[Megathread] Star Citizen

[NatePsy]

How long has it been since Skyrim exactly? And they're just barely announcing anything for ES:6. Point is, major games like these take time. That and they're only barely a 1,000 employee company.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

How long has it been since Skyrim exactly? And they're just barely announcing anything for ES:6. Point is, major games like these take time. That and they're only barely a 1,000 employee company.

Bethseda doesn't just develop TES games; they develop a multitude of games. Fallout, Rage, Dishonored, and currently Starfield. They don't have their entire team working on a single game. Nor do I think Bethseda began development on TES:VI immediately after Skyrim's release.

[sabe]

How long has it been since Skyrim exactly? And they're just barely announcing anything for ES:6. Point is, major games like these take time. That and they're only barely a 1,000 employee company.

According to Google, they have 400 employees. Do we count cleaning lady, voice actors, drivers etc?

[Fencers]

I don't follow gaming news much. Occasionally I browse R/PCgaming and R/Gamingnews for a feel of what's going on these days. Sometimes people email links or post on facebook cool game stuff like that Outer Worlds game or Cyberpunk 2077.

So I totally forgot about Star Citizen until seeing this thread at the top of the forum. Read the last few pages, did a quick Google search... what the fuck?

This game still hasn't had a full release? Wow. Irresponsible.

[MrAnderson]

You completely missed the point… but since you already with your hands on a dictionary, look up “morphing”, spoiler alert, if it’s still there, then it didn’t change into something else, the fact that the game it known for its f2p PvP mode is irrelevant to that.

I’m not saying that CiG didn’t put a lot of hard work into the project, or that it isn’t taking risks with it, I’m saying that compared to other companies, they had a relatively easy start, I mean, a lot of well-known companies out there started with a group of friends in a basement, some of them quitted their jobs, using their life-savings, selling their belongings, borrowing cash from family & friends, just to put out a product that allowed them to cover the costs and move into the next one, and in case of failure would lose it all and be left in debt, to a certain point CiG doesn’t have to worry about that, because they don’t owe anything to most of the people backing the project, and just the fact that this is a possibility nowadays, makes them far more fortunate than the ones that came before them.

Oh! It’s a “fact” … then I’m assuming you can prove it to be true, right? Please, go ahead.

Have you ever considered that the problem might be just in the way you decide to interpret it?

Of course I do, doesn’t everyone!?! I even highly recommend you putting it up in your curriculum… “Sir, says here that you have 7 years of experience in game developing, can you please elaborate?”, “Oh you know, I backed a video game project through Kickstarter back in 2012.”… and by the way, you are not an “investor” for helping crowdfunding a project, “investing” implies expecting to profit from it, in this case, at best, you just get what you paid for, and that’s not profiting.

You are using the most extreme and vocal minority of a "group" (that you also happen to be part of) to generalize it on its entirety to serve as some sort of justification to go after people individually and attempt to shut them down just for supposedly being part of it, and that always falls short.

It's also not that different than the people who pop-in here time to time just to shit on the Star Citizen community as a whole for being a bunch of “fanatics”, “cult-like”, and what not by cherry picking the most extreme cases of the people who back it, such as the individuals sending death & rape threats to youtubers families for daring to upload videos about SC that they just don’t approve of…

It's a pretty ironic way to call someone ignorant or hypocrite.

Edited: Also great formatting...

I think the point was saying that games can change a lot during their development. Fortnite changing it's focus from PVE to PVP is just one of many examples.

The thing your missing is that Star Citizen started with a group of friends in the basement, all they had was a pitch video and a game engine license. That and most importantly Chris Roberts & Co pedigree from their past games. They went from basement to a small studio still in the US, only when funding continued they could hire it's brother and dev's from the UK to open a studio there (2014) and only in (2015) they opened the German Studio.
The fact that they could grow and escalate their studio so fast is thanks to their hard work by getting gamers behind their vision to make the game they want to play.

Yeah it's a fact, you can check that all the kickstarter projects that Chris Roberts personally endorsed in the Star Citizen official website saw a boost in funding that helped them meet their goals. Frontier making a kickstarter campaign for Elite just one month after the Star Citizen one blew all records wasn't a coincidence, Dual Universe, Infinity, Everspace all received personal praise and mention from Chris Roberts in the Star Citizen website and it's funding increased thanks to it.

I see crowdfunding a game as an investment in future entertainment or by the sheer realisation that you helped build someone's dream game that so it happens to be also a game you enjoy.

As for vocal minority group that's exactly what most forums are composed off. They hardly represent gaming communities, you'll find them mostly playing the games they like. Most gamers spend their free time playing games not writing about them, at most they might read a post or two and never participate. Ultimately the ones playing it are the ones that matter the most, the rest is mostly useless noise.

[Monster Hunter]

Game's been playable since 2014. If you dont like the direction just move on to games you like. That's what normally gamers do.

A short-film made ingame by one of the many talented folks of the Star Citizen Community.

i get the feeling that guy is called Ryan and he really liked mass effect and he is from america. not sure what from.

[1001]

Frontier making a kickstarter campaign for Elite just one month after the Star Citizen one blew all records wasn't a coincidence

Kickstarter wasn't available in the UK when CIG did their pitch. If it had been available perhaps they would have done their pitch sooner but the case was that UK companies had to wait until November of 2012 before they could do a fundraising project.

There's zero proof that Roberts' endorsement was directly responsible for a boost in funding, it's been widely documented that Kickstarters start with a lot of interest and then plateau until the last few days when they see a sudden push to get them over the finishing line. Which is no different to what happened in Frontier's case.

https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/14...s/#chart-daily

[MrAnderson]

Dude, sorry but… you are the one making the claim, you are the one with the burden of proof here, people don’t have to go off their way to fact check everything you say just because you call it a fact.

Aw, that’s adorable. Go ahead then, just put that up in your curriculum, 7 years of experience as “business investor” and “video game developer”, just please, when asked to elaborate on it, repeat that up and watch them standing up just to slow clap.

Yeah, and that’s generally quite true. The problem is that you are still trying to represent a group of people by cherry picking a even smaller group inside of it, and I’ll bring my previous example, there are people reporting to have received death threats over their opinions about the project, for example, one YouTuber by the name of “Sid Alpha” has reported to receive emails from people saying shit like “I’m going to rape your underage daughter in front of you while you die.”, now tell me, do you honestly think it would be fair to try to represent the SC community or just those who engage in discussions online about it using such examples? It would be utter nonsense.

This is just one example from the Dual Universe -> https://as.reddit.com/r/DualUniverse...uring/eqw7tsa/

Considering that any nutjob can write things in the internet and the amount of haters trying to harm the project by faking refunds, glassdoor reviews and god knows what more I would take those "threat emails" with a huge grain of salt. Again there's emotionally damaged people on the loose everywhere.

I'm not looking for a job in the industry but since I've been involved with crowdfunded games I've been fortunate to be able to talk to a lot of developers and get access to information and knowledge that otherwise I wouldn't. That's about 6 years of following a lot of games and developers and watching things grow year by year.

If you do a simple exercise and compare the evolution of many other games development or even the many crowdfunded mmo's that are in production you'll notice similarities common to all games (delays, change of scope - direction, new hires, lay-offs, bugs, bad performance, placeholders, remake of whole systems etc) that usually detractors like to single out to Star Citizen as being flaws of management or professionalism when it's the norm in the industry.

Sure most games don't have SC budget or such passionate and knowledgable community and have to make much bigger compromises along the way but fundamentally having money just enables for for time and hire more manpower to solve the problems instead of just cutting them.

[ManiaCCC]

If you do a simple exercise and compare the evolution of many other games development or even the many crowdfunded mmo's that are in production you'll notice similarities common to all games (delays, change of scope - direction, new hires, lay-offs, bugs, bad performance, placeholders, remake of whole systems etc) that usually detractors like to single out to Star Citizen as being flaws of management or professionalism when it's the norm in the industry.

We do and it's called development hell.

Look, it's fine you are fan of the project, I hope for the best just for sake of backers even If I believe the game will collapse on itself and never will be properly released but I have nothing from it. It would be much much better for everyone, if SC would be actually good game in the end.

However, don't pretend that SC development is "normal", that they don't have some HUGE!!! missteps, that Chris and other leaders in studio are some great game developers - they are not, and current SC development is problematic to say at least. But still, let's hope for the best I guess.

[MrAnderson]

We do and it's called development hell.

Look, it's fine you are fan of the project, I hope for the best just for sake of backers even If I believe the game will collapse on itself and never will be properly released but I have nothing from it. It would be much much better for everyone, if SC would be actually good game in the end.

However, don't pretend that SC development is "normal", that they don't have some HUGE!!! missteps, that Chris and other leaders in studio are some great game developers - they are not, and current SC development is problematic to say at least. But still, let's hope for the best I guess.

It's like any other ambitious game, just more open then usual so you get to see more about it warts an all. If it happens with many other games, devs and studios it would mean that they are ALL incompetent when the reality is that it's just the result of doing games as massive as this one.

If you take into account that they are building Squadron 42 along with developing while maintaining a live service in Star Citizen at the scale and scope that they are while still doing weekly talk-shows to the community and yearly game conventions to showcase the progress you can see how it takes the time it takes.

You'll say "well but they are doing all that because they choose to, they could just focus on doing Squadron 42 first , cut all the weekly shows and conventions and deal with the MMORPG version later"

But the thing is one thing funds the other and vice versa. Some people backed for the Online Universe others for the Single Player. The tech we see in Star Citizen now is all needed for Squadron 42 too. NPC's, clothing, armour, guns, animations and so on.

The funding that the backers gave them was to allow for a better and bigger game and that's what they are doing. If some are impatient about it's their problem because for sure CIG is not gonna rush things or cut major features just to shut the little johny crybabies in the back-seat.

[Majestic12]

I don't follow gaming news much. Occasionally I browse R/PCgaming and R/Gamingnews for a feel of what's going on these days. Sometimes people email links or post on facebook cool game stuff like that Outer Worlds game or Cyberpunk 2077.

So I totally forgot about Star Citizen until seeing this thread at the top of the forum. Read the last few pages, did a quick Google search... what the fuck?

This game still hasn't had a full release? Wow. Irresponsible.

Yeah, you're right Fencers. I for one gave up on the game a year or so ago. People can say what they want, but this game was never intended to have a long development cycle as this.

What should've happened was that there should have been a feature-lock a long ass time ago. And they should've just made the game..

I blame things entirely on Chris Roberts the feature creep master. He single-handedly ran SC's reputation into the ground with his promised dates(every year) and there's still no end in sight.

Next year we'll have Cyberpunk and SC has just failed on all levels.

[MrAnderson]

It's mentioned in that reddit conversation on how they really helped the project get to their kickstart goal and even the dev's from Dual Universe tweeted a thank you message.

Knowledgeable as in being from an older age with good paying jobs due to their backgrounds on science and tech and with a thing for space games, sim's and generally more complex and slow paced ones. People who are naturally interested in some kind of development or creative process to build things or deal with complex systems: Engineers, Architects, Astronauts, Pilots, Finance guys and so on, people who also have disposable income to spend on their hobbies and aren't shy to use it.

Most games now are more to the cartoony side and are targeted to broader audiences that include a lot of youngsters who don't really care about the tech behind games or even have the financial conditions to be able to buy computers good enough to play the more demanding ones much less to back kickstarters.

[Chinese Bootlickers]

Because realistic graphics age like fine milk.

[MrAnderson]

I think you choose a bad example as Crysis graphics still holds on very well today and the other example you gave surely looks dated.
Besides Crysis and cryengine are a great example of graphics scalability.

[ManiaCCC]

It's like any other ambitious game, just more open then usual so you get to see more about it warts an all. If it happens with many other games, devs and studios it would mean that they are ALL incompetent when the reality is that it's just the result of doing games as massive as this one.

If you take into account that they are building Squadron 42 along with developing while maintaining a live service in Star Citizen at the scale and scope that they are while still doing weekly talk-shows to the community and yearly game conventions to showcase the progress you can see how it takes the time it takes.

You'll say "well but they are doing all that because they choose to, they could just focus on doing Squadron 42 first , cut all the weekly shows and conventions and deal with the MMORPG version later"

But the thing is one thing funds the other and vice versa. Some people backed for the Online Universe others for the Single Player. The tech we see in Star Citizen now is all needed for Squadron 42 too. NPC's, clothing, armour, guns, animations and so on.

The funding that the backers gave them was to allow for a better and bigger game and that's what they are doing. If some are impatient about it's their problem because for sure CIG is not gonna rush things or cut major features just to shut the little johny crybabies in the back-seat.

You are repeating yourself but you are wrong. SC development is not same as any other big project. It's much much worse. Fact, that people don't understand game development is making this whole thing possible.

If SC development would have proper overseeing structure by publisher or competent leader, game would be already canceled or released in some form. Bud there is none. People like you still believe, it's normal development and you have no problem to spread this non-sense further so someone may even believe you and invest into the mess what SC currently is and will start excusing it too.

Maybe in like 6 years SC will be released and will be fantastic game and there will be tons of lessons to learn from for other developers. Maybe. But maybe it's all for nothing. In CIG there are many taleneted people, who are sabotaged by incompetency from leaders. Good will from backers is slowly fading away, because even fanboys can see through that shit so how much time do they really have?

If EA or Blizzard would pull what CIG is doing, like Star Marine fiasco, or CEO/game leader lying directly to people faces just to sell some stuff, they would be buried alive. CIG is lucky that star citizen, outside of the echo chamber, is already meme for players and industry so people are really not paying too much attention to is so..this may actually help them in the long run.

[MrAnderson]

You believe in what you want to believe but the reality and facts show the game is growing year by year along with it's funding and playerbase.

- Many games have been in development for longer than SC despite being smaller in scope and scale and from bigger studios.

- The past years have shown a rise in funding with last year breaking the record for most funding, this year funding is surpassing last year.

- Player engagement is better than ever. Star Citizen is the most played and watched *space* game on twitch surpassing similar genre titles like EVE, NMS, X4, Elite and so on.

As much as it causes disconfort to detractors and cynics Star Citizen and it's comunity are doing just fine without them.

[Sezerek]

Star Citizen is the most played and watched game on twitch surpassing similar genre titles like EVE, NMS, X4, Elite and so on.

You might want to rephrase that sentence as it implies SC would be #1 on twitch in general.

[MrAnderson]

You might want to rephrase that sentence as it implies SC would be #1 on twitch in general.

It seems I somehow managed to eat the "space" word. Thanks, I've added it to the post.

[Kyanion]

- Player engagement is better than ever. Star Citizen is the most played and watched game on twitch surpassing similar genre titles like EVE, NMS, X4, Elite and so on.

Yeah sorry I don't see them on the list unless I scroll way down and let the page load more games. Ooh a robust 353 viewers right now. Very healthy!

[Katchii]

You believe in what you want to believe but the reality and facts show the game is growing year by year along with it's funding and playerbase.

- Many games have been in development for longer than SC despite being smaller in scope and scale and from bigger studios.

- The past years have shown a rise in funding with last year breaking the record for most funding, this year funding is surpassing last year.

- Player engagement is better than ever. Star Citizen is the most played and watched game on twitch surpassing similar genre titles like EVE, NMS, X4, Elite and so on.

As much as it causes disconfort to detractors and cynics Star Citizen and it's comunity are doing just fine without them.

The whole funding part isn't really something to brag about as far as the game is concerned, because it means nothing except that they're getting more funding....which is frankly ridiculous. It's received more funding than the vast majority of any video game ever and been in development plenty of time for their to be a fully released version of something.

When it has more accolades that are specific to game play and design, that's something to brag about, but saying that CIG has somehow managed to get their paws on even more funding for this developmental purgatory of a game...that says more about the players than it does the game, and it's not really something positive, IMO.