[Megathread] Star Citizen

[Post]

I'd be curious to hear what you think of Cyberpunk 2077 then.

I'm pretty sure CD Projekt Red haven't consistently broken their publicly advertised promises and deadlines for years now.

[MrAnderson]

As it says on the page itself: This is a crowdsourced endeavor. If you spot an inaccuracy, please submit it.

Someone somewhere must have been feeling really miserable to even think about doing such tracker much less updated it

[stellvia]

I'm pretty sure CD Projekt Red haven't consistently broken their publicly advertised promises and deadlines for years now.

It's a good thing this is still alpha. Internal development schedules cannot be considered an actual admission of release date.

[Gorsameth]

It's a good thing this is still alpha. Internal development schedules cannot be considered an actual admission of release date.

No, but consistently failing every single one of them is a flashing neon sign of management failure.

[MrAnderson]

No, but consistently failing every single one of them is a flashing neon sign of management failure.

You've been out of the game dev loop son. All the updates delivered this year have been on time.
I know that messes with your negative narrative.
Sorry about that.

[1001]

You've been out of the game dev loop son. All the updates delivered this year have been on time.
I know that messes with your negative narrative.
Sorry about that.

To be fair, it's should be easy to achieve that when you can pull a large amount of features beforehand.

Anyhow, I'm interested in what they manage for 3.3 as there's so much riding on getting OCS and NBC in place.

[masterhorus8]

Anyhow, I'm interested in what they manage for 3.3 as there's so much riding on getting OCS and NBC in place.

Supposedly, OCS is in QAs hands now, and NBC is waiting on the OCS. So they are at least making progress on it?

[Post]

It's a good thing this is still alpha. Internal development schedules cannot be considered an actual admission of release date.

That's cool, they've given a bunch of "it'll be out by" and have failed to deliver. CD did not.

[Gorsameth]

You've been out of the game dev loop son. All the updates delivered this year have been on time.
I know that messes with your negative narrative.
Sorry about that.

yeah... their just missing a whole bunch of the features they were originally announced to have that got moved to a future update. Easy to claim you made a deadline when you remove everything you didn't finish.

And we know we're getting SQ42 this year... oh wait.

[Eleccybubb]

yeah... their just missing a whole bunch of the features they were originally announced to have that got moved to a future update. Easy to claim you made a deadline when you remove everything you didn't finish.

And we know we're getting SQ42 this year... oh wait.

Just like we were getting SQ42 in 2014, 2015 and 2017.... oh wait.

[Cracked]

You've been out of the game dev loop son. All the updates delivered this year have been on time.
I know that messes with your negative narrative.
Sorry about that.

Yeah, I guess pushing back the contents of a patch and releasing whatever you can scramble by the patch date does make you look less bad in the eyes of less intelligent people.

[MrAnderson]

That's exactly what the majority of the Studios do to release their games in the appointed deadlines. That's why you get Elites, Sea of Thieves, NMS and other half-asset games disguised as "full-experiences" and charged as such. Cue in the DLC's.

CIG having so much financial backing allows them that luxury of taking their time to focus on making the fundamental base tech altogether as a cohesive whole.
That's why they could deliver the 2 huge updates in one sitting in 2.0 and 3.0! Those were big chunks of tech and features delivered in one go that combined all the modules into one single Universe.

Features that other games are still dreaming about implementing are already working very well in Star Citizen.

Now that they have these foundations of the universe laid out and the delta patching they can easily deliver incremental patches with the quarterly release schedule and that's what they are doing.

101 Game Development done right.

[Edge-]

That's exactly what the majority of the Studios do to release their games in the appointed deadlines. That's why you get Elites, Sea of Thieves, NMS and other half-asset games disguised as "full-experiences" and charged as such. Cue in the DLC's.

This is a specious argument. NMS was smoke and mirrors from the get-go, deadlines had nothing to do with it. Sea of Thieves was simply underwhelming, it wasn't due to deadlines. Can't speak to Elite, but last I recall that was well received when it launched and has done well since then.

Deadlines matter. Deadlines allow for forward planning and keep things on track. Deadlines ensure that you don't go ludicrously overbudget because you just keep expanding and expanding with no regard for what that will do to budgets, timelines, and the added complexities of simply trying to fit more things together without breaking everything.

Deadlines are super important, and any employee/company routinely missing deadlines, self-imposed or not, should be rightfully looked upon with skepticism.

IG having so much financial backing allows them that luxury of taking their time to focus on making the fundamental base tech altogether as a cohesive whole.

But for how much longer? How much longer are whales going to throw money at the game? What happens if they run out of money and need to seek private investment due to them not being able to meet their deadlines and overscoping the game?

That's why they could deliver the 2 huge updates in one sitting in 2.0 and 3.0! Those were big chunks of tech and features delivered in one go that combined all the modules into one single Universe.

I'm not super familiar with what was in those respective patches, but that's simply hitting a major milestone in development. That's standard stuff, unless there was something unique I'm unaware of.

Features that other games are still dreaming about implementing are already working very well in Star Citizen.

Features like?... I mean, most of the stuff I've seen is cool, but just about all of it exists in other games. It may not all exist together in other games, but it exists.

101 Game Development done right.

Disagree strongly. The only reason this is working is because of the whales that continue to spend thousands and thousands on the game. This isn't remotely game development done right, and while I'm sure plenty of developers would love a blank check and no deadlines when working on a game, it's not a good way to develop a game.

[kenn9530]

Disagree strongly. The only reason this is working is because of the whales that continue to spend thousands and thousands on the game. This isn't remotely game development done right, and while I'm sure plenty of developers would love a blank check and no deadlines when working on a game, it's not a good way to develop a game.

there is only a small minority that actually spends thousands on the ship packages, between the amount of accounts and money raised it averages out at 100 bucks each account spent, this isnt a typical game being developed either as it had to be built from the ground up while trying to make the game at the same time so that has extended development time by a few years.

Trying to get everything into one game is a massive undertaking and they are not even that far behind on typical game development, game has had 5-6 years proper development time with some major changes that set back things along the way.

Many games these days are released way too early with little to no content and missing features, i am happy to wait that little bit longer for star citizen to be released as complete as possible.

[Cracked]

there is only a small minority that actually spends thousands on the ship packages, between the amount of accounts and money raised it averages out at 100 bucks each account spent, this isnt a typical game being developed either as it had to be built from the ground up while trying to make the game at the same time so that has extended development time by a few years.

Trying to get everything into one game is a massive undertaking and they are not even that far behind on typical game development, game has had 5-6 years proper development time with some major changes that set back things along the way.

Many games these days are released way too early with little to no content and missing features, i am happy to wait that little bit longer for star citizen to be released as complete as possible.

I see that built-from-ground-up argument thrown around routinely. LUCKILY - we have a direct comparison! Kingdom Come: Deliverance came to KS the same year as Star Citizen, and CIG was even founded a year earlier than Warhorse! Now let's forget about comparing scopes of KCD and SC, but let's be more modest. Compare the scope of SQ42 and KCD. I'd very much argue that KCD has a much bigger scope.

Both studios had to grow from nothing and start working from nothing. One delivered a game after 6 years of development, one has a pretty long way to go to do the same.

I'm willing to accept some arguments about why SC's development is so shit, but this isn't one of them.

[Zeta333]

there is only a small minority that actually spends thousands on the ship packages, between the amount of accounts and money raised it averages out at 100 bucks each account spent, this isnt a typical game being developed either as it had to be built from the ground up while trying to make the game at the same time so that has extended development time by a few years.

Trying to get everything into one game is a massive undertaking and they are not even that far behind on typical game development, game has had 5-6 years proper development time with some major changes that set back things along the way.

Many games these days are released way too early with little to no content and missing features, i am happy to wait that little bit longer for star citizen to be released as complete as possible.

Thats why they shouldnt have tried to get everything in one go. The base game first then all the extra bullshit. Instead they went for extra bullshit first, base game last. And now they will suffer from development hell. The people here making excuses for that are the first to demonize other studios for long development cycles or development hell.

[Omedon]

Holy crap this game isn't "accountably complete" yet? I just saw it pop up on the front page and was reminded of its existence!

[Eleccybubb]

Holy crap this game isn't "accountably complete" yet? I just saw it pop up on the front page and was reminded of its existence!

Yeah mostly it's people bumping it with the odd video and a picture of a ship. Or flooding a single page with a load of pictures to lag it out.

[Jastall]

I see that built-from-ground-up argument thrown around routinely. LUCKILY - we have a direct comparison! Kingdom Come: Deliverance came to KS the same year as Star Citizen, and CIG was even founded a year earlier than Warhorse! Now let's forget about comparing scopes of KCD and SC, but let's be more modest. Compare the scope of SQ42 and KCD. I'd very much argue that KCD has a much bigger scope.

Both studios had to grow from nothing and start working from nothing. One delivered a game after 6 years of development, one has a pretty long way to go to do the same.

I'm willing to accept some arguments about why SC's development is so shit, but this isn't one of them.

To be absolutely fair, Kingdom Come could have used more time in the oven, it was the buggiest open world I had seen in some time, and that in a game with limited save slots for who knows what insane reason.

Still, it had two major leg ups on Star Citizen; first, the former isn't even close to being released even after these 6-7 years (hell it looks like the game is maybe halfway done) and, much more importantly, Kingdom Come didn't price gouge its backers and customers with a business model so ridiculous even EA doesn't look greedy by comparison.

As for Squadron 42, I'm incredibly skeptical because of the genre. Single-player shooter is actually fairly hard to get right by my reckoning, and given that it will run on an engine that is designed for space flight and was in serious development hell I very strongly doubt it will have good gunplay. Yeah, they have Mark Hamill and co. voicing characters and such, but that sort of thing didn't stop Call of Duty's campaigns being dogshit. I don't care how much money you spend on flashy decors and VA celebrities in your shooter if the actual gameplay isn't good.

[stellvia]

Trying to get everything into one game is a massive undertaking and they are not even that far behind on typical game development, game has had 5-6 years proper development time with some major changes that set back things along the way.

Many games these days are released way too early with little to no content and missing features, i am happy to wait that little bit longer for star citizen to be released as complete as possible.

I would say its more like 4.5 years of primary dev time atm. But while I think that is about on track for their scope, complexity, and predictable setbacks... Chris shouldn't have trumped up the unrealistic expectations the game would be finished in 3-4 years. I've expected a 7 year dev time and that seems about on track given the state of the features. Only thing I didn't expect was sq42 to not be finished yet. It seems far more of the systems from the MMO are used in it.

I think Chris assumed if he made the realistic 7 year timetable he wouldn't get the funds he needed. So he would rather beg forgiveness than not have it happen, despite having to stake a lot on this mess so far. That's how I see it, for better or worse.