14 ms·

Star Citizen will limit its roadmap, as players are getting upset over delays

165 points by danso 5y ago

louissan 5y ago
Reminds me of Dark & Light .... the largest MMO you'll never see!
duxup 5y ago
This seems endless and if the users are still there... does it matter? The only real risk is if people quit the game, but apparently not enough to actually change anything.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
When I gave $60 about 10 years ago, I expected that I would have played Squadron 42 by now. At least there's something I can play in Star Citizen.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  I think I paid $80 in the original kickstarter. I've spent maybe a total of two hours playing the game, but the entertainment I've got out of the development has been well worth the money.
- AQuantized 5y ago
  I have actually had a fair amount of fun playing Star Citizen. To my knowledge it's the only game you can actually mess about with friends on spaceships where you aren't limited to merely controlling the ship (i.e. Elite Dangerous). That said, it's clearly well out of proportion to their funding. Some of the feature creep implies such horrible judgement by experienced game designers it would have been hard to predict.
NelsonMinar 5y ago
$433,799,090 and counting.
belval 5y ago
I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up. Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Is there anything playable yet? edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing, While Star Citizen is currently in the Alpha stage of development, it is playable now. New content, features, and fixes are consistently added as development continues, with a major patch released each quarter. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now As somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.
  - CoastalCoder 5y ago
    It sounds like the definitions of "playable" and "alpha" really matter here. When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software. I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms. From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Chris Roberts discovered Steam-by-another-name: it's more profitable to make hats than games. And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.
yolo69420 5y ago
the game gets shit on a lot but for better or worse they are genuinely trying a lot of things that nobody else tries and is probably ever going to try again. the depth of simulation they have going on is insane, unsurprisingly the resulting dev difficulties are also insane. and likely to make the project fail. but I still want them to try for the sliver of a chance that they can actually pull it off after 20 years. at the very least I think the idea that star citizen is some kind of intentional scam where they intentionally don't want to get the game done because the can keep their current monetization running is extremely stupid to say the least. even if chris roberts and the leadership are mustache twirling monocle wearing capitalist masterminds with no interest in actually making a game like this (they are not), they wouldn't be able to systematically control literally hundreds of engineers without anyone noticing what's going on.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  >a lot of things that nobody else tries Serious question, like what?
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    The scale of the planets and the kind of environments they can have is genuinely impressive. It doesn't look like procedural generation like No Man's Sky. The cities and environments can be placed and this allows for actual planetary scale with multiple biomes which has never been done before Of course this also causes lots of difficulties in dev since it's a ridiculous scale and being multiplayer, there's even more complexity. Plus the performance seems to be terrible sometimes
  - Locrin 5y ago
    Well. Last time i played I finally had my first flight. It’s been possible for a while now to visit different planets, space stations and so on. But I have not tried before now. They have focused a lot on details and realism. When I opened the ramp to my ship and walked in it felt like i was there. I walked through the door to the cockpit and entered the pilot seat. Then I powered up the ship. A voice spoke and informed me the ship was online and a flurry of hud elements gave me a disorienting amount of information about fuel, elevation, ammo, comm channels and so on. After fiddling for a while I figured out how to ask for launch permission and clumsily took off. I barely managed to float up and out of the spaceport hangar I was in. You have supreme control of your ship and can rotate and tilt any which way. After getting used to the controls I used the star map to select a destination and began the quantum jump. It takes several minutes to to this. When I arrived I was on the wrong side of the planet, and so I had to do a second smaller jump to correct this. The view was something else. You really feel like you are floating far above a planet. I then got out of the pilot seat, opened one of ships bay doors and just stood there looking down on the planet below me. After a while I flew down looking for a landing place. I could not find it so I landed on a high rise building and left the ship. I then got stuck and had to kill myself to get sent back to my starting point.
cmusfan 5y ago
Releasing a playable MVP and adding features would be preferable to a big bang with the kitchen sink. I had already abandoned my investment in this product. "Best is the enemy of good."
- prepend 5y ago
  “Minimally viable is the enemy of terrible.” “Good is the enemy of terrible.” For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff. I don’t think reductionist arguments are terribly useful for real things.
  - xbar 5y ago
    "Reductionist arguments are the enemy of useful." "Minimally viable is the enemy of class action."
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Everyone knows bad, terrible, and non-functional is bad. But it seems like lots of people don't know that chasing perfection is also bad.
  - deeviant 5y ago
    > For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff. It sounds like you just don't understand the statement. It's not a binary assessment, it's an observation: if you set your bar too high, you simply may never get there and have nothing to show for it, thus by "lowering the bar" you may actually deliver a better product (you know, because it actually got delivered, and not canceled).
    - prepend 5y ago
      That’s my understanding of the statement. The reason I’m irked is that you simply may never get there by not implementing features or fixing bugs (you know, because it got cancelled due to never being useful enough to make it). Its not binary but by setting the bar too low, you never get their either. My irk is that the premise is that anything not chosen is too “perfect.” Also annoying is having “minimum viable products” that aren’t actually viable.
uejfiweun 5y ago
Is this game actually legit or just a scam as is popularly understood? I saw there is an alpha, but it's tough to separate fact from fiction on this game, would love to hear the perspective of some HNers.
- DoItToMe81 5y ago
  It has embezzled hundreds of millions, yet does not even have a fully playable product after a decade, and seemingly exists only to exploit whales with more money than sense who'll buy new ships. You be the judge.
- ProAm 5y ago
  I dont think its a scam but I think its planned to never finish. It's a well funded job for a bunch of people. I think it is finished and will just receive updates as-is for years.
  - xbar 5y ago
    You have a generous definition of scam/not scam.
- pixxel 5y ago
  Legit, mostly. I’ve recently purchased the game and it is stunning and rather awe-inspiring, with some solid gameplay loops. But, the bugs are heartbreaking. I’m not prepared to invest 100s of hours learning/playing the game with immersion breaking bugs. So I’ve shelved it for now. The scam IMO is continuing to work on anything other than fixing the bugs.
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    As someone who hasn't played this, 5 years ago when I looked at videos, the UI seemed comically bad. Interacting with something brings up some flying UI text that gives in front of you until you disengage or select something. Recent videos show that same UI. Is that UI actually usable? Sometimes the text seems to blend into the background and I'm not sure of the purpose behind the weird flying animations they have
JaimeThompson 5y ago
They can't ship a game but they are paying out dividends. https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/17/star-citizen-financial-report-outlines-over-1m-in-paid-dividends-to-investors-as-of-last-year/ https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/17/star-citizen-financial-re...
- notafanboy2 5y ago
UI_at_80x24 5y ago
The first and last time I pre-ordered a game was for MOO3. I won't ever be fooled again. Besides now that i've gotten older I don't care as much. I can wait.
TheIronMark 5y ago
The real mmo is the Star Citizen forums
- steveylang 5y ago
  I was just going to comment, the real game seems to be the development of the game, (pre)ordering and outfitting your ship and gear, etc. It will no longer be a game, once the game is finished. “After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.”
- the_snooze 5y ago
  So the real Star Citizen is indeed the friends we made along the way!
- guntars 5y ago
  I like this take. There's a book called "Games people play" by E. Berne that changed how I think about things like this. It talks about how people on a biological level need to interact with others and how they'll unconsciously repeat a script (game) with predictable roles and results to accomplish that. The main insight is that these games don't necessarily need to have a positive outcome - people still get something out of it. So it gets repeated, to the puzzlement of any observers and sometimes even the participants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
- Krasnol 5y ago
  The thread on reddit isn't bad either: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/siymuj/roadmap_roundup_february_2nd_2021_roberts_space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/siymuj/roadmap...
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  For sure. I feel like I've gotten my $25 worth of entertainment just from following all the drama for over a decade. If you have a few hours to kill, Sunk Cost Galaxy is a great rundown of how SC got to where it is today. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCcJKZHHY0E https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...
fxtentacle 5y ago
I bought in back in the early days when it was supposed to be a new single player game with optional multiplayer. By now, the whole thing is more like an unplayable buggy mess of a failed MMORPG. And no single player yet. EDIT: Also it says a lot that my account got deactivated for inactivity while I was waiting for them to release something playable...
izzydata 5y ago
At what point should people or even governments seek legal action against these people? There must be some kind of fraud going on here.
- brokencode 5y ago
  The project just seems to suffer from an extreme case of scope creep to me. That’s not fraud, it’s incompetence. I doubt you’d have a case, since there is clearly a game being built, it’s just that the developers have done a terrible job finishing it.
  - izzydata 5y ago
    It seems intentional. Possibly in order to continue the collection of money from people thinking they need people to keep investing. As soon as they release an actual game and development can come to an end then they can't profit much its continued dependance on investment money.
    - brokencode 5y ago
      Do you have evidence of this? I personally try to give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of their intentions. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” - Hanlon’s razor Of course, that doesn’t absolve the developers of guilt here. They are at the very least guilty of failing to build a successful game with all the money they’ve raised, and nobody should ever trust them with their money again.
throwaway743 5y ago
All I want are for the lodging elevators and subway stops to reliably appear, and to not get booted right when I'm at my destination outpost/planet without lodging. Loading the game takes 10 min at best, and to wait that long only to see the one and only elevator out not rendering (requiring reloading the game) is beyond frustrating. I can deal with lag here and there, but this literally makes the game unplayable. *yes, my primary residence is in New Babbage
caconym_ 5y ago
To clarify, based on my reading of the article: CIG is not reducing the scope of their planned deliverables^[1] for a v1.0 release. Rather, they are going to reduce the granularity of the roadmap info they share with the public so that people will complain less. ^[1] For a game that has been in development for a decade and blown past every planned release date by a comical margin.
- aeternum 5y ago
  This sounds more like something CIG would do.
prepend 5y ago
I had a heated discussion with a friend in 2013 about StarCitizen and that it was a scam. They believed it was real and that their early investments would pay off. They bought stuff multiple times and were very mad that I would insult what would be such an awesome game. It was so curious to me back then. I need to ask them about this as I can’t believe people still pay any attention to this as I think it will never happen.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  It was watching Beanie Babies that inoculated me. Someone monetarily buying into an idea + in communication with a large community who has also bought in + future promises = cult It may be a productive cult, but it's still a cult. And has all of a cult's reality distortion effects on its members.
- markbnj 5y ago
  I think there are some pretty solid reasons why certain types of people remain very interested in it. If you're a space sim nerd then it ticks a lot of boxes. I played it about a month ago for the first time, after a decade or so of mocking it every chance I got for all the usual reasons. I was looking for something new and saw enough videos that seemed to suggest it had reached a point of being interesting to me. My space nerd creds go back a long way: wing commander at release, freelancer, eve, various flavors of X3, elite, ten minutes in no man's sky, etc. I'm one of those people who wants to immerse into a game world where I can do all the things CIG promises. So I dove in. What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet. I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.
- 5y ago
jq-r 5y ago
Sounds like Theranos.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  Except this is far less evil because it's not a medical device. But the worst that happens is you never actually get your ship, versus getting incorrect results and falling ill
  - jq-r 5y ago
    Yeah, but similar. Both were built on mountains of promises, lies, and investor's money.
danso 5y ago
As a software project, Star Citizen seems like a complete debacle — a project promising the basically impossible (tens of thousands of players on a single server/shard) and yet failing so far to deliver even the feasible-but-difficult (rudimentary AI crew, ~100 star systems). But as a marketing campaign, it feels like an astounding success to attract record-breaking fundraising year-over-year despite diminishing development milestones. https://twinfinite.net/2022/01/star-citizen-crowdfunding-record-2021/ https://twinfinite.net/2022/01/star-citizen-crowdfunding-rec...
- prox 5y ago
  All the while, I have been enjoying Elite Dangerous, which ticks a lot of boxes. Frontier Development is building from the ground up, and even though it’s not without problems (they just had a year of fixing their bodged Odyssey release) , they seem to have a running space simulation. I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Elite is, without a doubt, the best spaceship parking simulator ever made.
    - pkilgore 5y ago
      X4 would like a word, fartcannon. (I love both games, but yes).
    - adamrezich 5y ago
      my first experience with Elite: Dangerous was playing it in VR and parking my ship on a station was a legitimately awesome experience.
      - ssully 5y ago
        I've never touched the game nor own any VR devices, but my friends basically treat it as the defacto VR game. It sounds really cool.
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
The version numbers say everything you need to know. "Alpha 3.16.1" should never have been a thing for any software project.
georgeecollins 5y ago
It seems quaint now to be upset about Star Citizen. There are so many "games" being promised now to people buying NFTs that don't even seem to be trying to be plausible. Like: No one working on our team has ever really made a game before but we plan to make a revolutionary one before the end of the year. Sure. At least Roberts Industries is trying. But its still kind of scummy imo.
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  No NFT game has raised even close to hundreds of millions of dollars (at least yet).
  - georgeecollins 5y ago
    True if you consider only consumer money. But if you consider investors that is not true. There are NFT "games" that have raised a lot. I don't know if they would define themselves as games, but functionally they all look like they are trying to be an MMO or Roblox. And they haven't had as much time!
    - cmeacham98 5y ago
      What is an NFT game that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from any source (including investors)?
      - georgeecollins 5y ago
        https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/the-sandbox-f24f-series-b--b1acbc04 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/the-sandbox-f24f-se...
  - xbar 5y ago
    We are merely days away from Star Citizen from announcing its NFT plans and obviating this statement.
- ethbr0 5y ago
napkin 5y ago
Star Citizen is a topic I sink a bit of time into every year or so, because I find the whole phenomenon incredibly curious and somewhat unique to our times. Don't be generous to Cloud Imperium Games (CIG). If I had to present but a single slide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project, broken promises, and delivered nothing that resembles what most people would qualify as a playable game. They've only given evidence that they will continue wasting resources. For some really entertaining coverage, I'd highly recommend: "Sunk Cost Galaxy", an amateur YouTube series made by former fan/investor/associate/!?: https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA And LTT's more recent feature, which definitely pokes fun but is still overly generous IMO: https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Ehhh that list of game dev costs seems really suspect; Star Citizen is only notable because they released dev costs when everyone else holds them tight to the chest. Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie. AAA video games over the last 10 years typically have as much if not more budget than tentpole movies (and corresponding revenue draw).
  - napkin 5y ago
    Yeah, interesting point! However, even if you just adjusted all the other dev costs in that list by a factor of two or three - Star Citizen would still easily remain in the top five. My point was mainly- Compare CIG's efforts to other studios that have spent hundreds, or even just tens of millions!
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie." Are voice acting costs that huge? It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?
erwincoumans 5y ago
That's a real time capsule, latest news posted in 2013 (spectrum stories section): https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/universe https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/universe This Star Citizen 2021 video looks nice though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrU27WMr4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrU27WMr4E
kingcharles 5y ago
I went to jail in 2013, not long after I donated to the Kickstarter. I recently got out - hoping an old game like Star Citizen would still be playable. Found out it wasn't even released yet o_O.
- steveylang 5y ago
  May as well have stayed. (JK kidding of course, congrats and hope you stay free and clear.)
- sandos 5y ago
  For real? Is that by design? In elite jail is at least just an instantaneous transfer and an financial transaction, which is maybe one reason why the justice in elite doesn't really work.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Jail in the real world is also just a financial transaction. I was only in there for 8 years because I couldn't afford the fee to get out.
pavlov 5y ago
Star Citizen crypto pivot soon? Why make a game when you can just be a virtual spaceship trading platform.
deeviant 5y ago
If Cloud Imperium Games thinks the answer is limiting what parts of their roadmap to share with the public is the answer, they are sadly mistaken. At this point, this is not a unrealistic expectation of their user problem, it is a CIG can't develop a game problem. The team itself needs to ruthlessly cut features and develop a MVP game concept and execute it. At this point Star Citizen is already the next Duke Nuke'em forever, and it is now well on it's way to creating a class of it's own in the over-hyped gaming vapor-wear category. Frankly, this type of conflict with and blaming of their own fans is a portent of the beginning of the end.
waynesonfire 5y ago
it occurred to me many years ago that star citizen is a meta game. the game is watching a game come together. plenty of people get a kick out of all that this encompasses. unfortunately, it wasn't sold this way but maybe out of necessity. furthermore, i'm not even convinced that they anticipated this.
emptyfile 5y ago
Wow I had completely forgotten about this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sdoering 5y ago
I remember the hype when the kickstarter ran. Not being a gamer I nonetheless thought how cool it would be to try my hands at this world they promised. I thought that once the kickstarter delivered I would test it out. Since then I heard nothing for a long time and had more or less forgotten about it. Then I stumbled into a rabbit hole on Instagram as I clicked some scify artwork. The algorithm picked up on that and from there on forward I saw post after post from people promising credit if one joined through their recommendation code. For me it felt like a pyramid scheme, like people trying to get me hocked on NFTs or Amway or any one of these rip some sucker schemes. At least with Amway one would have physical products albeit massively overpriced. With Star Citizen one would have some unplayable (at least from my POV) pixels on a screen.
shmerl 5y ago
I'm looking forward to their Vulkan renderer rewrite and Linux version release.
sleepingadmin 5y ago
Star Citizen upsets me. It's in theory the video game I want, but never pre-order something like this. It should have been out in 2014. Here it is 8 years overdue. Don't care what the budget was or anything. The most AAA of games can be produced in less than that time. It's very obvious it's not coming. So sad. What makes me still curious about star citizen is why? Money was obviously not the problem. You can't blame software development framework. Waterfall vs agile doesn't matter. The least efficient processes would have delivered now. Even deadly things like micromanagement cannot be the cause because eventually you would deliver. I also suspect it's not a scam, there are employees there. So what exactly was the failure? What exactly would cause them to never deliver? >We can't allow for individualism... what you want is people who are positive, can do, and want to work as a team, not always trying to go 'This won't work' or 'It's about me'. - Roberts >The race isn't finished yet. Wait till the finish line is crossed and then I'll say people can make judgements about whether it was the right way or not. - Roberts So let's make it clear here. We can make the judgement. It didn't work. Those devs were right. Chris Roberts most likely pushed out or fired those people who said 'this wont work' and better yet created a toxic work environment where people who were left couldn't speak up and say it wouldn't work. His toxic culture creates incompetence. The blame obvious lay entirely at the feet of Chris Roberts.
- newacc9 5y ago
  >>What exactly would cause them to never deliver concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt.
  - sleepingadmin 5y ago
    >concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt. With such a budget, you can solve these problems within 8 years. I would bet my net worth that you(anonymous HN account 'newacc9') could have solved these problems in 8 years. You might even need to have gone to university and gotten a compsci degree to learn about all these things and still have had over 4 years to solve it. I feel like it cant be a technical thing.
opdahl 5y ago
Star Citizen is actually the perfect game for me. What I’ve noticed over the years is that I almost enjoy the wait for a game more than when its released and I get to sit down and play it. I love reading up news about games, seeing announcement of new features and developer blogs. With Star Citizen never properly releasing I get to watch youtube videos of people dissecting new systems etc and looking forward to the new tech coming in a few years. The moment Star Citizen releases I know for a fact I will lose all interest, so keep up the current pace CIG!
- rafale 5y ago
  You are gonna be Senior Citizen by the time you play it.
  - notafanboy2 5y ago
- gigaflop 5y ago
  It sounds like the kind of game I'd like to watch other people play, with how big and expensive everything seems. Why would I want to spend $1k and wait to be bad at the game, when I can instead watch someone else who spent $10k and does cool things?
- tonguez 5y ago
  That's like saying you enjoy buying lottery tickets because you like to fantasize about what you're going to do with all the money once you get it.
  - barbecue_sauce 5y ago
    That seems accurate.
  - Operyl 5y ago
    I mean, this is why I chuck 5 bucks in every once in a while. I know, realistically, I am not going to win, but the fantasy is a fun activity. The human brain is weird.
kybernetyk 5y ago
I just wish they had some overview on their website of what's already in the game and what you can play. I bought a ship pack back in 2012 (or whenever the initial announcement was). I'm not too invested in the game but it would be nice if there was an at least somewhat playable version (mostly interested in ship to ship combat - don't care about the FPS parts).
mkaic 5y ago
Hearing about the long demise of this game makes me really start to wonder: is there an opportunity here? The concept behind Star Citizen is spectacular--unfortunately, that concept is also all it has going for it at the moment. But there's nothing fundamentally impossible about realizing that concept if it were approached efficiently. I sense a major opportunity for a motivated, well-managed team of developers to do "Star Citizen, but like actually this time". I imagine a project where an MVP is shipped as a number one priority, and the project is incrementally expanded from there, instead of what's happened with SC and CIG's obsessive perfectionism. Is there anyone doing this?
- inasmuch 5y ago
  I wonder this same thing every time Star Citizen hits the news again. What baffles me most about the whole thing is how much value SC fans are placing on the ideas versus the execution of those ideas. It's almost as if people think that other game studios just aren't as creative or haven't thought beyond the scope of what they've delivered in shipped games. Like the only reason Assassin's Creed doesn't allow players to start their own splinter group of assassins to operate within a robust, period-correct world economy and political system is because no one ever thought of it. What gamer hasn't sat down to make a list of features for her dream game and eventually realized what she was describing was just an 'entire universe where everything is possible' sim? As with most artistic and technological achievements, the greatness comes from actually producing a game that manages to satisfactorily offer some portion of that dream list, not from coming up with the list itself.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  I am working on a game that hits some of the main bullet points. Being a duo developer and aiming for a low end hardware demographic, it won't have the high polygon visuals many want, so I wouldn't call it equivalent. Hopefully I can carve out a niche that's enjoyable for a number of people.
drumhead 5y ago
Its a cult, a bit like a cryptocurrency
cletus 5y ago
Watching Star Citizen has been a hobby for me like watching a train wreck is painfully slow motion. It came about at the same time as the revival of a beloved franchise Elite in the form of Elite Dangerous. ED didn't have the budget SC does but it stuck to quite narrow development goals and shipped years ago. It's progressively added updates, patches and expansions since. No Man's Sky is vaguely in the same vein and had a terrible launch (I highly recommend this video [1]) but, to their credit, Hello Games has plugged away at NMS adding more content and updates to the point where it's an enjoyable experience now and has a loyal fan base. But SC? By God. It's like a progenitor for NFT scams. Constantly raising even more money by selling limited run ships (for a game that still basically doesn't exist). I'd occasionally see a presentation on some new system under development (eg the prison system) and I always thought "why on Earth are they talking about this before they even have a core game?" It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything. I'm honestly surprised so many still drink the Kool-Aid on SC. I really wonder where all the money has gone (and how much is actually gone). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  > It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything. Totally agree. I think they're addicted to keeping people engaged through upcoming features rather than an actual game. Fascinating.
gorjusborg 5y ago
https://archive.is/p4TiO https://archive.is/p4TiO
atzero 5y ago
I am a Star Citizen backer, and have been since 2015. I have over $1200 spent in this game (over the course of the last 7 years). My most expensive, and longest held ship, the Orion, is not flyable yet. Yet, I regret absolutely nothing. Its funny how you guys are saying "Why isnt it released yet", without also acknowledging that every single game that has "released early" has been a massive dumpster fire. Not to even mention that, CIG have literally had to create new tech out of thin air to accomplish their goals. The feats of strength CIG have pulled off are already huge. They have created an in-game solar system, with full size planets, that you can fly around, walk around, with no loading screens, anywhere. They have created tech that allows artists to procedurally create planets, at will. Their Quantum AI simulation aims to be the largest, and deepest AI simulation in gaming history. Couple this, with that CIG is really making two games. Star Citizen, and Squadron 42. Granted, we havent seen a whole lot of SQ42, but it is there. Anyone that claims Star Citizen is a scam is hoping for its destruction and is being disingenuous. CIG is extremely transparent that this is not a finished product, and that you are buying a PLEDGE. They call the people who buy their pledges BACKERS. They literally make you click the box saying you understand that. They also publish a Roadmap and a Release Tracker, which they regularly make good on. However, certain top of line features are pushed so the teams can work on other things, and the hugely invested player base just wants to play the game that they enjoy with new stuff because they know that CIG is creating something special. Look at the progress, and content added to the Persistent Universe over the years. We went from having just Port Olisar (PO), to PO and surrounding POIs, to PO/POIs to nearby moons that we couldnt land on, to PO/POIs nearby moons that we could land on, and so on. They added mining, missions, trading, hauling, bounty hunting, hacking, fps combat, even illegal drug smuggling. They have added hundreds of ships, ship weapons, and handheld weapons combined. Currently, Star Citizen has a larger weapon variety than Battlefield 2042. They have added 4 entire planetary systems including 4 major new cities, 4 major ports, several moons, all with their own points of interest. All without any loading screens whatsoever. They even have a fucking convention every year called CitizenCon where they unveil a bunch of stuff they have been working on. In one of the latest ones, they showed off jumping to a whole new system. Also what about their YouTube channel which has literally thousands of videos showing their progress over the years? Does that count for anything? But no, its def a scam. Or, and more likely, its a game that a lot of people believe in, like myself. I would rather give $1200 to CIG for a moonshot game, that has the potential to be genre defining, than give it to scumbags like EA, Activision/Blizz, Ubisoft, etc, who release broken cash-games. If SC is a scam, its the worst run scam in history.
jeffwask 5y ago
I was single, lived in a different state, and had a different career when I backed this game a decade ago. Delayed doesn't really cover it.
sebow 5y ago
It's become a bad joke at this point, arguably worse than the half life 3 one, because it showed some kind of promise.
awinter-py 5y ago
this really tickles my lifelong toxic fascination with estimation + failures thereof and also makes me believe that better estimation tools enable crowdfunding to vastly increase in scope (and have benefits within orgs as well)
t1c1 5y ago
I haven't done jack since the Kickstarter. When does this thing come out?
ajsharp 5y ago
Can people still not play this game??
thereddaikon 5y ago
SC is a textbook example of feature creep. And Chris Roberts has the same problem George Lucas did, a creative with a blank check and nobody to tell him no. If they had stuck to the original feature set as promised in the kickstarter nearly a decade ago then the game would have been released by now. Instead they waste time and resources on overly ambitious features that are mostly unfinished and more and more ships. Do I think its a scam? Not strictly. I don't think they went in to this with the goal of taking people's money and not delivering. But I do think its horribly mismanaged.
- drchopchop 5y ago
  This is exactly what happened on his last big space project (Freelancer) - way over time/budget, too much random micromanaging of meaningless things, etc. Microsoft had to swoop in at the end and save the project, removing him in the process.
  - thereddaikon 5y ago
    And it turned out to be a pretty good game. Which shows he has good ideas, he just needs constraints. Its a really common pitfall in creative industries. You don't see it as much in AAA games I think because devs tend to be more structured. But it happens a lot in indie games and all the damn time in film. There are countless movies which were vanity projects for the directors.
pupppet 5y ago
As a game developer they have the sweetest gig – near unlimited funds and zero expectations.
Justsignedup 5y ago
just for context: - star citizen roadmap used to be: "improved fps, 3 new ships, new inventory system" - star citizen roadmap became: "these 50 things are being worked on" - star citizen roadmap is now: "improved fps, 3 new ships, new inventory system" The reality is that literally ZERO features of star citizen have been delivered on time. Everything that is announced might as well add 3 years to. AND THE BEST PART: They can't stop raising record breaking profits. Last year alone was 80MM USD, and that's I believe 10MM more than previous year.
- mateo1 5y ago
  So they don't even have a reason to release after all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
brailsafe 5y ago
Star Citizen looks like the least playable game I've ever seen. Not one thing looks compelling about it. Does anyone here actually like playing it? Why!? Help me!
- geranim0 5y ago
  I know for a fact that some of these folks are passionate about the ships, how they look, their stats... and they buy a lot of them. It's not just about the game, it's also to show off to your friends your cool new ship
manigandham 5y ago
It’s not a game, it’s a simulation. Perhaps that’s what needs to be communicated better.
bastardoperator 5y ago
I paid for this game despite it being in alpha, tried it with friends, it's not fun, and it doesn't really work. Losing progress is infuriating. Thankfully we were able to a get a full refund and back to Rust I go. It's kind of amazing to see what Facepunch is able to do with a 30 person crew considering it now sits as a steam top 5 concurrent users up there with CS:GO and DOTA2.
t0bia_s 5y ago
I love sci-fi. Star Citizen has potential. But when I tried to play it half year ago, it was extremely boring. It's like life simulator in space. That is not the reason why I usually play games. I expect story with good point. There is none of that.
Sporktacular 5y ago
"But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community" The arrogance. Said as if they've delivered what was advertised to anyone except said contingent. The developers have shown their word counts for nothing, and so the same goes for these statements. They've accepted people's money, which obliges them to provide a reasonable quality return in a reasonable time scale.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  You have to understand there’s very few games out that inspire anything in people now days. It’s all very uninspiring, and it’s almost better to put your hopes into an attempt at something better. Otherwise all that’s left is the drivel, and you better like eating it.
  - Sporktacular 5y ago
    How about a little contrition? Something like 'Yeah, we know we've screwed up our delivery over and over again. And we've never really delivered anything as promised. And our model has been repeatedly shown to be a failure. And we know you told us for years this would be the case if nothing changed, and we ignored you anyway. So we are sorry to ALL of you. Here's how we're going to change everything or here's how we're going to refund you.' Pretending there is one marginal, disgruntled group is a cynical, face-saying decoy designed to ignore the fact that virtually everyone is disgruntled. Pure arrogance.
savingGrace 5y ago
I refunded after I lost hours of gameplay due to game-crashing bugs. I look forward to playing this as a 90 year old man someday.

165 points by danso 5y ago

Reminds me of Dark & Light .... the largest MMO you'll never see!

This seems endless and if the users are still there... does it matter? The only real risk is if people quit the game, but apparently not enough to actually change anything.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

When I gave $60 about 10 years ago, I expected that I would have played Squadron 42 by now. At least there's something I can play in Star Citizen.

thesuitonym 5y ago
I think I paid $80 in the original kickstarter. I've spent maybe a total of two hours playing the game, but the entertainment I've got out of the development has been well worth the money.
AQuantized 5y ago
I have actually had a fair amount of fun playing Star Citizen. To my knowledge it's the only game you can actually mess about with friends on spaceships where you aren't limited to merely controlling the ship (i.e. Elite Dangerous). That said, it's clearly well out of proportion to their funding. Some of the feature creep implies such horrible judgement by experienced game designers it would have been hard to predict.

NelsonMinar 5y ago

$433,799,090 and counting.

belval 5y ago

I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up. Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.

JohnBooty 5y ago
Is there anything playable yet? edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing, While Star Citizen is currently in the Alpha stage of development, it is playable now. New content, features, and fixes are consistently added as development continues, with a major patch released each quarter. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now As somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  It sounds like the definitions of "playable" and "alpha" really matter here. When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software. I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms. From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Chris Roberts discovered Steam-by-another-name: it's more profitable to make hats than games. And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.

yolo69420 5y ago

the game gets shit on a lot but for better or worse they are genuinely trying a lot of things that nobody else tries and is probably ever going to try again. the depth of simulation they have going on is insane, unsurprisingly the resulting dev difficulties are also insane. and likely to make the project fail. but I still want them to try for the sliver of a chance that they can actually pull it off after 20 years. at the very least I think the idea that star citizen is some kind of intentional scam where they intentionally don't want to get the game done because the can keep their current monetization running is extremely stupid to say the least. even if chris roberts and the leadership are mustache twirling monocle wearing capitalist masterminds with no interest in actually making a game like this (they are not), they wouldn't be able to systematically control literally hundreds of engineers without anyone noticing what's going on.

JaimeThompson 5y ago
>a lot of things that nobody else tries Serious question, like what?
- aniforprez 5y ago
  The scale of the planets and the kind of environments they can have is genuinely impressive. It doesn't look like procedural generation like No Man's Sky. The cities and environments can be placed and this allows for actual planetary scale with multiple biomes which has never been done before Of course this also causes lots of difficulties in dev since it's a ridiculous scale and being multiplayer, there's even more complexity. Plus the performance seems to be terrible sometimes
- Locrin 5y ago
  Well. Last time i played I finally had my first flight. It’s been possible for a while now to visit different planets, space stations and so on. But I have not tried before now. They have focused a lot on details and realism. When I opened the ramp to my ship and walked in it felt like i was there. I walked through the door to the cockpit and entered the pilot seat. Then I powered up the ship. A voice spoke and informed me the ship was online and a flurry of hud elements gave me a disorienting amount of information about fuel, elevation, ammo, comm channels and so on. After fiddling for a while I figured out how to ask for launch permission and clumsily took off. I barely managed to float up and out of the spaceport hangar I was in. You have supreme control of your ship and can rotate and tilt any which way. After getting used to the controls I used the star map to select a destination and began the quantum jump. It takes several minutes to to this. When I arrived I was on the wrong side of the planet, and so I had to do a second smaller jump to correct this. The view was something else. You really feel like you are floating far above a planet. I then got out of the pilot seat, opened one of ships bay doors and just stood there looking down on the planet below me. After a while I flew down looking for a landing place. I could not find it so I landed on a high rise building and left the ship. I then got stuck and had to kill myself to get sent back to my starting point.

cmusfan 5y ago

Releasing a playable MVP and adding features would be preferable to a big bang with the kitchen sink. I had already abandoned my investment in this product. "Best is the enemy of good."

prepend 5y ago
“Minimally viable is the enemy of terrible.” “Good is the enemy of terrible.” For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff. I don’t think reductionist arguments are terribly useful for real things.
- xbar 5y ago
  "Reductionist arguments are the enemy of useful." "Minimally viable is the enemy of class action."
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  Everyone knows bad, terrible, and non-functional is bad. But it seems like lots of people don't know that chasing perfection is also bad.
- deeviant 5y ago
  > For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff. It sounds like you just don't understand the statement. It's not a binary assessment, it's an observation: if you set your bar too high, you simply may never get there and have nothing to show for it, thus by "lowering the bar" you may actually deliver a better product (you know, because it actually got delivered, and not canceled).
  - prepend 5y ago
    That’s my understanding of the statement. The reason I’m irked is that you simply may never get there by not implementing features or fixing bugs (you know, because it got cancelled due to never being useful enough to make it). Its not binary but by setting the bar too low, you never get their either. My irk is that the premise is that anything not chosen is too “perfect.” Also annoying is having “minimum viable products” that aren’t actually viable.

uejfiweun 5y ago

Is this game actually legit or just a scam as is popularly understood? I saw there is an alpha, but it's tough to separate fact from fiction on this game, would love to hear the perspective of some HNers.

DoItToMe81 5y ago
It has embezzled hundreds of millions, yet does not even have a fully playable product after a decade, and seemingly exists only to exploit whales with more money than sense who'll buy new ships. You be the judge.
ProAm 5y ago
I dont think its a scam but I think its planned to never finish. It's a well funded job for a bunch of people. I think it is finished and will just receive updates as-is for years.
- xbar 5y ago
  You have a generous definition of scam/not scam.
pixxel 5y ago
Legit, mostly. I’ve recently purchased the game and it is stunning and rather awe-inspiring, with some solid gameplay loops. But, the bugs are heartbreaking. I’m not prepared to invest 100s of hours learning/playing the game with immersion breaking bugs. So I’ve shelved it for now. The scam IMO is continuing to work on anything other than fixing the bugs.
- aniforprez 5y ago
  As someone who hasn't played this, 5 years ago when I looked at videos, the UI seemed comically bad. Interacting with something brings up some flying UI text that gives in front of you until you disengage or select something. Recent videos show that same UI. Is that UI actually usable? Sometimes the text seems to blend into the background and I'm not sure of the purpose behind the weird flying animations they have

JaimeThompson 5y ago

They can't ship a game but they are paying out dividends. https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/17/star-citizen-financial-report-outlines-over-1m-in-paid-dividends-to-investors-as-of-last-year/ https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/17/star-citizen-financial-re...

notafanboy2 5y ago

UI_at_80x24 5y ago

The first and last time I pre-ordered a game was for MOO3. I won't ever be fooled again. Besides now that i've gotten older I don't care as much. I can wait.

TheIronMark 5y ago

The real mmo is the Star Citizen forums

steveylang 5y ago
I was just going to comment, the real game seems to be the development of the game, (pre)ordering and outfitting your ship and gear, etc. It will no longer be a game, once the game is finished. “After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.”
the_snooze 5y ago
So the real Star Citizen is indeed the friends we made along the way!
guntars 5y ago
I like this take. There's a book called "Games people play" by E. Berne that changed how I think about things like this. It talks about how people on a biological level need to interact with others and how they'll unconsciously repeat a script (game) with predictable roles and results to accomplish that. The main insight is that these games don't necessarily need to have a positive outcome - people still get something out of it. So it gets repeated, to the puzzlement of any observers and sometimes even the participants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
Krasnol 5y ago
The thread on reddit isn't bad either: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/siymuj/roadmap_roundup_february_2nd_2021_roberts_space/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/siymuj/roadmap...
Rebelgecko 5y ago
For sure. I feel like I've gotten my $25 worth of entertainment just from following all the drama for over a decade. If you have a few hours to kill, Sunk Cost Galaxy is a great rundown of how SC got to where it is today. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCcJKZHHY0E https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...

fxtentacle 5y ago

I bought in back in the early days when it was supposed to be a new single player game with optional multiplayer. By now, the whole thing is more like an unplayable buggy mess of a failed MMORPG. And no single player yet. EDIT: Also it says a lot that my account got deactivated for inactivity while I was waiting for them to release something playable...

izzydata 5y ago

At what point should people or even governments seek legal action against these people? There must be some kind of fraud going on here.

brokencode 5y ago
The project just seems to suffer from an extreme case of scope creep to me. That’s not fraud, it’s incompetence. I doubt you’d have a case, since there is clearly a game being built, it’s just that the developers have done a terrible job finishing it.
- izzydata 5y ago
  It seems intentional. Possibly in order to continue the collection of money from people thinking they need people to keep investing. As soon as they release an actual game and development can come to an end then they can't profit much its continued dependance on investment money.
  - brokencode 5y ago
    Do you have evidence of this? I personally try to give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of their intentions. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” - Hanlon’s razor Of course, that doesn’t absolve the developers of guilt here. They are at the very least guilty of failing to build a successful game with all the money they’ve raised, and nobody should ever trust them with their money again.

throwaway743 5y ago

All I want are for the lodging elevators and subway stops to reliably appear, and to not get booted right when I'm at my destination outpost/planet without lodging. Loading the game takes 10 min at best, and to wait that long only to see the one and only elevator out not rendering (requiring reloading the game) is beyond frustrating. I can deal with lag here and there, but this literally makes the game unplayable. *yes, my primary residence is in New Babbage

caconym_ 5y ago

To clarify, based on my reading of the article: CIG is not reducing the scope of their planned deliverables^[1] for a v1.0 release. Rather, they are going to reduce the granularity of the roadmap info they share with the public so that people will complain less. ^[1] For a game that has been in development for a decade and blown past every planned release date by a comical margin.

aeternum 5y ago
This sounds more like something CIG would do.

prepend 5y ago

I had a heated discussion with a friend in 2013 about StarCitizen and that it was a scam. They believed it was real and that their early investments would pay off. They bought stuff multiple times and were very mad that I would insult what would be such an awesome game. It was so curious to me back then. I need to ask them about this as I can’t believe people still pay any attention to this as I think it will never happen.

ethbr0 5y ago
It was watching Beanie Babies that inoculated me. Someone monetarily buying into an idea + in communication with a large community who has also bought in + future promises = cult It may be a productive cult, but it's still a cult. And has all of a cult's reality distortion effects on its members.
markbnj 5y ago
I think there are some pretty solid reasons why certain types of people remain very interested in it. If you're a space sim nerd then it ticks a lot of boxes. I played it about a month ago for the first time, after a decade or so of mocking it every chance I got for all the usual reasons. I was looking for something new and saw enough videos that seemed to suggest it had reached a point of being interesting to me. My space nerd creds go back a long way: wing commander at release, freelancer, eve, various flavors of X3, elite, ten minutes in no man's sky, etc. I'm one of those people who wants to immerse into a game world where I can do all the things CIG promises. So I dove in. What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet. I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.
5y ago

jq-r 5y ago

Sounds like Theranos.

999900000999 5y ago
Except this is far less evil because it's not a medical device. But the worst that happens is you never actually get your ship, versus getting incorrect results and falling ill
- jq-r 5y ago
  Yeah, but similar. Both were built on mountains of promises, lies, and investor's money.

danso 5y ago

As a software project, Star Citizen seems like a complete debacle — a project promising the basically impossible (tens of thousands of players on a single server/shard) and yet failing so far to deliver even the feasible-but-difficult (rudimentary AI crew, ~100 star systems). But as a marketing campaign, it feels like an astounding success to attract record-breaking fundraising year-over-year despite diminishing development milestones. https://twinfinite.net/2022/01/star-citizen-crowdfunding-record-2021/ https://twinfinite.net/2022/01/star-citizen-crowdfunding-rec...

prox 5y ago
All the while, I have been enjoying Elite Dangerous, which ticks a lot of boxes. Frontier Development is building from the ground up, and even though it’s not without problems (they just had a year of fixing their bodged Odyssey release) , they seem to have a running space simulation. I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Elite is, without a doubt, the best spaceship parking simulator ever made.
  - pkilgore 5y ago
    X4 would like a word, fartcannon. (I love both games, but yes).
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    my first experience with Elite: Dangerous was playing it in VR and parking my ship on a station was a legitimately awesome experience.
    - ssully 5y ago
      I've never touched the game nor own any VR devices, but my friends basically treat it as the defacto VR game. It sounds really cool.

FartyMcFarter 5y ago

The version numbers say everything you need to know. "Alpha 3.16.1" should never have been a thing for any software project.

georgeecollins 5y ago

It seems quaint now to be upset about Star Citizen. There are so many "games" being promised now to people buying NFTs that don't even seem to be trying to be plausible. Like: No one working on our team has ever really made a game before but we plan to make a revolutionary one before the end of the year. Sure. At least Roberts Industries is trying. But its still kind of scummy imo.

cmeacham98 5y ago
No NFT game has raised even close to hundreds of millions of dollars (at least yet).
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  True if you consider only consumer money. But if you consider investors that is not true. There are NFT "games" that have raised a lot. I don't know if they would define themselves as games, but functionally they all look like they are trying to be an MMO or Roblox. And they haven't had as much time!
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    What is an NFT game that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from any source (including investors)?
    - georgeecollins 5y ago
      https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/the-sandbox-f24f-series-b--b1acbc04 https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/the-sandbox-f24f-se...
- xbar 5y ago
  We are merely days away from Star Citizen from announcing its NFT plans and obviating this statement.
ethbr0 5y ago

napkin 5y ago

Star Citizen is a topic I sink a bit of time into every year or so, because I find the whole phenomenon incredibly curious and somewhat unique to our times. Don't be generous to Cloud Imperium Games (CIG). If I had to present but a single slide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g... They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project, broken promises, and delivered nothing that resembles what most people would qualify as a playable game. They've only given evidence that they will continue wasting resources. For some really entertaining coverage, I'd highly recommend: "Sunk Cost Galaxy", an amateur YouTube series made by former fan/investor/associate/!?: https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA And LTT's more recent feature, which definitely pokes fun but is still overly generous IMO: https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo

wayoutthere 5y ago
Ehhh that list of game dev costs seems really suspect; Star Citizen is only notable because they released dev costs when everyone else holds them tight to the chest. Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie. AAA video games over the last 10 years typically have as much if not more budget than tentpole movies (and corresponding revenue draw).
- napkin 5y ago
  Yeah, interesting point! However, even if you just adjusted all the other dev costs in that list by a factor of two or three - Star Citizen would still easily remain in the top five. My point was mainly- Compare CIG's efforts to other studios that have spent hundreds, or even just tens of millions!
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie." Are voice acting costs that huge? It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?

erwincoumans 5y ago

That's a real time capsule, latest news posted in 2013 (spectrum stories section): https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/universe https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/universe This Star Citizen 2021 video looks nice though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrU27WMr4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrU27WMr4E

kingcharles 5y ago

I went to jail in 2013, not long after I donated to the Kickstarter. I recently got out - hoping an old game like Star Citizen would still be playable. Found out it wasn't even released yet o_O.

steveylang 5y ago
May as well have stayed. (JK kidding of course, congrats and hope you stay free and clear.)
sandos 5y ago
For real? Is that by design? In elite jail is at least just an instantaneous transfer and an financial transaction, which is maybe one reason why the justice in elite doesn't really work.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Jail in the real world is also just a financial transaction. I was only in there for 8 years because I couldn't afford the fee to get out.

pavlov 5y ago

Star Citizen crypto pivot soon? Why make a game when you can just be a virtual spaceship trading platform.

deeviant 5y ago

If Cloud Imperium Games thinks the answer is limiting what parts of their roadmap to share with the public is the answer, they are sadly mistaken. At this point, this is not a unrealistic expectation of their user problem, it is a CIG can't develop a game problem. The team itself needs to ruthlessly cut features and develop a MVP game concept and execute it. At this point Star Citizen is already the next Duke Nuke'em forever, and it is now well on it's way to creating a class of it's own in the over-hyped gaming vapor-wear category. Frankly, this type of conflict with and blaming of their own fans is a portent of the beginning of the end.

waynesonfire 5y ago

it occurred to me many years ago that star citizen is a meta game. the game is watching a game come together. plenty of people get a kick out of all that this encompasses. unfortunately, it wasn't sold this way but maybe out of necessity. furthermore, i'm not even convinced that they anticipated this.

emptyfile 5y ago

Wow I had completely forgotten about this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sdoering 5y ago

I remember the hype when the kickstarter ran. Not being a gamer I nonetheless thought how cool it would be to try my hands at this world they promised. I thought that once the kickstarter delivered I would test it out. Since then I heard nothing for a long time and had more or less forgotten about it. Then I stumbled into a rabbit hole on Instagram as I clicked some scify artwork. The algorithm picked up on that and from there on forward I saw post after post from people promising credit if one joined through their recommendation code. For me it felt like a pyramid scheme, like people trying to get me hocked on NFTs or Amway or any one of these rip some sucker schemes. At least with Amway one would have physical products albeit massively overpriced. With Star Citizen one would have some unplayable (at least from my POV) pixels on a screen.

shmerl 5y ago

I'm looking forward to their Vulkan renderer rewrite and Linux version release.

sleepingadmin 5y ago

Star Citizen upsets me. It's in theory the video game I want, but never pre-order something like this. It should have been out in 2014. Here it is 8 years overdue. Don't care what the budget was or anything. The most AAA of games can be produced in less than that time. It's very obvious it's not coming. So sad. What makes me still curious about star citizen is why? Money was obviously not the problem. You can't blame software development framework. Waterfall vs agile doesn't matter. The least efficient processes would have delivered now. Even deadly things like micromanagement cannot be the cause because eventually you would deliver. I also suspect it's not a scam, there are employees there. So what exactly was the failure? What exactly would cause them to never deliver? >We can't allow for individualism... what you want is people who are positive, can do, and want to work as a team, not always trying to go 'This won't work' or 'It's about me'. - Roberts >The race isn't finished yet. Wait till the finish line is crossed and then I'll say people can make judgements about whether it was the right way or not. - Roberts So let's make it clear here. We can make the judgement. It didn't work. Those devs were right. Chris Roberts most likely pushed out or fired those people who said 'this wont work' and better yet created a toxic work environment where people who were left couldn't speak up and say it wouldn't work. His toxic culture creates incompetence. The blame obvious lay entirely at the feet of Chris Roberts.

newacc9 5y ago
>>What exactly would cause them to never deliver concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt.
- sleepingadmin 5y ago
  >concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt. With such a budget, you can solve these problems within 8 years. I would bet my net worth that you(anonymous HN account 'newacc9') could have solved these problems in 8 years. You might even need to have gone to university and gotten a compsci degree to learn about all these things and still have had over 4 years to solve it. I feel like it cant be a technical thing.

opdahl 5y ago

Star Citizen is actually the perfect game for me. What I’ve noticed over the years is that I almost enjoy the wait for a game more than when its released and I get to sit down and play it. I love reading up news about games, seeing announcement of new features and developer blogs. With Star Citizen never properly releasing I get to watch youtube videos of people dissecting new systems etc and looking forward to the new tech coming in a few years. The moment Star Citizen releases I know for a fact I will lose all interest, so keep up the current pace CIG!

rafale 5y ago
You are gonna be Senior Citizen by the time you play it.
- notafanboy2 5y ago
gigaflop 5y ago
It sounds like the kind of game I'd like to watch other people play, with how big and expensive everything seems. Why would I want to spend $1k and wait to be bad at the game, when I can instead watch someone else who spent $10k and does cool things?
tonguez 5y ago
That's like saying you enjoy buying lottery tickets because you like to fantasize about what you're going to do with all the money once you get it.
- barbecue_sauce 5y ago
  That seems accurate.
- Operyl 5y ago
  I mean, this is why I chuck 5 bucks in every once in a while. I know, realistically, I am not going to win, but the fantasy is a fun activity. The human brain is weird.

kybernetyk 5y ago

I just wish they had some overview on their website of what's already in the game and what you can play. I bought a ship pack back in 2012 (or whenever the initial announcement was). I'm not too invested in the game but it would be nice if there was an at least somewhat playable version (mostly interested in ship to ship combat - don't care about the FPS parts).

mkaic 5y ago

Hearing about the long demise of this game makes me really start to wonder: is there an opportunity here? The concept behind Star Citizen is spectacular--unfortunately, that concept is also all it has going for it at the moment. But there's nothing fundamentally impossible about realizing that concept if it were approached efficiently. I sense a major opportunity for a motivated, well-managed team of developers to do "Star Citizen, but like actually this time". I imagine a project where an MVP is shipped as a number one priority, and the project is incrementally expanded from there, instead of what's happened with SC and CIG's obsessive perfectionism. Is there anyone doing this?

inasmuch 5y ago
I wonder this same thing every time Star Citizen hits the news again. What baffles me most about the whole thing is how much value SC fans are placing on the ideas versus the execution of those ideas. It's almost as if people think that other game studios just aren't as creative or haven't thought beyond the scope of what they've delivered in shipped games. Like the only reason Assassin's Creed doesn't allow players to start their own splinter group of assassins to operate within a robust, period-correct world economy and political system is because no one ever thought of it. What gamer hasn't sat down to make a list of features for her dream game and eventually realized what she was describing was just an 'entire universe where everything is possible' sim? As with most artistic and technological achievements, the greatness comes from actually producing a game that manages to satisfactorily offer some portion of that dream list, not from coming up with the list itself.
mysterydip 5y ago
I am working on a game that hits some of the main bullet points. Being a duo developer and aiming for a low end hardware demographic, it won't have the high polygon visuals many want, so I wouldn't call it equivalent. Hopefully I can carve out a niche that's enjoyable for a number of people.

drumhead 5y ago

Its a cult, a bit like a cryptocurrency

cletus 5y ago

Watching Star Citizen has been a hobby for me like watching a train wreck is painfully slow motion. It came about at the same time as the revival of a beloved franchise Elite in the form of Elite Dangerous. ED didn't have the budget SC does but it stuck to quite narrow development goals and shipped years ago. It's progressively added updates, patches and expansions since. No Man's Sky is vaguely in the same vein and had a terrible launch (I highly recommend this video [1]) but, to their credit, Hello Games has plugged away at NMS adding more content and updates to the point where it's an enjoyable experience now and has a loyal fan base. But SC? By God. It's like a progenitor for NFT scams. Constantly raising even more money by selling limited run ships (for a game that still basically doesn't exist). I'd occasionally see a presentation on some new system under development (eg the prison system) and I always thought "why on Earth are they talking about this before they even have a core game?" It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything. I'm honestly surprised so many still drink the Kool-Aid on SC. I really wonder where all the money has gone (and how much is actually gone). [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ

robertlagrant 5y ago
> It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything. Totally agree. I think they're addicted to keeping people engaged through upcoming features rather than an actual game. Fascinating.

gorjusborg 5y ago

https://archive.is/p4TiO https://archive.is/p4TiO

atzero 5y ago

I am a Star Citizen backer, and have been since 2015. I have over $1200 spent in this game (over the course of the last 7 years). My most expensive, and longest held ship, the Orion, is not flyable yet. Yet, I regret absolutely nothing. Its funny how you guys are saying "Why isnt it released yet", without also acknowledging that every single game that has "released early" has been a massive dumpster fire. Not to even mention that, CIG have literally had to create new tech out of thin air to accomplish their goals. The feats of strength CIG have pulled off are already huge. They have created an in-game solar system, with full size planets, that you can fly around, walk around, with no loading screens, anywhere. They have created tech that allows artists to procedurally create planets, at will. Their Quantum AI simulation aims to be the largest, and deepest AI simulation in gaming history. Couple this, with that CIG is really making two games. Star Citizen, and Squadron 42. Granted, we havent seen a whole lot of SQ42, but it is there. Anyone that claims Star Citizen is a scam is hoping for its destruction and is being disingenuous. CIG is extremely transparent that this is not a finished product, and that you are buying a PLEDGE. They call the people who buy their pledges BACKERS. They literally make you click the box saying you understand that. They also publish a Roadmap and a Release Tracker, which they regularly make good on. However, certain top of line features are pushed so the teams can work on other things, and the hugely invested player base just wants to play the game that they enjoy with new stuff because they know that CIG is creating something special. Look at the progress, and content added to the Persistent Universe over the years. We went from having just Port Olisar (PO), to PO and surrounding POIs, to PO/POIs to nearby moons that we couldnt land on, to PO/POIs nearby moons that we could land on, and so on. They added mining, missions, trading, hauling, bounty hunting, hacking, fps combat, even illegal drug smuggling. They have added hundreds of ships, ship weapons, and handheld weapons combined. Currently, Star Citizen has a larger weapon variety than Battlefield 2042. They have added 4 entire planetary systems including 4 major new cities, 4 major ports, several moons, all with their own points of interest. All without any loading screens whatsoever. They even have a fucking convention every year called CitizenCon where they unveil a bunch of stuff they have been working on. In one of the latest ones, they showed off jumping to a whole new system. Also what about their YouTube channel which has literally thousands of videos showing their progress over the years? Does that count for anything? But no, its def a scam. Or, and more likely, its a game that a lot of people believe in, like myself. I would rather give $1200 to CIG for a moonshot game, that has the potential to be genre defining, than give it to scumbags like EA, Activision/Blizz, Ubisoft, etc, who release broken cash-games. If SC is a scam, its the worst run scam in history.

jeffwask 5y ago

I was single, lived in a different state, and had a different career when I backed this game a decade ago. Delayed doesn't really cover it.

sebow 5y ago

It's become a bad joke at this point, arguably worse than the half life 3 one, because it showed some kind of promise.

awinter-py 5y ago

this really tickles my lifelong toxic fascination with estimation + failures thereof and also makes me believe that better estimation tools enable crowdfunding to vastly increase in scope (and have benefits within orgs as well)

t1c1 5y ago

I haven't done jack since the Kickstarter. When does this thing come out?

ajsharp 5y ago

Can people still not play this game??

thereddaikon 5y ago

SC is a textbook example of feature creep. And Chris Roberts has the same problem George Lucas did, a creative with a blank check and nobody to tell him no. If they had stuck to the original feature set as promised in the kickstarter nearly a decade ago then the game would have been released by now. Instead they waste time and resources on overly ambitious features that are mostly unfinished and more and more ships. Do I think its a scam? Not strictly. I don't think they went in to this with the goal of taking people's money and not delivering. But I do think its horribly mismanaged.

drchopchop 5y ago
This is exactly what happened on his last big space project (Freelancer) - way over time/budget, too much random micromanaging of meaningless things, etc. Microsoft had to swoop in at the end and save the project, removing him in the process.
- thereddaikon 5y ago
  And it turned out to be a pretty good game. Which shows he has good ideas, he just needs constraints. Its a really common pitfall in creative industries. You don't see it as much in AAA games I think because devs tend to be more structured. But it happens a lot in indie games and all the damn time in film. There are countless movies which were vanity projects for the directors.

pupppet 5y ago

As a game developer they have the sweetest gig – near unlimited funds and zero expectations.

Justsignedup 5y ago

just for context: - star citizen roadmap used to be: "improved fps, 3 new ships, new inventory system" - star citizen roadmap became: "these 50 things are being worked on" - star citizen roadmap is now: "improved fps, 3 new ships, new inventory system" The reality is that literally ZERO features of star citizen have been delivered on time. Everything that is announced might as well add 3 years to. AND THE BEST PART: They can't stop raising record breaking profits. Last year alone was 80MM USD, and that's I believe 10MM more than previous year.

mateo1 5y ago
So they don't even have a reason to release after all.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

brailsafe 5y ago

Star Citizen looks like the least playable game I've ever seen. Not one thing looks compelling about it. Does anyone here actually like playing it? Why!? Help me!

geranim0 5y ago
I know for a fact that some of these folks are passionate about the ships, how they look, their stats... and they buy a lot of them. It's not just about the game, it's also to show off to your friends your cool new ship

manigandham 5y ago

It’s not a game, it’s a simulation. Perhaps that’s what needs to be communicated better.

bastardoperator 5y ago

I paid for this game despite it being in alpha, tried it with friends, it's not fun, and it doesn't really work. Losing progress is infuriating. Thankfully we were able to a get a full refund and back to Rust I go. It's kind of amazing to see what Facepunch is able to do with a 30 person crew considering it now sits as a steam top 5 concurrent users up there with CS:GO and DOTA2.

t0bia_s 5y ago

I love sci-fi. Star Citizen has potential. But when I tried to play it half year ago, it was extremely boring. It's like life simulator in space. That is not the reason why I usually play games. I expect story with good point. There is none of that.

Sporktacular 5y ago

"But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community" The arrogance. Said as if they've delivered what was advertised to anyone except said contingent. The developers have shown their word counts for nothing, and so the same goes for these statements. They've accepted people's money, which obliges them to provide a reasonable quality return in a reasonable time scale.

crate_barre 5y ago
You have to understand there’s very few games out that inspire anything in people now days. It’s all very uninspiring, and it’s almost better to put your hopes into an attempt at something better. Otherwise all that’s left is the drivel, and you better like eating it.
- Sporktacular 5y ago
  How about a little contrition? Something like 'Yeah, we know we've screwed up our delivery over and over again. And we've never really delivered anything as promised. And our model has been repeatedly shown to be a failure. And we know you told us for years this would be the case if nothing changed, and we ignored you anyway. So we are sorry to ALL of you. Here's how we're going to change everything or here's how we're going to refund you.' Pretending there is one marginal, disgruntled group is a cynical, face-saying decoy designed to ignore the fact that virtually everyone is disgruntled. Pure arrogance.

savingGrace 5y ago

I refunded after I lost hours of gameplay due to game-crashing bugs. I look forward to playing this as a 90 year old man someday.