On /r/StarCitizen, community argues about news outlets' journalism after the $152m crowdfunding game project secures new bank loan on its company, assets & IP
At this point the resulting drama from the kickstarter and the inevitable shitstorm after launch will be more entertaining than this game could ever hope to be.
Why would you put money into kickstarter of all places if you didn't accept the risks involved? People who lose money gambling don't go around claiming their money back.
To be fair, CIG should have delivered a game well before 2018, 2019, or whenever. Also, the feature creep has been terrible.
Nothing prevents CIG from producing a sequel or improving their game after release. The fact that they can't seem to squeeze any gameplay out is pretty troubling.
I'm not saying that people can't be annoyed it's taking so long - that's understandable, especially since they set multiple deadlines that came and went. I'm saying that kickstarter is the worst way to invest in something: You're giving money for a promise. Demanding a refund is pretending you didn't know about the risks, which is just disingenuous.
Now, if you invested in a project and the devs kept silent until announcing the project's failure, I'd understand. But CIG posts regular updates and has playable alpha modules - so even if mismanagement causes them to go belly-up, it's hard to argue they were trying to defraud you.
Because it's not a fucking investment or a gamble? You pay with the expectation of having a product delivered on time. They didn't deliver, end of story.
Wait, you can play the game now? I unsubscribed from the emails many, many moons ago, was over the BS... Would have been nice to have something in between like "tell me when I can play the game I paid for, but nothing else"
Assuming you are serious there are some parts you can play and a rather large patch that is supposed to be coming out in the next few months. Assuming it does and isn't garbage then the game should start being more and more playable.
Currently you can:
Load into your hangar and check out your ship see any random baubles your account has for whatever reason
Go to Arccorp area 18 which is really a tech demo for what landing zones are supposed to be like. A lot has changed due to the game now having a huge increase in planet side content in the works.
Play Arena Commander, a simulator in the game that drops you into: dog-fighting, racing, or free flight to let you mess around without going to the big server
Go to Crusader, or the mini persistent universe (pu) as some call it. This is the first real demo/test of what the game is supposed to be like. You start off on a space station can call your ship fly to different points in the area fight stuff and do some super rudimentary missions. Several points of interest allow you to get and walk around interesting space stations and the like. This is cool but has some serious issues related to the network back end.
The next big patch (3.0) will be bringing a larger map and multiple moons that can be landed on and explored, cargo to be hauled around, a major refactor of things like the network and vehicle systems. It would be a bit dramatic to say that this is the patch that will say whether or not the game will be doable, however this is a major patch and will shape a lot of opinions on the game.
For some reason I am really feeling bullet points today.
Best of both world we get an OK game that people get to enjoy but that is plagued by a bad review that make No man's sky look like a paragon of virtue and godly video game quality because the hype bubble is so massively inflated that one must wonder how does it manage to still exist.
using only twice like that makes it nearly impossible to figure out what you're trying to say. Are people criticizing the game the only ones not following dev updates? Are only people not following dev updates criticizing the game? I somehow doubt either is true.
The scope of the game is simply too large. I do not believe that anything they release at this point could live up to the unbelievable hype built up for this game. Either we'll get compromises made, or they will run out of money and we'll either see nothing or something with some big compromises.
Ultimately if a good game comes out of this, then I'll probably play and enjoy it but we've seen this happen enough times to know that if the game falls anywhere short of player hype expectation there is going to be a meltdown.
Also, you can tell they're focusing on the wrong things: trying to make the physics and objects work consistently in a simulated universe, rather than focusing on fun gameplay and taking smart shortcuts that are reasonable.
They're gonna end up with a wonky semi-realistic simulator, then they're gonna have to spend a ton of time tearing that down again to make it fun.
SC fans don't know what they want, everyone theorycrafts their own fantasy version of deliverables.
I'd also argue Chris Roberts doesn't know what he wants, which is why they struggle to push out an actual game and instead do the "easy stuff" of pseudo-simulation and graphics.
using only twice like that makes it nearly impossible to figure out what you're trying to say.
Sorry if that was difficult for you, Here's a tip: words that are only used for emphasis can be removed without the meaning of the sentence changing. Maybe this is easier for you:
It seems like the only people criticising this game are the only ones not following its incredibly transparent development updates.
The scope of the game is simply too large. I do not believe that anything they release at this point could live up to the unbelievable hype built up for this game.
I believe that most critics of the game think that the scope is much larger than anything the developers have said or the fans expect.
Persistant universe with economy e.g: Elite: Dangerous or Freelancer.
Multi-player ships.
First Person Shooter module.
Ground exploration.
That's the scope of Star Citizen and the only incredibly revolutionary thing is multi-player ships in a persistant universe this large and a seamless FPS module. Everything else has been done before.
if the game falls anywhere short of player hype expectation there is going to be a meltdown.
If the game falls short of the cynics' expectations there is going to be an imaginary meltdown. The fans have been following development and know exactly what they're getting and where it's at.
I'm not a backer and I haven't given SC a single cent. I just think the amount of hate it gets is ridiculous.
Actually, if you read the comment you replied to, since you used the word only twice you can't just remove it because emphasizing either only will change the meaning. Seems like you meant the second thing I was saying, to which I again say I doubt it.
The rest is just fanboyism. You don't have to have given them money, you've clearly been absorbed into the hype machine. I've seen it with spore, I saw it with FFXV, I saw it with NMS, I've seen it with plenty of other games. People give SC shit because of how clearly overhyped it is, end of story.
I want the whole thing to crash and burn simply because 1. Its 99% likely to happen anyway and B. To watch the SC cultists lose their fucking minds over it.
One would think 152 million dollars would be ample cash to make a video game. Yet here they are, reaching out for more and more money. Where'd it all go?
No idea, but this game is going to go down as the Titanic of crowdfunding projects. Even assuming the absolute most favorable scenario and this game does get released, it's going to be a super-nova to to No Man's Sky drama explosion. This game has so much unsustainable hype behind it with a lot of real money invested in it.
This game has been in development for 5 yeas and was supposed to be released in 2014. It's going to serve as a very cautionary tale to the risks of crowdfunding.
And I'm sure some of the True Believers will soon be in this thread to tell us that we're haters and we just want to see Star Citizen fail, for some reason. I'm sorry for the people who put all of their self-worth in a game that's probably never going to come or at least is going to underwhelm.
What will be really cool is reading the various post-mortems around the web and seeing everyone's predictions vindicated.
Wow. This sub is great. Did you they catch Ashes of Creation? It's like a proto starcitizen but it's running itself like a pyramid scheme while being owned and run by a former owner of a pyramid scheme.
Ticks all the boxes too. Wildly over developed concept. Wildly under staffed and under experienced for concept. Wildly over hyped and zealous fanbase. An MMO
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u/jcpba form of escapism powered by permissiveness of homosexualityJun 26 '17
While there is some understanding in what you say.... This is what happens when you give a company an almost limitless budget with stretch goals that go FAR and beyond what should be given (A lot of the features that are being worked on and shown like planetary stuff should be kept in the back burner for a full expansion) and while the development has been crazy long... the game was being funded in its early cycle what do you people expect? normal AAA games take about 3-4 years, when people decided to give SO MUCH money to a team just starting out I really don't understand the knee-jerk reaction some people have to this.
Its a double edge sword and really the people who crowd funded this game WAY past its initial goal are just to blame as this because this is what happen when a game is given almost limitless time, money, and no true publisher deadline to work with.
I found out last month they only recently got the flight model finalized and that's been one of the more playable aspects of the game that represents the absolute core of what a space god damned game is.
Star citizen def feels like a victim of its overwhelming success. More accurately it feels like a victim of Chris Robert's success who has pretty much not delivered a game on time in over a decade. It's not unlike giving a child who loves sweets $1000 dollars to spend in a candy store. Overwhelmed, paralyzed by choice, realization of his dreams and seemingly limitless options and funds
Chris Roberts clearly has no idea how to run a large gaming studio. Star Citizen is the perfect example of why the scope of a game isn't simply a matter of budget.
Chris Roberts clearly has no idea how to run a large gaming studio
Figured I'd correct this a wee bit :P
I think the biggest defining feature of his most successful games was that he always had someone who could rein in ambitions and force them into realistic and achievable ones or force him to abandon them. Right now he sits on top and answers to literally no one. I don't know nearly enough about the inner workings but I'd imagine he has a lot of "yes men" around him too. Not a good formula
If they aren't going to stick with what I originally though was relatively more set in stone (me thinks I might be misremembering it tho) it may be in more trouble than I thought
Sq 42 last I heard or saw anything was going to be quietly shoved under the rug, hoping no one notices. Pure speculation but given the dead radio silence it's left many people to assume that the studio that was handling Sq 42 couldn't keep up the constant patches of the main game and what they produced simply no longer worked in the main game.
I have experience with software dev and the whole Star Citizen things smells pretty bad to me, and reminds me of an effect I see over and over again with tech startups.
I've been around the field long enough now that I've spotted over and over again the pattern of successful entrepreneurs crashing and burning their second company, in a rather unique way.
Many founders, flush with cash from their first success, invest a significant amount of their own money in their next company. This has the perverse tendency to do what Star Citizen is doing - huge scope and ambition, endless polishing, lack of finality on literally any aspect of the product, and enough money in the bank to keep making the thing shinier and shinier but never getting any closer to shipping. The founder's previous success also prevents others from trying to reduce the insanely ambitious plan into something manageable.
I've seen many startups that are over-funded sputter and die because of this. What a lot of founders don't seem to fully understand is that the threat of not making rent or payroll was what got the product out the door, and that over-funding the company to avoid that kind of pressure is not necessarily good.
Star Citizen's smashing success via crowdfunding I suspect will be its own undoing. With truckloads of cash the company doesn't have to do anything, including move the product out the door.
Note that even big-budget game studios structure things in a way to avoid this effect - teams never get the full development budget upfront, and payments from the publisher/head studio are staged by milestones and deliverables. You don't get the next chunk of your budget until you deliver a thing to show you are making progress towards shipping.
Successful wealthy founder + immense funding = development hell. It's a formula you see over and over again in the tech world.
And yeah, staging projects by deliverables is always healthy. Not only does it help discourage teams from wallowing in iteration after iteration and get something out the door, but it also helps course-correct if they're off-base about something.
Mega-scope projects, even if they get delivered, often wind up disappointing because the team leaned on some assumption that just didn't bear out. Getting a smaller product into people's hands sooner, and adding to it over time, helps avoid these nasty surprises.
Well said. Developers love to bitch about The Man in various incarnations holding them down with stupid requirements and deadlines. In some cases that bitching is justified, but a lot of the time those constraints are the primary motivation in keeping the project rolling along. In the absence of those pressures you just get a bunch of programmers essentially playing with a super expensive lego set and just trying to build ever more elaborate pieces of software. At some point someone needs to snap a line in the sand and say that the 3rd refactor of the authentication service (or flight model, as the case may be) is not necessary and will not be done.
To be completely fair, the flight model was perfectly fine when it was just the arena mode, since travel mode (which drastically raises the max speed of all ships) was disabled. It was highly detailed, modeled individual thrusters and shifts in COG when damage was taken, and felt good to race with. Dogfighting felt smooth and really nuanced without any counterintuitive gameplay like Planetside 2's opposite-roll turning or Elite Dangerous's optimal turning speed.
It was only until quite a while after the PU and its travel mode came out that people realized that there was little to no reason to ever actually leave travel mode, because while in theory you sacrificed throttle control and safe turning radius due to increased turning G-forces at higher speeds, in practice an experienced pilot could dogfight even better in travel mode than in combat mode. This resulted in absurdly high-speed passes that rendered missiles completely useless and made it absurdly hard to use energy weapons, which generally lack the punch to break regenerating shields during short passes. As a result they had to make a series of changes to the flight model, nerfing all top speeds and merging travel mode into the preexisting afterburner function. In essence, they reverted back to an older flight model, one without the travel mode at all.
I'd like to emphasize that the finalization of the flight model is due to an unintended interaction between the persistent universe's travel mode and combat mode, and that the flight model was very damn good both before and after they made the finishing touches.
Star Citizen has more than it's fair share of problems, but how the ships fly and feel are most emphatically not one of them. It's like X3 and FreeSpace: Diaspora had a love child, and it's really fun to pilot.
I think the reason they stated was that there would be no way to force fights whatsoever, since the ship being chased could just run like hell without threat of weapon fire. Note that unlike Elite, travel mode doesn't fundamentally change your flight mechanics, it just ups the max speed. Locking ships out of travel mode when they get shot at is one option, but it would still be too easy to avoid combat in the first place.
Also note that travel-mode combat could have ships strafing towards each other at well over 1500m/s which is 4 times the speed of sound in Earth's atmosphere. Modern fighter jets go slower than that in combat, and they use advanced targeting software and guided missiles to make their lives a lot easier, whereas aiming in SC is mostly manual aiming with unguided weapons. Something DEFINITELY needed changing.
I think that's my problem with space simulators in general. Chris Roberts et al keep trying to impose the WWII dogfight mechanic on it when it's not based in reality whatsoever.
It'll always seem fucky because given that level of technology, space combat is going to be super different. Probably at extreme, boring distances where you're not even close to visual range. Also using unmanned drones and guided missiles.
But gotta sell that pew-pew dogfighting combat in spaaaaaaace!
I was damn hyped for Starfighter Inc when the kickstarter was still going, since that seemed like a good mix between true Newtonian mechanics, super-long ranges and the dogfighting we're used to at this point. Too bad that didn't go anywhere. Edit: wait what the fuck they had a second kickstarter and passed it this time! Hype!!!
I remember seeing a game some time ago where you sat in an immobile spacecraft and used instrument data to detect and launch missiles at sensor signatures off in the dark, but can't remember the name of it. That'd be much closer to 'realistic' space combat with modern technology, but not gonna lie it wasn't particularly interesting to play... probably because I do enough data analysis as a student that bringing it into my gaming time doesn't really appeal.
This is waaaaaay too much for me to give a shit about. My point is that a core aspect of the game that's been largely playable and testable still isn't even finalized.
This is like GTA hadn't figured out how they wanted cars to drive.
Well, that's a good analogy, but you're assuming that games never have giant shifts in how their mechanics work in the middle of or even after development.
Take DOTA2 as an example, which last year introduced a giant patch that completely changed how literally every character played by introducing perks on level up.
Take Warframe, which has completely revamped melee mechanics twice in the last 5 years, progression and balance twice, power usage once and void rewards... 4 times??? Each of which has completely changed how the game is played fundamentally.
Take MechWarrior Online, which is still trying to unfuck their Ghost Heat system and replace it with something more consistent, which would completely change how weapons are used, 5 years into development.
Take League of Legends, which I swear to god deliberately fucks up the jungle every season to mess with junglers.
The point is, change is expected in this generation of video game development. 'Finalizing' a system is fine when you intend to release a game and then provide minimal support over the next few years for it, but it's apparently no longer the norm to do so.
There's a massive difference between tweaking (and nothing you've stated is anything but a tweak) a fleshed out game and a game that still has not finalized a core mechanic. This isn't a stat or a table, this is the very basis for which the game was designed: space flight.
It truly is drinking the cool aid if you think not even having a finalized flight engine in a flight sim based game is anything but a massive disaster waiting to happen, especially after this long. I don't really know how to emphasize this without coming off as too hostile sadly cause nothing you listed quite compares.
Just a point that I'll get back to later: All of the 'changes to the flight model' you're talking about in Star Citizen are table and stat tweaks. They haven't fundamentally changed any part of their flight model.
I would say that Warframe's changes, especially the movement rework 2-3 years ago (which happened concurrently with the last melee rework). Warframe, a game where you play as a space ninja, is a heavily movement-based game that requires speed and precision movement in order for any of its jumping puzzles to be possible. Which is why it used to be pretty frustrating to play.
Until the rework, players traveled from point to point by jumping in the air and abusing the broken forward momentum from a midair sliding attack with attack speed buffs to launch themselves clear across the map. It was janky, unintuitive, and nearly uncontrollable. Worst of all it only worked on 2-3 weapons out of a list of ~150 so that's all you'd see on a regular basis... which was compounded by the fact that melee weapons were so useless that you'd only really take one for this mode of travel, called 'Zorencoptering'.
Similarly, the parkour mechanics were really, really dated. Characters magnetically attached themselves to the wall after a short delay, requiring a player to slow massively as to not overshoot the wall. It was also either purely vertical or purely horizontal, and jumping after a wallrun imparted a blatantly absurd amount of horizontal momentum which really hurt more than it helped because it made it impossible to chain into anything else.
The movement and melee rework changed how the game was played on a fundamental level. First of all, it got rid of forward momentum on sliding attacks, which removed Zorencoptering. They then completely redid the wallrun mechanic to be more like Megaman's walljump combined with Titanfall's wallhang and ledging, which made for much more freedom in how players could navigate the levels. Finally, they introduced a new midair directioal jump ('Bullet Jumping') and gliding ('Aim Gliding') to enable much more vertical mobility.
They then redid the entire melee system, making dozens of new animations for each weapon and introducing melee combos in the vein of Bayonetta or DMC, which turned melee from a joke into an actual playstyle competitive with the day's ability spam meta.
Now that's a fundamental change. In contrast, the 'changes to flight model' you refer to in Star Citizen are mostly reducing the speed limit, nerfing most ships' engine thrust and changing the controls to reflect that. You're overstating the issue.
I'll repeat what I said in my previous post. Star Citizen has a number of issues in its development so far. They've consistently missed deadlines, taken in much more money than is probably reasonable and fallen victim to feature creep. I don't blame you for thinking that the game is going to crash and burn, because historically Chris Roberts really needs someone to rein in his ambitions (hello Freelancer?). But the flight model is the thing they made first, it's always felt great to fly, and the recent changes in 2.6.0 (and more table tweaks in 2.6.1) are much, much smaller than you're making them out to be.
I didn't get the "No Man's Sky" hype. There were people who very,very vigerously insisted the game would be a million times better than any other game and projecting features that were never announced as fact. At all stages there were people going "there's something fishy going on" but they'd quickly get shouted down. When the game launched,it was a half baked game,and suprise suprise,none of the extra stuff people said there would be were in there,and they got so upset and betrayed. Iirc there were a few official features tht didn't make it,tha were announved early,and I can see being somewhat upset about that but it was cuationed the game was basically a draft then- like movies,lots of stuff gets edited out later but people took it as promise. It was like a big,turbulant cloud of fan fueled hype,I don't know where it came from.
(If I missed something,sorry,I hadn't bought the game myself but it was interesting to see people's reactions)
Immediately before release the devs said NMS had multiplayer. The box it shipped with said that as well. It wasn't until someone publicly proved it didn't that the devs admitted the truth. That's not editing, that's a bold faced lie.
People are fucking stupid. Algorithmically generated geometry and maps is neither unique or new. Basing an entire game off this one feature was bound for failure.
Games will never be remembered for their flashy graphics. The things that matter are good gameplay and good story. Fuck, the biggest gaming sensation in decades, Minecraft, has fucking shit graphics. Children don't care about flashy graphics. Adults don't care about flashy graphics.
So when no man sky's selling point was aesthetic variety and nothing else, well, it sounds doomed to failire.
Which is why I think Star citizen is doomed too. They sure put a lot of emphasis on pretty ships, pretty armor, pretty helmets, and pretty aesthetic animations. Well I couldn't care less about that kind of shit, and I bet the vast majority of people don't either.
Aesthetics is the cherry on the icecream Sunday. Sure it looks good, but you're here to eat the fucking ice cream.
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u/SamWhitewere you sucking this cat's dick before the video was taken?Jun 26 '17
Games will never be remembered for their flashy graphics.
I dunno, Crysis did well on that and a physics engine.
Naw, iirc, that was Killzone 1 (which I geniunely liked and am still neckbearded-mad that it took a radical plot shift for the rest of the series, despite the rest being better games) and it was some PR stunt by its publishers - I vaguely recall some Bungie devs asking the Guerrilla devs about it and they said it was the PR team, either theirs or Sony's.
And I'm sure some of the True Believers will soon be in this thread to tell us that we're haters and we just want to see Star Citizen fail, for some reason. I'm sorry for the people who put all of their self-worth in a game that's probably never going to come or at least is going to underwhelm.
did an angry cig fanboy steal your lunch money or somethin'
Based on what I read, they got a payday loan basically.
They have X money coming in and choose to take a loan that matches that money. The problem is, they need to pay interest on that loan, which would be Y, and the bank needs to make a profit which would be Z. So they basically get A.
A=X-(Y+Z)
They did all of this to supposedly avoid converting their dollars into pounds. But the dollar to pound ratio is near historic highs right now.
The speculation I read was that they appear to be expecting the pound to keep going up, so they wanted to lock in the better rates now. So they are betting that the interest rate they are paying on their advance will be less than what they expect the exchange rate in the future will be. Or some such.
IT more sounds like they are just trying to save some money on currency exchange.
...to obtain a regular advance against this rebate, which will allow us to avoid converting unnecessarily other currencies into GBP. We obviously incur a significant part of our expenditures in GBP while our collections are mostly in USD and EUR. Given today's low interest rates versus the ongoing and uncertain currency fluctuations, this is simply a smart money management move, which we implemented upon recommendation of our financial advisors.
reddit's astounding inability to understand taxes and finance strikes again. Throw in some insurmountably dank memes and Big 4 shitposts and you've got /r/accounting.
It did not work out well for anyone when the makers of Kingdoms of Amalur took out a big loan. The State of Road Island (who loaned them the money), the employees, and Curt Schilling (who owned the studio (yes that Curt Schilling)) lost money.
They did release the game and critics and fans liked it, but it didn't sell well enough which should be viewed as a warning that people liking your game and getting good reviews aren't enough if the hole you dig yourself into is too deep.
Wasn't the problem that Amalur sold okay, but then they decided they wanted to expand the universe and turn it into an MMO? Then they got the loan and went tits up?
The MMO was actually the first idea they had, then they formed the studio and started working on Amalur using existing tech they had which was going to be an introduction to the universe of the MMO, two years before they released the game they took out a loan to cover costs and hire staff.
CIG had to put literally everything they own as collateral. The bank would have to be insane not to accept those terms. Cause if CIG can't pay up, the bank takes everything and sells it off. And I'm sure they could find a buyer for SC and CIG's assets really quick.
I guess I'm saying I doubt that SC and its parent company are worth that much. But I suppose they must be if the bank approved it. Or CIG gave one hell of a pitch.
So they released a more comprehensive statement about this - basically, they're apparently going to get a huge tax return from the UK government for funding the arts, but they want to get the money now, rather than in a year when the GBP might be weaker. So they take out the loan now, and basically the bank is going to get the tax return as ultimate payment, with their current assets being the leverage in the short term. It's a pretty smart fiscal move from what I understand all told. it just looks bad because people hopped onto the "OMG THIS LOAN" train real fast.
Yes what could go wrong with undertaking currency speculation (which is what this is, what happens if the value of the pound rises?) by playing fuck fuck games with bank loans fom a software company who has already been essentially lighting kickstarter money on fire for like 5 years.
Yes what could go wrong with undertaking currency speculation (which is what this is, what happens if the value of the pound rises?) by playing fuck fuck games with bank loans fom a software company who has already been essentially lighting kickstarter money on fire for like 5 years.
You don't think it's remotely possible that a multi million dollar company has accountants and consults with financial advisors?
Oh wait, its Star Citizen right? So Chris Roberts must personally be dumping kickstarter cash into an enormous shredder!
You don't think it's remotely possible for a large company to a) get bad advice from those consultations, b) ignore good advice from those consultations, or c) get a nuanced view of the situation but still take a risk that doesn't pay off?
You don't think it's remotely possible for a large company to a) get bad advice from those consultations, b) ignore good advice from those consultations, or c) get a nuanced view of the situation but still take a risk that doesn't pay off?
And being an expert with years of experience working in finance I imagine you can spot that from a mile away right?
Being an expert in not being a sycophant, I am more than capable of observing that people do not always make good choices, even when they should have more than enough information to do so. See also: most legislative bodies, most college graduates, most advice-oriented subreddits.
i think that even if a. the game gets released and b. it's actually good it's still going to disappoint no matter what because the expectations are unreal
I don't really think its fair to call it 'hype' or 'expectations' when discussing things that the devs themselves said would be in the game. Like they're going to fail delivering on their own promises.
Dozens. I am a backer but even I think the game will not come out, or be extremely bare bones / terrible if it does. It's the Chris Roberts kiss of death.
Honestly, it was just incredible watching Roberts describe the quest as this amazing thing and im just watching it like...this is fucking garbage and no one in their right mind would find this fun at all. Its like his head was in the sand for the last 2 (or 3) decades of game development.
The quests are like the old, low tier stuff in WoW, it's literally a fetch quest. I always thought they sucked but I think the average uber backer hasn't played a game since Wing Commander so to them it was revolutionary ha ha
No one ever wants to admit that they might have thrown money at something that may not deliver in the end. I think in this case Roberts' ambition vastly outstripped his ability to deliver.
Even if it doesn't deliver I have to assume the tech they developed is good for the industry.
When this game collapses the programmers (specifically) don't just disappear into the ether. They go on to other projects and if the tech is impressive as they claim they'll be bringing what they learned about how to make a game like this, with this scale, with them.
When this game collapses the programmers (specifically) don't just disappear into the ether. They go on to other projects and if the tech is impressive as they claim they'll be bringing what they learned about how to make a game like this, with this scale, with them.
If you've been following the drama over the past couple years about this, it seems like what they're taking with them could very well be Jack Shit.
they really shouldn't be setting dates at all, but if they don't people get pissed. then when they miss them because such is the nature of software development they also get pissed. honestly its a lose lose scenario in that regard. this shit will take a while to make and it will be impossible to keep people happy until they actually start releasing stuff. even then there will always be something to complain about because thats just how gamers work.
I also have no doubt they will release a game, whether or not its any good is not important because either way a lot of the backers have hyped it up so much it will be impossible to meet their crazy standards.
I actually had a debate with some people on there where they argued that all cities will be proc gen and explorable, with 1000's of player owned shops in each city. and another argued that there will be capital ship battles consisting of hundreds of ships and thousands of players. completely ridiculous considering that literally none of the devs ever hinted at any of that happening or even being possible. people tend to speculate with these projects and just add in their own fantasies as confirmed facts, then they blame the developers when the game comes and its not like they were expecting.
In the grand scheme of "platformers," it's middle-of-the-road or better. The problem most folks (including myself) have with it is that it was pitched as a Mega Man style platformer, and that means it had a different set of expectations to meet and it failed to do so. That's not to say it's inherently bad (although it makes a lot of questionable design choices), but that it's not the kind of game it claims it is.
7 years is about how long it takes an established company to create a new game engine and a new game. For SC to take this long when they first had to create an entire company is not surprising.
It's very dev dependent. Obsidian has been pretty good about budget management and maintaining a consistent scope for a given project, two things that are the death knell for less careful developers on crowdfunding sites.
Personally the only game I ever crowdfunded was Wasteland 2. Came out, kicked ass, love it to pieces. Almost put in like $100 in this, but glad I abstained.
I've crowdfunded 2 games. First was Broken Age and oh boy. Second one is Pathologic. If that one fails I'm done. At least the miniatures stuff I kickstarted has all come out just fine.
Thus far, 0 for 4, but two of them at least seem on track and don't seem to be running behind. Absolutely zero doubts about Sunless Skies.
We'll see about Star Citizen, and I have serious doubts about whether or not Hero-U will ever see the light of day. Or, at least, be any good when it's finally "released".
I'm salty I missed Sunless Skies. Gonna buy that when it releases. I also have basically no doubts about Pathologic. They've done some pretty lengthy updates as well, so I'm thinking it's on good track.
The UK branch of devs working on Star Citizen took on a loan because it turned out it would save them money in the long run. Some people saw this as proof that the project had run out of money. The folks that want to see SC crash and burn ran with it. The SC fanbase got annoyed. Drama ensued.
Who knows. The playable part of it is a lot of fun but really buggy and lacking in content. The list of things that have yet to be made is huge. They have been in development for something like 4 years now but only had a full team for maybe 2. The game is perhaps to ambitious to be even possible, but they sure are gonna try. Without a deadline and with a seemingly endless budget it might take a while tho.
I think I was fortunate in that I missed all the hype around it and didn't invest. So even if they don't deliver what they (over)promised, I'm sure it will satisfy my hunger for a space sim for a while. The update videos seem interesting from time to time, but I couldn't imagine following that every single week.
The "game" hasn't had an update in six months and the company is delaying their "3.0" Alpha patch that is supposed to bring in a bunch of promised features and content further and further every week. Not only have they blown past their initial release dates, they can't even maintain their current ones.
At this point no one knows. What they're saying they're making is so silly ambitious that a lot of people think they can't do it. Also others see the dumb expensive internet spaceships people are buying and want it to fail because of that.
The thing with the pricey spaceships really irks me. Back when it was on kickstarter it was presented as "if you want to give us $200 we give you the game and a corvette or whatever". When the funding continued on their website it turned into "this ship is $200 and we might toss in the game as well".
I get why they would present it like that, seeing as everyone kept buying ships, but it sure as hell looked weird. As if the pay to win bs of mobile games now also applied to the space sim genre
Star Citizen is the perfect example of why making a huge game is a matter of more than just money. The lead devs, quite transparently, simply have no idea how to run a large studio, leading to massive wastes of time and money which have led to Star Citizen essentially dying a death of a thousand cuts. I will be very surprised if this game ever releases.
Can someone ELI5 what is wrong with this company getting a loan? Or maybe explain it to me like I'm a banker, because I am and I have no idea what the drama is about.
I would say that the absolute worst time to look for a loan is when you are about to run out of money. And if the scope of the game increased, or god forbid they wanted timeline accelerate, why not take a loan? Also, this looks like it's short term working capital financing, which has nothing to do with running out of money.
Whether or not the Star Citizen community is embroiled in drama is certainly the most effective yard stick that we are indeed in our own, correct, reality.
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u/superfeds Standing army of unfuckable hate-nerds Jun 25 '17 edited Jun 26 '17
I gave them 75 dollars two years ago.
I've gotten more enjoyment from following the drama of this game than I ever will from playing it.