[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Majestic12]

Nothing was groundbreaking in how WoW was built, it was just a streamlined EQ clone. Yet, look how that turned out. I'm not saying that the same will happen with SC, nobody can say how that will turn out but time itself. But you can't write something off because of how something is built. Destiny 2 is just a generic FPS when you look at the core mechanics; there is nothing new or groundbreaking about it. Still, its one of the fastest selling game of all time.

I didn't say that SC will definitely be bad, I just mean that people throw around the "groundbreaking" word far too much when it comes to SC

Edit: Oh, and while you're right about EQ and WoW's relation, one major reason why WoW became so popular was because it is focused on availability to attract a wide audience. SC is taking the opposite direction with a niched style of game. Nothing indicates that SC will be good even now, because so few mechanics are out.

[KyrtF]

NMS looked like crap in it's trailers

Also SC is playable, and only getting prettier by the time

And yet a lot of people felt NMS looked quite good in the trailers. One reason why so many were disappointed.
As it is - that NMS makes use of a certain graphical style does not mean it looks bad.

As for SC - it is playable in that you have a character that can move. There is no content or gameplay, and only the most basic of gameplay mechanics.

[masterhorus8]

And yet a lot of people felt NMS looked quite good in the trailers. One reason why so many were disappointed.
As it is - that NMS makes use of a certain graphical style does not mean it looks bad.

As for SC - it is playable in that you have a character that can move. There is no content or gameplay, and only the most basic of gameplay mechanics.

What a load of shit, as usual from you.

1. NMS released a few videos during their entire development while only giving a few statements (which some flat out wound up being false/changed without them ever mentioning). If you can't see the difference between how CIG shows their development and how HG did theirs, then you truly are just as blind as you make yourself out to be. Worst case scenario, we get to watch the train wreck cooked and prepped as opposed to sitting down and it being served directly to us on a platter with no inclination that it was going to be garbage in the first place.

2. You keep showing your lack of awareness for what SC is with these statements and will have in it. As you so kindly ignored from my previous (apparently wasted attempts at) interaction with you, both the separate modules for Star Marine and Arena Commander are here to stay. They will be virtual simulations in-game used to practice without actually risking anything. As for the Universe part, what was released in 2.0 is actually a part of the SC universe. Just because it's not done doesn't mean it's not there.

[Majestic12]

Biggest reason why people got disappointed was cuz Sean spent till the game release talking as if it was a multiplayer game, “Oh yes you can play with your friends!”, “Yeah, you can grief them a lil bit!”, “Oh to know what you look like you need another player to describe it for it!”, “oh the chances of meeting someone else are so slim cuz we have a bazillion planets!” only to end up being a single-player Grav.

It’s not like they were disappointed with the trailers, they just felt cheated by Sean interviews about the game.

Yeah the biggest reason was that Sean simply lied. We see the same disappointment with Chris when he lied about the original 3.0 release date, knowing that it would never be met. Sean lied about features in the game, Chris lies about release dates and the state of the game. The former is 10 times worse. It's false advertisment hands down.

[Wilian]

If you consider crash prone modules that are more like demos than anything playable, more power to ya.

Calling them demos is far off-shooting and not representative of what they are. Playable prototypes of ideas that might be implemented. It's not even a proper vertical slice yet.

[Mister K]

Gonna be the most expensive No Man's Sky clone in history.

How is Star Citizen a NMS clone? Are you drunk?

[Odeezee]

What a load of shit, as usual from you.

1. NMS released a few videos during their entire development while only giving a few statements (which some flat out wound up being false/changed without them ever mentioning). If you can't see the difference between how CIG shows their development and how HG did theirs, then you truly are just as blind as you make yourself out to be. Worst case scenario, we get to watch the train wreck cooked and prepped as opposed to sitting down and it being served directly to us on a platter with no inclination that it was going to be garbage in the first place.

2. You keep showing your lack of awareness for what SC is with these statements and will have in it. As you so kindly ignored from my previous (apparently wasted attempts at) interaction with you, both the separate modules for Star Marine and Arena Commander are here to stay. They will be virtual simulations in-game used to practice without actually risking anything. As for the Universe part, what was released in 2.0 is actually a part of the SC universe. Just because it's not done doesn't mean it's not there.

/agree. well said.

How is Star Citizen a NMS clone? Are you drunk?

haha, ikr?

Don't take my word for it, but judging from the discussion that followed that post I believe he was talking about in a "disappointment" kind of thing, you know, how NMS stood behind a lot of claims and hype only to end up being… well, NMS.

you can take it both ways and he would still be wrong. if it's a clone from a gaming perspective, just off what we have now that is completely false as we already have multiplayer in Star Citizen. and if we take it to mean that Star Citizen will be a big disappointment because of lies told to players prior to release, that's literally not possible as players are testing the game features, mechanics all the time during the dev process and the devs "show their work" 4 days a week with various videos and texts.

[Jastall]

Calling them demos is far off-shooting and not representative of what they are. Playable prototypes of ideas that might be implemented. It's not even a proper vertical slice yet.

Very true. They're less demos than debug rooms at this point in time.

[KyrtF]

Spoken like someone that doesn't know what he or she is talking about. It's funny that you pointed out the Optane thing, when this isn't nothing new. Also since your not interested at all in. What they actually have to show or talk about. Of course it's gonna to be boring to you.

It's not just a demo and it's not something that we will not ever see in the game...like wat? so are we not getting moons or the idris or shopping or cargo? and now we're not getting planets or arccorp (even though a piece of it is there, waiting to be updated like in the demo). It's obvious the tech is there -in the demo- they've shown the progress of the tech over the years, an just recently talked about PG cities, now they've shown it. I mean they are already using the stuff they developed to create the moons (first step) and the next is to do planets (like or better then the homestead demo). So like all the other tech they've developed or improved upon. It's very real and will see the light of day, they aren't making this stuff for shits and giggles.

It's truly amazing how folks can waste their time shitting on something they clearly don't care anything about and still lurk or comment in order to dismiss everything on display and ED fans are the worst of the bunch. In their arrogance and yes you are the ship and will remain to be only the same regardless of your delusions of grandeur. Until your avatar moves his or her ass from that ship and walks around like a character.

WOW - you actually created a troll account just to reply to lil' ol' me!!!!!
Should I be honoured?

As it is...I am very interested in what they have to talk about. I LOVE the idea of creating universe and aliens. I can't create languages though...I'm not a linguist. That doesn't mean their presentation of the ideas and concepts was wildly exciting. Parts of the CC17 were interesting, but much of it was a borefest. That is admittedly subjective - but I'm also not the only one who mentions this. CC17 lacked the "energy" I would normally associate with a CIG event.

And yes - it was a demo. It was a scripted, on rails technical demo specifically created for CC17. Just like all the other demos that CIG have provided.

And it is obvious the "tech" is IN the demo. That is the point...it is in the DEMO!!! NOT the game...the demo. It is relatively easy to create what CIG showed us. They showed no content...they showed no gameplay...they showed no mechanics. They used a City creator and then flew around it.

Sure - it looked pretty. It was supposed to.

The question is how much of that demo will make it into the game. Previous demos have shown us sandworms and planets. Previous demos have shown us levels of graphical details the "real" game has yet to match. Previous demos have shown a lot, very little of which has actually been followed up.

Why do you think this time will be any different?

[The Penguin]

Until Star Citizen releases (and it hasn't in 5 years), I consider it Vaporware.

[KyrtF]

Please this game is another Kickstarted game that has spent years in development due to the developers lack of being able to stick to schedules among other things.

To be fair to CIG, it's quite easy to account for the wasted time.

First - CR created CIG. Then he spent a year developing Star Citizen, punting it to publishers who said "no". He hired a third party to create a demo and then he went to Kickstarter.

Then Kickstarter was successful, so Chris Roberts put his master plan into action. He put CIG to work on some aspects, and then hired numerous third parties to work on others. This is why the talk about Chris Roberts needing time to build up a team is nonsense. He had a team - the 50 strong CIG was already larger than many other dev teams - and he hired third parties to make up the difference.

All well and good so far

Then the money kept coming in and Chris Roberts had an idea. Instead of adding on a few MMO elements, as per the stretch goal, why not make the game that he had always wanted. Instead of a spiritual successor to Wing Commander...why not a spiritual successor to Privateer?

So - he changed direction. Of course, this meant the development and work carried out till then was mostly useless. Feasibility studies and prototypes for a Space sim just cannot carry over to an MMO. It also required massive changes to aspects such as the game engine because what was suited for a Wing Commander type game was inadequate for an MMO style game. The change in scale, for example, required 64 bit precision at least, and not the 32 bit scale used by CryEngine. CryEngines netcode routines were not suited for an MMO, the AI was now not useable, the backend functions were not suitable, and more.

Chris needed a brand new engine. He **SHOULD** have stopped work with CE then and there, but didn't. Maybe he didn't think of it. Maybe he didn't realise the scale of the changes necessary. Maybe he assumed the change wouldn't impact too heavily on the rest of the game. Maybe he felt he couldn't afford to switch.

Regardless, the end result of CRs change in direction was that a lot of the work carried out to date was rendered useless. Divergent code bases between CIG and third party devs made their work incompatible. CIG started to bring the work in house, effectively starting the development of those modules from scratch - again.

Effectively, the work done between 2011 and 2014 on the game was thrown out. Worse, Chris Roberts had committed himself to the use of CryEngine and much of the game could not move forward until the conversion to StarEngine was complete. CIG still tried to do so...but when the engine is in flux, you are looking at a need to constantly redo work, a need to continually update it to keep it compatible. Worse, you cannot really optimise the code as much, and that goes for the engine systems as well. In short, you are looking at a system that is going to be prone to bugs, bugs that are difficult to locate and eradicate (in that fixing one will likely create another) and where performance suffers.

That means progress will be slow, torturous at times, more expensive....but that there will be progress.

Where we are now with CIG isn't an issue with the developers, the lack of progress can really be accounted for and explained. It's simply the result of a number of very poor decisions made by Chris Roberts early in the development process. Once CR decided to change the type of game he wanted, he would have been better off developing a custom engine using his core team of 50 people in CIG, creating new prototypes, conducting new feasibility studies and more. That would have likely taken 2 years or so, but it would have avoided many of the issues we are seeing today.

So - please don't blame the devs. Think about who their boss is, and then marvel at how much progress they have made despite that.

- - - Updated - - -

I'd have watched the streams if they weren't in the middle of a shift on a work day. Weekends are better, and at least Blizzard generally doesn't do their own convention streams during a work week. I mean, it is on a Saturday, which is a big difference from a Friday afternoon, not to mention the demographics between SC and Blizzard games can be fairly different as well.

Weekends are definitely better and would easily have led to a bigger audience.

The question then is why choose the Friday?

[Mister K]

Don't take my word for it, but judging from the discussion that followed that post I believe he was talking about in a "disappointment" kind of thing, you know, how NMS stood behind a lot of claims and hype only to end up being… well, NMS.

I don't think CGI is lying to us, I think they are telling the truth. The issue is, CRs is treating this project as his play ground and might not be focusing on vital aspects of the game.

Regardless, I think the let down when this game launches could be some of the following:

• Lack of content that is interesting. Whether that will be story, missions, end-game "raiding/pvp" orientated.
• Optimized game to work smoothly in both FPS/Latency aspects.
• Lack of patches to fix the pleathora amount of bugs due to so many systems in the game.
• Lack of income stream which affects all of the above and then some.
• Re-playability, due to the lack of points in the first point, the game MIGHT become stale rather quickly.

Whether the game is released within next 2-4 years or not, is irrelevant. I think many backers know that they might be throwing money away. Regardless of that, I think the technological feats and accomplishments this game can achieve are outstanding.

There is NO GAME out there which is taking risks like Star Citizen. This is what gaming industry needed for a long time now. A solid project like this. I am sure they might be able to re-sell some of the tools or assets if the game does not get delivered.

CR is not here to take our money, more like, achieve his childhood dream and we are allowing that by backing it.

I think the game is fairly solid already, we will see how 3.0 turns out as once that is live, it will give us a better understanding of what to expect on full release.

[Odeezee]

I believe you might be completely missing his point…

Regardless anyone’s personal opinion, the possibility of the entire project going to hell is there, just like any other project, especially crowdfunded ones. Considering how SC is getting hyped as one of the most innovating games projects ever, if it ends up in a failure for whatever reason, considering how much money some people threw at it, I dare to say that calling it a “NMS clone” as far as disappointment goes, would be an immense understatement.

But hey, I might just be reading too much into it, it might turn out that the dude is indeed literally comparing both games just for the sake of it ~ fuck if I know

no, you are the one who completely misses the point. NMS was not a failure due to just beign a bad game. it was a failure specifically because the devs lied about the mechanics and features (e.g. multi-player and something awesome at the center of the galaxy), they did not issue any pre-release copies of the game for review, they did not have an open alpha/beta like SC where players get to test the game mechanics and systems and give feedback, so no the comparison is not even remotely the same outside of both games involving space.

Regardless, I think the let down when this game launches could be some of the following:

• Lack of content that is interesting. Whether that will be story, missions, end-game "raiding/pvp" orientated.
• Optimized game to work smoothly in both FPS/Latency aspects.
• Lack of patches to fix the pleathora amount of bugs due to so many systems in the game.
• Lack of income stream which affects all of the above and then some.
• Re-playability, due to the lack of points in the first point, the game MIGHT become stale rather quickly.

it's much harder to apply these criteria to Star Citizen as backers literally get to test updates and give feedback, so if the game turns out to be shit then we the players would bare some of the responsibility for not giving better feedback. but i agree with most of what you said in the rest of your post.

[masterhorus8]

it's much harder to apply these criteria to Star Citizen as backers literally get to test updates and give feedback, so if the game turns out to be shit then we the players would bare some of the responsibility for not giving better feedback. but i agree with most of what you said in the rest of your post.

This is 100% derailing that I am doing, but how the heck did you get a scroll bar in the [QUOTE] from Mister K? (screenshot below)

[Jastall]

it's much harder to apply these criteria to Star Citizen as backers literally get to test updates and give feedback, so if the game turns out to be shit then we the players would bare some of the responsibility for not giving better feedback. but i agree with most of what you said in the rest of your post.

That reasoning is bullshit when I see it applied to Blizzard's beta realms, and it's bullshit here. Any fault of QA is squarely on the hands of the game's development team. Beta testers are there to provide a live testing environment, they're another tool in the shed. They are not supposed to do the developer's job nor should they be held accountable for said developers botching it, and this goes for every single game.

[Odeezee]

Oh I get it, so we just ignore the actual facts and reasons for the failure of NMS and instead go with opinions based on feelings instead? You cannot talk about Star Citizen being a huge failure of the magnitude of NMS without *qualifying* how the two would even be related, which you have not even shown seeing as it's your argument so you should back it up. The reasons that NMS failed are objective and verifiable. Just saying if Star Citizen fails without even qualifying how Star Citizen would objectively (not fictitiously) fail is a disingenuous argument to begin with, especially when the reasons that NMS failed are non-issues for Star Citizen. /sigh

About the scroll in the quote idk. It might have something to do with quoting bullet points?

[ldev]

A solid project like this.

That's... brave...

[kenn9530]

Until Star Citizen releases (and it hasn't in 5 years), I consider it Vaporware.

so according to you vaporware is classed as an alpha with a small system of which you can travel in multiple ships with other people and do a multiple of missions, along with fps combat and space combat.

3.0 has been in testing for a fair while now and will ready public alpha is the near future which includes planet landing.

[Eleccybubb]

so according to you vaporware is classed as an alpha with a small system of which you can travel in multiple ships with other people and do a multiple of missions, along with fps combat and space combat.

3.0 has been in testing for a fair while now and will ready public alpha is the near future which includes planet landing.

Oh man being able to land on a planet......

Such an exciting time.

Gotta admit it's fun watching people try and hype this game up more than it needs to be.

Not that there is much hype at the moment anyways other than from people who defend the game like it's going to be GOTY 2024.

[KyrtF]

so according to you vaporware is classed as an alpha with a small system of which you can travel in multiple ships with other people and do a multiple of missions, along with fps combat and space combat.

3.0 has been in testing for a fair while now and will ready public alpha is the near future which includes planet landing.

No...vapourware is software which hasn't been released, especially software that has been in development for an unusual amount of time.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh I get it, so we just ignore the actual facts and reasons for the failure of NMS and instead go with opinions based on feelings instead? You cannot talk about Star Citizen being a huge failure of the magnitude of NMS without *qualifying* how the two would even be related, which you have not even shown seeing as it's your argument so you should back it up. The reasons that NMS failed are objective and verifiable. Just saying if Star Citizen fails without even qualifying how Star Citizen would objectively (not fictitiously) fail is a disingenuous argument to begin with, especially when the reasons that NMS failed are non-issues for Star Citizen. /sigh

NMS "failed" because it didn't live up to the hype. It promised a lot and it failed to deliver. Players expected a lot and were upset when the game didn't deliver.

Star Citizen...if it fails...will be of a magnitude worse than NMS because backers are much more invested in the project. Right now, I believe SC will launch...but that CIG doesn't have enough money to provide the game expected or promised, a situation made worse by Chris Roberts' usually vague statements of intent which have allowed backers to envisage the game they personally want rather than the game that will actually be delivered.