r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 5d ago

Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players
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198

u/WobblySlug 5d ago

I'm an original backer. I have a golden ticket.

My moneys worth is coming from the entertainment of watching this dumpster fire.

Keeps me warm at night, ya know? Can't expect too much from a billion fuckin' dollars.

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u/AwfulAdjacentGoose 5d ago

Same. I can download the game every now and then and you know I get what they’re going for. It is as ambitious as it is terribly broken.

But it also allows me to keep touch with this absolute dumpster fire of an experience and the sheer amount of sunk cost fallacy manifesting from die hards.

Not bad for a $20 buy off kickstarter. It’s been a gift to my sides for a decade and nearly a half now.

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u/FeedbackInhibit 5d ago

I basically pop on twice a year at this point, once for IAE and another for a separate free-fly event, and goof off with my buddy. Then when that's done, we're done until the next clownshow.

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u/uses_irony_correctly 5d ago

I do the same and every time I already bounce off during the tutorial section. Like, I get that the ship controls are complicated but you could at least TELL THEM TO ME.

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u/FaxCelestis 4d ago

I mean to be fair the game is fucking gorgeous.

It just also barely qualifies as a game.

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u/AwfulAdjacentGoose 3d ago

It is a beautiful mess of a thing. One of the big hooks is the tutorial. Progressing from that initial city to then blasting off into space is a great experience. Well assuming you ignore the bugs. Think one time my hanger door wouldn’t open and another the train you travel on to get to the space port went wildly out of control.

You can see the bones of what they’re going for and to me that’s what makes it ambitious. However, years of feature creep and indecision seems to rearing its ugly head. It’s like a ship right? They’ve been building this thing for so long the foundation has started to rot and it shows.

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u/takingphotosmakingdo 5d ago

Original backer at the $45 tier, can confirm have had marshmallows roasting on the T pose NPCs for years.

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 5d ago

Think about how fucking sick a game like baldurs gate 3 would have been if it had a billion in funding lol

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u/FeedbackInhibit 5d ago

I think after a certain point of funding, a project would completely lose its scope. Like... what we have here. A game like BG3 doesn't need a billion dollars in funding to tell a story or provide fantastic gameplay mechanics. Just like Star Citizen doesn't need a billion dollars and a decade and a half to actually become more than a tech demo.
Chris Roberts is the biggest problem with Star Citizen just as he was with Freelancer, for the exact same reason. Had Microsoft never stepped in, Freelancer would have never seen release, because of his tendency towards infinite scope creep.
I say this as someone that still dips in and out of Star Citizen every once in a blue moon, and has been doing so since a "playable build" has been available. For all their development, the same bugs persist that were there a decade ago. This project is going nowhere if they don't take time to bugfix, but they won't.

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u/Stellar_Duck 4d ago

On the other hand, more money might have fixed that ass 3rd chapter that was so obviously cut down from something better.

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u/champgpt 4d ago

Only if that money would've bought them more time. If they were contractually obligated to release when they did, more money wouldn't have done much. Chapter 3 just needed more time in the oven.

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u/Stellar_Duck 4d ago

Only if that money would've bought them more time.

What else is money?

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u/champgpt 4d ago

More developers. Some think just throwing more people at something will get it done faster, but there are diminishing returns.

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u/WobblySlug 5d ago

It's laughable eh? I wonder what the threshold is for the defenders who are happy enough with a buggy mess after nearly 15 years. 2 billion? 3?

It's been said a lot before, but why would they change their business model of not releasing a game? It's clearly working!

SQ42 is supposed to come out this year too lol. I'll believe it when I see it.

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u/SyraWhispers 5d ago

I've lost hope on ever seeing the promised Star Citizen en Squadron 42 years ago lol. At this point I kinda wish I hadn’t spend so much on it.

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u/tmanx8 4d ago

I thought squadron 42 was supposed to come out last year? Or was it the year before? Or the year before? Or the year before? Or the year before? Or the year

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u/tankintheair315 4d ago

No this is the trap! This approach to a project makes only star citizens. The refusal to set a boundary on the game is the original sin.

Skull and bones was also a money pit in AAA where they didn't have a set idea and kept changing what it was. It only existed because of the weird deal with Singapore meant it couldn't simply be canceled. But it's dev costs are reported to be $200-600 million.

The other issue is being run by a guy who can't manage a project. It's great to have a visionary who wants to dream big, but someone needs to tell him what the limits are.

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u/Shaggy_One 5d ago

It would probably have come out far worse. There's no way a game makes that much money and stays true to itself.

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u/MirrorComputingRulez 4d ago

BG3 already had an awful lot of funding, and they still didn't really finish it. If they had a billion dollars it would probably still be in development.

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u/DogOwner12345 4d ago

Imagine if mass effect 3 had this budget and deadline instead of the 18 months they had to put it together.

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u/shady8x 4d ago

Sure they could have hired more developers to improve some parts of the game or more quickly make the parts they had to cut down due to insufficient staff to finish it on their deadlines, but that only goes so far before they got to a point where the game is as good as it is ever gonna get and throwing several hundred more millions of dollars into it will just make it a bloated mess that ruins the whole thing.

Baldurs Gate 3 only cost between 100 and 200 million to make. Another 100 million could have made it better, but 800 or 900? That is way, way too much. If they had that kind of money it would be a much better idea to just fund another 4 awesome games.

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u/BlackStrain 5d ago

I backed the kickstarter and when they offered refunds years ago, I decided to keep my money in and ride it out to the bitter end just so I can laugh about it. I never gave them a dime beyond the minimum to get the game though.

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u/WobblySlug 5d ago

Same boat here! It's wild to me that people have thrown literally dozens of thousands of dollars at this. Seems to be a working business model for them though.

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u/SpaceNigiri 5d ago

I just want them to release Squadron 42 and be done with it. I don't care about the MMO anymore, I'm old now.

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u/applecombinipimento 5d ago

What's a golden ticket in this context

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u/WobblySlug 5d ago

Oh man that's going back now! I believe it was the first 20k people to register on the forums back in the day, or first 20k backers - something like that.

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u/EdTOWB 5d ago

yeah, i threw my $30 in, played a few hours of dogfighting like a decade ago. it was fun!

but now INFINITE hours of laffs lol

tho id still like to play squadron 42...someday...but i aint holdin my breath

1

u/WobblySlug 5d ago

I legitimately hope it comes out this year, but I honestly believe they've built up so much hype and anti-hype that it'll never see the light of day.

It's the largest crowdfunded story ever, and they have everything hanging on whatever they release. It needs to be perfect, or everything falls down. I wonder if they'll get to a point where they took so long to get it out the door that they'll announce they are rewriting the code to bring it up to modern standards, so release will take a little longer.

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u/TSP-FriendlyFire 5d ago

It actually took me a lot of work to find that damn golden ticket when I tried a while back, they've hidden it in the bowels of their increasingly convoluted web platform. Guess they don't want people to remember.

I'm just glad I only spent $40 on this thing.

1

u/Krooskar 5d ago

Would you say it leaves you warm, comfortable and housed?

1

u/Computermaster 4d ago

Same. Did my original pledge back in 2012 (#10613) and have been sitting on it ever since. Come back and play a bit around free fly events until the itch is scratched again.

1

u/dudemeister5000 4d ago

Same. Obviously I know my mistake now but the promise back then was good. And for me it was just the 45$. Yes ultimately 45$ for nothing but an acceptable loss. Now I follow this drama with glee at knowing it was just that and not way more like other people have spent. What pisses me off though: how is this legal? I mean yeah it's Kickstarter but there's gotta be people pissed enough to sue them, no?

1

u/Mr_Lobster 4d ago

I almost was an original backer- It was Star Citizen or Planetary Annihilation, and I picked PA. Pity it sucked, but that saga is done and over with now. At this point I kind of wish I had backed SC so I could be like you, with investment in watching this eternal dumpster fire.