What can you do so far in-game?
I'm genuinely curious about how far in development this game is.
You can fly a few ships, drive a few vehicles and walk/run. The ships and vehicles are missing almost all of their multiplayer functionality. You can do a few missions although these tend to screw up resulting in lost credits more often than not. You can shoot other players and become a criminal. You can buy some clothing and play dolly dress up. You can stand around with other commandos saluting and stuff to pretend there is more of a game than there actually is, and that's kind of it at this point. A bargain for just $180 million.
Star Citizen is promising an entire universe of procedurally generated worlds, fully-fleshed out ships and stations where you can explore every nook and cranny, not to mention an FPS aspect which will require character models, weapons, etc. The art team has plenty to do.
The decision to sell renderings of ships is purely to rake in more money. That's it. Because for every ship that the art team comes up with and designs, there's another team that has to actually program and construct it. With 50+ ships, that's going to be literally tens of thousands of man hours from all the different teams that will need to touch and refine them. That's a huge, massive waste of bandwidth when the core mechanics of the game are still lacking.
My feelings exactly. It's the equivalent of Blizzard boasting that they implemented a hundred mounts in WoW while only Elwynn Forest, Durotar and parts of Westfal are even close to playable, professions aren't even a thing, the combat system is still in construction and you can only play Warriors and Mages. Mounts and ships should be the stuff you create once the actual, you know, game is done, not your absolute priority. And yes, the man-hours and money spent meticulously crafting these hilariously overpriced ships are man-hours and money not spent on all the other programming, design and art assets that obviously need to go elsewhere in the game.
But you can sell ships ahead of time. You can't sell quests, activities or new planets (yet at least). So that's where the focus is for the devs, milk the whales as much as humanly possible. They're no better than EA now.
You started off okay, and then you broke right down into name calling and hyperbole. Guess there's no point in being polite to you? That said - Jesus, could you be any more of a cuck for Chris Roberts? Do you wipe his ass with your tongue too, kid?
To be fair, yes, a lot of the ships have a multitude of variants. But let's break it down, okay son? Not including Vanduul, Banu, and capital ships, there are 43 different individual ships in the game. Of those 43 ships, there are 53 variants for a total of 96 ships that need to be designed and engineered. That's a massive waste of development time and money when the core game is still unfinished, and the only reason these ships exist is to milk more money out of their gullible, ass-licking backers.
You're right though, CIG is backer funded. Elite Dangerous raised roughly $2.4 million from backers and released a game two years later. CIG's Kickstarter raised $4.2 million and 7 years later - after raising another $144 million - we still only have test environments. Talk about a return on investment!
WoW is space invaders compared to SC? Elite Dangerous can barely do anything that Star Citizen can? You say these things and have the brass ones to question my IQ. Hilarious!
WoW - which only took 4 years to develop - has only been the most successful MMO in existence, only introduced ground-breaking, industry-defining tech and systems, and has only had tens of millions of players throughout 14 years, while raking in billions of dollars in revenue.
Elite Dangerous has sold nearly 3 million copies in it's 4 year run, and is still going extremely strong. The only thing Elite doesn't have that Star Citizen promises is an FPS mode, and I can pretty much promise you now that Elite's first-person mode will be out before Star Citizen even hits shelves. How you can say that Elite can "barely do anything" SC can do, while in the real world, Elite does 90% of everything SC promises to do and is an actual game that people can actually play is testament to how completely fucking backward and stuffed up your own ass your head is.
And lol at "cutting edge tech." Maybe 7 years ago, sure, but not so much today. You say it's only really been in development for 5 years? Patently false. When SC was announced in 2011 they had tech demos, which means development started long before. And I don't have to know shit about game development to know that the game - as originally promised - should have been out only a few years after they received their funding as evidenced by their original release goal of 2014, then 2017, and now it's "sometime in the future", which we know won't be for at least another 2-3 years at this point. Compare that to similar games (like Elite!) which were able to release in a much shorter time-frame, as promised.
Admit that CIG has completely taken advantage of their supporters, and admit that Star Citizen - and at LEAST Squadron 42 - should have been released years ago had they not decided to milk every last dollar out of their backers with completely unnecessary feature creep, and an entirely unnecessary fleet of high-cost "playable" ships. Their original goals were already so lofty, so ambitious, that for them to work on anything more than the development of those core basics constitutes a stunning lack of focus, management, efficient use of money, time and the good-will of their would-be player base.
Seriously, come up for some air, bro, it's gotta be getting dank up there.
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I paid for the game. I'm one of the original backers, and I'm extremely interested in whether the game is going to be released. Chris Roberts was my childhood hero and I played every game that he released, be it from Origin or Digital Anvil.
But I won't sugar coat things, and I won't blow smoke up my own ass in order to make me feel better about the direction the game is going. I've seen this cycle of lofty goals and industry shattering-ambitions, followed by years of delays from developers before, and it's never once resulted in a finished product that was anything like the original promises. Chris Roberts himself is guilty of it.
At this point I'll only believe it when I see it.
Every single one of your replies has proven as much.
Why do you keep attempting to insult people? Why are you so emotionally invested? What's the actual reason behind these vitriolic attacks?
I'm not kidding; you need professional help man.
Last edited by nocturnus; 2018-03-22 at 07:09 PM.
The ship pipeline is its own thing, it's not holding up development. Yep, the game is funded through the sale of ships. Thanks for letting me know, I didn't know that but now I do
Elite Dangerous is a simplistic, shallow, instanced based core experience with a load of menu options and progression systems bolted on. It was in development before the kickstarter and used a lot of investors funds to get it out the door. The inital release of the game was pretty damn barebones(and still is), but it ran well I give it that.
Yes the tech in Star Citizen wipes the floor with WoW or ED. The most impressive thing about WoW is the battle.net tech itself, the game is cool but it's nothing special anymore.
Great game. But irrelevant.
I've got hundreds of hours in Elite, it's a very simple and shallow game, end of story. It will never have a seamless first person mode like Star Citizen, the best you can hope for is something along the lines of the SRV experience. First person mode in ED would be a floating camera while maybe holding a gun or a tool. Kind of pointless because there's already the SRV so lets be honest here, there's never going to space legs in ED. Frontier can't even the get menu option multicrew to work properly, let alone letting players walk around their ships at the same time the ships are flying. Elite Dangerous may have recieved a more polished earlier release, but they have painted themselves into a corner when it comes to extending the core experience I'm sad to say. Many of the features that ED players dream about are so integrated into the core experience of SC it barely registers as a "feature".
Yes cutting edge tech.
What other games can do this that either exist or are in development that we know of? None. Cutting edge tech, yes! The new animation IK stuff? Cutting edge tech! Seamless space travel between space stations, ships and, detailed planets. Cutting edge tech!
Yes, tech demos were developed early on with their team of 12 employees. Arena Commander was released in 2014. Heavy production did not begin until 2014 when the number of employees ramped up into the 100s. The original release goal was scrapped when the backers voted on a more ambitious game, CIG offered refunds to players who weren't interested, so I don't understand why you're still complaining about that now. I won't deny that the project had teething problems, but things seem to be going much better now. They just need to finish the bind culling and object container streaming and then the devs will be free to start pouring content into the game. Stop dwelling over the past, it's the most pointless thing.
Stuff being unnecessary is your subjective opinion. For me and others that stuff is necessary and I would be angry if there wasn't lots of ships in the game. I couldn't care less about the poverty game you have in mind that you think is acceptable. Elite Dangerous already exists for that. I don't think you understand who the big spenders on the game are. They have stupid amounts of disposable income, and really want to see this game being made. They aren't victims and they require neither your sympathy or criticism. We live in a world where some people give thousands to twitch streamers or thousands on loot boxes. Funding the development of your dream game seems like a better way to spend money than giving it to twitch streamers.
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You don't get to say that unless you say how. All I've seen from you is parotting the "suck cost fallacy" line and not much else.
Fine I'll stop insulting people if it makes you that concerned about me. Creeps me out man.
Last edited by CogsNCocks; 2018-03-22 at 08:19 PM.
The fact that you're defending this project beyond all objective reason, shows you're either a victim of sunk cost fallacy or you're emotionally invested, which would be worse.
You shouldn't stop insulting people because you think it concerns me. You should stop insulting people because it makes you look like a fool that doesn't know how to converse properly and because it undermines your credibility or what's left of it anyway.
Why they keep churning out ships? Because they make a shitton of money out of this.
I'm pretty sure this whole thing will go belly up in a couple of years with its chief con artist mysteriously disappearing.
Ah yes the old "it's a scam canard".
They have 475 employees working on two games, with studios in the US, UK, and Germany. If it does go belly up in a couple of years there won't be much left over to run off with. My prediction is slighty less gloomy, I say that we will see SQ42 released no later than sometime next year, and SC going into beta the year after.
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Can I not just enjoy my internet dueling and keyboard warrioring in peace?
Infracted (for pre-edit post)
Last edited by Venara; 2018-03-23 at 03:22 AM.
Clearly you have never played MechWarrior Online. You want to talk about snail's pace development, not to mention fucking flat out lying to your player base? Go check out the history of that game and how inept Piranha Games development is, in particular their knuckle dragging, slack jawed president, CEO and lead designer. They openly attempted to crowd fund a new game without delivering on the content that the promised the MWO founders. It went from being "in 60 days" of launch to two fucking years before they delivered on their promises and they were half assed at best. RSI has nothing on those clowns at PGI. Since then, they just keep selling more Mech packs like RSI sells ships while any updates to the game are still half assed and 6+ months to get completed.
Sure, it's own thing which shouldn't be a thing when the core game is no where near ready. Again, it comes down to priorities, and the only reason ship design is a priority is to secure more funding to allow the feature bloat to continue. You know what else would fund the game? Devoting all your resources to the deliverables you originally promised and releasing the game to retail while you continue building on a solidly designed and built infrastructure.
The initial game was barebones, yes, because they were anticipating competition with Star Citizen, which is laughable to think about now.Elite Dangerous is a simplistic, shallow, instanced based core experience with a load of menu options and progression systems bolted on. It was in development before the kickstarter and used a lot of investors funds to get it out the door. The inital release of the game was pretty damn barebones(and still is), but it ran well I give it that.
But to describe Elite as "simplistic, shallow and barebones" is not only completely and utterly dishonest, it's striking at how well it frames your bias.
I mean, if you consider a game that's a near-seamless simulator of our entire galaxy with hundreds of thousands of procedurally-generated planets - many if not most of which you can land on - with weekly story-driven community events, 33 unique ships with a variety of roles for transport, combat, exploration, material gathering, planetary assault, search and rescue, passenger transporting, bounty hunting, pirating, mining, player ship support, and now Thargoid combat. A game with a galaxy power system that players can be directly involved in to further the influence of their chosen faction. A game with deep progression system terms of ship, role, and module variety, in addition to ship engineering and upgrading. A game that allows players to form wings, join each others ships via multi-crew, share and undertake missions together, and soon a fleet guild system with a "home base" ship in development. A game whose story unfolds via weekly updates, and especially so with the return of the Thargoid threat, community goal missions to fight them back, rebuild destroyed stations, and build new vanguard stations.
What do you honestly think Star Citizen is going to do differently? It's advertising itself to be exactly the same as all of that above, and the one singular thing that sets it apart is Star Marine and the "seamless" ability to walk around your ship and engage in FPS combat. Which is all well and good, but that was tacked on as a goal for SC only well after their initial pitch and funding phase. Elite will have a first-person mode (they've had an avatar system for about a year now), but it'll likely never have an FPS component, because no one's asking for one in a space flight simulator.
Beyond that, all SC might have going for it is that it's interface will be more pretty, but ultimately all it's going to be is a simulator where you buy a ship and undertake missions for specific jobs, just like in Elite.
So keep pretending that Elite is just a boring spaceship simulator if it makes you feel better about your game that's still in early Alpha after 7 years, and after pulling in $144 million more in funding.
It's almost as though SC and WoW are two completely different games with two completely different levels and applications of their tech. The fact still remains that WoW has set every single standard for MMOs since the day it launched and continued to do so for over a decade, and they were able to release the game in almost half the time it's taken SC to get to it's current alpha state.Yes the tech in Star Citizen wipes the floor with WoW or ED. The most impressive thing about WoW is the battle.net tech itself, the game is cool but it's nothing special anymore. Great game. But irrelevant.
What other games do we know of that use procedural generation? Here's a list.Yes cutting edge tech.
What other games can do this that either exist or are in development that we know of? None. Cutting edge tech, yes! The new animation IK stuff? Cutting edge tech! Seamless space travel between space stations, ships and, detailed planets. Cutting edge tech!
SC is using it to create huge cities that you can fly over. Okay? Is that any more than just cosmetically different than a procedrually generated planet with forests? Mountain ranges? Cutting-edge tech? You're overselling yourself here.
IK rigs? Evidently Ubisoft is working on that, too.
Seamless space travel between space stations, ships and, detailed planets? WoW did seamless travel back in 2004. Elite does seamless planetary landings, and near-seamless transitions between ships and SRVs.
SC has some really impressive tech so far, this is true, but the only truly cutting edge tech it has is the IK rig. WoW did seamless open world in 2004, and No Man's Sky did it (with detailed, procedrually generated worlds) two years ago.
I never complained about players not getting refunds?CIG offered refunds to players who weren't interested, so I don't understand why you're still complaining about that now.
I agree, the progress they've made in the last two years has been exceptionally good and if they can actually rein in CR's ambitions, they'll have something special to release. That said, ignoring the last 6-7 years is purposely allowing yourself to be ignorant of what CIG has been doing and why SC has so much negativity surrounding it. No one's denying that the game will be truly amazing IF it lives up to all the promises. But after so much time and money and complete loss of focus, when does the player-base stand up and start demanding better rather than being complicit in their own fleecing?I won't deny that the project had teething problems, but things seem to be going much better now. They just need to finish the bind culling and object container streaming and then the devs will be free to start pouring content into the game. Stop dwelling over the past, it's the most pointless thing.
Again, Elite is absolutely nothing like how you describe it. Is it lacking in a lot of ways? Sure. But it's far from a game that's starved for content. Very far.Stuff being unnecessary is your subjective opinion. For me and others that stuff is necessary and I would be angry if there wasn't lots of ships in the game. I couldn't care less about the poverty game you have in mind that you think is acceptable. Elite Dangerous already exists for that.
Also, no one is saying that they want a game devoid of ships or things to do. You gotta stop with the ad hominem and hyperbole. My point is, and continues to be, that the game doesn't need to launch with 90+ flyable ships and variants, nor does it need a full combat-ready FPS module. If the game is so much more than Elite, then it should be able to trounce without the FPS modules, and without all those ships, shouldn't it? Or are you admitting that those are the only two things SC has that makes it different?
They have neither. I think you misunderstand my criticisms. I give two shits about the sheep that throw money at CIG, but I do give two shits about the extremely shadiness of CIG's insistent need for more funding while missing every single deadline they've ever set, to the point that the game has gone from a retail release date of four years ago, to last year, and now to "when we feel like it."I don't think you understand who the big spenders on the game are. They have stupid amounts of disposable income, and really want to see this game being made. They aren't victims and they require neither your sympathy or criticism.
Again, I don't give two shits about you. I do give a damn that your method of debate relies on hyperbole, ad hominem, and distracting from the point by personally attacking people when they've called out your bullshit and outmaneuvered you. Don't expect anyone to take you seriously or consider any of your opinions valid while you're being a memelord child.Fine I'll stop insulting people if it makes you that concerned about me. Creeps me out man.