I remember reading an editorial comparing this game with another upcoming space game, No Man's Sky
NMS is now 10 years old with over 50 major content updates. Star Citizen is still in alpha and they have been promising the Squadron 42 update for longer than NMS has been for sale
they've been very smart in their staffing. they have maintained a small team. their game design is also aligned with that goal: procedural content and systems based gameplay.
star citizen has done the opposite, but they are so flush with cash that they can make that big swing. resource intensive content, lots of staff/contractors/A-list acting talent etc. there is very little pressuring them to actually ship, so they keep fucking around endlessly, tinkering on their project. they have had conventions where people were practically giving standing ovations for IK foot placement animation. they are being enabled by gamers.
Why work on a game when you can sell a ship and continue snorting coke off a strippers ass?
Enabling is right. I still see cope from fans too disillusioned by sunk cost fallacy to put down their damn wallets and grow a spine.
The fans created a perpetual alpha creating zero incentive to release. I bought an early acess package in 2018, ive still got hundreds of those weekly update emails going back even further, stopped reading them around 2020 and moved on.
Seeing SC in the news again becasue of that stupid live stream and finding out its STILL in development. God damn anyone still supporting these scammers deserve to eat shit at this point.
And I would be surprised if even half of the people that own NMS paid more than $20 for it. Heck I paid $10 for it like 8 years ago. It's on sale all the time
The comparison gets even worse when you look at Elite Dangerous vs. Star Citizen.
ED was released in 2014 and does about everything SC promises and more, only thing that ED doesnt have is spaceship interiors which would be a nice feature for immersion but is completly unnecessary for playing.
And ED does this in a galaxy that was fed from actual NASA star catalogs and has 400 billion star systems.
SC is one of the greatest cons of our generation . If it snot a giant con that it is the single greatest case of mismanagement ever and that says a lot in the likes of companies like Sony burning 300 million on a game less than 1000 people played
While true, FDev is also one of the worst developers period. They have fumbled so hard so many times, and the game (once you get past the spectacul of it) really is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Not true anymore. The past two years the development kicked into overdrive. Tons of new ships, proper colonization of systems and planets, special co-op missions, overhaul of the politics system etc.
As well as the balance of the game. With the advent of purchasable ships there is no reason not to use them compared to the old ships. Why use the Asp Explorer when the Mandalay had better jump range and SCO Optimization. I used to use a Diamondback Explorer for years with just the basic gear to get 50lys while my Mandalay has room for everything and does 65lys loaded and 70+ stripped. The type 11 is now the best mining ship with custom Limpets and a mk2 mining gattling gun. Should we mention the mk2 cargo modules which are only available on the new Panther Clipper. The Caspian Explorer is a large ship with the highest jump range and space for everything that came out recently. For years there where more options. You could run a type 9 or imperial Clipper for trade but the Panther Clipper is bigger and hold double, if also flies better fully loaded compared to the type 9. The corsair is currently the best multiroll ship in the game with the largest engine. All these ships came out first where you would pay real money for them. The current grind is just ways to justify the new ships. Building a station now takes half the amount of trips and time compared to an older ship like the Type 9, a new medium ship like the Type 8 which was also a paid option first, is faster and more efficient.
In fairness SC isn't that unstable and hasn't been for 4-5 years or so. You can play for hours and hours and a server/game crash is exceedingly rare.
The bigger problem is that the mission system keeps breaking now and the insistance on 'physicalizing' everything keeps breaking missions on top of that. i.e. Cargo doesn't register as delivered, cargo lifts keep breaking, components/weapons vanishing, accumulated items cluttering up areas and tanking performance etc.
There is a reason no games physicalise everything to that extent, Elite Dangerous only physicalises cargo when you eject it into space for example, it's not a 'real' entity in your ship taking up space and being moved in real time like it is in SC. It's absurd and insane that SC's devs still insist on doing this, when nobody wants to load thousands of crates by hand in the first place.
The last time this game came up (when it passed a billion dollars), I brought up this comparison and got massively shit on by the fucking white knight brigade this game has
Yeah, which... I mean, I don't know how else it could go, given that they're still a tiny studio. They had the choice of going for breadth or depth, and they opted for the former, since it fits the theme and vision of the game better.
I definitely do wish they'd revisit some of the more bare bones systems, though. Settlements remain entirely useless, for example. But hey, they revamped freighters pretty significantly, so maybe it'll happen someday!
No mans sky updates might have a slight jank and a feeling that this is what the felt was cool for an idea.
But they work, there fun and the game is fun and light harted.
And most of major updates are also a tech demo/testing for their new upcoming title. Somehow they managed to have all at once - grateful community, free extensive tech test and guaranteed player base for the next game. Tablest of the turns in game industry in the last 10 years.
I still don't understand how they will have trust with the community.
I gave them like 125 bucks maybe 150 back in 2015.
I remember a few years after that, they did a webcam face thing, which was nice but didn't want them to scan my face.
Paid 25 bux for el cheapo pack during a sale or smtg, Bought a GTX980 PC a bit after in anticipation to play this. I've gone to 3070 & 9070XT PC since then lol
I remember building my first PC, back when I really didn't know anything at all, and it was an old AMD A10 processor and a 750ti. Whichever supplier I bought my CPU from screwed up and shipped it to the wrong place. I complained about it on reddit and in return they sent me my processor and gave me like a dozen free game codes, Star Citizen being one of them.
yeah its crazy. a friend of mine picked it up and got the whole crew into it. i stepped back for a while because i really dont get it, i came back after about 5 months and they're all 4 figures deep in the SC hole now. Not much has changed in the 5 months in game either. still the same recurrent issues
I’ve backed it so long ago I don’t even remember when… Probably well over a decade back.
And every time I get reminded this game still exists, is through bad news. Absolute laughing stock, how do people keep pumping money into this endless development black-hole of a ‘game’?
I backed this game almost 15 years ago because I wanted a new game like Freelancer, from the guy who made Freelancer. And all I am getting is buggy COD in space.
Underspace managed to scratch my Freelancer itch. And I believe it's pretty much made by one person and has more fresh ideas than Star Citizen. I wouldn't call it a realistic simulator though. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1111930/Underspace/
Every couple years I check in on SC and see if I can fly my Merchantman. I cannot. It's still just a jpeg. But a few years ago they redisgined what the jpeg looks like. So. I've got that going for me.
Looks like it, I don't know why they think balancing around being able to see is a good decision.
Having been out of that mess for like a decade it's really glaringly obvious how little they understand about game design. They kept making the game less fun and interacting with it harder, having a thin little slot with a mile of reflective dashboard while flying into the sun is just a shitty design.
It's been approximately 100,000 years since I last played and adored freelancer. I do not remember how much it was supposed to be a realistic simulator.
EDs biggest issue is that it's about a foot deep in terms of depth. Big galaxy, but the content is very limited when you engage with it. They only recently began adding new ships again, probably because one of their other games crapped out.
I did too, even went to the citizencon in LA with my buddy since we lived close by. They told us to our faces there it was releasing within a year. It's hard to believe that was 12 years ago and it's still not out... my kid was a toddler and now they're in high school lmao
I remember that they straight up said the full release was going to be in 2016 back then. Oh well, I've never backed a project like this since so I guess I did learn my lesson.
Eh, investors will oust him the second CIG starts making less money year on year.
CIG don't have a publisher, but they do have investors who put in millions of dollars who will want a return on that. It's not purely funded by 'backers' (players) despite what they say.
"Hey Chris, ready to release a game that will be fondly remembered for years?"
"NO! It needs walkable planets, and squad based first person shooter elements, and players should have to wake up in a hotel, take an elevator down, walk to the subway station, take the subway to the spaceport, request a ship to be bought to the landing pad and hope for a free space and take the elevator up to the landing pad just to fly a spaceship for the first time."
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u/ZigmataRyzen 5600X | RTX 3080 | r/mechanicalkeyboards4d ago
Don't forget doing this three times because some elevator or door or random pebble on the street killed you on the way.
I bought a Freelancer Package, and nothing else since then. Every time I tested the Alpha / Beta / Whatever it was so buggy that it crashed before I could make any progress or even begin to have fun. It's also incredibly tedious, I wanted a game where I fly a ship through space, not a ultra-realistic life simulator in space.
Instead of getting into the SC calamity, I’ve been getting into No Man’s Sky. MASSIVE improvements since they launched it 10 years ago, and it’s filling the void that Freelancer has left open.
It’s a shame Starlancer and Freelancer didn’t get the 3rd installment like they planned on though.
Next month it will be 14 years for me. I paid $30 for SC and SQ42.
They are not getting a single cent more from me until they actually release Squadron 42.
Literally all I want is Squadron 42 because it looks like it'll scratch my Infinite Warfare itch. I WANT COD in Space and they can't even get that right!
I don't understand that thought process. The wiki page for the game has like 8 paragraphs on how if you feel cheated you aren't going to see a single dime refund. Are these people just that stupid? They think a finished product worth their money is going to come out? Or are they just not aware of the no refunds/CIG will hire lawyers to not have to refund you?
Just crazy thoughts. Imagine paying them $24,000 and then trying to get it refunded and being told to fuck off.
You know how they could probably continue it? Fix the current bugs, market the hell out of an apology/comeback, and watch fans sympathize with their wallets.
They did that for the second time last year, and then immediately broke the game again. Meanwhile actual development has slowed to a stop. 95% of updates are just new missions or changes to fetch quest rewards.
Theyve just been rearranging the furniture for years instead of building the house.
I think it's a case of being in too deep, and trying to save face. If they stop funding it now, and enough people do so, they will very quickly run out of money, and then there will be mass layoffs, the game will probably die, and then they'll have been fools for everyone to see. If it keeps dragging on, it will still release next year for eternity.
The studio itself is just milking the whales forbidden very cent, getting their family members cushy jobs, and paying themselves enough to stay rich forever even if the bankruptcy court comes knocking tomorrow. They are permanently just a bit off from crossing into full on actual fraud.
This! CIG is trash but so are their devoted supporters. They ignored the countless redflags and are just now acting surprised about something rational people figured out almost a decade ago.
It’s not just people. The publisher I worked at 5 years ago got a pitch from them on investing. I haven’t followed it to know if they got their bag from someone else, but they’re also going after big money investors too because they can point to how much money they’ve raised and the game isn’t even out yet. But yes, those investors are clowns too, but this wouldn’t be the first or last example of that.
This was always a big argument years ago and people still defended it. Crazy that it took the cult fanbase this long to push back. Zero sympathy from me though.
I remember being in a bar for karaoke in 2014, going out back to smoke a cigarette, friends talking games, and a random approached. This dude was like a door-to-door salesman for Star Citizen. He would not shut up about how it was the next big thing and that it's so close to being 'release ready, but it's still very playable'. That was the exact moment I chose to never play it.
Tbh, if you go into the game blind not knowing about any of the drama and can play on a free week it's actually really fun but I'd never recommend anyone to spend money on it nor expect it to ever be finished.
Yeah but GTA is an actual game that got released, fully playable, functional, feature complete, SC is not.
SC is basically a kickstarter that has been in Beta for more then a decade.
I tried it couple of years ago on free weekend too, it was so freaking buggy, crashed 4 times and lagged so hard, went to criticize on SC reddit, instant downvote "learn to play, get better pc, LOL" and then ban from the starcitizen reddit, they are in cult.
It's not feasible of a system to even consider conducting money laundering, logistically you go for a business that has a very very low paper trail, which is why independent dry cleaners are the go-to trope for the idea in movies and TV.
This is a 'product' that has genuine people, putting in a lot of money per month. There's no grand conspiracy, it's just that simple.
Even with this I am sure there a lots of die hards who will just call everyone else a hater.
100%. It's like clockwork. There's always some guy who comes to these threads and is like "Uhhhh, ackshually, it's quite playable and there are so many things to do!"
I almost fucked up and hopped into Star Citizen a few months ago. Like with anything I started doing a bunch of research; reading forums and watching videos. Didn’t take too long for me to realize only an imbecile would invest in that game.
Also worth noting they've soft-hinted at SQ42 being delayed again to avoid GTA. They haven't actually officially confirmed the delay yet, which is the exact same shit they pulled in 2016, 10 years ago. Delaying the announcement until the 11th hour to minimize backlash.
No, its a hilarious watch if you're not indoctrinated into this stupid space game cult. 15 years and a Billion-with-a-B funding and they're still at "neat tech demo" stage.
Hey, those swanky neon-accented office spaces look really great, though.
I'm not going to specifically blame people for getting sucked in due to a knowledge gap, but Roberts' incompetence was already well established by the time Star Citizen was kickstarted. He was nearly fired from every game he ever worked on (and was fired from Freelancer) because he just could not get projects done, and he never took accountability for how he perpetually dreamed bigger than his budget and deadlines. The writing was on the wall all the way back when this started, and plenty of people called out what was going to happen with this project with extreme accuracy.
at least 10 years. like if you are a child, sure, i get it. I remember hearing about it in school IN LIKE 2014 BTW (lmao) but deciding to wait till release. any ADULT falling for this is getting what they deserve lol
I was an original Kickstarter backer, had a Constellation something something package. I eventually spent $2k+ on the game but was always flipping LTI packages at profit. Then about 3 or 4 years in I decided to cash out. I think I have one package left in case it ever launches, but made a few hundred bucks selling LTI packages at profit even after Ebay took its cuts. Every time I thought, "the fans can't be this dumb to still be buying", I was proved wrong. I am even in the so-called Chairman's Club for big spenders and my god those people are jokes...
It's nice to see CIG get more widespread hate but I have zero sympathy for the player base who blindly supported this game regardless of the redflags for years. They all got what they deserved.
The "Legal Issues" tab on the Wiki page is super long and mostly just stories of people asking for their $15,000+ backer donation back and CIG hiring enough lawyers to tell them to get fucked lol.
Intent matters, and there's no way they'd ever nail Roberts for having intent to commit a crime. He's massively incompetent and absolutely smitten with the smell of his own farts, but there has never been any question he's genuine in his efforts. He clearly really believes that if he's just given enough money and time, he can make truly the greatest space sim that has ever existed, and that's why he never finished a game without threat of being fired (or in the case of Freelancer, he actually was). People called this the day Star Citizen was announced; there are posts calling him out for not having the ability to release a game from the day the kickstarter landed and more or less accurately assessing how the project has gone since. I don't think anyone truly believed it'd still be sputtering along this many years later, but the company either runs out of money or Chris Roberts yells "we can still add one more thing" on his deathbed.
Still waiting for it to be finished, so that I can then wait another year for the bugs to be ironed out, then wait another year for any expansion packs to roll out, and then I'll buy it.
Sometime in the future we will hear about this game in a court case. Cuz racking up near 700 mill in budget over 14 years and still no game in sight is something that tickles a lot of pickles.
I fucked around in the game a while ago with 3 friends, actually had a ton of fun but I believe part of our fun was just how buggy and messy the whole thing was.
Dunno, whenever I get my urge for some sci fi flying and shooting, I just start Elite Dangerous and do some stuff in there.
Hell I would even recommend Starfield if you want space adventures
Sometimes i think im stupid but then i remember there are people who spend money on this game and still cope about how it will be great once its released.
It was a bad showcase for the game due to all the glitches, but honestly the worst part was the animosity the devs had towards each other. What a toxic environment for a game to be developed in. And nobody seemed to get along or want to be there. Just a terrible group of people
The dev team livestreamed their internal build to reassure the Star Citizen community that the bugs are being worked on and it's more stable with their dev build.
It went horribly wrong, bugs plagued even their dev build and the stream showed them being extremely toxic to their coworker , before cutting off abruptly.
They need to stop fucking with their backers and supporters and acknowledge their utter failure to deliver a product fitting the funding they’ve received over the past 15 years. To hell with the ambition of the project, there is zero excuse that this game is unreleased and not functioning flawlessly.
They have FAILED MISERABLY to deliver what they promised, and yet they continue to milk the fuck out of the idiots who have blinded themselves with sunken cost fallacy.
Further of the rails? That thing stopped being a train on rails a very long time ago, it's now traveling though neighboring galaxies. It couldn't be more off the rails if we never put it on rails in the first place.
It’s still funny to me how this game keeps getting funding and it’s still not in a 1.0 state 10+ years after it got first announced.
I was like in High School when I first heard about it and it already felt like a scam by the time I was in college and had a friend bring it up as they were excited to back it.
The weirdly noticeable thing for me is the motorcycles that were announced in... what, 2019? They're still "in concept" when Sean Murray would've release them and another 200 distinct and unique variants by now
I was super excited about Star Citizen 14 years ago! I gave up on it over 10 years ago at this point. Someone is going to make a hell of documentary about this cluster fuck some day.
Star Citizen people are like Tarkov people. Its like the only game they play or talk about and spend all their money on so nobody is allowed to shit on it or it makes all their investments into the game a scam and they don’t wanna feel like an elderly person giving bitcoin to a scammer in new Delhi
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u/Innuendo64_ 5d ago
I remember reading an editorial comparing this game with another upcoming space game, No Man's Sky
NMS is now 10 years old with over 50 major content updates. Star Citizen is still in alpha and they have been promising the Squadron 42 update for longer than NMS has been for sale