Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players
2 days ago by sanitation to c/gaming
It's basically criminal negligence at this point. Imagine what a competent game studio could do with a billion dollar budget.
Imagine if Frontier Developments had gotten $1B…
Then there'd be so many more things to mindlessly grind for!
(I'm kidding, but I do think what's holding Elite back is FDev's insistence to not do game design and to just keep adding mindless busybody work - ended up leaving the game as a result)
Elite often feels like its just missing something. It's a good game but feels like there is potential to be so much better.
How about Egosoft? Although I am not sure if they would even know how to spend it all.
They'd crap out a game for 5 mil, spend five years and another 5 mil making the game go from shit to amazing, and then have 990m left over like "uhh, y'all want pizza or sumtn?
Consumer rights nerds please chime in and correct me
My understanding is that this game is crowd funded. And it heavily depends on what's promised in the contract. If the contract promises a playable game at some point, the consumers can just demand a development timeline and a game release schedule and that's it.
But if it's just a "donation to the development" with unbinding promises of ships as a reward, things look very different. Either way, this is definitely not a state of the art video game purchase, so it will be a bit of a gamble.
Concerning the class-action, there's a bit of a skirmish about jurisdiction but generally we have quite a big group of similarly situated plaintiffs, so from what I can tell this looks like something that would be class-certified. Just needs a bit of luck, a good attorney and some good case management to get it going.
the game is technically playable from what I understand, but has been in alpha for years and probably will be for years to come
Yeah I've got no idea. Seems like you can sue people for anything in the US but it probably isn't clear cut.
With a billion dollars, they could have made some actual space rockets.
And maybe I'm way behind but.... Wasn't this supposed to be some pay-for-a-ship-with-hundreds-of-dollars-US web3 kinda thing anyway?
Yeah I'll chuckle from waaaaaay over here, thanks. Lol
Initially the pledge ships were only supposed to be for funding development and would go away on release. I don't know if that's still the case, but if it is, the game will never release. Otherwise I expect a release sometime in the 2040s. Optimistically.
There has to be a point where the people who still buy into this don't give a fuck anymore?
Sunk cost is a hell of a drug. I'd bet if we could see their actual revenue you'd see the shift from individual purchases to more and more whales sinking money into it, that's what they're banking on. It might have started as an ambitious project, but it's definitely a full blown grift with some "keep up appearances" icing on top.
And this recent stream showed everyone that the icing tastes like shit.
Yeah its been the same people with too much disposable income or margin for a while. The whole scheme is selling "clout" for a few hundred a pop.
Worth reading some yt comments
Go easy on the dev team, it was probably the first time they've actually played the game.
"Welcome I'm your host Jared." to "Ollie this is your show. Wrap it up." What comradery and unity. I want this content to be mandatory and on live. Make them try to play weekly until the game runs well. Bet they fix it faster.
The energy in this Video feels like the atmosphere of a recently finished HR seminar.
I don't think I want the same experience they had today.
Wow, awesome work guys. Came in the presenting the game how its meant to be played. 4 guys on their own server, abysmal performance, bugs everywhere, one guy literally team killing and badmouthing his other teammates. And then ending acting all is fine. So we as the players are supposed to get this experience you just show us LOL! CLAP CLAP! awesome effort I will give you more money haha
Seriously, you devs literally just jump in on this with no preparation, no moderation, no prior media training. When you are about to literally show the world the best part of your game? Haha really show the effort you guys put in
Go easy on the dev team, it was probably the first time they've actually played the game.
This comment rings too true. There's a lot of games I play and I wonder if the developers ever just actually tried a playthrough from the start. But developer delusion does exist.
To be fair, a shitload of devs are under horrific crunch hours to meet un-meetable deadlines set by higher-ups. Not saying that that's what happened here, but QA testing is one of those things that gets the axe early in development far too often
QA doesnt exist in most games. I mean why bother? Players will buy a game in "early access", stumble over bugs, give you a positive review and aggressively defend against anyone who criticises it. Why pay for QA, when you can get paid for it. Industry is fucked and customers stopped demanding better.
It's one of (several) reasons I almost always wait to buy games till they are older and on sale. Why pay a pile of money today when I can pay less later and receive a more-polished game?
And if it never gets polished or never goes down in price? Well, the wishlist does get purged from time to time....
It gets the axe because, like a lot of support roles, if it works then it's "what do we pay you for" and if there's a bug then it's "what do we pay you for". Any time that there's a leadership member doing bean counting instead of actual product quality it's one of the biggest targets for the funding axe.
"We just won't program in bugs", oh okay sure buddy.
"AI can catch all the bugs", uh huh.
"Customers won't see most of the bugs, it's not worth the time and money", yep.
"What do you mean players don't invest time in something that can break for no reason", that's what we told you months ago.
"QA should have caught this, how did we miss this??", there's two QA and they've been pulling 80 hour weeks for a year, they did. it got put in the backlog to hit arbitrary deadlines.
"This bug is unacceptable, what does QA even do?" gestures at pile of hundreds of other system breaking bugs that they caught before this one edge case that got missed in the dumpster fire of development
That basically describes the development of Star Citizen but with an unhealthy amount of scope creep sprinkled in at every opportunity.
Although I'm not convinced that scope creep is necessarily the problem anymore. I think they've fundamentally designed themselves into a corner and won't be able to hack this game engine into being able to deploy anything close to the desired/promised player experience.
I remember working with a dev team for a patch on a AAA title.
They didn't even know what some of the values and variables that governed the game did. They'd cycled through so many people they didn't have anyone left who understood the engine.
It's a brutal watch, and fans have been making fun of the entire experience and expressing amazement over the fact that the team didn't pull the VOD offline.
"Incredibly awkward, cringe, forced, slightly sinister feeling at times, and the local server gameplay was still terrible. No one was having fun here," said a comment under the stream. "Felt like a hostage video."
Each and every one of the people who go in front of a camera to represent the work of hundreds of people needs media training. This is what happens when regular people talk about something they are passionate about and it starts to go sideways on them. A lack of emotional regulation, a reactive conversation, and a strong tone against team work. Such a bad look for the CIG.
I feel like if Chris Roberts had been kept on a leash, this game would have been out and beloved, with a less successful sequel also released.
If you know the history behind freelancer and that Chris Robert didn't finish it then it's quite foreseeable how star citizen happened.
In essence, you're right. For freelancer he was pulled off the project and Jörg Neumann (now at MS with flight simulator) redefined the scope, set boundaries and finished it. Thats how the freelancer we know and love came to be.
I don't like either but I do like KiraTV who did one too.
Or you could watch the video penguinz0 is watching.
It's shorter (21mins) also the guy has been covering SC for a long time.
Edit: wrong link.
in the long-awaited sci-fi game
Understatement of the millennia.
I do, but with little hope only. Will not pay or waste time in the current stage.
Tbh I feel like things StarCitizen was promising: explorable galaxy with detailed ships and space to space combat with social components and some kind of economy, games like Elite Dangerous and Eve delivered years ago.
For anything beyond it's highly unlikely they ever will deliver. The scope and pace of delevopment is just too large to come close to any kind of completion those games have even in 10 or 20 years. Anyone sane enough to see this has moved on to actual, real games either MP ones like the ones mentioned or singleplayer ones that fulfill the fantasy of being a trader in space like No Man's Sky or X4 foundations. So now all that's left is the believers.
As long as it's a pipe dream the game can be anything to anyone. It doesn't need to have functioning combat, physics or even run on most hardeware. All in-game problems will eventually be fixed just a little further down the road and SC can be exactly all the things you dreamed of! You're invested since 2012 so what do you have to worry about, it's come such a long way since then!
Especially since like with small indie games or competitve games at the highest level you can interact with people in the community: other financially or emotionally invested people just like yourself and you can meme fringe opinions about what changes they should make to the game into existence. Especially since the community of actual players is quite small...
I personally don't think SC will ever be close to any kind of finished product. They will probably be releasing new ships for people to buy for as long as someone will pay for them and they legally can but there will be no finished game. Not in 10 years nor 20.
To finish the game would be to kill all the individual hopes and dreams of every SC backer, anyone emotionally invested enough to make or watch content of the game, anyone who bought in when it was on kickstarter.
Maybe SC is the only true forever game, that is developed for the rest of the humanities existence. Even a narrow slice of the pie, a single player story campaign with a start and finish, Squadron 42 was originally set to release in 2014 (yes fourteen) and then delayed again and again until 2020. We have 2026 now and the game is still not released. If they don't even manage that, how on earth will they get the basics done for the actual big MMO Star Citizen?
Yeah, I spent $60 on a pixel ship and a promise like 13 years ago. Honestly we should all sue at this point
If you still think there is even the molecule of a possibility that star citizen ever releases, then you yourself are part of the problem. It's been obviously a scam for about 15 years now. It's not happening, accept that.
The shit they are selling puts me off ever wanting to touch the game
That's where I was at with the game. I bought the base package on sale for like 35 bucks then upgraded my ship to a Cutlass Black for another like... 40 or 50 for another sale?
I honestly don't mind the 80ish bucks I sank into the game. It was fun. But I don't expect it to ever be done.
Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer, just following along out of interest.
This is exactly what I don't get. People call it a scam and what not, but there is tons of footage of people actually playing a game that looks super fun and immersive.
Can you elaborate a little on those "scam" claims?
Claims vs delivery is the core issue.
Yes, you can play the game. Frankly, the game world itself is fucking rad as shit, and I have enjoyed it in brief bursts. However, the game world is also infuriatingly empty and incomplete. It is difficult to have fun for an extended amount of time because while the world is rad the game systems are like half done at best.
After like 15 years of development it feels obvious that they're more interested in getting market sales for ship designs than actually finishing the game systems... and that's where you see people get angry. It doesn't feel like they even want to do a full release as long as they can sell $10k ship pictures.
Actually, starfield took like 12 years and it was a big bag of ass.
I'm pretty content with what I've got out of Star Citizen and I'm fairly deep into it.
There's always something new being dropped or some new meta.
And honestly, I liked Bethesda games for the bugs. Being eaten by an elevator or falling out into space is amusing as long as its not too regular. It straddles the line between infuriating and hilarious.
Theres a lot of haters who've never played it. When the 4.0 tech release dropped there were a bunch of people realising it was actually playable, and had been for some time.
Its had a very public development cycle that has so far taken about as long as Starfield, except starfield was shrowded in secrecy and had loading screens and landing wasn't fun. Star citizen doesn't show you a loading screen once you're in the universe. Shows you plenty of other things that may as well be (riding the train, riding the elevator, inter-planet QT)
Its technically quite impressive and the first time I stumbled upon Whistlers Crypt was absolutely dope
I wouldn't want to yuck anyone's yum, but is there anything you couldn't do in EvE Online or Elite: Dangerous in the current state of SC?
Elite dangerous: We forgot how to make inertia wheels
EvE is spreadsheets in space.
Space truckin' in SC is fun, as is dogfightin' and dude-killin'.
Its also pretty. Super pretty.
Sure, SC is pretty but last I played on some else's Pc all you could do is walk around and try to leave hangar without the game crashing or breaking which would inevitably happen.
counter strike?
Well... technically, Counter-Strike doesnt sell the skins for that much. That's a player driven market. Shows you how much people care about a gun being a different colour, which is crazy in itself.
"A different color"? That's a gross oversimplification of some of the incredible art you can get. Sure it's kind of a weird medium if you think about it, but it is art appreciation nonetheless.
Also no part of the actual game is locked behind paying, only cosmetics.
The company sells them
No way I'm paying real life money to buy in game assets. I think we all know this is going the route of Duke Nukem whenever.
They got that out whole Jon St. John was still alive.
The people that still hold out hope for this game are the same kind of apes that mortgaged their house to go all-in on GameStop stock
Before or after it peaked? Really makes a difference lol.
Yeah, if they did it at the low point then fuck that worked out well for them.
I admit I was an idiot. I pledged to this thing years and years ago. bought the base package and like a couple ships, even had a monthly "newsletter sub" going to get access to other ships for a month.
I admit, I was an idiot. Then I just gave my account to some rando on reddit who wanted to play it.
I'm so glad I was too outpriced for this scamware
It's amateur developers out of their depth and with no experienced management to top it off. It's the same across a lot of the big budget games these days.
Sad to see, their jobs are on the line so they are obviously going to turn a blind eye to the problems.
This game needs cancelling and something with a much, much, much smaller scope created instead. What the stream showed was essentially just a bullet sponge boss, so uninspiring and basic, but still fails to function.
Also that Elliot guy is a real dickhead.
much smaller scope
That's what the entire problem is though. The original game was ambitious but the scope was like 10% of what it is now. People kept shoveling money at it so they said "know what let's add 1,000 new features and polish them later" and now it's an unmanageable clusterfuck.
I think it's akin to yandev broadening the scope of yandere simulator because that game lived and died off of Youtuber hype, and Youtubers only made videos when there was a brand new shiny feature. He kept widening the scope while everything was basically in a tech demo state and only worked on the test rival.
Yeah, which is a lack of experience. Any experienced designer or developer knows you dont keep increasing the scope like this. The lead management have zero idea what they are doing, the developers are not competent enough, so it's a viscous cycle that will only end when the money runs out.
Would like to see their turnover rates tbh
Whoever was onboard a decade ago would have left by now. And they probably were the ones that replaced the original management and devs back when this started on kickstarter. maybe except the c-suite that got close to Roberts. they probably got paid well fleecing players.
Same, but I can also see it not being that high. The developers seem really amateur and there's definitely an ego problem. I can see a lot staying on because they think they have made it. Also, who wants to work for a company like that? On a spaghetti project that will never be finished? They will wanna keep people already committed.
spaghetti project
that's what I mean. it became this absolute mess because devs coming and going.
long ago the original team started the project. along the way it became a minor spaghetti. and along the way Roberts starts to feature creep. devs fed up and left. replaced with new devs. some might be new, and enticed by working with Roberts. Roberts creeper more feature. more spaghetti. repeat.
I kind of remember they did a few revamping the codebase along the way a few times. by this point it's been a decade, there's a few changes of the teams, and god knows how well their documentation is. But by this 10th year in my headcanon, Roberts is already swimming in money and maybe this is where he decided to just not finish the game. maybe he decided earlier, or later. idk
fast forward to now. game still isn't finish. game still runs like ass. some people still keep buying fungible tokens. that's what the ships amount to, ultimately, in my eyes.
I think there's enough if they just finish the story and quests the single player game focusing on just ship movement without the person combat would work fine. It wasn't even supposed to be a shooter just updated space sim.
It's amateur developers out of their depth and with no experienced management to top it off.
Management is Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame.
But then again, the troubles with Star Citizen were already there. It even had gotten so bad that Microsoft had to step in and buy the whole studio so it would eventually release.
No ones buying this studio though. Guess that means it won't release the game then.
I had a buddy make fun of me in 2012 for not having heard about Star Citizen yet because it was obviously going to be the game to rule all games. This was also soon after Yachtzee invented the "PC Master Race" thing, and he was a proud PC gamer who was going to have hardware ready for the job. An Xbox One X is almost certainly more powerful than his desktop at the time was.
Lol
The "game to end all games" was one I heard a lot too. It always confused me because it's really not possible. Even if they got every single person who matches their genre (flight sim, transit sim, space combat, exploration, space themed FPS, "living world" games, etc.) there's just no way to make it as big as people were claiming. Minecraft and Roblox are built on the "it can be anything" idea and even those aren't the "game to end all games".
Star citizen has always seemed like a bait and switch of "give us your money for "what if's" and dreams of possibilities" but with no real plan to deliver. There's some cool tech that's come from it (like the distributed servers with live interaction between them) but it just feels more like a scientific R&D lab that's desperate for investors than an actual product in progress. I bought it in 2014 and checked it out once, but anyone who believes in it as much as the developers has too much money and too little sense.
It was clear that they bit off more than they could chew 10+ years ago. You'd have thought they'd bring in some leadership that could keep them aimed at a reasonable goal. They could've had something amazing.
You know… If Star Citizen comes out someday, and it’s fun? Great! I’ll try it, I guess.
I don’t get the FOMO though. Why care?
Like, why should I think about a game that isn’t fun yet, beyond maybe brief demos? Not my job.
And I’m not against early access or anything.
I submitted a bug report for very early Rimworld, because I thought it was an interesting concept. I played the hell out of it in alpha because it was fun with the modding scene. But that’s a best case scenario… and why TF would I spend hundreds of dollars, and many hours of my life on Twitch, over it? I don’t get it.
Yeah, well, that’s not fun…
I eagerly await the day Star Citizen collapses completely.
Would you like to pay $4,000 for a Deluxe Waiting-Class starship?
@lemmy.world
!gaming is a community for gaming noobs through gaming aficionados. Unlike !games, we don’t take ourselves quite as serious. Shitposts and memes are welcome.
Our Rules:
1. Keep it civil.
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only.
2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry.
I should not need to explain this one.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month.
Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Logo uses joystick by liftarn
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
!gaming is a community for gaming noobs through gaming aficionados. Unlike !games, we don’t take ourselves quite as serious. Shitposts and memes are welcome.
Our Rules:
1. Keep it civil.
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only.
2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry.
I should not need to explain this one.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month.
Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Logo uses joystick by liftarn
go to feed...
A billion dollars in sunk cost fallacy. Jeeze. Elden Ring, Tears of the kingdom, most “AAA” games have what, $200 million in development costs?
I can’t imagine trying to be supportive of 15 years of financial mismanagement and frankly what looks like just a long grift.
save