The Fight over Star Citizen’s Production Delay Is Getting Dirty

[Krazy925]

Why do anything at all? Roberts and his wife already have your money. They can release a giant turd and run off into the sunset together, for all they care.

Hell, people would still donate to his next Kickstarter.

Assuming they finish it, it most likely will be a steaming turd.

But, even if they do and it’s just okay I don’t think they’re going to have a ton of buyers. They’ve also already milked their whales. It’s gotta be great. Like epically great. Like bigly epically great.

The only way the money works is if they got monthly sub or have a huge influx of new people — which will require a few different things, most critically the game kicks ass.

I’d love to see the it be the greatest, but I think we’re gonna see meh and a whole lot of fizzling out.

 

[Nenu]

I foresee long jail sentences.
He probably realises this and is building a moon base to live out his days.
He can play asteroids for real out there and send jpgs back for cash.
Saves on writing a game anyway.

 

[Pringle]

I foresee long jail sentences.
He probably realises this and is building a moon base to live out his days.
He can play asteroids for real out there and send jpgs back for cash.
Saves on writing a game anyway.

I'm not a lawyer by any means, but I'm also not sure anything he's done would be considered illegal per se. I can definitely see civil suits being levied against him (he might even begin another Kickstarter for the legal fees!) but him in a jail cell I see not.

 

[ChadD]

First off, as a developer you do have to choose between graphics and a larger game world. This isn't done because a given engine can't do pretty graphics, but it's great online. Games do sometimes have limitations on object size, map sizes etc, but these limitations are cheated all the time. Mass Effect 3 cheated the character sizes and even the texture size on at least Shepards default armor. Batman Arkham Knight cheated a lot more about the Unreal Engine by being modified to hell and back. Frostbite had map size limits that were altered for Mass Effect Andromeda. That said, there are some limits that can't be overcome. The fact is, games are limited to the systems they were developed on at that time. They are limited to what a lower common denominator can do. There is a total budget of resources that the target systems can handle and that budget can be spent on really detailed smaller maps, or really large open worlds that take variable hits in graphics. Netcode, being an MMO etc. has nothing to do with other than what an MMO needs vs. something like Battlefield or Doom.

I used to be an avid SWTOR player and still play it a couple hours weekly. Its graphics are the way they are for performance reasons yes, but the engine is limited as hell. For one thing it runs as two separate 32 bit processes. It has no 64 bit client which is very limiting memory wise. SWTOR also uses a modified alpha version of the Hero Engine, not the release version. Supposedly It was the most advanced MMO engine when development began but five years later when the game launched, not so much. You are totally wrong on Elder Scrolls Online. That game was prototyped on the Hero Engine. The engine was licensed, and ultimately changed for the actual game. It takes less than 10 seconds on Google to fact check shit before you post it.

Your point about SWTOR costing over 150 million and having that much dialog and content in five years is valid. Especially since BioWare didn't have a clue how to make an MMO when it started the project. Although graphically, it's nothing like Star Citizen.

Fair enough on the Elder Scrolls stuff... I really am not to familier with their development. TORs development I do know quite a bit more about, I personally know some of the guys at Bio in Canada. With the ES I simply took the hero engines website at their word.... yes reading a bit more it sounds like they used the hero engine to build their game while a second team built an actual in house engine. Makes sense as it would save plenty of development time clearly. Also funny enough sounds like the exact route Roberts should have considered. To be fair bio did in many ways pretty much the same with the hero engine, as you mention what they shipped in the end was beyond heavily modified.

In some ways SC development does seem to mirror both Zenimax and Bios situations... all starting with no previous in house mmo engine to build on. And I stand by what I'm saying Roberts choose Cry engine because it was flashy not because it did what they needed it to do out of the box. Yes I agree of course the hero engine is pretty bla graphically, and companies that have used for AAA projects have had to hack the hell out of it to suit their needs. I do believe however it would have been far easier to take an engine designed to build a MMO from a content perspective with proper server hooks ect and rebuilt the parts that make things pretty.... then doing it the reverse way that Roberts choose of taking an engine missing all that stuff and trying to create it.

Just a few months back they have been detailing major changes to their object system... upgrades to be sure but, you have to ask as an observer how where they building a MMO for 5 years without such options in their engine before now.
Trying to reinvent the way your engine deals with objects 4-5 years into development doesn't shout we had our priorities straight day one.

Of course I am speaking in hindsight. 5-6 years back I'm not sure the case for Cry was completely terrible... and perhaps that speaks more to Roberts and his changing targets for what he wanted to create. The game he talked about 5 years ago could very well have been done with the cry engine very well... his single player /lite multi player Squad42 game I'm sure would be capable to pull off with the cry engine. (and yes I do doubt personally Roberts is pouring the money into this game he claims he is anyway)

 

[Pringle]

Gotta hand it to SIG; they sure know how to take a handful of development buzzwords, fart them out in a Reddit post, and call it an 'update'

 

[WorldExclusive]

Say what you want about EA. The would have started and released this game with a 50M budget in under 2 years.
Then whatever didn't make it into the first one, will either be DLC or in the second game.

These clowns are trying to build parts 1,2,3,4,5,6 and all the DLC associated into one game. lol
They'll never finish.

 

[Nenu]

I'm not a lawyer by any means, but I'm also not sure anything he's done would be considered illegal per se. I can definitely see civil suits being levied against him (he might even begin another Kickstarter for the legal fees!) but him in a jail cell I see not.

Twoz a bit of fun, a story needs a foundation
And y' never know!

 

[Dan_D]

Say what you want about EA. The would have started and released this game with a 50M budget in under 2 years.
Then whatever didn't make it into the first one, will either be DLC or in the second game.

These clowns are trying to build parts 1,2,3,4,5,6 and all the DLC associated into one game. lol
They'll never finish.

I think CIG wants us to think that they are going for this super complete gaming experience, but the reality is that they have surprisingly little to show for it. If the Kotaku article is to be taken at face value, (and I believe we can) there was allot of prototyping done for Andromeda and allot of concepts and experiments with game play that were all over the map. The developers had to modify the engine and people had to figure out how to change the Mass Effect formula into an open world game and work with Frostbite 3.

When push came to shove, they delivered a complete and surprisingly good gaming experience in a short time after tons of fucking around. This only happened when they got Mac Walters back on board and got some fucking direction. It wasn't as lofty as Star Citizen, but it's an example that illustrates the lack of focus they have at CIG and what it looks like when people are left to fuck around without direction. I predict that the developers will have, or already have run out of money and that they will attempt to justify their lack of content as part of the R&D process needed to develop a game that meets all their original and stretch goals. They'll talk about how expensive it is and how they had to invent it all as they went, since the mechanisms they needed didn't exist anywhere while asking the public for more money.

 

[WorldExclusive]

I think CIG wants us to think that they are going for this super complete gaming experience, but the reality is that they have surprisingly little to show for it. If the Kotaku article is to be taken at face value, (and I believe we can) there was allot of prototyping done for Andromeda and allot of concepts and experiments with game play that were all over the map. The developers had to modify the engine and people had to figure out how to change the Mass Effect formula into an open world game and work with Frostbite 3.

When push came to shove, they delivered a complete and surprisingly good gaming experience in a short time after tons of fucking around. This only happened when they got Mac Walters back on board and got some fucking direction. It wasn't as lofty as Star Citizen, but it's an example that illustrates the lack of focus they have at CIG and what it looks like when people are left to fuck around without direction. I predict that the developers will have, or already have run out of money and that they will attempt to justify their lack of content as part of the R&D process needed to develop a game that meets all their original and stretch goals. They'll talk about how expensive it is and how they had to invent it all as they went, since the mechanisms they needed didn't exist anywhere while asking the public for more money.

EA values project management enough to put away their pride and hire Mac Walters back.
No one wants a real life game. Those games turn out to be indie titles that never hit mainstream.

Games are not suppose to be real, they should be fun.
Building a game true to life will never be great because real life isn't perfect either, it's flawed.

Art imitating life.

 

[M76]

Fair enough. That's probably pretty close to the truth.

It's the exact opposite of fair. And there is another way to look at it: a single player game would be excellent to test their ideas in practice, how well they work, or how much they suck and they can still implement major changes to it., but if they bring out the so called "persistent universe" any change would be difficult to implement, and major changes would be out of the question because it would risk resetting the game world.

 

[Pringle]

"persistent universe"

I keep hearing this phrase from backers, used as the primary reason why all of these "features" are taking so long to development and implement. And yet, didn't CIG massively scale back the size of this "universe" compared to its Kickstarter?

 

[M76]

I keep hearing this phrase from backers, used as the primary reason why all of these "features" are taking so long to development and implement. And yet, didn't CIG massively scale back the size of this "universe" compared to its Kickstarter?

Actually the inital campaign had comparatively modest and realizable goals. But as they saw the money rolling in they started making up stretch goals on the spot, and continued to do that for at least a year or more. I don't know what is their actual standing promise now, but I suspect it's still larger in scale than the goals they started the kickstarter with. And this is not a defence of them, they might wanted to create a game initially, but they saw that they created a money making machine without much work instead, so they continued to strike the iron while it was hot. They lost sight of their initial promises.

 

[5150Joker]

Are we there yet?

 

[nilepez]

I backed the game with the basic $45 pledge early on in the project. I wasn't one of the first wave, but got in on it after a year i think. I haven't spent any money on ships or any of that crap. I was a big fan of space combat games like X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Wing Commander, and Descent Free Space. It's a genre that's effectively died out and I wanted to throw my support towards a project that would revitalize the genre and hopefully bring on a resurgence in the popularity of those games. I figure $45 was a small price to make that happen and I knew I was pissing that money away at worst. It wasn't like that was going to keep me from eating or making my mortgage payment. Hookers and blow.

I wouldn't put any money into it today without CIG bringing us Squadron 42 at a minimum. Their modules and other incomplete game modes and pre-alpha garbage aren't enough. Squadron 42 would show that CIG not only knows how to make a game of some sort, but it would give us a clear example of a finished product and show that CIG has someone in charge who can get shit done. The game is late and anyone who gives CIG money at this point is a fool.

If S42 had been released (and didn't have horrible reviews), I'd have been all over it. That's the game I want. I'm not against an MMO, but honestly, there's already Eve and I've never bothered with it, so that's not going to sell me, but a WC/Privateer like stand alone game would've been great.

Not holding my breath. I think this is a scam at this point, but I'd be thrilled if I was wrong.

 

[Dan_D]

If S42 had been released (and didn't have horrible reviews), I'd have been all over it. That's the game I want. I'm not against an MMO, but honestly, there's already Eve and I've never bothered with it, so that's not going to sell me, but a WC/Privateer like stand alone game would've been great.

Not holding my breath. I think this is a scam at this point, but I'd be thrilled if I was wrong.

I couldn't agree more. The persistent universe stuff sounds nice in theory, but it's not what I was looking for specifically.

 

[Pringle]

I couldn't agree more. The persistent universe stuff sounds nice in theory, but it's not what I was looking for specifically.

It wouldn't surprise me if they did one of their 'backer polls'.

"Do you mind if we hold of on SQ42 while we work on our MMO?"

Yes
No
More ships pls

 

[Dan_D]

It wouldn't surprise me if they did one of their 'backer polls'.

"Do you mind if we hold of on SQ42 while we work on our MMO?"

Yes
No
More ships pls

It wouldn't surprise me either. It wouldn't surprise me if people actually said "yes" to that question. Honestly, if they were doing anything towards actually producing Star Citizen, they'd have everything they need to put Squadron 42 together anyway since the ships and settings should be the same. Not delivering Squadron 42 by now is a bigger indication of mismanagement than people want to believe.

 

[Pringle]

It wouldn't surprise me either. It wouldn't surprise me if people actually said "yes" to that question. Honestly, if they were doing anything towards actually producing Star Citizen, they'd have everything they need to put Squadron 42 together anyway since the ships and settings should be the same. Not delivering Squadron 42 by now is a bigger indication of mismanagement than people want to believe.

Do you play/have you played Elite Dangerous? I remember when SQ42 was announced, I was tempted to back it. ED came around but I wanted to wait a bit for it to get fleshed out more. Now that SQ42 looks to be vaporware, I have the itch to jump into Elite. Just want to know if it's any deeper than it was on release.

 

[Dan_D]

Do you play/have you played Elite Dangerous? I remember when SQ42 was announced, I was tempted to back it. ED came around but I wanted to wait a bit for it to get fleshed out more. Now that SQ42 looks to be vaporware, I have the itch to jump into Elite. Just want to know if it's any deeper than it was on release.

I haven't played Elite Dangerous.

 

[hexamon]

Do you play/have you played Elite Dangerous? I remember when SQ42 was announced, I was tempted to back it. ED came around but I wanted to wait a bit for it to get fleshed out more. Now that SQ42 looks to be vaporware, I have the itch to jump into Elite. Just want to know if it's any deeper than it was on release.

I don't play it but they have been very careful about what features they promise. They are way ahead of Star Citizen at this point. From a technical perspective at least. I have been told it's still not all that fun but they are making steady progress. One day it might look good enough to pay for.