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I pledged a fraction of this fellow's total in Star Citizen, probably the lowest tier that would result in a digital copy of the game once complete. I was after

I pledged a fraction of this fellow's total in Star Citizen, probably the lowest tier that would result in a digital copy of the game once complete. I was after a modern Privateer reboot, essentially, and figured it was worth the gamble. I haven't followed the development with anything more than a casual, occasional glance and accompanying eye-roll. I doubt I'll ever see anything come of it. A shame, not necessarily a surprise. I'm fully aware and prepared that kickstarting a game confers no guarantee, but the feature creep in this case is staggering. I suspect that if this case were to succeed they'd suddenly find themselves underwater with all the pledges clawed back once the precedent was set.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
I think they came to a point when they thought "This could be huge and mind blowing, and can't be done for a long time if we don't do it" and kept going. I myself went from a critic to someone shouting "Go ahead!"
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  However, in the process they seem to have fully embraced the waterfall method which seems to me to be the root cause of the problem. They could have delivered the original concept as an MVP and continued to build towards their long-term vision through patches and incremental updates, much like rockstar did with GTA V online. Instead they're working slowly towards shipping a gigantic monolith where all that's playable in the meantime are very small vertical slices that don't really represent a game in their own right.
  - WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
    Compare the process for "Star Citizen" to "Rimworld", another kickstarted project which is nearing a 1.0 release after years of development. Rimworld had a public beta and has been iterating and incorporating feedback and while the end-result might not be as ambitious as someone with $200m might care to dream up (rimworld raised ~$250k) but it's a very fun game which most importantly actually exists. In fact existing in some form allowed the community to write mods and extensions many of which have ended up patched into the game itself as it nears release.
    - shusson 8y ago
      I think a closer comparison is Elite Dangerous.
      - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
        I regret backing Elite Dangerous, it's underwhelming.
        deadbunny 8y ago
        The irony being that it's basically what SC promised in their KS.
        sgift 8y ago
        If E:D is what SC has promised in their KS they are finished. Fly around for half an hour in the SC dogfighting mode, fly a bit more in the open world, maybe do a mission. Done. You have now fully experienced E:D. And that's with the current state of the Alpha.
        fcarraldo 8y ago
        And this is the unfortunate problem with the agile “release an MVP and iterate” approach when talking about a game. Unlike a SaaS product that might initially solve a problem, a game needs to be compelling, make a good first impression, and be fun, all out of the gate, to retain player interest. The Early Access model has continued to fail because people try the early version, dislike it (because it isn’t finished), then leave bad reviews and never return to see the game’s progress. Elite continues to get better all the time and will likely eventually be a pretty good game, but it’ll never have the audience it would have if they had the budget to release a full and finished product on day 1.
        beaconstudios 8y ago
        I think that's because many early access developers don't put enough focus on the "Viable" aspect, and focus too hard on "Minimum". For a game to be viable it should express its core gameplay features in a compelling way. Iteration should just be building additional content on top of that, or building new modules that live on top of the core (like the FPS aspects of Star Citizen arguably should be).
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    Is GTA V Online a good example? Most of the delivered updates have just been additional vehicles and a few more game modes. I don't mean to sound like I'm shitting on the hard work they do, but GTA V Online wasn't really an "MVP".
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      I was thinking specifically of how they originally shipped when the game first came out. I don't really play it much but my understanding is that the initial version didn't contain heists, corporations, warehouses, half the mission types, half the vehicles, and so on. It may not have evolved much recently and the initial scope may have been over 50% of the current feature set, but they're the best example I can think of for an MMO MVP. For singleplayer games, minecraft would be an obvious choice but it was also the progenitor of early access so that's more of a hit-and-miss.
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    Part of the problem is that they're hacking MP into an engine that hasn't really been proven out for MP so until they get that sorted MP is gonna be rough.
    - skohan 8y ago
      Yeah but it seems like a huge problem that this issue hasn't been sorted out years into development. The whole premise of the game is based around playing in a shared persistent world: they should have gotten the multiplayer experience working perfectly in a proof-of-concept stage, with characters running around blank environments full of grey boxes before anything else. At the moment it seems like they are a content production company for a game that doesn't exist.
      - EamonnMR 8y ago
        That certainly would've been my first step.
  - deadbunny 8y ago
    I'll preface with the fact I've not kept up with SC development at all. But haven't they released multiple "modules" as they've been going?
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      yes, but they're not building those atop a functioning game platform. They're completely separate, like individual prototypes. If they were integrated into a whole that'd be a totally different story.
      - plttn 8y ago
        They are though. You can go from flying a spaceship, land, get out, shoot some friends, get back in a spaceship and fly away. The module concept hasn't really been a thing for a while.
        sullyj3 8y ago
        This is true, but I was under the impression that they were using separate mechanics for star Marine vs shooting in the persistent universe, which they're still in the process of merging together
        the4ner 8y ago
        no longer true
  - the4ner 8y ago
    This changed starting at the end of last year. They are on a quarterly release cycle now, and they've hit the last 2 quarterly deadlines.
- Zooper 8y ago
  Investors need to re-imagine epic games as platforms, a movie that plays for twenty-plus years, iteratively developed. This also tends to collapse genres (markets): the World-of-Warcraft effect, wherein all other games of the genre bleed-out to the big platform. Good if you're the Star Citizen in the room and succeed.
raesene9 8y ago
For me, Elite:Dangerous had a better model (although still not without it's troubles). They delivered the base game in reasonable order and have been iterating and adding content since then. Whilst the early game was pretty sparse in terms of content, at least it was delivered and reasonably complete.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  That does seem like a better model. I might have to check that game out. Games should produce the base game they promised, and then just add expansion packs or additional levels (free to initial backers) to try and get everything else in until the money runs out. Maybe even the old shareware style route of releasing Episode 1, 2 and 3 (although in the shareware days, Ep1 was free and 2/3 were commercial .. like 1 was a really long game demo).
  - zchrykng 8y ago
    Elite:Dangerous is definitely worth a look. Gave money to both of these projects and don't want anything more to do with anything Chris Roberts touches.
  - pearle 8y ago
    Elite is also one of the better VR games available.
  - notjustanymike 8y ago
    I love Elite, just be prepared it's very much a make-your-own-adventure game.
- skohan 8y ago
  I'm a huge fan in general of starting a project from a complete, well-polished core and growing outward gradually while maintaining quality. Once things get messy it's almost impossible to get back to that same level of refinement as if it was kept clean the whole time.
  - 8y ago
m0llusk 8y ago
The game he always wanted to make, he said. How can you creep from there?
everyone 8y ago
Its not feature creep that killed SC. I'm a game dev and I followed its development just out of sheer morbid curiosity.. Pretty much their entire process was fucked from the beginning, and they never corrected it. Its a huge case of 'Escalation of commitment' rather than feature creep, being the root cause. At the very beginning Chris Roberts hired some artists to make a visual demo in Cryengine, to raise money. It worked, great! .. This is when they should have scrapped the demo, and hired a really great lead dev to plan out the full game. But, no, they kept building on this amateur Cryengine demo in a disorganized fashion and have been ever since.
- benjaminsuch 8y ago
  Uhm sorry but what you just wrote are pure assumptions. And the fact that you are "a game developer" doesn't make your claims more true. If you really followed the development process and watched their "Around the Verse" video series you cannot, by any means, call it a "Cryengine demo". In late 2013 the scope of the game got totally changed. It turned from a small multiplayer space flight game to an MMORPG. So they literally had to start from zero and nobody has any insights about the game development and organization except the CIG developers themself. A very weird post from you as "game developer".
  - Laforet 8y ago
    He's not entirely wrong though, CryEngine was and arguably still is wholly unsuited for anything that borders on MMO. Instead of realigning your plan around the changed scope, Chris Roberts decided to keep the glitter of CryEngine visuals and he is paying the price for this decision. Netcode is still affecting performance to this day and I doubt if it will ever be solvable. We are long past the time when Iwata managed to single handedly refactor Earthbound in a few months with minimum external help. Complex projects carry so much inertia that makes it very hard to correct course once you have momentum in one (wrong) direction.
    - benjaminsuch 8y ago
      They switched 2 years ago from CryEngine to Lumberyard from Amazon which have an integrated feature for using AWS. They also stated that they completely rewrote the network part and still working on it to date. They call it Object Container Streaming and Network Bind Culling (I'm not a network developer, so I have no idea about the technical side of it). I don't know how far along they are (they postponed the feature to the 3.3 update) but I'm confident in their abilites.
wlesieutre 8y ago
The thing I'm most skeptical of is them being able to balance the economy in a way that makes it a fun MMO. The technology parts of it seem more achievable. If you backed in the first few years you'll have access to both the Star Citizen MMO universe and the Squadron 42 single player game. Both keep getting delayed, but the scope of Squadron 42 isn't as huge so I'm crossing my fingers that it'll be a 2019 release. The Star Citizen alpha 3.3 release (end of Q3) will be a make or break point for the project's current schedule. That's when the "container streaming" system that lets them seamlessly load parts of the universe in and out is supposed to happen, along with Hurston, the second planet (and Loreville, the first planetside city area). If you have a beefy enough computer that's when I'd recommend coming back and giving it a play.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

I think they came to a point when they thought "This could be huge and mind blowing, and can't be done for a long time if we don't do it" and kept going. I myself went from a critic to someone shouting "Go ahead!"

beaconstudios 8y ago
However, in the process they seem to have fully embraced the waterfall method which seems to me to be the root cause of the problem. They could have delivered the original concept as an MVP and continued to build towards their long-term vision through patches and incremental updates, much like rockstar did with GTA V online. Instead they're working slowly towards shipping a gigantic monolith where all that's playable in the meantime are very small vertical slices that don't really represent a game in their own right.
- WorkLifeBalance 8y ago
  Compare the process for "Star Citizen" to "Rimworld", another kickstarted project which is nearing a 1.0 release after years of development. Rimworld had a public beta and has been iterating and incorporating feedback and while the end-result might not be as ambitious as someone with $200m might care to dream up (rimworld raised ~$250k) but it's a very fun game which most importantly actually exists. In fact existing in some form allowed the community to write mods and extensions many of which have ended up patched into the game itself as it nears release.
  - shusson 8y ago
    I think a closer comparison is Elite Dangerous.
    - _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
      I regret backing Elite Dangerous, it's underwhelming.
      - deadbunny 8y ago
        The irony being that it's basically what SC promised in their KS.
        sgift 8y ago
        If E:D is what SC has promised in their KS they are finished. Fly around for half an hour in the SC dogfighting mode, fly a bit more in the open world, maybe do a mission. Done. You have now fully experienced E:D. And that's with the current state of the Alpha.
      - fcarraldo 8y ago
        And this is the unfortunate problem with the agile “release an MVP and iterate” approach when talking about a game. Unlike a SaaS product that might initially solve a problem, a game needs to be compelling, make a good first impression, and be fun, all out of the gate, to retain player interest. The Early Access model has continued to fail because people try the early version, dislike it (because it isn’t finished), then leave bad reviews and never return to see the game’s progress. Elite continues to get better all the time and will likely eventually be a pretty good game, but it’ll never have the audience it would have if they had the budget to release a full and finished product on day 1.
        beaconstudios 8y ago
        I think that's because many early access developers don't put enough focus on the "Viable" aspect, and focus too hard on "Minimum". For a game to be viable it should express its core gameplay features in a compelling way. Iteration should just be building additional content on top of that, or building new modules that live on top of the core (like the FPS aspects of Star Citizen arguably should be).
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Is GTA V Online a good example? Most of the delivered updates have just been additional vehicles and a few more game modes. I don't mean to sound like I'm shitting on the hard work they do, but GTA V Online wasn't really an "MVP".
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    I was thinking specifically of how they originally shipped when the game first came out. I don't really play it much but my understanding is that the initial version didn't contain heists, corporations, warehouses, half the mission types, half the vehicles, and so on. It may not have evolved much recently and the initial scope may have been over 50% of the current feature set, but they're the best example I can think of for an MMO MVP. For singleplayer games, minecraft would be an obvious choice but it was also the progenitor of early access so that's more of a hit-and-miss.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  Part of the problem is that they're hacking MP into an engine that hasn't really been proven out for MP so until they get that sorted MP is gonna be rough.
  - skohan 8y ago
    Yeah but it seems like a huge problem that this issue hasn't been sorted out years into development. The whole premise of the game is based around playing in a shared persistent world: they should have gotten the multiplayer experience working perfectly in a proof-of-concept stage, with characters running around blank environments full of grey boxes before anything else. At the moment it seems like they are a content production company for a game that doesn't exist.
    - EamonnMR 8y ago
      That certainly would've been my first step.
- deadbunny 8y ago
  I'll preface with the fact I've not kept up with SC development at all. But haven't they released multiple "modules" as they've been going?
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    yes, but they're not building those atop a functioning game platform. They're completely separate, like individual prototypes. If they were integrated into a whole that'd be a totally different story.
    - plttn 8y ago
      They are though. You can go from flying a spaceship, land, get out, shoot some friends, get back in a spaceship and fly away. The module concept hasn't really been a thing for a while.
      - sullyj3 8y ago
        This is true, but I was under the impression that they were using separate mechanics for star Marine vs shooting in the persistent universe, which they're still in the process of merging together
        the4ner 8y ago
        no longer true
- the4ner 8y ago
  This changed starting at the end of last year. They are on a quarterly release cycle now, and they've hit the last 2 quarterly deadlines.
Zooper 8y ago
Investors need to re-imagine epic games as platforms, a movie that plays for twenty-plus years, iteratively developed. This also tends to collapse genres (markets): the World-of-Warcraft effect, wherein all other games of the genre bleed-out to the big platform. Good if you're the Star Citizen in the room and succeed.

raesene9 8y ago

For me, Elite:Dangerous had a better model (although still not without it's troubles). They delivered the base game in reasonable order and have been iterating and adding content since then. Whilst the early game was pretty sparse in terms of content, at least it was delivered and reasonably complete.

djsumdog 8y ago
That does seem like a better model. I might have to check that game out. Games should produce the base game they promised, and then just add expansion packs or additional levels (free to initial backers) to try and get everything else in until the money runs out. Maybe even the old shareware style route of releasing Episode 1, 2 and 3 (although in the shareware days, Ep1 was free and 2/3 were commercial .. like 1 was a really long game demo).
- zchrykng 8y ago
  Elite:Dangerous is definitely worth a look. Gave money to both of these projects and don't want anything more to do with anything Chris Roberts touches.
- pearle 8y ago
  Elite is also one of the better VR games available.
- notjustanymike 8y ago
  I love Elite, just be prepared it's very much a make-your-own-adventure game.
skohan 8y ago
I'm a huge fan in general of starting a project from a complete, well-polished core and growing outward gradually while maintaining quality. Once things get messy it's almost impossible to get back to that same level of refinement as if it was kept clean the whole time.
- 8y ago

m0llusk 8y ago

The game he always wanted to make, he said. How can you creep from there?

everyone 8y ago

Its not feature creep that killed SC. I'm a game dev and I followed its development just out of sheer morbid curiosity.. Pretty much their entire process was fucked from the beginning, and they never corrected it. Its a huge case of 'Escalation of commitment' rather than feature creep, being the root cause. At the very beginning Chris Roberts hired some artists to make a visual demo in Cryengine, to raise money. It worked, great! .. This is when they should have scrapped the demo, and hired a really great lead dev to plan out the full game. But, no, they kept building on this amateur Cryengine demo in a disorganized fashion and have been ever since.

benjaminsuch 8y ago
Uhm sorry but what you just wrote are pure assumptions. And the fact that you are "a game developer" doesn't make your claims more true. If you really followed the development process and watched their "Around the Verse" video series you cannot, by any means, call it a "Cryengine demo". In late 2013 the scope of the game got totally changed. It turned from a small multiplayer space flight game to an MMORPG. So they literally had to start from zero and nobody has any insights about the game development and organization except the CIG developers themself. A very weird post from you as "game developer".
- Laforet 8y ago
  He's not entirely wrong though, CryEngine was and arguably still is wholly unsuited for anything that borders on MMO. Instead of realigning your plan around the changed scope, Chris Roberts decided to keep the glitter of CryEngine visuals and he is paying the price for this decision. Netcode is still affecting performance to this day and I doubt if it will ever be solvable. We are long past the time when Iwata managed to single handedly refactor Earthbound in a few months with minimum external help. Complex projects carry so much inertia that makes it very hard to correct course once you have momentum in one (wrong) direction.
  - benjaminsuch 8y ago
    They switched 2 years ago from CryEngine to Lumberyard from Amazon which have an integrated feature for using AWS. They also stated that they completely rewrote the network part and still working on it to date. They call it Object Container Streaming and Network Bind Culling (I'm not a network developer, so I have no idea about the technical side of it). I don't know how far along they are (they postponed the feature to the 3.3 update) but I'm confident in their abilites.

wlesieutre 8y ago

The thing I'm most skeptical of is them being able to balance the economy in a way that makes it a fun MMO. The technology parts of it seem more achievable. If you backed in the first few years you'll have access to both the Star Citizen MMO universe and the Squadron 42 single player game. Both keep getting delayed, but the scope of Squadron 42 isn't as huge so I'm crossing my fingers that it'll be a 2019 release. The Star Citizen alpha 3.3 release (end of Q3) will be a make or break point for the project's current schedule. That's when the "container streaming" system that lets them seamlessly load parts of the universe in and out is supposed to happen, along with Hurston, the second planet (and Loreville, the first planetside city area). If you have a beefy enough computer that's when I'd recommend coming back and giving it a play.