more of a sandbox. (More mission scripts would help here.)
* SNIS is (I think) comparatively less buggy, and I have run sessions for hours with zero hiccups. I don't get the impression from what I've read that Artemis is quite so stable, but I might be wrong.
* The SNIS server processes are entirely headless with no UI graphical or otherwise, while the artemis server is also the "main screen" client (as I understand it).
* It's possible to have a constellation of SNIS server processes and traverse between them via "warp gates", building an arbitrarily large universe given enough servers to host it all (or, it can auto-start and auto-shutdown servers on a single machine on-demand to give the illusion of an arbitrarily large universe.) Artemis has no similar concept that I am aware of.
There's loads of other differences as SNIS is not really a copycat of Artemis but rather just taking the general idea of a bridge simulator and not much else.
I would be remiss not to mention the existence of another open source spaceship bridge simulator, Empty Epsilon. There's a forum for the genre: https://bridgesim.net
SC is a huge disappointment for me. It is not playable yet, even though there are things to do if you log on. It looks like it has all the features of a bubble - a hype. If this had been a normal project everyone involved would be worried about whether or not they can deliver due to the continuous postponements. It is not a normal project however, people are still "buying the pitch". It's the idea of SC and the vision of SC that keep people enthusiastic, and SC are feeding the hopeful. It is however suspicious that they have changed their TOS to make them less customer (player) friendly in the "rights dep". If they finish the vision I will definitively use my license to try it out, even though they seem to take the "pay to win" concept to new highs. I very much feel that the money I have spent, though, has been lost to someone who did not succeed to deliver. That is not uncommon in early access games, and is what to expect from many projects I and others help by purchasing an early license. SC However is different, though. They seem to keep on building the hype instead of coming out clean and say it as it is. The game will most likely launch one day, but I expect it will be something completely different than originally sold to me and many many others. I hope they prove me wrong, but as of today SC is guilty of promising more than they can keep
To a lot of backers this isn't just a game, they wan't to build a space matrix.
Lets also remember that crowd funding is not the only way this game has been funded, primarily yes but there's always been private equity and I wouldn't be shocked if we hear about more in the future.
Star Citizen is the excuse to build a platform for a digital universe.
It's surprising that only 55% voted yes considering how many spend a lot of money for nothing (nice pictures of items that may come) and still voted "no".
I was on the fence when Star Citizen first showed up, but in the end I avoided it because the goal just seemed so absurdly over complicated. The Wing Commander series was great, and Freelancer was tons of fun, but the idea of having a brand new studio turn that kind of skill based gameplay into an MMO was just crazy talk. I spent a fair amount of time in EvE so its not like I hated the MMO idea, it was just too obvious the core idea was overly ambitious at best.
If they had started with S42 as a single player game, with a massive universe you could actually have an effect on (like X1/2/3, but you know, good), and then said they were building out a MMO version of it, I'd have thrown my wallet at them.
I got there early (big fan of freelancer), and played a bit. The game is just technically bad for now. Like not even a pleasant alpha to explore. I won't get my hopes up.
I'm so frustrated with star citizens development. Don't get me wrong I'm a happy backer (only $20 so maybe that's why haha), but I spent months of my free time writing software to work with star citizen, and due to the glacial pace, I feel like it's a waste of time.
Full voice controlled copilot with onscreen overlays, voic support and fully customisable commands - useful for the dozen or so pilots I was able to get to test, but it's quite difficult to gain any sales when the game isn't anywhere near where we thought it would be by now.
Oh well, at least I learnt a lot (my first software release haha).
I'm a backer of Star Citizen and I've gotten my value out of backing it just from the community and all of the content that keeps coming out on the game. It's been $50 for me for hundreds of hours of entertainment so far, much better value than two tickets to the movies.
I do believe that there has been a bunch of mismanagement, which is a shame, but I still look forward to playing it sometime within the next 5-10 years. No game has ever been as ambitious as the scope of what Star Citizen aims to do.
I just came in here to sarcastically say something like: "This is a fascinating new business model where the product is DLC trailers and hype and the act of buying DLC but not playing anything".
I did not expect someone to say that non-ironically and be happy about it ...
The core problem here is how one goes about seeking funding. Star Citizen has been hugely successful in gaining funding, which has been more of a problem than a benefit. Every new round of crowd funding or investment was married to increased promises from the devs to deliver even more. The game had to be all things to all people. Which is always easy to do hypothetically in the future than practically in the here and now.
There's in-game insurance, everyone and anyone can get it for any ship.
Some of the pledges have it as a bonus so you get it for free for that ship or for a few months. If you get destroy you can get everything back for basically nothing and faster.
Insurance isn't that big of a bonus but it solidifies your pledge. You tend to see lifetime attached to higher priced or rare packages/pledges. Which is a good message to send to backers that are willing to hand over 500+
Because it's closer than any other game in the genre to the genre ideal. I have not put any money in, but I have played in their free alpha weekends, and that game is right on the edge of being incredible. (Where "on the edge" is defined as, "Has a crap ton more work to go".)
Honestly, that game in its current alpha state has given me experiences totally unlike anything I've seen in another game.
That's the thing that's insane to me. When I think "hey, can I do this", and it's something the designers didn't expressly intend, but because everything is done to the fidelity that they've made possible... there's nothing mechanically preventing you from doing so.
It's missing a lot still, and the scope creep has been incredible. Who knows when or if they'll ever meet even the basics of their original promises.
But for example, I found a strategy to board (and steal) spaceships that were intended to be "locked", because I managed to get to an entrance that was not locked, once. I watched some entertaining videos, like where people boarded NPC fighters mid-flight, or parked spaceships inside other spaceships they weren't really intended to fit into.
A lot of AAA games "cheat", where the visuals and the actual game mechanics are pretty different. For instance, in Tomb Raider, a dramatic ledge sequence, underneath, is just a couple arrow keys you can use to balance a value and progress forward. All the wind, leaves, character movement, all of that means nothing, it's just the art layer. Meanwhile, Star Citizen has dealt with bugs like the flashlight coming unstuck from a pilot's suit midflight.
It's incredibly unique. And maybe it's an incredibly unique tech demo that will never go anywhere. Maybe Crytek will take RSI for everything they have. Maybe eventually someone else will take the reigns after they go bankrupt and finish it up somehow with more manageable expectations. Who knows?
But it's the most interesting thing anyone's done in the industry in a long time.
they are selling a dream that appeals to many gamers. they are doing it very well and it is beautiful at times.
I suspect a good number grew up in the days of Wing Commander and Privateer and rose colored glasses remember those days. Now with money to spend it isn't much to fork out a little to relive that experience.
What's hilarious is that there are no rose-colored glasses necessary. Privateer's on GOG. Just go play Privateer. It's still fun and it doesn't cost $30, $150, or $125 million.
Eventually I could fly it, and it was cool but of course it was alpha and there was nothing to do except drink more kool-aid. More ships, more promises, more stars, more space.
Now, my same ship can land on planets, I can walk around and it's great. Honestly it's pretty cool. The only issue is now I am 26, married, spend 75% of my awake time working or with my wife. I don't want an mmo.
I am no longer the target demographic, and the majority of the early adaptors are not either.