Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous came around at roughly the same time but Elite has been a complete game for years. Elite did things right in the sense that they released a complete game and added to it.

I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I can think of is that this sounds cool but why are you spending any effort on this before you have a core game?

star Citizen development just seems to be completely unfocused with periodic sales of ships to top up the coffers. How much better could it have been had they decided on core features that were a complete game and then just added content releases every 6-12 months?

For anyone who just wants to explore without the grittiness and over-realism of Elite Dangerous, check out No Man's Sky. Side note, there's a great Internet Historian video [1] on the redemption of NMS after over-promising on release.

Also, I see another game that seems to be falling into the trap of being too ambitious before having core gameplay and that's Ashes of Creation, sadly.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ&t=26s

Star Citizen should be a B-school case study about how to raise money and make a good living doing what you enjoy.

The fact that they continually raise money over years is telling that RSI is a huge success. [0]

[0] - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-15-star-citiz...

The closest thing I can think of is Minecraft, which IMO is a 100x better game but still you can't play it forever. People loved the creativity of it, but even more they liked the idea and the story of the creativity. How many times did you see in a feed that some kid made a computer in minecraft, a display, a life size battleship or tv spaceship. I am sure people see those stories-- think I could do something like that-- and go back to the game. The dream informs the play.

That game came out in March 1999. It's so old, it's creator is dead.

You can play something forever if you're dedicated enough.

Minecraft launched into EA with a game that was still actually fun to play in itself, and asked a moderate fee for access to ongoing improvements.

Star Citizen isn't selling a dream, it's selling plots of land on the moon.

Says you.

The initial folks who figured out how to build a computer a minecraft were very creative.

Rube Goldberg machines I think do involve a fair amount of creativity. it's not because they are physical per-se, but because the physical environment tends to force individual and creative thinking to solve the problems unique to that environment. Physical environments tend to be less homogenized and predictable than digital ones.

Designing and building a replica of a Boeing 747 is less creative than a rube goldberg machine, but depending on how many decisions you made yourself while building it makes it more or less creative.

Wait, how ?

Where are exponents used in Minecraft ?

2^2 = 4

2^3 = 8

You know, as much as I see people complain about their jobs or companies they work for, Chris Roberts has been able to figure it out. His delivery isn’t the best, but many people love the work he does, and that gives him a job for life that he loves.

I think it would be great if everyone on HN would be able to crowdfund a job they love. Some will deliver better than others, but it would probably reduce the stress and frustration about companies that people have.

This has been my impression too of Star Citizen for years now.

I won't be surprised if they soon jump on the crypto bandwagon and start auctioning off ships as blockchain NFTs. Still can't use them in a working game, but you can trade them on crypto markets.

It could be interesting to see markets apply sophisticated valuation tools to the net present value of future Star Citizen cash flows. I bet clever financial engineers could figure out ways continuing the funding and delaying Star Citizen's launch indefinitely.

If you are constantly trying to push some notion of a gigantic, ever-expanding open world, then someone is still going to have to paint within those confines in order to build a meaningful experience. The bigger you make it the harder it is to do this.

If you find yourself in this position (tons of money & time), maybe double down on the idea that you might suck at building engaging creative experiences, but do have the ability to produce profoundly capable tooling & engine code. License the tech out to someone who has a more reasonable creative vision.

This resonates with me. I know from experience that being comfortable stifles your creativity. I've felt more creative and focused while uncomfortable, be it by resource constraints, heartbroken, lonely or angry. At my age I prefer comfort, but I understand why some artists deviate from the norm, and even behave as if they were deliberately seeking a tortured life.

the company has made massive investments tech just around this feedback loop and to entertain these backers. it's a core to what they're doing.

unfortunately, this is not how it was sold when they first launched but that ship has sailed.

this is like WWF of game development. it's fake.

now you get a progress tracker that's fukin versioned to further feed you packets of endorphins to build up this imaginary world that doesn't exist.

I think I see your point.

Also they do things no one asked for like limiting teleporter range.

I understand your point about there not being a lot to do. I mean you're not wrong and if that's what you're looking for, I understand it may not be for you. To me, NMS is really about just chilling out and doing stuff. That stuff is largely self-directed like finding the right kind of planet ofr a base, building that base, getting the ship you want and fully upgrading it. You don't need to do any of that but if you enjoy that you can.

Being open in this way is a key part of fostering emergent player behaviour.

It's also completely OK to play it for awhile and then decide you're done. Personally I've played >200 hours. Every major patch changes and adds to the major storyline so it can be worth starting a new game to see what that's like.

IMO the most interesting thing about NMS is their marketing story. They were able to achieve enormous hype before launch, and since then they've been able to continuously grab headlines with the redemption narrative. I would love to know who's doing their marketing/PR because I believe they are very talented.

X4 Foundations is the new release, but I haven't tried it personally yet.

Major mistake. The game was buggy, and the worlds cold and lifeless. The fanboys excused it as "well, every Egosoft game is released like this... but it gets better after a few updates...."

Haven't played X4 in a long time. I've heard its better, but I would caution people interested in purchasing the game to do their research, and only buy it on sale.

And never buy an Egosoft product within 6 months of release, at a minimum.

It's just how Egosoft works apparently.

Part of me was turned off by how long it seemed to take to travel between systems. I saw some streamers play this and taking an hour to do something like that is just way too much for me.

I was excited about the idea of the new expansion. Like being able to walk around in a world you can fly in seems like such a good addition but I've come to realize that you're really developing a completely different game with almost no crossover.

(To me Elite Dangerous is the VR experience. Anyone who love space and have a chance to try E:D in VR absolutely should do it. I refuse to play E:D in 2D, and I'll probably give Frontier money for the new expansion even if I will not play it for many months just in hope that the game will stay around in years to come to have a chance to scratch my space itch)

Many hobbies take time to prep, do, then clean up after. EG, working on a car/boat, working with hands, or really many hobbies.

Jumping in/out isn't doable. And yes, I know this is a sadness.

But a full life is its own reward too...

But they had to develop this. The fans have been asking for it since forever. I think that what the fans actually really want, isn't just the ability to walk around their ships and look at space stations up close. The FPS game that is built around it isn't actually that interesting to most ED players, and I think the people who will be playing it is a different category of people.

I haven't done much walking around since it's giving me single digit performance on my 4k screen, so I need to get a new graphics card. The flying part is perfectly fine at 60 fps at 4k.

On its face, this seems like an obviously awful idea. Escaping from prison the first time sounds awesome. Escaping from prison the fifth time sounds super boring.

So there is nothing inherent to the topic that makes or breaks this. On an very abstract level it is something that forces you into a different kind of gameplay as a punishment. Whether that different kind of gameplay is engaging or boring is a different can of beans.

History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds).

This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of Creation.

The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer gets nothing in-game for doing so.

Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even the permanent death of a character isn't permanent.

Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just hubris that "my game will be different".

So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world PvP, at all. That requires no development effort whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like concept but those are optional and can be added later.

No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just alienate those who don't want PvP.

Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets on stations can't even hit anyone.

I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for cheap entertainment.

There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system. I think that whole aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of the game and felt so organic.

Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly designed from head to toe in a game design doc.

What stops a griefer from just putting cash on the head of someone they want to torment?

You cannot counter somebody's preference with another preference.

> Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system.

...and you are also missing the roleplay aspect of this -- "I am an outlaw!" -- that a lot of people enjoy and get deliberately flagged in order to experience it.

What you describe hasn't been happening in most MMORPGs that tried to have a world PvP. Maybe it happened where you were -- and I'd argue it happened for a limited time. But the points of your parent commenter still stand. It's a gaming dream that just never materializes due to human nature.

Game devs assume that the players will do things that make sense or reward them, and that assumption fails every single time.

What would be your preferred way of me bringing this up with a hot take to his hot take? Apparently a counter isn't valid or you're being pedantic.

> ...and you are also missing the roleplay aspect of this -- "I am an outlaw!" -- that a lot of people enjoy and get deliberately flagged in order to experience it.

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily. Also, you would be punished with a "jail" time after you died. Not a permanent death, but the time counter increased per murder. I specifically remember my friend having a player killer character that his own brother poisoned for the bounty. My buddy was quite furious and I believe even got into a fist fight with his brother about it given that character wouldn't be playable for weeks.

> What you describe hasn't been happening in most MMORPGs that tried to have a world PvP.

I mean at the time it was one of the largest MMORPGs on the market. Maybe because in the late 90's early 00's the market was smaller and there was less griefing online, which I don't believe to be true, but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around. Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.

Well, I don't know English idioms so saying "hot take" to me is netting you a blank stare. I suppose you are simply saying "my opinion differs from yours when it comes to..."? If so, then sorry for my remark, apparently it was misguided.

> It was a thing that existed and you were often careful to avoid it otherwise you couldn't access resources in town easily.

There are people who don't play for resources as a goal or, in general, follow the path that the game creators have outlined for the players. A role-playing "outlaw" experience is basically being a good citizen in the game until you farm enough gear and resources and then turn around and start griefing other players without caring you're denied access to towns because again, you want to roleplay an outlaw. Live in the open, be in constant danger of being killed by a bounty hunter, and not being allowed in the main hubs. Some people are into that.

Time and again, game creators have tried to discourage such behaviours but the thing they keep missing is that some people do things regardless of partially punishing mechanics. Game creators optimize the game flow for people who want to gain stuff with minimum (or reasonable) resistance. And there is no small amount of people whose motivation doesn't fall within those parameters at all.

> but the system worked pretty well despite headhunters constantly being around

I cannot prove it but I'd wager this was due to smaller amount of players and gaming not being as mainstream as it is today. These limiting mechanics simply don't scale after more people start pouring in due to the huge diversity of needs and priorities of the players who joined.

The punishing mechanics are meant to discourage players of a certain state of mind and/or priorities and/or needs. But I've known people who sit at their PCs for 10 hours a day looking for whom to grief (in WoW) with a huge grin on their face during ALL of it. Bored people with comfy lives who had nothing better to do and they were happy to grief all day long. What can you do. Nothing, except leave the game (which I did).

My only conclusion or a fix is: make the punishments much more severe or if even that doesn't work, simply disallow certain behaviours to begin with, e.g. like with WoW's PvP and PvE servers. If you are on the latter, nobody can attack you no matter what (although they do still allow enemy players to kill your friendly NPCs so there griefing can take the form of them denying you quest givers or vendors which is still nasty).

> Perhaps no one has found a solid formula for it or the more modern MMORPG gameplay loop doesn't allow it with the constant fetch and grind.

Yeah, I think so too (agreed with both your points). Most companies are too scared to change anything; the normal [MMO]RPGs make certain amounts of money and they are extremely risk-averse to try anything even slightly new, lest even this revenue dries up (and I'd argue the revenue is less than they want).

It's not like games can't be made to accommodate for all kinds of human nature IMO (and where they can't you can simply use opt-in mechanics, again like PvP or PvE servers). We simply have gotten to the very logical point in time where the market is cornered by several giants and several dozen hard-working smaller studios and it doesn't make financial sense for any company to experiment and look for a better formula.

The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from acting upon other players and making other players miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them.

That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution of how people self-describe themselves to the four quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of the number of people they can act upon ("grief").

I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer" players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased enough with single player games (and single player game design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these days is just as often left by game designs to fall through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or Discord.

That's precisely correct. I've been in WoW from 2007 to 2012 and you could tell that the people who loved ruining the fun for everybody else were the most vocal in the forums. They also became quite good in painting it with innocent colors: "think of the roleplaying aspect, are you not an RPG anymore?", "the world feels more vibrant and live", "fights for resources happen in the real world, let's have a realistic game" etc.

While in reality they simply enjoy obstructing other people's gaming. And this has been evident for so many years, and it has been known that these people are the minority -- it's truly puzzling why they haven't been shut down, hard, at least a decade ago.

The only good explanation that I have ever found was: part of the game devs are those griefers, and they defend the open-world PvP on internal meetings.

---

The other kinds of players are indeed much more quiet. I personally started playing WoW because I wanted an RPG and I didn't care about the MMO aspect for a long time. But it's what the market had available as the best game in the genre at the time. My regret from back then is that I didn't aggressively scan the market in more details. I surely would have found a single-player RPG to my liking.

The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me.

I wish more games took a similar mature approach.

I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that would be gone in minutes.

Basically, wasting a ton of time.

That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you have a job and a life.

EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to be with what looked like zero competition in their heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have been doing pretty poorly.

It's one of the reasons I left WoW. I don't want to be at the mercy of somebody like you who creatively invents a beautiful justification for stopping me to have my gaming fun.

I am sure whatever it is you are telling to yourself makes sense. But not to me.

You don't need to be flippant about it, if you are so worried about others "ruining" your gaming fun, when why TF are you playing an MMO? That's just like setting yourself up for disappointment.

Much happier on the Switch these days.

I mean you start most TES games in prison.

If it's the former, maybe you tank the stat loss and deal with it. If it's the former, how many times are you actually going to tolerate going to prison rather than loading your save file from before you got caught? In a multiplayer game that's probably not an option. Breaking out of prison multiple times is both annoying and immersion breaking, especially if its the same prison over a short period.

Obviously the concept of a prison break is fine for gameplay. There are whole games dedicated to it. But implementing it as a punishment is by default going to be viewed as either not a punishment, due to it being rewarding, or tedious, because the player doesn't want to do it. Generally speaking, there's intrinsic loss to being put in prison already because you're forced to stop what you were actually trying to do already. Ocarina of Time had the gerudo sequence where you could get thrown into prison if caught, but then hookshot yourself out immediately. That's probably the better choice for most games because having to deal with consequences of prison are very boring. If the system to escape is easy, it should be very short. If it's not easy, you have to question how annoying it is to the player and whether it actually makes the game better.

Yeah, going to prison in video games can be quite fun and dynamic to the point where the scenario is replayable. Helps that there's a different jail in each major city in Skyrim as well.

Don't get caught. And yeah, that's an option, if you're leet enough ;)

PS: I've bought Elite but not Star Citizen ;-)

PPS: I've also bought Elite in 1984 and was blown away.

I've done some ambitious things in my engineering career... nothing like Star Citizen in absolute scope but relative to the resources I had they were ambitious. But I always made sure there was some core I could show off before the project was complete.

If nothing else, Agile (by which I mean more the orginal manifesto rather than any specific thing like "scrum") recommends this sort of approach for a reason. The more parts you develop in isolation in your "ambitious" project, the higher the odds are that when it comes time to put them all together, they won't go together. Games have the extra problem that they can both technically fail to go together as expected, but they can also artistically fail to go together as well, making it even riskier to do this in gaming. Many is the game where the obvious fault lines between the various pieces are plainly visible in the final product. (Heck, The Ubisoft Game™ that they keep remaking and just slapping new skins on is all but a game structure designed to make this approach possible, which is basically why they keep remaking it over and over; it's not that they're artistically committed to it, it's that they've probably structured their entire game making organization around it and the rest is just Conway's Law.)

I still see little reason to expect Star Citizen to ever be anything like the hopes and dreams. I still expect that whatever finally comes out of this process will be profoundly disappointing. The process just can't work.

PS: I've introduced Agile in several companies as CTO, no need to convince me ;-)

Excatly, and it will exactly produce the games we currently have.

Even if they keep going to 10 years, they're doomed. To be relevant 10 years from now, SC is probably going to have to switch engines. That will probably mean starting from scratch on many game systems and assets.

There's a reason you don't see many (or any?) successful games that have a 10+ year development time.

Game engines went through a period where they evolved very quickly, and they are still evolving. But the rate of change is slower, like word processors. It starts to make more sense to evolve them rather than replace them.

Without someone to constrain him he tends to constantly expand the scope of his projects. If people knew about his involvement in the debacle that was Starlancer/Freelancer then they would've seen this coming.

So no, it's not a matter of being 'too ambitious'. It's a matter of shifting the goalposts and expanding the scope of your project to the point that it never actually ships. When he had someone to stop him from doing that he delivered. Without that, he just keeps soaking up money as long as people will enable that behavior.

Still, making everything required for a regular mmorpg takes a lot of time and effort and most doesn't deliver a quality product, so it is still very likely it wont be great.

Elite Dangerous took the more release and then add updates to maintain momentum. A more common approach and how many investors would hang on for all these years, yet for Star Citizen, when the investors are users and the extra's the offer sure do tap into that Whale momentum income and really does seem like a whole new approach to business the way it is panning. Though Kickstarter seem to of coined that.

I love that there's this spectrum of space games in the last few years. Starlink is a fun little game, with a bad rep due to the toys-to-life aspect. (Though also, if you like the toys, they're cheap/clearance nowadays).

Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of those huge ideas he has always wanted to build on but now with an essentially unlimited budget funded by idiots like me that believed he'd actually be able to deliver an actual game.

Seeing a progress tracker for it is just a slap in the face. They aren't being held accountable by anyone but themselves and they've proved time and time again that they're incapable of sticking to timelines. They'll just create more awesome looking tech demos that are probably not even linked together into a fully realized and playable game.

If Star Citizen could actually deliver everything it promised, it'd be a damned near perfect game for a nerd like me who loves science fiction, outer space, and epic space operas. The idea of zooming through the cosmos on my ship "Freelancer" with a group of friends doing whatever we feel like, exploring new worlds, fighting space pirates, and getting a drink on an old and decrepit space station built a century ago sounds like everything I ever wanted in a video game.

Sadly, Star Citizen will never be that game.

I like Star Citizen for being the one constant thing in life. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I know there will always be a Star Citizen roadmap to look up.

Star Citizen was announced in 2010 and has raised over US$300 million [1].

It's wild to me that it takes twice as long and similar amount of money to make a game launch than a rocket launch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_v1.0 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/313367-star-citizen-deve...

Star Citizen is pretty much the proof that unlimited resources is not necessarily a good thing for a project. Constraints can help keep things focused.

Massively mismanaged project, and not just because it was overfunded.

They are basically making Wing Commander Privateer 4 at this point. Game wise they would have been better off shipping something years ago that worked and then iterating on it. However, it seems money wise the route they are going is their business decision and that is doing very well. There are a lot of tall 'promises' made that are not going to live up to the hype.

I personally gave up pre-buying any games ages ago. I have plenty of existing games that work. In some cases I have not played some for 20+ years and I am going back and playing them again and it is a blast as I do not remember much of it other than a vague 'I think I liked this one'.

What game I do see looks very nice. But there is not a lot of meat on those bones. In its current state looks like a very solid tech demo. When they finally ship I look forward to seeing what they got. But at this point I do not expect much.

It's hard to look at all that and think what RSI is doing still makes sense at this point. It seems like someone is being a bit of a perfectionist. I can relate, which is why I agree with other comments that a Project Manager who can pull Roberts back from this tendency would be a huge improvement and probably make him less stressed as well.

It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is a bit wonky. The FPS gameplay looks supremely uninteresting, I think they should have focused more on the roleplay and exploration aspect.

On the whole it's a really great game, but no game will ever really play like a personal movie or novel.

One example where things do / can work is Space Engineers, where players can build and program maps in the sandbox for others to play.

Isn't part of goal for SC to be far more realistic because that's only way to be immersive?

I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I've read that there's a planet that has player spawn in one area, with space port where their space ship is being in other area, and you need to get to train station, wait for the train, ride the train to space port to get to your ship, entire process taking 10 minutes to complete?

imo, eve is the best current implementation of "be a real person in space". much less in-your-face grinding, since skill training happens offline. a few noobs in cheap ships can be a serious threat to an experienced player in something expensive. player actions can have serious consequences in-universe. although the last time I played, there were some issues with capital ship spamming in alliance wars. not sure whether they've done anything about that; it's been a while since I played.

Is that all because they can't make walking in space work in VR? I mean they could say "you need to play normally" when switching to space legs.

There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature request, but I think they're underestimating how much effort first class on-foot VR support would be to implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in VR.

The console release is in the early fall, and that's when most of the community expects the PC version to reach a more acceptable level of stability.

I suspect internally someone pitched the "FPS is more mass appeal and will draw in new players!" idea and it just went ahead uncontested?

I've also read rumours (but enough from different places that they're likely somewhat valid) that Frontier as a company has had a lot of engineering turnover in the last 2 years, which no doubt has an effect on extending and maintaining an in-house engine and product like Elite.

Frontier definitely tried to appeal to the typical FPS crowd with the on-foot conflict zones, which was a huge misstep: it was never going to be good enough as just a small part of a much larger game, and a lot of the existing players are much more interested in the space stuff.

If you ignore the shooty bit of the on-foot gameplay, though, it really does (or at least has the potential to) add to the core gameplay. Being able to walk around station hangers and concourses, prison ships, planetary installations and the planet surface itself is definitely increasing my enjoyment of the game.

The general hope is that they're leaving a bunch of the content releases - hints of new ships, SRVs and new thargoid-related gameplay - until the console releases for Odyssey in the autumn so that a large chunk of the playerbase isn't left behind. Sadly that means that us PC players are currently beta testing Odyssey, but after the recent patches it's just about performant and stable enough to enjoy.

And more than most games, Elite basically requires you to use third-party tools built by the community to do the more complex stuff like long-distance navigation or trading. Many are already long in the tooth, and Odyssey is rapidly pushing away the most dedicated part of the community.

The thing is that this can be said about many games, but something that will always hold true is that "potential", "vision" and "promises" are not worth much (basically nothing) when it comes to games. The loop of overambitious (or false) promises -> failed execution and delivery is as old as games themselves.

I remember cruising through a desolate system brimming with the broken hulks of battlecruisers to be ambushed by alien Nomads as I tried to beat a hasty retreat with my cargo bay full of high-grade weapons salvage.

Along with that in 3.14, new power management and missile stuff that will hopefully make multi-person ships effective compared to each person in their own ship.

I'd like to think this lets them finally settle on a flight model and figure out combat balance, but not optimistic because the planned ship armor/damage system isn't in yet. I'll continue to fire it up for a couple of hours every patch to go sightseeing, but it's a ways off of gameplay that I'd want to sink real time into.

All that said, you can get in for $45, and I've paid more than that for worse games. I'm looking forward to my next sightseeing trip to the volumetric clouds of Crusader.

I'm not interested in tech demos. I don't care about how they're adding one more new system into the 'game.' I don't care that they've figured out some beautiful lighting or entry into a planet or gigantic dune-like space worms or an FPS system or a prison system or anything like that. I'm not interested in going sightseeing, even if they are very impressive to behold. My computer that I bought for Star Citizen can't even really run it competently the way it is now.

I've given up on it. if they ever do release an actual game, I'll reevaluate then. But frankly I can't share your enthusiasm for it.

Joke aside, I want to say something controversial here: I don't think the release date/progress matters much anymore for the dev team at this day and age. At least not as matter as it used to be when the game plan was just announced. The same point is somewhat true for their backers: they are not in a hurry as well, they want to (emotionally) see Star Citizen success one day (Or they just don't care anymore).

(Assuming they're actually building a game, instead of doing something else with that money, of course)

Remember [Freelancer]? It was released back in 2003, some people are still playing the game today, and they even go as far as creating an open source version of it called [Librelancer].

[Freelancer]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)

[Librelancer]: https://github.com/Librelancer/Librelancer

The scale of Star Citizen is way larger than Freelancer, and the potential of the game is greater as well since you can do many things in the game. If one day Star Citizen releases and delivered what's promised, the game will last for a very long time. So for the fans, the wait maybe worth it.

(And hopefully it will be released before Elon Musk, NASA, ESA, CNSA or ROSCOSMOS etc give us the real-world version and make us actual 1-heart space-slaves LOL)

For the non-fans, however, the market is largely fulfilled by Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky etc.

In fact, one aspect of Freelancer that's been left to history is the fact that when Microsoft bought some equity in his studio before acquiring them entirely, some producers claimed he later used part of that money to fund his failed movie ventures instead of Freelancer, which were also later held afloat by a weird German tax fraud scheme (the mastermind of which later went to jail, which also resulted in German law changing and his whole excursion into the film industry collapsing instantly). His response to this was "it's fine, because it was general equity stake and not earmarked for Freelancer." The fact they had to wrestle Freelancer away from him is absolutely not surprising when he quite literally was dicking around on C-tier shitfilms like Wing Commander while people busted their ass.

People here are mentioning the notion of auteurs, of visionaries, etc. I disagree; that's an insult to actual creatives. Hideo Kojima is creative and has proven himself time and time again with both his repeated success and his wide array of unusual work. Everything I've seen of him indicates to me that Chris Roberts is, essentially, an overly ambitious child of a man and petty boss who was lucky Richard Garriott ever gave him a chance, and has ridden on almost nothing more than his legacy at Origin Systems, and has been desperately attempting to capture that again ever since.

But this part:

> Hideo Kojima is creative and has proven himself time and time again with both his repeated success and his wide array of unusual work.

...I'll disagree with. Kojima seems to be a guy who wants to actively subvert expectations which, with the release of Death Stranding, felt even more like a rebellious teenager wanting to stick it to the system above all else, and not make an actual fun and engaging game. (Not to mention that the premise and general plot have been beaten to death long ago and are well-known for most but the most juvenile of gamers.)

"Unusual work" does not equal "interesting and fun result". In fact I find most modern incarnations of "unusual" to be rebelling against the "norm" just for the sake of it.

But I in general have a beef with a lot of these Japanese "creators". They might be unusual on the background of a lot of the copy-paste Japanese (or generally Asian) works but on the global scale they are nothing special.

In fact they are a running joke in no small amount of circles: "Oh, a Kojima game? I bet now we'll have a crying raven, or a talking baby, or cows will turn out to be the superior race on Earth all along? And I bet there will be a government conspiracy even if most of humanity is already dead? And the protagonist will be just a regular guy who reluctantly saves the world?"

I kid you not, the above is almost word-for-word quote from a table discussion I had with a few other guys and girls when Death Stranding was 2-3 months away from release.

You and others might find this unconstructive and maybe even obnoxious but I'd still like to bring the perspective on you that guys like Kojima are in fact fairly predictable as well, and not in a good way.

But now somebody has to support and update the progress tracker indefinitely...

No it isn't. It's also not even clear it will ever come even close to it at this point.

I also seriously doubt that there are so many backers fuelling this space video production company. It's pretty well known that there is a significant amount of whales who carry this thing around.

I'm still in awe at what they have achieved. You really do feel like you are in space. I can float around the station for an hour and not get bored. I walked into a space ship and got lost inside of it one time. So much if it is realistic. Nothing compares.

Sadly, it's just a great tech demo. That's all it will ever be. I wish RSI would be more honest.

- volumetric clouds

- interior/exterior culling

- "dynamic door alignment"

- ship engine swapping

So looks like they won't be completing their magic millions-of-players-on-a-single-instance tech any time soon. [0]

[0] https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmissio...

The million players thing is still being worked on and they have said their aiming for this year, they go into more detail on monthly reports. That counts as one of the more major techs like the Icache system which also wasnt on the roadmap but is on the progress tracker. ITs competed already. They get a decent amount of stuff done and info out about things once in a blue moon your going to miss large swaths of info.

I'm not sure it's possible, no matter how good you are, to ever get to the point that you don't need someone else assessing what you're doing and willing to be critical, at times even harsh if necessary. You will always be too close to your own work. Cultivating a dispassionate attitude can help, but you'll still be too close to your own work.

It's a shame, considering how on-point a lot of the messages in his earlier games were (the speech by the AI on the role of automated systems filtering human knowledge to "create context" out of endless junk data streams - in a game that came out in 2001! - always sticks out to me), even if sometimes his actual scientific knowledge was a bit shaky. (You know why Solid Snake never lost his full head of hair? Male pattern baldness is a dominant gene!)

That was a hidden easter egg - breaking the fourth wall and unrelated to the story and gameplay.

EDIT> I removed an unfriendly statement

I mean, neither of us chatted with the creator about it so don't act like you know it for a fact.

Also, "next time do X", really? Gave me a good giggle at least.

I agree with the first point - but dont understand your second point. A reference to what? I don't understand

>I mean, neither of us chatted with the creator about it so don't act like you know it for a fact.

Know what for a fact? It's a well known easter egg - have you actually played the game? Im getting a feeling you haven't.

>Also, "next time do X", really? Gave me a good giggle at least.

I was just giving you advice as if you were a younger me, it is not a personal attack just unwarranted advice, not sure why you would laugh. I mean't no disrespect in any case. I think its good to talk to people with counter arguments and I appreciate it. I just wish you didn't keep making points I don't quite understand and then moving onto another one - such as "talking with Kojima" himself is the only way to resolve any of what I believe are straight forward points.

But I appreciate your time in replying. Im just trying to avoid coding a particularly thorny issue in my hobby project.

Nope, I admit I didn't. But I got told by several of my acquaintances, then watched a few videos and I have to admit I wasn't won over -- quite the opposite in fact.

But I get your point, easter eggs are being put in games all the time, that's true.

> I was just giving you advice as if you were a younger me

Sounded like that to me as well but still, no hard feelings. :) I just don't take kindly to anything said that sounds condescending.

---

As for our discussion, I am sharing an empirical historical observation. I am not an avid gamer in general -- even though I was there where Diablo 2 and StarCraft 1 came out and I played them in the computer clubs I was frequenting... very long time ago, at least two decades now. I also played Quake 2 and 3 a lot to the point of almost being a pro and winning a few tournaments.

But again, I never was a hardcore gamer in the meaning of playing 100+ games over a course of a year or two, for example.

I did give a good amount of games a fair try however and Kojima's games always struck me as made by a person who just wanted to surprise the consumers of his media -- and coherent story and engaging universe be damned in the process.

Maybe I am too big of a fan of logical and coherent story universes -- could be the case.

But "Death Stranding" for me was a final nail in the coffin. I watched a playthrough and while it was moderately pleasant to consume it passively, the premise is absurd -- dead people turning into nuclear bombs, guys living like spiders, couriers addicted to the rush of delivering packages, and let's not even mention the baby in the bottle or the Lovecraftian monsters the protagonist encounters here and there. Oh, and the protagonist was immortal if I remember correctly? And yeah, a government conspiracy, nevermind that most of humanity is gone and there's no need for it -- although that part I can somewhat understand and maybe justify, since at my age I lost all faith in people and I know that power corrupts and that some people would literally destroy the world just so they can have the last word.

Most of what was in the game felt very... out of place. It's like Kojima threw a dice on each story / premise element.

I enjoy and appreciate artists that try to be unconventional. But my opinion -- and I of course I am not going to claim that my opinion is a fact -- is that his shtick is shock value and randomness. I get it how that can be appealing for people who consume mostly the same stuff all the time but I'd personally grow tired of it at the middle of his second game.

>I just don't take kindly to anything said that sounds condescending. It's not something that I tend to witness - are you sure people aren't just trying to help generally ( that is the way I tend to take it when it happens )

>Maybe I am too big of a fan of logical and coherent story universes -- could be the cas Ah ok I see - thats kind of interesting - can you recommend anything? I havent played games in ages

I might not be very constructive about it but for years I can't understand what's so different or interesting about the guy. His main goal seems to be randomness. He is so desperate to be different. And of course, he's not.

I remember the early days where Chris Roberts would say anything to folks asking for things like "can my guy be left handed to shoot but right handed to right?" or "can my character have a tattoo that isn't visible to anyone?" - these aren't really examples but they were the level of questions I remember folks asking. He'd answer "yes" to anything and everything.

I quickly realized that the game would become a chore when folks were euphoric that you'd have to manually load cargo on your ships. It felt like folks didn't want a space game but a second life and there was already a great space game that didn't waste my time doing stupid loops that I didn't want (Elite Dangerous, though they did add stupid loops with Engineering).

After that I kept following the project's development and having a giggle as the madness increased over time.

Which is a shame because that's what I was buying in to. I wanted massive player counts in a persistent and evolving universe. I didn't want "dynamic door alignment" and "Face over IP". My hope was Star Citizen would be the game to break the mold that WOW created 20 years ago and gave us the next generation of MMO.

They cant even finish the single player campaign which they did all the mocap and VA work for years ago. Is Mark Hamill going to still be alive when Squadron 42 is released?

Feature creep is their entire business model, that's how the make money. Their game(s) is mediocre and certainly not up to part with the budget they got for developing it, so they are going to stall to get even more money from their fans.

Here's a bunch of people having a good time and making a video out of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31v7sSGfTm8

The end result is that there is no really good way to actually make use of all that empty volume that the game already has. And that ratio is only going to become worse if all the other solar systems get added. And Star Citizen revels in that available playground with excessive travel times, low ship ranges, few ways to discover and intercept nearby ships, etc.

For comparison, Elite: Dangerous has an even vaster playing field, but it does three things that make it work: the vast majority of the galaxy is designed for lone explorers cruising out there and trying to survive without assistance. The rest of the gameplay is contricted to "the bubble", a tiny part of the galaxy that contains civilization. There, all the PvP and PvE gameplay is concentrated. Little tricks help focus most of the gameplay on very few spots in each solar system, forcing encounters to happen quite naturally. Arrival in a solar system is always at a specific point near its star. Likewise, trading and resupply happens at only very few places in each system. These are the places you need to reach as a miner or trader to make money. And these are the spots to stake out as a pirate or bounty hunter. Supercruise also turns the vastness of space within a system into a playing field of reasonable size that also reveals most of the traffic.

Reminds me of Duke Nukem sequel who never was released because the dev team kept switching engines every few years because of envy.

Also, the large size of the world kind of destroys any kind of balance, given that ships need to travel at 1000+ m/s to make travel possible, but combat at those speeds is basically a dps fest where you click on a small icon in the distance, with no dodging or outflying the other pilot. They've tried to adress this in like 3 different ways at this point, and nothing has worked.

Regardless, I will never understand why they didn't just massively reduce weapon ranges and copy ED's flight model, given that it is pretty much the best in the "WW2 dogfights in space" business, and has been out for over 8 years now.

That doesn't mean they're not working on an actual game (or games), but it follows that almost all the effort goes into the in-game asset sales funnel. Creation of new assets and selling them.

What you and I would likely consider core parts of game development, namely focusing on technology and gameplay, has never been a priority except in short bursts. But even during those short burst of priorization, development seems to have been hampered by duplication of effort, incompetent programming, and absent project management. Judging by what's being accomplished, the often-repeated reasoning of "it's just very complex and ambitious" is not enough of an explanation. On top of this, I believe there is actually a disincentive of making gameplay progress too quickly, because much like many SV startups there is probably more value in keeping the unicorn phase going.

That being said, I don't think SC is a scam. It's just a victim of its overall design in some respects, while continuing to be very successful financially.

It's not. You grow your game organically and incrementally and release early if it is too complex to be ready at launch.

There are items on the progress tracker for replacing the rendering engine even now. It's insanity.

It's incredible this wasn't labeled a scam and shut down. Warm fuzzy intangibles like "community" and "the idea of a game" aside, imagine what good in the world that $$$ could've done otherwise.

They know what this answer is, but they will go to great lengths not to share. For example, this detailed look at what each team/person is doing, but only for 9 months. With no idea how they relate to an actual release.

At the rate at which the scope of the project has been expanding? Never.

Bad initial design, change of engines, licensing issues, unbelievable feature creep, questionable management..

And I'm not sure exactly, but this progress tracker suggests the game will be complete by March 2022 ? Its just begging for criticism.

They said it took 3 engineers one weekend of work, using a diffchecker.

https://arwes.dev/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24282270

It's there to be pointed at but achieve nothing

I played Elite (the original) on the C64, and loved it. I've been 'meaning to play ED for years' - but still haven't. I bought No Man's Sky, was disappointed, as were many, at the time, but about a year ago started playing again - got excited (again) and then lost interest due to the heavy time commitment required to do anything useful.

I suspect games like Red Dead Redemption II would be a similar time-sink without an awful lot of ersatz (in-game) accomplishments. I'm tempted, but wary.

If EA had half a brain they would beatup robert and take his development money.

Definitely a vast change in scope, and probably disappointing for early backers, but I'm actually intrigued and excited about how far they can go with this.

[1]: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

Chris Roberts is a brilliant guy to work with, a first rate coder and by any standard a visionary. He seems to have a new idea every ten seconds, and they usually begin "it would be cool if..." An hour later, you're still taking notes and he's saying, "and it would be realllly cool if..." Technical difficulties and obstacles were, at that stage anyway, actually a reason to do things. Part of the idea was to prove that PC gaming would always outstrip the console experience. Polygon counts could be made higher, and higher again. The goal wasn't performance, but the opposite - how much could you put on the screen. Think about it now with 10 years of hindsight, that's a race you're only one ever one generation of consoles away from losing.

My impression of working with him was that there's no such thing as practical constraints. A good enough coder should be able to get around anything. Prior to the first demo, there was a hard deadline to have something to show, so a lot of corners had to be cut. Once that happened, his attitude immediately shifted to "sky's the limit". And with the wild success of the first round of crowd funding, that became "spare NO expense." This was never just a space game, or even only his magnum opus. It's a fully functioning universe that exists in his mind, that just needs to be turned into code. Everything Wing Commander was limited by, this would be unconstrained by. Everything is possible as long as you're committed to always building for the latest platform, on the most powerful machine in the known universe, and your audience was committed to having the same hardware. A newer engine comes out or newer hardware? Tear down everything and rebuild for it.

So, I never thought that this was a crowd-funded game about the making of a game. I think it's what happens when perfectionism meets unlimited resources. I also have to say that the community forum was very, very involved and demanding from the beginning. They were already playing the game they imagined in their own heads. Having put their dollars in, they felt entitled to their say in feature development. And this crowd involvement, their one-upping each other's ideas, mixed with Chris's almost infinite drive to incorporate new features, and his impulse to say yes to almost anything that sounded cool, and then a tsunami of cash, created a dynamic of setting up more and more far-fetched goals right out of the gate.

Around that point, what I had built - which was never actually integrated into a working build - was jettisoned for a different approach. He hired 500 people and I sort of drifted off without ever being specifically let go.

Still, it was a great experience, one of the most challenging and certainly one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on, especially in the sky's-the-limit phase, and Chris is the kind of demanding but fair person who held everyone to high standards, but who held himself to the highest. He was a pleasure to work with. I hope he finishes his game.

They're making a game but first they have to build and launch a progress tracker website?

In general, this is the case the higher profile and more money is poured into it.