[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Val the Moofia Boss]

such tortured logic. playing a slice of the game is still playing the game, how is this so hard to acknowledge? the Stanton system that we can play-test right now, is the same Stanton system that will be there at release, though much more fleshed out at that point

I don't think Stanton in the future is going to be much more than what we already have. Stanton will probably just be the same old 4 planets with one single city on each planet that only has 3 small playable areas and the rest of city is uninhabitable set dressing you can't go to, with most of the planet being empty with only a few outposts here and there with nothing to do there, and maybe an empty cave here and there. We might get one or two new small playable areas added to the cities of Hurston/Area 18/New Babbage/Orison, but that's it. I don't expect the little hab outposts or bunkers to be overhauled. I don't expect houses to dot the landscapes of the planets with NPCs driving around on the planets or operating tractors as they till their farms. At best, they might add bears to caves to or dear wandering around in the fields, and if the servers are fixed then maybe we'll have more NPCs flying around in space, but that's it.

[banmebaby]

Just to put things into perspective, this is an indie single-player title made by one dude with a 5,000$ of 25,000$ goal kickstarter:



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...=project_build

I wonder what a well stablished company will manage to do with Unreal Engine 5…

[KevyB]

Just to put things into perspective, this is an indie single-player title made by one dude with a 5,000$ of 25,000$ goal kickstarter:



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...=project_build

I wonder what a well stablished company will manage to do with Unreal Engine 5…

Please stop, singleplayer games are insanely easier to make, you can't even begin to comprehend how much redundant bullshit work goes into networking, i can since i had the displeasure of integrating a back end inventory system for a guys UE5 mod once, and even though i only experienced a small slice of it it's painfully obvious that a properly integrated networking element is like creating another game within a game.

[MrAnderson]

"How My Girlfriend and I Stole Thousands of Credits worth of Drugs"


Only in Star Citizen

[kekerino]

Please stop, singleplayer games are insanely easier to make, you can't even begin to comprehend how much redundant bullshit work goes into networking, i can since i had the displeasure of integrating a back end inventory system for a guys UE5 mod once, and even though i only experienced a small slice of it it's painfully obvious that a properly integrated networking element is like creating another game within a game.

Squadron 42 is supposed to be a single player game.

[Gorsameth]

Squadron 42 is supposed to be a single player game.

SQ42 does not exist.

[Odeezee]

it's like watching a movie trailer and saying it's the same thing as watching the actual movie. you can get hours of enjoyment out of a 2 min trailer! and how many trailers contain shots that get cut in the final movie?

what is with people and such tortured logic? a movie trailer is not a cohesive part of the whole movie, it's a mish-mash of many different parts of a movie out of sequence and may even include content not in the final movie, and is meant to intrigue you to watch the whole movie, so your analogy is flawed. the Stanton system we have now has the Tier 0 to 4 of varying systems, mechanics, tech, etc, that we will have in the final game, though less refined atm. everything in the current alpha builds will be there at release and you can play in just the Stanton system at release if you wish and never leave, because the devs are planning on high content density.

also, Star Citizen and Squadron 42 do not have to worry about things getting cut because, for starters, they are not movies and second, the whole point of this development experiment is to push boundaries and put in as much tech, systems, mechanics, gameplay, etc, as possible. there has been very little cut from the games and they were cut back in 2014.

at what point does "more fleshed out" turn into "something completely different with the same name"? how many years before it's "fixing outdated systems/content" instead of "fleshing out"?

what? this is not a coherent sentence. more fleshed out literally means updated/changing something to be better than what it was initially, whether it has the same name or not is highly irrelevant. as an example, the flight model that was there back in 2015 is drastically different from the one we have now and it has improved for the better with greater 6DOF, more distinct flight characteristics between ships, as well as atmospheric flight modeling to name a few. the flight model will change again when they add control surfaces, individual thruster manipulation, ship power distribution, ship armor, physicalized damage and components, etc.

and it will take as long as it takes, but atm, SQ42 is the priority and has the majority of devs working on it, once complete all those devs can focus on SC.

surely star citizen is creeping up on the record for longest unreleased game in active development by now?

so what? why do you want them to release a game that is incomplete and of what relevance does the record for the longest game in development have? as long as the game is great when it comes out i couldn't care less. i am tired of buying incomplete games that are sold as fully released titles. i am surprised that gamers would actually want devs to rush two games being developed concurrently, given the past 5 years of games from AAA studios, many beloved that were disappointing to say the least.

I don't think Stanton in the future is going to be much more than what we already have. Stanton will probably just be the same old 4 planets with one single city on each planet that only has 3 small playable areas and the rest of city is uninhabitable set dressing you can't go to, with most of the planet being empty with only a few outposts here and there with nothing to do there, and maybe an empty cave here and there.

so you don't follow the development of the game then, or read the progress tracker at all? we don't even have rivers, volcanoes, systemic weather, planetary hubs, roads, towns, planet tech generated stars, complete biomes on the Stanton planets, missions using Quantum in cities and around the solar systems, the nav mesh for npcs and fauna, etc, etc. i am surprised you even made that comment to be honest. and the planet tech itself will be changing once they finish automating many systems like generating of said towns and the content there-in.

We might get one or two new small playable areas added to the cities of Hurston/Area 18/New Babbage/Orison, but that's it. I don't expect the little hab outposts or bunkers to be overhauled. I don't expect houses to dot the landscapes of the planets with NPCs driving around on the planets or operating tractors as they till their farms. At best, they might add bears to caves to or dear wandering around in the fields, and if the servers are fixed then maybe we'll have more NPCs flying around in space, but that's it.

haha, ok. but why are you just guessing when we can see what the devs are actually working on? they have the time and the resources, they are not up against a clock. i also find your take odd given, we already know what's coming as far as content for many things as they have already cutout space for all of these things to be implemented like hygiene, rooftops with elevators that don't go anywhere currently, even hospitals and Quantum is not even really in yet, as they are literally testing it right now with Jumptown 2.0 and the Nine-Tails Lockdown. viewing the future of the game based on what is currently there is rather myopic since many huge features like object containers, volumetric clouds, seamless transitions, static physics grids (about to be dynamic with CR's tech addition), etc, are already in and they were thought to be impossible when they were announced.

the dependencies for most content is known, namely Full Persistence, Server Meshing and the switch to the Gen 12 Renderer (before they make the render thread completely asynchronous) and the switch to the Vulkan API. most if not all of those should be coming in this year, barring any issues. /shrug

[Val the Moofia Boss]

so you don't follow the development of the game then, or read the progress tracker at all? we don't even have rivers, volcanoes, systemic weather, planetary hubs, roads, towns, planet tech generated stars, complete biomes on the Stanton planets, missions using Quantum in cities and around the solar systems, the nav mesh for npcs and fauna, etc, etc. i am surprised you even made that comment to be honest. and the planet tech itself will be changing once they finish automating many systems like generating of said towns and the content there-in.

Adding rivers and weather systems would be very nice, but that doesn't make for more interesting gameplay. Roads and more towns (that aren't just the copy-pasted hab settlements) might be added, but given the server situation I highly doubt that they will be sufficiently populated with NPCs to make the planets feel more alive or to add more interesting gameplay. There is no possible way they're going to have the valleys of Microtech populated with deer. The servers would not handle it. With the latest patch, the servers aren't crashing within 2 hours for the first time since 2017 but that doesn't mean that they throw more stuff in. I guess the deer could be spawned in once the player got close enough to forest, with the tree cover obfuscating it, but that's not going to work for fauna that populated plains or steppes that can be clearly seen popping in from a distance, and so on.

viewing the future of the game based on what is currently there is rather myopic since many huge features like object containers, volumetric clouds, seamless transitions, static physics grids (about to be dynamic with CR's tech addition), etc, are already in and they were thought to be impossible when they were announced.

I learned long ago to stop hoping for "what could be". We were once promised that we would be able to have Star Citizen private servers that we could mod. Obviously that is now utterly impossible. We were once promised a singleplayer campaign (which was the MAIN selling point of the project, before the "do everything MMO life simulator" ballooned and hijacked the spotlight), a campaign that has apparently regressed in development and has been rebooted multiple times and which has pretty much disappeared as of several years ago. We were once promised that we would be able to have massive spacebattles with dozens of people onboard destroyers and dozens of destroyers and dozens more fighters flying around fighting, and yet for the past 6 years the servers were utterly incapable of coming anywhere near close and CIG refused to come out and say what went wrong, and only just a few months ago did they finally admit that they might not be able to pull it off. And the entire game up until this point has been on the presumption that it would be a truly massively multiplayer game, and now they're almost certainly going to have to waste more time going back and trying to redesign systems to account for the reality they have been kicking down the road.

When I say "We might get one or two new small playable areas added to the cities of Hurston/Area 18/New Babbage/Orison, but that's it", I'm taking a realistic perspective at CIG's capabilities. It has been six years since the Stanton servers went live, and in that time CIG has managed to release a grand total of... 4 cities. 4 cities that are 95% set dressing with only 3 or 4 small playable areas each. Besides those 4 cities, literally the only other settlements in the Stanton system are generic tileset spacestations that use the same copy-pasted kit, and small hab settlements using the exact same copy-pasted kit, and have a population of like one guy standing at a counter. In that time, how many Assasin's Creed games have released? How many cities with different art designs, with individual cities dwarfing SC cities in playable space? And at a far greater level of detail than Star Citizen's locations too. And what about the many varied small towns and villages that deck out the rest of the world outside of the cities? Now yes, we saw in streams that they are finally working on new small town settlement kits, but even if Pyro magically comes out this year with the new settlement aesthetic, it would've taken CIG 6 freaking years to just come up with a new small town non-city kit. And even if a new city did come out this year, 5 cities with such shallow depth over the course of 6 years...

You can pick apart any one thing, but the problem with the Star Citizen dream isn't any one particular thing you can point your finger towards. It's a death by a thousand cuts. Do I have hope that the current game will be a little more than it already is? Yes. Will it reach be what we have been promised, and what is still being advertised to unsuspecting newcomers? Almost certainly not. That's why whenever I recommend Star Citizen to people, I do so telling them what the game really is right now, and the likelihood that it is probably not going to much more than it already is, and if that doesn't interest you then you should probably pass.

- - - Updated - - -

CIG has been doing this for almost a decade. They keep telling us "we're working on this cool new feature! The servers are going to be better! You're going to have huge battles! We're going to Pyro next year!" and then a year passes and the glorious vision they've been touting has yet to pass. And then the next year. And the next year. And then before you know it, it's been 6 years since the servers launched and Stanton doesn't feel much bigger or more filled out or varied than it did when the servers first went up. And Stanton isn't supposed to be the extent of the project. We were supposed to have 40+ star systems and a singleplayer game. The one and only thing that SC has been able to consistently release is new ships for you to drop hundreds of dollars on, and they all fit the same mold of either being a combat ship, a cargo ship, maybe a miner, ships with halfbaked gameplay (those medical ships), or sometimes some a ship that is built around a gameplay loop that has been promised to us for years and is still nowhere in sight (the Reclaimer that can't salvage anything, the information runners that can't harvest any data, etc), while the big feature ships that were promised years ago and costed thousands of dollars like the colonization ship or the research ship or the Kraken with player owned shops has yet to be added because the devs straight up cannot implement the gameplay meant for them.

Almost a decade since the kickstarter, and 6 years since the servers first went up. That is a long time, and it's more than enough to make an assessment of CIG's capabilities and behavior and make a judgement on what is realistic for SC's future.

We've seen this time and time again. Quarter after quarter. Year after year. Dozens of promises: new features, systems, new assets, new content, and so on. "This will finally be the patch that brings SC closer to fulfilling the vision!". Release day arrives. 75% of the promised stuff has beeb pushed back. The stuff that does come is either half baked and falls woefully short of the expectations CIG had set and then isn't expanded upon for years (or ever), or is utterly meaningless stuff like being able to buy a nonfunctional coffeemaker for the 300i series of ships. The same cycle for years on end, and there is no reason not to believe that it will remain the same for the years to come.

[Hellobolis]

what? this is not a coherent sentence. more fleshed out literally means updated/changing something to be better than what it was initially, whether it has the same name or not is highly irrelevant. as an example, the flight model that was there back in 2015 is drastically different from the one we have now and it has improved for the better with greater 6DOF, more distinct flight characteristics between ships, as well as atmospheric flight modeling to name a few. the flight model will change again when they add control surfaces, individual thruster manipulation, ship power distribution, ship armor, physicalized damage and components, etc.

sure let's take that as an example. you use the word "drastically different".

so which one of the following scenarios is closest to reality:
-they made the initial system in 2015 and every 6-12 month orso added a little bit to it to arrive where it is now.
-they made the initial system in 2015 and then a couple years later did a major addition, and then another major addition a few years after that.
-they made the initial system in 2015 and then recently said "wow this system is so outdated it's not worth trying to fix, let's start from scratch."

i have a funny feeling the 3rd scenario happens an awful lot with star citizen considering how often i've heard terms like "2.0 version" come along.

- - - Updated - - -

i am tired of buying incomplete games that are sold as fully released titles.

as opposed to buying an incomplete game that is sold as an incomplete game?

i am surprised that gamers would actually want devs to rush two games being developed concurrently,

always reminds me of that copernicus mmo and kingdoms of amalur. but hey i'm sure the only reason they failed is cause they had to borrow money instead of get crowdfunding.

[Easo]

Pushing boundaries? I really want to see how the SQ42 will do that. The last gameplay video's we had are by now looking dated...

[XDurionX]

"How My Girlfriend and I Stole Thousands of Credits worth of Drugs"


Only in Star Citizen

I love how they're employing time skips all the time to veil how boring running through an empty world is. Or taking down a non-reactive npc.

[Kyanion]

because the devs are planning on high content density.

Sure, they are planning things in what, year 9 of development? Is it 10? I don't even remember anymore. Who cares what they are planning, they have proven time and time again they cannot get many things into the game and keep pushing things back farther and farther. It is 2022 now, good lord this KS finished in Oct 2012 right?

- - - Updated - - -

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 do not have to worry about things getting cut

Glad you know the inner workings of what is going on...oh wait you only go on what they tell you. Where is SQ 42? Who knows! It was only greyboxxed years ago. Yeah they haven't had to cut things down like server meshing, oh wait.

- - - Updated - - -

and it will take as long as it takes

Or until the whales have had enough and move on to something else.

- - - Updated - - -

i am tired of buying incomplete games that are sold as fully released titles. i am surprised that gamers would actually want devs to rush two games being developed concurrently, given the past 5 years of games from AAA studios, many beloved that were disappointing to say the least.

I think 'rushing' went out the door years ago. Given the past 5 years of games that released from AAA studios when CiG can't release a damn thing.

- - - Updated - - -

haha, ok. but why are you just guessing when we can see what the devs are actually working on?

You can see what they are working on? Neat, so you see what SQ42 is like, oh you mean they only put out blurbs about it but there is nothing to see. Oh.

- - - Updated - - -

I learned long ago to stop hoping for "what could be". We were once promised that we would be able to have Star Citizen private servers that we could mod. Obviously that is now utterly impossible. We were once promised a singleplayer campaign (which was the MAIN selling point of the project, before the "do everything MMO life simulator" ballooned and hijacked the spotlight), a campaign that has apparently regressed in development and has been rebooted multiple times and which has pretty much disappeared as of several years ago. We were once promised that we would be able to have massive spacebattles with dozens of people onboard destroyers and dozens of destroyers and dozens more fighters flying around fighting, and yet for the past 6 years the servers were utterly incapable of coming anywhere near close and CIG refused to come out and say what went wrong, and only just a few months ago did they finally admit that they might not be able to pull it off. And the entire game up until this point has been on the presumption that it would be a truly massively multiplayer game, and now they're almost certainly going to have to waste more time going back and trying to redesign systems to account for the reality they have been kicking down the road.

This sums up the game in one paragraph.

- - - Updated - - -

I love how they're employing time skips all the time to veil how boring running through an empty world is. Or taking down a non-reactive npc.

They didn't want to show the crashes, bugs, server meltdowns and things either. And heaven forbid if everyone on the server got in the same area.

[MrAnderson]

2021 went on to be another great year for Star Citizen, probably the best yet.

Started the year with the Xenothreat event that got us a taste of Capital Ship battles. The Bengal, Javelin and Idris. Javelin inside tour with fully mocaped npc's and voice-overs. Multiple new features and QOL improvements. Ship to Ship docking, Bombing ship, a Tank, Gravlev Bikes, Radar, Scanning and Ping improvements, The Gas Cloud Planet Orison completing Stanton. Full volumetric clouds added to Microtech, Full Looting and it's management, Medical/Revival Gameplay, JumpTown2 war event, Ship Server Crash Recovery, improved stability and performance etc etc.
No wonder they broke their player concurrency and funding record.

Bring on 2022!

[Odeezee]

Adding rivers and weather systems would be very nice, but that doesn't make for more interesting gameplay.

huh? how? adding things like rivers literally adds gameplay opportunities like underwater content, fishing, etc. this is an MMO remember and these are staple features of MMOs and the devs have already talked about that type of content, but they need the medium in-game first.

Roads and more towns (that aren't just the copy-pasted hab settlements) might be added, but given the server situation I highly doubt that they will be sufficiently populated with NPCs to make the planets feel more alive or to add more interesting gameplay. There is no possible way they're going to have the valleys of Microtech populated with deer.

what are you talking about? i do not know if this is willful ignorance on your part, but i already explained the tech currently being worked on an scheduled to go in this year that should alleviate many of the issues you seem to have. why are we discussing issues you know they are actively working on, to frame the game as though the devs do not know what's wrong and how to fix it? that's highly disingenuous and bad faith.

The servers would not handle it. With the latest patch, the servers aren't crashing within 2 hours for the first time since 2017 but that doesn't mean that they throw more stuff in. I guess the deer could be spawned in once the player got close enough to forest, with the tree cover obfuscating it, but that's not going to work for fauna that populated plains or steppes that can be clearly seen popping in from a distance, and so on.

you are very mistaken, the most stable patch was actually 3.7 in 2019, but more importantly, why does it even matter when you are literally play-testing an pre-alpha game? as long as enough people can test the systems and give feedback, it doesn't matter if some people have a bad experience as it is to be expected when playing a game in development in the first place. and again, what do you think the whole point of Server Meshing is? it alleviates the resource bottleneck of servers, bad AI performance, content density, player numbers, etc. you keep guessing, but why though? nothing i am saying is my opinion, it is what the devs have and are currently working on, why guess at all?

I learned long ago to stop hoping for "what could be". We were once promised that we would be able to have Star Citizen private servers that we could mod. Obviously that is now utterly impossible. We were once promised a singleplayer campaign (which was the MAIN selling point of the project, before the "do everything MMO life simulator" ballooned and hijacked the spotlight), a campaign that has apparently regressed in development and has been rebooted multiple times and which has pretty much disappeared as of several years ago.

why are you using such loaded words like "hope"? there is a progress tracker and a release window on the Roadmap, you don't have to have "hope", if something makes it to the release window as committed, then that is what will be released. no hope required. the devs have addressed the private server question already, they will revisit it after all the core systems are in, so you are mistaken on that. the kickstarter games, pitched, died right after the initial kickstarter ended at the end of 2012 and with the beginning of the stretchgoals in 2013. CIG gave those who wanted a refund the chance to get one, even though they were not legally obligated to all the way until the end of 2017. so for anyone pledging to the games as of 2013, they were pledging for the increased scope of the projects (remember the initial pitch of the games only brought in ~7 million, compared to the ~420+ mill now). SQ42 has only been rebooted once after the leak of the SQ42 script, the rest has just been iteration, even when they were able to leverage one of the Stretch-goals' tech being produced sooner than anticipated, planet tech, for it as well.

We were once promised that we would be able to have massive spacebattles with dozens of people onboard destroyers and dozens of destroyers and dozens more fighters flying around fighting, and yet for the past 6 years the servers were utterly incapable of coming anywhere near close and CIG refused to come out and say what went wrong, and only just a few months ago did they finally admit that they might not be able to pull it off. And the entire game up until this point has been on the presumption that it would be a truly massively multiplayer game, and now they're almost certainly going to have to waste more time going back and trying to redesign systems to account for the reality they have been kicking down the road.

Val, it seem that you are seriously lacking critical, but easily available information which is leading you to conflate many, MANY things together. the devs never said that we would be unable to have massive spaceship battles, they said we might not be able to have a single world/global shard, but that's less due to desire and more the literal laws of physics, as even with perfect fiber optic connections, information has a speed limit, which is the speed of light, so latency is always going to be a factor. but they are going to start small and build out to regional shards and once that tech has matured, see if a global shard can be tackled, as it is still a goal of theirs and attempting it can give benefits to the regional shards even if they can never achieve a global shard.

When I say "We might get one or two new small playable areas added to the cities of Hurston/Area 18/New Babbage/Orison, but that's it", I'm taking a realistic perspective at CIG's capabilities. It has been six years since the Stanton servers went live, and in that time CIG has managed to release a grand total of... 4 cities. 4 cities that are 95% set dressing with only 3 or 4 small playable areas each. Besides those 4 cities, literally the only other settlements in the Stanton system are generic tileset spacestations that use the same copy-pasted kit, and small hab settlements using the exact same copy-pasted kit, and have a population of like one guy standing at a counter.

i am sorry, but you have not shown that you can accurately assess the capabilities of CIG, when you are not even capable of understanding the things that have already done and how they plan to accomplish those that remain, when all of this information is readily available. SC was the first game ever to have seamless planet to space transitions, the first to have a fully traversable volumetric gas giant planet (not even Space Engine has this), the first game to use POM for all assets in-game from buildings, to ships, to characters, etc, etc, so they are making many strides not only in the MMO space, but in the gaming space as a whole. about the pace of development, many devs disagree with you, based on how CIG started with a much, MUCH smaller budget, 12 staff, no infrastructure, etc, they have made amazing strides in such a short amount of time. CIG went with Stanton literally to prove out their concepts and create the foundation for automating many of the functions devs would do individually, in order to produce all the systems that they need. you also forget that we can ONLY play-test in one system, but they have made at least 4 others. wait, maybe the advantage i have over you is that you do not read the monthly reports on SC and SQ42? they explain and occasionally show us what they are working on, sometimes even with videos. also they just had CitizenCon, where they actually showcased some of the work they are working on and the tools and tech they are creating and they explain most of this, but most of it was already common knowledge, if you followed the development closely.

In that time, how many Assasin's Creed games have released? How many cities with different art designs, with individual cities dwarfing SC cities in playable space? And at a far greater level of detail than Star Citizen's locations too. And what about the many varied small towns and villages that deck out the rest of the world outside of the cities? Now yes, we saw in streams that they are finally working on new small town settlement kits, but even if Pyro magically comes out this year with the new settlement aesthetic, it would've taken CIG 6 freaking years to just come up with a new small town non-city kit. And even if a new city did come out this year, 5 cities with such shallow depth over the course of 6 years...

you can't be serious? are you actually comparing a single-player game series to SC here? how are you complaining about copy/paste assets in SC (which are literally just T0, as the devs have said they will be iterating on in the future, once they finish the tools to automate settlements with the accompanying gameplay content) to a copy/paste game in a series from a dev with its workflow, art assets, infrastructure, funding and devs already in place? you do get how these things are disanalogous, right? and again, why are you acting like the things in SC are final when the devs are actively working on those very things you are complaining about? we literally have had hospitals, as an example, being just backdrops in the cities, until they became functional spaces with content. so why the willful ignorance?

You can pick apart any one thing, but the problem with the Star Citizen dream isn't any one particular thing you can point your finger towards. It's a death by a thousand cuts. Do I have hope that the current game will be a little more than it already is? Yes. Will it reach be what we have been promised, and what is still being advertised to unsuspecting newcomers? Almost certainly not. That's why whenever I recommend Star Citizen to people, I do so telling them what the game really is right now, and the likelihood that it is probably not going to much more than it already is, and if that doesn't interest you then you should probably pass.

death? what death by a thousand cuts are you talking about? and what is being advertised to newcomers that isn't true? what have they "promised" since the end of the Stretch-goals in 2014 that they have gone back on exactly? actually, when did you pledge for the game? and i never "sell" the game to people as only they know what they will enjoy, and there are plenty of Free-Fly events for people to experience it for themselves. the only thing i tell them, is that they are not playing a finished game, and if they are not good with incomplete things, bugs and instability then they should wait until the game is more fleshed-out.

CIG has been doing this for almost a decade. They keep telling us "we're working on this cool new feature! The servers are going to be better! You're going to have huge battles! We're going to Pyro next year!" and then a year passes and the glorious vision they've been touting has yet to pass. And then the next year. And the next year. And then before you know it, it's been 6 years since the servers launched and Stanton doesn't feel much bigger or more filled out or varied than it did when the servers first went up. And Stanton isn't supposed to be the extent of the project. We were supposed to have 40+ star systems and a singleplayer game. The one and only thing that SC has been able to consistently release is new ships for you to drop hundreds of dollars on, and they all fit the same mold of either being a combat ship, a cargo ship, maybe a miner, ships with halfbaked gameplay (those medical ships), or sometimes some a ship that is built around a gameplay loop that has been promised to us for years and is still nowhere in sight (the Reclaimer that can't salvage anything, the information runners that can't harvest any data, etc), while the big feature ships that were promised years ago and costed thousands of dollars like the colonization ship or the research ship or the Kraken with player owned shops has yet to be added because the devs straight up cannot implement the gameplay meant for them.

you are basically saying that you are impatient and that this pre-alpha game, currently, isn't for you. just wait until beta or full release, nothing you do in the game now is permanent, so don't feel compelled to play-test just because you pledged. you keep using loaded terms like "halfbaked" when you are in a pre-alpha like it's somehow a bad thing? it's literally when devs experiment and try things out, and you want them to try things out before they go too far down the line and end up having to scrap a lot of work, thereby wasting even more time.

i am not trying to dismiss your claims out of hand, but they seem premature, if the games were a released products, then you would be well within your rights, but they are in development and we have seen the tools that they have and are working on and we can see the benefits that we get from them. do you know why they keep pumping out ships? other than the fact that it's what brings in the funding, it's also one of the most mature pipelines in the company, same thing with the planet tech and their fruits have been shown to us, either through upcoming content or currently in-game content. we have always had multi-crew ships with a co-pilot seat that was basically defunct, now co-pilots can manage scanning, missiles and in the future, emp, radar, navigation, etc. compare the 400i to the 600i and see all the quality of life enhancements that have been added and the better use of space, even prompting an internal rework of the 600i, which given the 400i will make the 600i the best ship in it's class. also look at the fleshing out of systems like survival/logistics mechanics, with the Redeemer coming out with a fully stocked and interactable mini-fridge

Almost a decade since the kickstarter, and 6 years since the servers first went up. That is a long time, and it's more than enough to make an assessment of CIG's capabilities and behavior and make a judgement on what is realistic for SC's future.

curious, so how long should a game like SC take to make and what is your frame of reference? is this also taking into consideration all the issues that they have had to deal with, as well at they are making two games concurrently, one of which is SQ42 and has been the primary focus of the company for the past 3 years?

i don't make predictions because i lack so much information on the internals of CIG, that it would be pointless and i actually read the monthly reports on both games, as well as consume most of the media on the games, so i'm fine with the game being ready when it's ready, even though i want it to have been completed years ago already. the way i see it the game will either succeed when it launches, or it will fail to even launch. it cannot be just "okay" or "bad", as we backers can test SC and give feedback, which they listen to, when warranted and i have had some of my most fun, engaging and memorable gaming experiences in this incomplete, buggy and unstable pre-alpha that we get to play-test.

We've seen this time and time again. Quarter after quarter. Year after year. Dozens of promises: new features, systems, new assets, new content, and so on. "This will finally be the patch that brings SC closer to fulfilling the vision!". Release day arrives. 75% of the promised stuff has beeb pushed back. The stuff that does come is either half baked and falls woefully short of the expectations CIG had set and then isn't expanded upon for years (or ever), or is utterly meaningless stuff like being able to buy a nonfunctional coffeemaker for the 300i series of ships. The same cycle for years on end, and there is no reason not to believe that it will remain the same for the years to come.

why do you love the use of loaded terms like "promised" when they have not promised anything at all? there are disclaimers and caveats everywhere that state that all things are tentative and things are subject to change at anytime and for whatever reason. from the way you write and the issues you bring up, play-testing this pre-alpha is definitely not for you and there is no shame in that. games in development require a certain temperament that few people have, hence why few gamers pre-order, even fewer play early access, and even fewer still back and play-test crowdfunding projects. people just want to be able to buy a game and play the finished product when they do, it's totally understandable, but that is not what SC/SQ42 are. they are in active pre-alpha development, so if missing features, content, mechanics, systems, tech, etc is something that you take issue with, then there is no harm in just waiting, there are plenty of other games to play in the meantime.

sure let's take that as an example. you use the word "drastically different".

so which one of the following scenarios is closest to reality:
-they made the initial system in 2015 and every 6-12 month orso added a little bit to it to arrive where it is now.
-they made the initial system in 2015 and then a couple years later did a major addition, and then another major addition a few years after that.
-they made the initial system in 2015 and then recently said "wow this system is so outdated it's not worth trying to fix, let's start from scratch."

i have a funny feeling the 3rd scenario happens an awful lot with star citizen considering how often i've heard terms like "2.0 version" come along.

i mean only if you live in an alternate reality, then maybe. why downplay what CIG have actually done though? i am sure you can still pursue your narrative without having to mislead and misinform. i actually love how CIG have decided to develop the games (though i do selfishly wish that it was faster, but i can wait for them to realize CR's vision), as it shows that people do not really pay attention to milestones and progress makes the dreams of the recent past unnoticeable now. like people forget that prior to things like the Network Bind Culling, Object Container Streaming and other tech, people would get 5-20 fps with just Crusader and its moons as backdrops, with a player cap of 25, and constant ctds. now we can regularly hit 30 to 75 fps consistently, with a player cap of 50 to 60 depending on the patch, a very few, if any, ctds or 30ks. so i am looking forward to us all taking systemic weather, roads, rivers, lush biomes, lava biomes and volcanoes, radiation, poison, disease, acidic and alkaline player effects, Quantum derived missions and content, parachutes/jetpacks, native VR support, multiple, varied and content rich systems, salvaging, hacking, full medical, repair, rearm and refueling, etc, for granted.

oh and the actual answer is:
-they may have introduced the system in 2015, but they technically only physicalized the planetary bodies in 2018 with the moon Daymar (and only Port Olisar coming over) and then every 3 months they have added a lot to the game, either on the front-end, on the back-end, or both as well as content and gameplay mechanics, professions and tech, to where it is now.

as opposed to buying an incomplete game that is sold as an incomplete game?

you are obviously not buying an incomplete game, you are backing a projects development in the hopes of a game at the end, as the game may never actually reach release, so it is a risk, but it's one you go into it knowing.

always reminds me of that copernicus mmo and kingdoms of amalur. but hey i'm sure the only reason they failed is cause they had to borrow money instead of get crowdfunding.

many games, not just MMOs, fail due to a lack of a coherent vision (CP2077, etc), a lack of funding (ME:A, etc), a lack of talent (Anthem, etc), a lack of time (CP2077, ME:A, Anthem, etc), or any combination of. most of these issues are not currently plaguing CIG, except maybe not having enough devs as they still have many open positions, so there is a good chance that they can still reach their goals. we just have to wait and see.

Pushing boundaries? I really want to see how the SQ42 will do that. The last gameplay video's we had are by now looking dated...

well it will have fully traversable procedural planets for starters. also, haven't you ever wanted to just explore the planets in ME? or have more control over how you traverse the maps and planets? how about cool features like SQ42's Spoil-tech where npcs react to where you are looking and give you lore that way, as opposed to through a menu? or seeing 24-hour daily lives of npcs, that are not just standing around waiting for you to interact with them? or having more interactivity with the gameworld than any game to date, with animations to go with them all? and even if none of this unexhaustive list appeals to you, how about all of these features in the same cohesive package?

Sure, they are planning things in what, year 9 of development? Is it 10? I don't even remember anymore. Who cares what they are planning, they have proven time and time again they cannot get many things into the game and keep pushing things back farther and farther. It is 2022 now, good lord this KS finished in Oct 2012 right?

first, the kickstarter started in Oct 2012. second, people who are interested in the game would care ofc. third, people really do need to read the caveats, disclaimers and the ToS which states that the devs can change content whenever and however they like, as well as taking the time needed to get things to their standard, however long it takes, as all dates are tentative. you may not like that, but that's okay if you don't like it, you are free to just keep it moving and not back the game. the game will take as long as it takes, but SQ42 will come out first, as it has the most devs and resources allocated to it, so judging the pace of development on SC, will always be inaccurate primarily due to a lack of internal information and also because SC is not the main focus of development and hasn't been for at least 3 years.

Glad you know the inner workings of what is going on...oh wait you only go on what they tell you. Where is SQ 42? Who knows! It was only greyboxxed years ago. Yeah they haven't had to cut things down like server meshing, oh wait.

wait, so i am wrong by going off of what i have read from the Roadmap, what i have watched of their development and what i can test in the pre-alpha build, but that is apparently incorrect somehow? then please tell me, where do you get your information about the game and how do you know if you can trust it?

also, SQ42 is still in active development, they send out monthly reports on their progress, like there are only 3 iirc out of the 27 or so chapters that still needed content before going into bug fixing, QA, polish pass, etc, gold, as of the end of 2021, barring any issues.

Or until the whales have had enough and move on to something else.

why make a claim that you cannot corroborate? you literally have no idea where most of the funding CIG are getting is coming from, per backer or otherwise, so why make the claim and use it in a derogatory manner on top of that? and the reason it will take as long as it takes, is because CR and CIG don't want to put the game out unless it's as great as they can possibly make it. and even if funding were to dry up right now, they can continue to focus on SQ42, release it within the next 2 years and use those funds to fund the development of SC, or they could just get a loan if it will taken longer than that and they have no other funding. they have options.

I think 'rushing' went out the door years ago. Given the past 5 years of games that released from AAA studios when CiG can't release a damn thing.

so what is the argument here exactly? that it's better to release an incomplete game, that will be poorly received, than take your time to release the most ambitious game ever attempted? out of curiosity, how many of those AAA studios released a brand new IP that was a technological and gameplay marvel and not just the next game in a series of the same game?

You can see what they are working on? Neat, so you see what SQ42 is like, oh you mean they only put out blurbs about it but there is nothing to see. Oh.

we can on the Roadmap, and in the monthly reports, they even show us screenshots and videos. we have also seen a vertical slice of SQ42 gameplay, albeit 4 years old at this point, but we also get to test out similar systems in the SC pre-alpha, so we know mechanically what to expect and are actively testing for it through shares mechanics with SQ42. but why do you want to know what SQ42 plays like instead of it just being done, as it is a single player narrative driven story? just like all other single player narrative driven games, the true sense of the game will be at full release. so backers playing it during development would just be spoiling the game for themselves, not to mention the nightmare of enforcing the NDA.

They didn't want to show the crashes, bugs, server meltdowns and things either. And heaven forbid if everyone on the server got in the same area.

this is very strange, you don't seem to know anything you are speaking of in this regard, but speak as if you do. is it safe to assume you have never played this patch, let alone the game at all? you know that this was a fan made video, right? do you know there were any crashes? do you know that they encountered any bugs? do you know that the server had a meltdown? and you do realize that if everyone on the server was actually in the same place that the servers would actually perform BETTER than if people were spread out? why are you and others who make similar declarations, so comfortable speaking from such an apparent point of ignorance? /sigh

- - - Updated - - -

I love how they're employing time skips all the time to veil how boring running through an empty world is. Or taking down a non-reactive npc.

...they literally jumped off their bike 7.5 km from their target location, and had to actually run all the way there, so it took them a while, not to mention that they also were trying to avoid being spotted by the ships searching for them. they also did not take down an non reactive npc, that was a player loading his ship with drugs, from the drug lab they were at, this was literal PvP piracy gameplay that you witnessed in this video. smh.

[Edge-]

huh? how? adding things like rivers literally adds gameplay opportunities like underwater content, fishing, etc. this is an MMO remember and these are staple features of MMOs and the devs have already talked about that type of content, but they need the medium in-game first.

Damn that's a lot of words, but I'll just stop at this bit -

Was fishing ever a selling point for a futuristic sci-fi spaceship game? Has it even been discussed by CIG? I see fans discussing, but nothing in search is popping up from CIG. Why would it make sense within the game currently, are they planning on having a cooking system where you can grow your own crops and herbs and catch fish and gut it and cook it? On top of everything else that they are struggling to get working? Is it gonna be space fishing, or boring terrestrial fishing?

And, you'll have many SC fans here disagreeing that Star Citizen is a MMO because "CIG don't call it a MMO" since they removed that descriptor some years back.

I mean, we're nearly a decade in and they're still struggling with a lot of foundational elements and you're talking about a major addition to the game that would impact other systems in a huge way. Something that won't be cheap to design and implement and get working with everything else without a ton of bugs.

Should they add another 2-3 years (minimum) onto the development timeline for fishing and underwater exploration or something?

[Jastall]

Damn that's a lot of words, but I'll just stop at this bit -

Was fishing ever a selling point for a futuristic sci-fi spaceship game? Has it even been discussed by CIG? I see fans discussing, but nothing in search is popping up from CIG. Why would it make sense within the game currently, are they planning on having a cooking system where you can grow your own crops and herbs and catch fish and gut it and cook it? On top of everything else that they are struggling to get working? Is it gonna be space fishing, or boring terrestrial fishing?

And, you'll have many SC fans here disagreeing that Star Citizen is a MMO because "CIG don't call it a MMO" since they removed that descriptor some years back.

I mean, we're nearly a decade in and they're still struggling with a lot of foundational elements and you're talking about a major addition to the game that would impact other systems in a huge way. Something that won't be cheap to design and implement and get working with everything else without a ton of bugs.

Should they add another 2-3 years (minimum) onto the development timeline for fishing and underwater exploration or something?

From what I've observed, it's not an MMO when it's time to compare it to the stability, features, design process and development of other MMOs, but it IS an MMO when it comes to describing what it could be in an extremely indeterminate future that is only visible to those that have faith and, one assumes, an existing sunk cost in the game.

But to be fair in regards to your question, wanting to add terrestrial fishing for the sheer hell of it while the actual space portion of the game is still half an unplayable mess, patches launch with a fraction of planned features and the entire SP game exists only in wishy-washy blogs would be a very Star Citizen move.

[Edge-]

But to be fair in regards to your question, wanting to add terrestrial fishing for the sheer hell of it while the actual space portion of the game is still half an unplayable mess, patches launch with a fraction of planned features and the entire SP game exists only in wishy-washy blogs would be a very Star Citizen move.

I mean yeah, but at the same time the whole studio can't just wait for the server meshing team to get that finally working before working on everything else. They gotta stay busy working on other elements of the game while waiting on core tech to be ready.

[Cyclone Jack]

From what I've observed, it's not an MMO when it's time to compare it to the stability, features, design process and development of other MMOs, but it IS an MMO when it comes to describing what it could be in an extremely indeterminate future that is only visible to those that have faith and, one assumes, an existing sunk cost in the game.

SC is in a perpetual state of being both an MMO and not an MMO while also being both released and not released, and is apparently able to change its state at will.

[Gorsameth]

I mean yeah, but at the same time the whole studio can't just wait for the server meshing team to get that finally working before working on everything else. They gotta stay busy working on other elements of the game while waiting on core tech to be ready.

exactly, they keep adding and working on random shit because the project can go nowhere until critical tech is developed and implemented.

In competent design you would expect this to be done first and when (if) its figured out you expand the team and do everything else. CiG in their infinite wisdom now have 600 people twiddling their thumbs waiting for a dozen to deliver the magic bullet that will save them all.

[MrAnderson]

I think speaking of server meshing like its a small task and predominant in many other games already is a usual armchair dev mistake.

"Everyone" has the perfect way to deliver yet no one can provide actual examples of it being done. At least in the way CIG needs. EVE uses time dilatation to achieve it's numbers while not being a game heavy on physics or fast twitch gameplay, both NMS and Elite are solo games which connect to a central server and resort to P2P to connect toguether players like Destiny and other "mmo light" aproaches.

Planetside 2 does it in a constricted arena and yet has to reduce visible players after X ammount and range of sight is very low.

Dual Universe, Starbase, SpaceEngniers have their own solutions with their own limitations in terms of scalability and performance.

Star Citize universal scale means thousands of km of not only view distance but actual physycs, more entities to simulate and way more complex calculation than most games.

That's a Capital ship firing a railrun projectile across a planet that can be seen until the planet starts curving.

So they are trying to solve a problem that is incredibly difficult.
Trying to create a datastore system that can expand horizontally, keeps ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability), and does it quickly. The quick part is the real kicker. They have to be quick in order to support twitch reactions in a game with pvp capabilities.

It's quite a challenging task and why there's so little (none) alternatives to Star Citizen and why many people keep supporting the game.

In fact, it's exactly why this project is so special, gamers enabling a company to tackle technical challenges instead of resorting to scale down the game complexity/graphical/scale for the sake of profit margin constrains.