Star Citizen has a disastrously laggy stream with horrendous vibes, which isn't a great look when you're past $1 billion in funding
2 days ago by inclementimmigrant to c/pcgaming
I think you pointed out why they don't get their shit together.
You only have to visit the secondary market for SC in-game merch to find the scammy bits. The funny this isn't that this game is fully of overpriced, stupid bullshit. It's that six developers who fell out the back of the Wing Commander franchise found a way to bilk people for billions of dollars by creating the thing Mark Zuckerberg has been losing 10x as much on for just as long.
Digital real estate. Digital in-game businesses. Digital currency. A clumsy interface with dogshit codebase to match that's sagging under its own technical debt and still ten years behind the development curve. Star Citizen is the Metaverse.
It’s a scam. They scammed the original Kickstarter investors. Ffs i had a whole campaign TEN YEARS AGO that started the refunds! Like I FUCKING STARTED THAT SHIT! If you get a refund in star citizen- YOU’RE WELCOME. It took hundreds of emails of people claiming they were scammed for them to allow refunds!
Now over ten years later you chucklefuck losers want to defend that. Get the fuck out! You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about!
14 years and they have almost figured out how to have a reloadable rifle. This whole project has become a scam not due to having nothing people can play, but that they have crowd funded over 1 billion dollars (and counting) without (I feel) any real expectations internally of ever having a finished product.
Chris Roberts has cemented his legacy as the sole person to ruin his own games. In fact he may have done the most damage to space games then anyone else.
Scam Citizen
Saying this while sitting on a stack of FIFA World Cup discs that date all the way back to the 1990s.
Those were all at least playable games, and the world Cup editions of FIFA at least came out ever 4 years and had meaningful differences from the previous world Cup edition. And weren't just a glorified NFT scam
Everytime i see star citizen it frustrates me because the comments are 90% dumb. It has predatory monetization, it has been in development hell, it has been a great disappointment to many people.
Its not a scam. You can pay money and log into the game right now and play. Theyve done some technically very impressive stuff (that doesnt help the game at all, potentially hurts it, definitely contributes to the devlopment hell), and people do have fun. There is an actual game with mechanics. I would argue those mechanics arent fleshed out or fun enough and dont work well, but thats subjective.
I paid like $20 very early on knowing backing things is a risk. It didnt really pay off for what i wanted, but i still had some fun flying ships around, racing them and exploring. I dont recommend it, its ran terribly and performance is bad for obvious reasons, etc. but its still not a scam or equivalent to slop.
It's less a game and more a sim. They'll not fix broken box missions, but spend weeks on fart mechanics. Either they are incompetent or intentionally stalling. I personally believe the latter.
They don't intend to leave alpha because they're making money from ship sales. It's pretty, but it's not fun when you run, and boom, you dead. 45 mins to get back there.
Even scams have valid products behind them.
That's a fair point. We'll see. Do they even have a viable post-release business model?
Milking your supporters for ten years is a scam, just not legally.
I agree on both points but there's a difference between Halo 4 being genuinely ass (shitty) and No Man's Sky releasing on false promises and outright lies (false advertising).
One of these i consider a genuine scam (upon release, anyway).
Admittedly, I'm not the authority on SC; where would you place it on the scale? Because from what ive heard there were/are lots of empty promises.
If you gave a number score halo 4 is 100% no mans sky is 0% , star citizen would probably lay somewhere at like 60%. The main, biggest issue being time and not being able to meet their own set goals. They eventually do get there, but then they also add new stuff behind it that they eventually get to, and they are (seemingly) pretty transparent about everything. (Or were ig idk i havent paid any attention in like 5+ years and its not like i was hardcore following it before that)
Its not like im an authority either but every topic involving it is so vitriolic and hyperbolic and people do say empty promises but they either dont specify, its flatout untrue, or its back to their timeline (which ill reiterate doesnt equal scam to me bc there IS a game you can play, and some people even like it despite me thinking its not very good, that encompasses the things theyve talked about, just at a snails pace). Is there something thats gotten cut or whatever? Im certain, theres no game that implements every single idea theyve ever had . But the big things and overarching gameplay is as advertised. All of this to say, the real issues are drowned out by people who've only read sensational headlines and its frustrating to read, drowns out bringing up new issues etc.
No. No you don’t have the slightest idea of what you are talking about. Scam citizen has over ten years of history. If you knew it you would not hesitate to call it a scam! They lied to the original Kickstarter investors right out the gate and that was the first scam of many scams!
What are you doing here? Like... What's your goal? Why are your defending this shit ass "game" studio?
I wouldn't call it a scam either. Just another shitty game farming whales. They actually refunded me so there's that. I wasted an hour of my life on that thing.
It's a shame because you can see the potential, there's nothing else quite like it. You can wake up in your apartment, walk around the city/base you're in, take a train to the spaceport, find your hangar, get in your ship, start your ship, take off and go somewhere. It has potential to be incredibly immersive but it's beyond clear the devs don't care about making it into a good game.
The controls are totally bizarre, unintuitive, and poorly designed. Everything you do is bugged in some way. The performance is ass. Terrible and confusing HUD design. The game is a complete chore to play. Got my refund and I'll never even consider going back.
You can. And you can also make yourself a bearded lady avatar. I recommend trying it out during one of their periodic free play weekends. You'll either quickly work out what you hate about the game, or you have a higher tolerance for glitches than I did.
I think you can lol, but it's been a couple years now. I'd say it's not worth it anyway. Stick to bg3 if you want to be hot and bang other hot people.
That’s ThirstCitizen
No, it's a scam. Hard disagree.
Correct, it is a development nightmare yes, it is beyond ridiculously delayed, it is overhyped, it is overpriced, it is predatory, it is stupid in countless ways, but a scam is intentionally fraudulent and anyone making that claim of Star Citizen is being disingenuous. It is a game being actively developed by idiotic, toxic, malignant narcissists powered largely by self-absorbed vanity, but that's not the same thing as a scam perpetrated by fraudsters. They're both very, very bad, but they're also very, very much not the same thing and we should stop confusing such basic concepts with each other.
Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried didn't start their companies with the intention to defraud their customers. But they quickly found themselves in too deep and the only thing they could do was ask for money to keep it afloat as long as they could. The only difference between those ventures and Star Citizen is that Star Citizen hasn't collapsed under its own weight yet.
It’s a scam like a Ponzi scheme is a scam. Nothing they have promised has been delivered in over ten years. They have lied countless times to get more backer money. The original concept for the Kickstarter was tossed out long ago, those people definitely got scammed! They were told too bad the scope changed after the kickstarter! It is a fucking scam and I’ll die on that hill.
Definition of scam: to deceive and defraud (someone)
I dunno man. They made a ton of promises in the past decade. Wasn't there supposed to be a first person shooter?
That's pretty deceiving.
They have that. There is first person shooting. Theres an entire separate game mode for it ontop of it being in the world. That was like one of the very first things they added. And one of the first dumb huge time consuming things they did was make first person and third person visuals line up completely
Squadron 42 is what they are talking about. And its not out yet. https://starcitizen.tools/Squadron_42
Please keep in mind that 42 was to be the quick thing that was to tie people over until star citizen was further along. It was announced 13 years ago.
It's no different than all those NFT based games from 6 years ago, only this is 10x bigger than any of them ever got. No actual game will ever be released, everyone who paid as much on a digital ship as an actual used car will ever get to properly fly it as they were promised.
That is obvious nonsense. While it is an everlasting beta version it contains a lot of content and innovative stuff. It just doesn't really work and likely never will. NFT cash grabs on the other side had little to no content, certainly no innovative code at all. The comoarison diesn't fly.
It's also the friends they made along the way.
Which there wasn't. All those people in the video hate each other. You can tell by how they were making snide comments and nobody was supportive of anybody.
They have more than a tech demo though, right? I haven't been following, but isn't the game technically already playable with people? It's just full of bugs and missing features.
It's playable like the way a early access game is playable.
There's streams out there. From the streamers and fans who donated over 10k, it's playable.
For anyone with half a brain... No.
That's still more than a tech demo. Just wanted to be sure I had the right idea.
Fair enough, its more like 4 tech demos mashed together in a way that none of the 4 like. The core of this game is clearly more spaghetti code then Kerbal Space Program and is missing the vast majority of promised features after 14 years (like reloading apparently).
We know the scope creep killed this project, just that for people who have put in $1000s its hard to admit. The tech debt alone likely makes this game impossible to make stable.
did it surprise me that Star Citizen is still a buggy mess? no, I expected as much.
What surprised me was the sheer unprofessional-ism from everyone involved in that stream minus the Ollie guy. That Jared is a HUGE douche nozzel and if he ever worked on one of my teams and acted that way towards other employees I'd throw is ass out of the door. the fact he acts this way on a LIVE stream is truly mind blowing. I mean your company is funded literally by the people watching your stream and you act this way? The tree other devs sitting there couldn't give a rats ass about any of this. They know the game is broken, they know the game will never get released, but why should they care as long as they get paid? they know it's a joke and treat it as such.
If you continue to pledge/support this game you're a bigger idiot than the people on that stream.
Yep, you’re totally right.
leading to a deeply uncomfortable moment where Jared Huckaby, content director on the game, leans behind Hull and says: "We're at time—it's your show, wrap it up."
Doing this to someone in public is something a dickhead would do. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.
what's even more of a dick move is in the beginning it was all "we" "us" "the team" etc and then when things go south, as those fucking idiots SHOULD have expected it would, suddenly it's "your show".
These people aren't building a game for market. They're a bunch of children that have managed to covince other children to give them money to the tune of $1billion dollars. I mean hell you can look at their pledge tracker for the proof in the pudding. the stream was august 3rd and 2-3 days later players pledged another $500k in a day. ONLY NOW that people picked up on the fact that this steam even happened are people ranting and raving over it.
Just take a look at the starcitizen subreddit. Someone should study that subreddit because everyone there has stockholm syndrome. So many posts of "maybe now they'll start to produce something" like these fools are going to KEEP giving them money.
Just provide a user base the bare minimum with pretty graphics and the cash will flow.
You can FEEL how much they hate each other.
What a toxic relationship.
I can't wait for people to STFU about this game.
Most people already have. It is just that it has a small hardcore fanbase, which behaves oddly cult-like. As long as you don't move in those circles you will never hear of the game except for when they fuck up so badly that even game journalists are reminded that the game exists.
fanbase, which behaves oddly cult-like
Sunk cost fallacy?
I don't know if you're joking or not but "Sunk Cost Fallacy" sounds like a great band/album name.
I keep joking with a buddy we're gonna start a bagpipe ska punk band. Need to use this name somewhere if we ever actually do it
Maybe they will finally release it just as gaming computers become totally unaffordable and everyone gets into yo-yoing instead.
I've still got my Protostar. I'm okay with yoyo and skateboards making a big comeback
As someone that has wasted 100s of hours into Star Citizen I don't think I ever really liked that game as much as I convinced myself I did. Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was. All my friends are trying to get me back into it but I just can't do it anymore. I probably only ever enjoyed 10% of my total playtime on that game as the other 90% was spent fighting the gargantuan technical issues, performance issues, game breaking bugs, and general jank. The game is all vibe and promises without an actual fun experience underneath.
Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was.
I never played Star Citizen, but this is kinda where I ended up with No Man's Sky. I played it at launch and again earlier this year and there's definitely some fun to be had but nothing fits together right, or feels fully realized. NMS lost a coherent vision of the game at some point and eventually it just made me itch to play better games that were more focused.
If that's your opinion on No Man's Sky than I don't think you should ever play Star Citizen. I've played both a bunch yet with No Man's Sky I've at least actually had fun even though they both suffer similar issues. Star Citizen barely even functions as a game at this point.
I pretty much agree, but you definitely can't say NMS is a scam anymore.
That first dude was pretty big when he said he was the host at the beginning.
Then the game bugged out and they could't continue and suddenly it was the other guys show and he needed to wrap it up.
What an ass.
The only thing I enjoy about Star Citizen is when Bruce and Lawrence on Inside Games cover it once or twice a year whenever a new story about what a shit-show it is pops up. https://youtu.be/oWJh8EfVRrw
holy shit how long have they been doing legally distinct inside gaming! love how YouTube has decided to never recommend them to me ever, not like I have watched hundreds of hours of Inside Gaming and Funhaus.
Couple years now. Also check out BroughtYouThisThing
For anyone who wants to play an actually developed space game that has many (not all) of the features of SC, I recommend checking out Elite:Dangerous. It was a fully released game 10 years ago and is still receiving content updates regularly.
I enjoyed my time with that game for a while. Then it got tedious. It's a mile wide and an inch deep.
I'm gonna say elite is generally a hard sell because of the steep learning curve. I love it and have over 1,300 hours, but only after a friend brought me back because I was so lost my first time playing it. I similarly quit trying the on-foot stuff on 3 separate occasions because it's so difficult to figure it out, and failing a mission often results in a fine or bounty you have to then find an interstellar factor to pay off.
Then there's the engineer grind. I won't speak on that here.
It's frustrating because the game is incredibly deep with faction mechanics, system states, market demands, etc. but all of that is basically inaccessible in any reasonable manner without 3rd party tools. Outside that your options are exploration, shipping, combat, mining, and that's about it.
That said, if you want a somewhat realistic space sim, it's probably the best you can find. Just make sure you have a guide and inara.cz bookmarked.
See I don't really think Elite scratches my space pilot itch very well, and so I don't really recommend it to people and I don't think it's because it's too complex or challenging - in fact the exact opposite. I found elite dangerous extremely shallow, missing nearly any engaging game loop that I could sink my teeth into. Granted this was 3 years ago but I've watched the content updates and they haven't seemed very large.
I like the flying but the combat seems rather dull with very little progression or optimization capable. Like comparing ED to something like an ARPG or a Dark Souls, there just isn't good itemization or "character" building last I played.
I liked the trading but there wasn't a ton going on around the logistics sim to make it really exciting, like flying place to place wasn't hard and interdictions were rarely challenging and the ship ladder felt kinda small. Mining also felt like the only other thing to do and again, not even a heavily compelling minigame.
They introduced planet side first person shooting stuff and that looked appealing as a new mechanic but it never grew into something that got me to return.
I guess I'm saying to anyone considering it but worried about complexity, give it a go it's still a fun sim for most people for at least a couple dozen hours. Some people will find hundreds of hours of fun. I personally, and I think a lot of people, will find it lacking though from a space game perspective and there is still a massive hole in the market for a real AAA space sim game to come fill.
To your second point, meaningful progression is locked behind engineering, and a little behind powerplay. Yeah you can get a ship and A rank every module but it won't hold a candle to a fully engineered build.
But yeah, there are some cool things you can do in the game but the core loop is shallow and grindy as hell. I spent most of my time unlocking engineers, making money, and farming materials to the point where I can get just about anything I want. I feel like cartman in the WoW episode saying "now we can finally play the game" after 1000 hours. Though I did finally join a squadron and that gave me a bunch of stuff to help with. One guy has a carrier and we farmed an assload of minerals and then picked up and turned in a whole bunch of 25m-50m credit mining missions all at once so that was kinda cool.
Oh they also added operations, which are basically multiplayer missions you can join a lobby for, and you don't actually have to physically be anywhere specific. It's a huge quality of life upgrade because previously you'd have to actually be in the same system or use telepresence which doesn't let the telepresence crewmember to use their own ship.
How is it as simply a space exploration game? Can you just go out and explore our stars, and is there real-time FTL for long distances?
This has been massively improved over the years with the introduction of Exobiology. Just about any new player can get into a ship worth a few mil and be collecting hundreds of millions of credits within a few hours without the need to consult a spreadsheet.
You certainly can min-max far beyond that point as you mentioned with external tools, but the feeling of ships or mission types being inaccessible is pretty much gone.
As an aside, I’m currently working on a guide to solve many of the issues you’re describing. Right now, it’s for my personal squadron, but I plan to expand this to a public sister site eventually.
I’m also working on a video series to introduce the game. This is part 1 of 3: https://youtu.be/c9xS9tcn4sk
I have 1000s of hours in Elite: Dangerous since 2016 and I would still play it if I didn't have other real-life commitments. I've spent probably half that time in VR which was awesome. I dropped off when they added FPS gameplay that didn't have great VR support, but I can't think of another space game that I've played that gave me the same feeling that Elite did.
There's also Parkan 2 and X2/X3, if it can be a done and ready game.
i droped out of elite dangerous when they made it so you could transition offline. so like, if you are transporting cargo, you would go offline and only be interdicted by the hapless bots. they would save up money to buy the super ships to pirate or to bounty hunt or to guard. but what is there to pirate? the haulers are offline. what pirates are there to hunt? the haulers are off line, what convoys are their to guard? the haulers are off line.
pvp was relegated to prebuilt nascar like standardization, and prevented limpets from forcing open cargo holds. it got super boring super quick
Oh I love these shitty presentations, so happy there is a new one to rubberneck
Was Star Citizen scope creeped?
I seem to remember it kind of always being sold as one of those "do everything for everyone" games that can't possibly exist. Fly spaceships to different planets, be a bounty hunter, be a cargo freighter, go way out in the wilderness and explore, be a back alley prostitute, get into fist fights, join the navy, run a government. Meanwhile what they've made is a marginally Elite: Dangerous without an actual game in it.
This was always my read on it, too. The scope was ridiculous from the jump, which fits Chris Roberts's MO. Only reason he ever put games out was because he used to have someone over his shoulder telling him to knock it off.
Star Citizen isn't the only game in the "be all other video games simultaneously" genre, I mean remember Peter Molyneux's Fable? But that eventually came out with a reasonable RPG scope. Star Citizen is the extreme example, that has gone the farthest with the least to show for it.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of what happened to John Romero when he was given unbelievable amounts of money to found Ion Storm and create Daikatana. But for Star Citizen the money faucet has never turned off.
I always saw Molyneux as more of the "traditional" hype man (or conman) in the video game space. Promise the world, but actually deliver some lesser product.
I genuinely think Roberts is just unhinged in this way (or maybe he was before he got this ridiculous endless funding stream). Grand visions that he won't let the minor annoyances of software engineering get in the way of. Tetsuya Takahashi's another one like that.
Hello Games has been showing how it should be done for years and while NMS did have a rocky start and you have to dig a bit to understand why it was released in such a state, they have strived to deliver on the promises they made before release and they did it with far less than Star Citizen has received and they have a stable game after years of content releases which were all free and Star Citizen couldn't showcase their game in working condition even in perfect conditions that was supposed to show the finished game, the whole stream was embarrassing bickering and has shown that not 1 cent was invested properly.
NMS is a mile wide and an inch deep. Nothing you do feels like it has meaning, the story is meh, the gathering feels like it's a placeholder, ships are only collected for looks, the graphics are ok.
This isn't a good comparison.
Yeah but I'd honestly say the same for Star Citizen. Nothing you do feels like it has any meaning as they wipe he servers twice a year and the only way to make real progress is to spend real money, there literally is no story outside of world building and subtle lore, all the missions and mining feel like they are placeholder and more than half the time don't even work depending on the update, ships are mostly just for looks and the majority of the features inside them are bare bones at best, and the graphics are pretty good if you can even run the game at 60 fps and ignore all the glaring graphical glitches.
I've probably played the same amount of time in both games and my opinion of both is usually the same with "this games could be so much better." The only difference is that I actually have fun in NMS whereas in Star Citizen I spend most of my time fighting the game in an attempt to come out the other side with any sense of actually having fun. Star Citizen is such a time suck that most days I'd play it I'd come out the other side and realize I literally didn't even do anything besides constantly play catch up because the game fucked me over in some way.
You may not like the comparison but NMS is a finished game, it was released in 2016 and has since improved massively while 14 years later and a billion dollars and Star Citizen is still a broken mess.
NMS is boring. I'm trying hard to like it but nothing you do feels meaningful. You get handed anything you want. Fly through a few systems and heres a free freighter. Set up a mining outpost and money means nothing anymore. Watch a twitch stream and get s+ ships for free. Nothing feels rewarding because it's all handed to you.
SCM levels of jank. Chris Citizen should've went into business enterprise software, he'll feel right at home
If someone lacks skill, creativity, and the fundamental ability to learn new things, it doesn't matter how much money or time they are given. Slop Citizen lmao.
I doubt that the* dev team* is lacking skill, creativity or ambition. What they need is a competent project lead that gives them guidance, meaningful input and directions. As long as there is still sufficient pressure on the money faucet, upper management doesn't seem to feel the need to get it done.
Woooowwwww tell me you don't know sc without telling me you don't know sc and barely payed attention....
I'm in the middle of watching it to see what everyone is flipping out about and already 2 things they said right off the bat shows they don't follow the development. The guy Elliot who says "you being up you being down doesn't matter" is joking that's literally his personality and he gets shit on all the time by other devs and streamers, it's like a joke to pick on Elliot and he dishes back, it's not some mean spirited thing being brought on by a failing stream. Hell the very beginning starts off with (paraphrasing) "let's introduce our great devs, oh and Elliot."
The "just close your eyes" wasn't about any glitch either... He literally said he took care of the enemies and one of the guys calls him out saying there was one right there that he had to take care of so he says no there wasn't just close your eyes, again joking I might be misremembering this part, he did say something about not needing a fuse, I don't feel like going back to disprove this so I'll just leave it and own it up to my own failure to remember.
I know it's everyone's favorite pass time to shit on star citizen, but being over an hour into the stream before I stopped for lunch I don't see anything they're all bitching about...
I heard about star citizen when I was a teen, and it looked soooo cool. Unfortunately my PC was not strong enough. So I saved up for months to buy a PC specifically to play Star Citizen. Finally, I had all the upgrades I needed for the PC. Started excitedly pouring over Roberts Space Industries to pick my ship. Noticed the pricing model was.... Off. In fact, this felt like a scam. Hold on, there's no real game I could actually play? Decided to hold off until something released I could play, ideally with friends, and ideally via a less obfuscated pricing model.
Anyways, I've checked in with SC about once a year since. I'm about to begin the process to finance a house with my girlfriend of 9 years. Exciting times ahead.
I'm pretty sire SC won't have released anything close to what was promised in 2012 by the time I retire, MUCH less anything promised since.
(Btw I was not a smart teen. I fell for lots of things and lost money to scams and stupid games. I got lucky with SC, because in an alternate universe, I might also be stuck in sunk cost fallacy.)
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This game has been in development for a decade with near-unlimited funding. Jesus christ guys, this has been plenty of time to get your shit together.
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