7 ms·

Star Citizen (2015)

41 points by luu 4y ago

evandwight 4y ago
2015. This is not a new take on the current state.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gaws 4y ago
  It was a scam then, and it's still a scam now.
bombcar 4y ago
Part of the “scale from single player to leader of the galactic forces” is that even if it were done, you’d end up having fast travel and skip systems anyway.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bobsmooth 4y ago
I'm pretty sure I was in high school when I first rumblings of a Freelancer sequel.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
If you attack me over this, remember, I'm an old school internet warlord
zionic 4y ago
“90 days tops” (famous quote from the author about how long CIG had left before bankruptcy)
chrisco255 4y ago
Have not kept up with Star Citizen but I understand they are still around. It's interesting that the author criticized game engines like CryEngine 2 and UE4 vs building your own engine. Lately, I've been following the indie game dev scene quite a bit and I'm very impressed with what even one or two devs are able to build with modern Unity. I wonder how much more mature UE and Unity are these days and whether the comment on building your own engine still applies or not.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I think we’ve passed the era where building your own engine let you focus on the features you needed. And if your expertise is building engines perhaps you should build an engine instead of a game?
dougmwne 4y ago
I was not very aware of this game, but apparently according to Wikipedia they have taken over 400 million in funding!? I guess this is more like Star Citizen Eternal.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Star Citizen Forever perhaps?
Datenstrom 4y ago
I don't want anything to do with the drama... but I backed a while ago and only just played the first time last fall for about 2 months and I've already got my monies worth. If you can make it past the rough edges there are already magical moments not available anywhere else available in the game and I can't wait to see what they do in the future. Recently Jackfrags who I watch cover FPS games on youtube played it and my reaction was similar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5niLl0fank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5niLl0fank
- tra3 4y ago
  Can you share what you liked? What are the magical moments?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
egypturnash 4y ago
Wikipedia tells me pre-production began in 2010, with a Kickstarter in 2012. It is 2022 and the game's site claims it is actually available: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now "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." How it compares to No Man's Sky (initial release: 2016, last update: late 2021, on its fifth anniversary) is anyone's guess, it's Windows-only and I'm a Mac girl, and even if I had something to play it on I'm not too interested in spending $45 on what is likely to be disaster tourism. (Edit: apparently it is pretty good for people who enjoy pretending to be a long-haul space pilot, so my “disaster tourism” projection was completely wrong. Yay!) Also this made me curious what Mr. Smart's up to right now and, sigh, the latest article on his blog is him declaring the inevitability of blockchain gaming; he's even repeating the line about how NFTs will let you move stuff between different games.
- madelyn 4y ago
  I've played NMS pretty much since release, off and on. First on Playstation, but I then bought it on Steam for Linux and plan to get it on the Switch when it drops. It's a fantastic game if you have friends to play with, or are interested in joining online groups. There's thousands of planets out there and I still get excited when I'm in a random galaxy and find something awesome I can share with the community. The single player in NMS is less fun than Multiplayer, but if you are down for what is basically space minecraft I still would say it's worth it! And for anyone wondering, it works great on Proton and the devs are maintaining support for Proton as well (thanks, Steam Deck!)
  - gergi 4y ago
    Serious question - mind sharing what you enjoy about NMS multiplayer? I tried it recently but the mission goals weren’t shared. So basically, we were playing two “solo” campaigns next to each other and got bored. Is there more to it?
  - secretsatan 4y ago
tux1968 4y ago
Coincidentally, this just showed up in my feed earlier today: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GraciousMintyGrasshopper-mobile.mp4 https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GraciousMintyGrasshopper-mobile.mp... Brief clip of a moment from this game, being played by a highly skilled "pilot".
- throwanem 4y ago
  Reminds me a lot of what you could do in "Tachyon: The Fringe". Space combat sims are a lot more fun when their devs remember that spacecraft aren't as constrained as World War II fighters.
  - sio8ohPi 4y ago
    For me, the constraints are what makes WWII fighters so fun. I've tried some space sims, but without aerodynamic limits I always feel like I'm piloting a spinning ball of lasers.
    - throwanem 4y ago
      There's nothing else like it in deathmatch, though. I've never seen an AI that can really handle a ship with that kind of maneuverability, but I've played against other humans who could, and it plays out like something out of Babylon 5's wettest dreams - just an absolutely wild and barely predictable furball, especially because any time you're not closely pressing your opponent you risk them severely contracting your maneuver options with a missile launch. Too, as the linked video helps demonstrate, it makes attacking capships a lot more feasible and a lot more fun - most games' capships are extremely hard targets for fighters because of their defensive armament and because a fighter operating as if aerodynamically constrained has a hard time making a strafing pass count. Freespace 2 gives bombers shipkiller missiles to help with this, but it's still a real problem with ships that mount a lot of point defense - as it is, those are so good at swatting fighters that you don't really have any way to answer them. Lifting the aerodynamic maneuvering limitation rebalances the engagement in a way that gives attacking fighters a lot more tactical flexibility, and gives a good deal of added salience and complexity to the escort role besides.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
unity1001 4y ago
Star Citizen can change gaming for the better. It can break the corporate-induced cycle of rehashing old game formats with slightly better graphics to siphon off money instead of providing more gameplay. Consider this: We need something new - there is absolutely no need for another rehashed clone of Privateer/Freelancer/Whatever. We played hundreds of such games. Nobody has been able to bring a new paradigm into this game genre since 1980s. Its the same old thing. With the hardware power that our computers attained since 1980s, we should be playing games that are much bigger in scope and much more immersive right now. We are not. We are playing the same rehashed games with better graphics. The gameplay is almost the same and cheap. Every major company that consolidated the gaming space is just rehashing this genre like all the other genres for profit, without bringing in anything new. Star Citizen is trying to change that. Its trying to create an entire universe in which you can make your space coffee, eat your space breakfast and move into whatever adventure you want in a living, breathing universe. Its trying to put is in something that is worth our time and attention today, instead of a rehashed copy/paste of whatever successful simplicity that was invented in the earlier decades. Its going to be difficult. Even making one living, breathing space-city for people to experience is like making a singular, major MMO game. Making a planet - even bigger. An universe? Phenomenal work. It was obvious that there would be needed gigantic funding on an ongoing basis and A LOT of work. It was obvious that a lot of developers would burn out on the way. It was certain that it would take a lot of time. STILL, its worth it. We need SOMETHING NEW now. Since 1970s, we got CPU power increase a TRILLION FOLD, but the games we play today STILL have the gameplay of 1970s' successful games despite all the new potential that immense CPU (and accompanying GPU) power provides. We need something that will make us immerse thoroughly in games, universes in ways we never did before. Star Citizen is trying that. And its a major step in the right direction.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Or, it's trying to create OS/360 with a team helmed by a designer. A game with 10x the level of interactivity does not take 10x as long to create. It takes 10^10. Star Citizen is the exact opposite of every lesson we've learned about successful project management and software development in the last 75 years.
Jedd 4y ago
I paid USD$55 back in 2017-02, and played a little at the time, but just didn't get it. I came back to it in ~2019, but again it felt like a high barrier, requiring the kind of esoteric knowledge you'd get if you'd been consistently tracking all the updates to really enjoy. (And there was a LOT of email updates about the project.) Also what felt like heavy selling on new spacecraft and addons, while I remained confused about what you're actually meant to do in the game, frustrated by the sandbox mechanics & limitations, bewildered by how resilient my ship was and what happened if it was destroyed (pricing was mostly around buying ships, I believe). I now suspect persistent MMOG universes just aren't my thing.
ZeroCool2u 4y ago
Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021/the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try something a bit different and growing up my dad fed me a steady diet of Asimov, Clarke, and Gibson. Besides, I'm privileged enough to be in a position that being out $100 for a virtual space ship is an acceptable risk to me. While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience. The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today! I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet! There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :) In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations. Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.
- throckmortra 4y ago
  > but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?
Rebelgecko 4y ago
In a similar vein, if you have time to kill check out "Sunk Cost Galaxy" on Youtube
- noduerme 4y ago
  I'd never seen this, thanks! Breaking out the popcorn. I worked on SC in 2010/11, pre-crowdfunding, and it's funny and head-smacking to see this all laid out as a documentary, even spotting some of my own work here and there in the earliest cuts. It's so bizarre to me that this development is still going on, and still in "alpha" although obviously it's now become an insanely huge product. Chris Roberts did not know he'd hit his crowdfunding goal.. and I think that's why he didn't go with Kickstarter initially, because he was going to work on the game one way or another. He sank his own money into building working demos before crowdfunding. IMHO it would have all been up and running by 2014 if there hadn't been so much money and hype. The fan expectations exceeded what was realistic from the moment it was announced, and just kept going higher. It's one of those things I look at in my life and have a hard time drawing a conclusion from. The obvious conclusions about shipping vs bike-shedding don't quite apply, because at some point the making of the game and the game itself became too intertwined. I'm glad to see it's made some people here happy now and it's finally starting to live up to its promise.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    Not to be too big of an asshole, but you really don't see the lesson here? To me, it's crystal clear. You don't allow a dreamer to be a project manager. They get bogged down in the dream and never finish the damn project. At some point, the dreamer has to hand off the dream to the doer, and let the doer go get it done.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      I don't disagree with that. I think in practice, the reason the campaign was so successful initially was that players wanted the dreamer to be in charge of every aspect of the project and to dream big... so once you get locked into that cycle, it's really hard to get out of it, even if you are someone who's good at delegating, which isn't CR's strong suit. Knowing when and how to hand off "your baby" is harder when you're getting all that positive affirmation that people are really excited for you to do it, and your name and reputation are totally riding on living up to gamers' expectations. It's a sort of self-reinforcing trap, and I'm not making excuses for the excesses of hubris, but nothing would have happened if not for that hubris to begin with. I guess if there's one conclusion I could draw it would be that dreamers need to be balanced by a practical co-founder with equal power in cases like this. But that was never a real possibility here.
xbar 4y ago
Many have died since pledging to Star Citizen, waiting for its release. But that does not make Derek Smart right—space sims are within humanity’s grasp.
midislack 4y ago
I’m still convinced Frontier was the very best most complete fun space sim. Bar none.
trh0awayman 4y ago
Star Citizen is the pretty much one of the only visionary MMOs since the mid 2000s (except for maybe Darkfall). I first read about it on Hackernews years ago - and ended up doing a deep dive on starcitizen_refunds. I watched a bunch of those videos about what a big failure it was. I kept wondering why people still supported it. My fundamental takeaway was that people didn't actually want their money back. For whatever reason, I didn't realize the game was actually playable. The way people describe it makes it sound like it doesn't exist. Once I read about the vision for it, I decided to try it. I was blown away. I'm not really into space or space games, but getting into a ship and flying it into space was insane. Probably one of the most interesting things I've seen in video games in the past 20 years. I stopped playing it but decided to subscribe to the $10 per month tier to support it. The game itself is playable and fun (they need to tweak a bunch of economic parameters once they're ready to leave alpha, because right now it's too easy), the MMO part is lacking (and it's an unsolvable problem based on their current vision). There are tons of bugs. Some of the simplest things don't work at all, like the overworld map, or even the game downloader. In spite of all that, it's fascinating. You don't get worldwide meetups, videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU or other Beatlemania fanaticism for other games for a reason. The biggest thing is that Star Citizen is meant to be a high-fidelity simulator first and a game second. There are tons of people in the community who don't realize this and just want another pew-pew, instant-gratification space shooter game (of which there are many) with good graphics. Those are the loudest people with the least understanding of the vision. Here's what I think needs to happen: 1) Put out the single-player version. This could realistically be done in a couple years and will surpass every space game ever made 2) Get rid of "sharding" completely, add caps to number of online players. 3) Change the mechanics for the MMO in a way that makes server meshing make sense. Develop some game mechanism similar to Asheron's Call portal storm that prevents mass gatherings of more than the server max. AND/OR 3) Something crazy like create a city-based MMO. Make Star Citizen ISP in NYC, pilot the MMO there. Would solve some of the networking issues. A lot of what Raph Koster has talked about in the past 20 years is being created in Star Citizen. It's the only thing that comes close to the vision of a "world" rather than a "game", that UO was able to capture.
intothemild 4y ago
I read this link with a huge grain of salt. Derek Smart is or was kind of an oddball. Anyhow. Here's something from the good days of Something Awful https://youtu.be/tIn1_9YvGds https://youtu.be/tIn1_9YvGds

Star Citizen (2015)

41 points by luu 4y ago

evandwight 4y ago

2015. This is not a new take on the current state.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gaws 4y ago
It was a scam then, and it's still a scam now.

bombcar 4y ago

Part of the “scale from single player to leader of the galactic forces” is that even if it were done, you’d end up having fast travel and skip systems anyway.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bobsmooth 4y ago

I'm pretty sure I was in high school when I first rumblings of a Freelancer sequel.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

If you attack me over this, remember, I'm an old school internet warlord

zionic 4y ago

“90 days tops” (famous quote from the author about how long CIG had left before bankruptcy)

chrisco255 4y ago

Have not kept up with Star Citizen but I understand they are still around. It's interesting that the author criticized game engines like CryEngine 2 and UE4 vs building your own engine. Lately, I've been following the indie game dev scene quite a bit and I'm very impressed with what even one or two devs are able to build with modern Unity. I wonder how much more mature UE and Unity are these days and whether the comment on building your own engine still applies or not.

bombcar 4y ago
I think we’ve passed the era where building your own engine let you focus on the features you needed. And if your expertise is building engines perhaps you should build an engine instead of a game?

dougmwne 4y ago

I was not very aware of this game, but apparently according to Wikipedia they have taken over 400 million in funding!? I guess this is more like Star Citizen Eternal.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Star Citizen Forever perhaps?

Datenstrom 4y ago

I don't want anything to do with the drama... but I backed a while ago and only just played the first time last fall for about 2 months and I've already got my monies worth. If you can make it past the rough edges there are already magical moments not available anywhere else available in the game and I can't wait to see what they do in the future. Recently Jackfrags who I watch cover FPS games on youtube played it and my reaction was similar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5niLl0fank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5niLl0fank

tra3 4y ago
Can you share what you liked? What are the magical moments?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

egypturnash 4y ago

Wikipedia tells me pre-production began in 2010, with a Kickstarter in 2012. It is 2022 and the game's site claims it is actually available: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now "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." How it compares to No Man's Sky (initial release: 2016, last update: late 2021, on its fifth anniversary) is anyone's guess, it's Windows-only and I'm a Mac girl, and even if I had something to play it on I'm not too interested in spending $45 on what is likely to be disaster tourism. (Edit: apparently it is pretty good for people who enjoy pretending to be a long-haul space pilot, so my “disaster tourism” projection was completely wrong. Yay!) Also this made me curious what Mr. Smart's up to right now and, sigh, the latest article on his blog is him declaring the inevitability of blockchain gaming; he's even repeating the line about how NFTs will let you move stuff between different games.

madelyn 4y ago
I've played NMS pretty much since release, off and on. First on Playstation, but I then bought it on Steam for Linux and plan to get it on the Switch when it drops. It's a fantastic game if you have friends to play with, or are interested in joining online groups. There's thousands of planets out there and I still get excited when I'm in a random galaxy and find something awesome I can share with the community. The single player in NMS is less fun than Multiplayer, but if you are down for what is basically space minecraft I still would say it's worth it! And for anyone wondering, it works great on Proton and the devs are maintaining support for Proton as well (thanks, Steam Deck!)
- gergi 4y ago
  Serious question - mind sharing what you enjoy about NMS multiplayer? I tried it recently but the mission goals weren’t shared. So basically, we were playing two “solo” campaigns next to each other and got bored. Is there more to it?
- secretsatan 4y ago

tux1968 4y ago

Coincidentally, this just showed up in my feed earlier today: https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GraciousMintyGrasshopper-mobile.mp4 https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GraciousMintyGrasshopper-mobile.mp... Brief clip of a moment from this game, being played by a highly skilled "pilot".

throwanem 4y ago
Reminds me a lot of what you could do in "Tachyon: The Fringe". Space combat sims are a lot more fun when their devs remember that spacecraft aren't as constrained as World War II fighters.
- sio8ohPi 4y ago
  For me, the constraints are what makes WWII fighters so fun. I've tried some space sims, but without aerodynamic limits I always feel like I'm piloting a spinning ball of lasers.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    There's nothing else like it in deathmatch, though. I've never seen an AI that can really handle a ship with that kind of maneuverability, but I've played against other humans who could, and it plays out like something out of Babylon 5's wettest dreams - just an absolutely wild and barely predictable furball, especially because any time you're not closely pressing your opponent you risk them severely contracting your maneuver options with a missile launch. Too, as the linked video helps demonstrate, it makes attacking capships a lot more feasible and a lot more fun - most games' capships are extremely hard targets for fighters because of their defensive armament and because a fighter operating as if aerodynamically constrained has a hard time making a strafing pass count. Freespace 2 gives bombers shipkiller missiles to help with this, but it's still a real problem with ships that mount a lot of point defense - as it is, those are so good at swatting fighters that you don't really have any way to answer them. Lifting the aerodynamic maneuvering limitation rebalances the engagement in a way that gives attacking fighters a lot more tactical flexibility, and gives a good deal of added salience and complexity to the escort role besides.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

unity1001 4y ago

Star Citizen can change gaming for the better. It can break the corporate-induced cycle of rehashing old game formats with slightly better graphics to siphon off money instead of providing more gameplay. Consider this: We need something new - there is absolutely no need for another rehashed clone of Privateer/Freelancer/Whatever. We played hundreds of such games. Nobody has been able to bring a new paradigm into this game genre since 1980s. Its the same old thing. With the hardware power that our computers attained since 1980s, we should be playing games that are much bigger in scope and much more immersive right now. We are not. We are playing the same rehashed games with better graphics. The gameplay is almost the same and cheap. Every major company that consolidated the gaming space is just rehashing this genre like all the other genres for profit, without bringing in anything new. Star Citizen is trying to change that. Its trying to create an entire universe in which you can make your space coffee, eat your space breakfast and move into whatever adventure you want in a living, breathing universe. Its trying to put is in something that is worth our time and attention today, instead of a rehashed copy/paste of whatever successful simplicity that was invented in the earlier decades. Its going to be difficult. Even making one living, breathing space-city for people to experience is like making a singular, major MMO game. Making a planet - even bigger. An universe? Phenomenal work. It was obvious that there would be needed gigantic funding on an ongoing basis and A LOT of work. It was obvious that a lot of developers would burn out on the way. It was certain that it would take a lot of time. STILL, its worth it. We need SOMETHING NEW now. Since 1970s, we got CPU power increase a TRILLION FOLD, but the games we play today STILL have the gameplay of 1970s' successful games despite all the new potential that immense CPU (and accompanying GPU) power provides. We need something that will make us immerse thoroughly in games, universes in ways we never did before. Star Citizen is trying that. And its a major step in the right direction.

ethbr0 4y ago
Or, it's trying to create OS/360 with a team helmed by a designer. A game with 10x the level of interactivity does not take 10x as long to create. It takes 10^10. Star Citizen is the exact opposite of every lesson we've learned about successful project management and software development in the last 75 years.

Jedd 4y ago

I paid USD$55 back in 2017-02, and played a little at the time, but just didn't get it. I came back to it in ~2019, but again it felt like a high barrier, requiring the kind of esoteric knowledge you'd get if you'd been consistently tracking all the updates to really enjoy. (And there was a LOT of email updates about the project.) Also what felt like heavy selling on new spacecraft and addons, while I remained confused about what you're actually meant to do in the game, frustrated by the sandbox mechanics & limitations, bewildered by how resilient my ship was and what happened if it was destroyed (pricing was mostly around buying ships, I believe). I now suspect persistent MMOG universes just aren't my thing.

ZeroCool2u 4y ago

Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021/the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try something a bit different and growing up my dad fed me a steady diet of Asimov, Clarke, and Gibson. Besides, I'm privileged enough to be in a position that being out $100 for a virtual space ship is an acceptable risk to me. While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience. The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today! I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet! There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :) In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations. Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.

throckmortra 4y ago
> but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?

Rebelgecko 4y ago

In a similar vein, if you have time to kill check out "Sunk Cost Galaxy" on Youtube

noduerme 4y ago
I'd never seen this, thanks! Breaking out the popcorn. I worked on SC in 2010/11, pre-crowdfunding, and it's funny and head-smacking to see this all laid out as a documentary, even spotting some of my own work here and there in the earliest cuts. It's so bizarre to me that this development is still going on, and still in "alpha" although obviously it's now become an insanely huge product. Chris Roberts did not know he'd hit his crowdfunding goal.. and I think that's why he didn't go with Kickstarter initially, because he was going to work on the game one way or another. He sank his own money into building working demos before crowdfunding. IMHO it would have all been up and running by 2014 if there hadn't been so much money and hype. The fan expectations exceeded what was realistic from the moment it was announced, and just kept going higher. It's one of those things I look at in my life and have a hard time drawing a conclusion from. The obvious conclusions about shipping vs bike-shedding don't quite apply, because at some point the making of the game and the game itself became too intertwined. I'm glad to see it's made some people here happy now and it's finally starting to live up to its promise.
- cbozeman 4y ago
  Not to be too big of an asshole, but you really don't see the lesson here? To me, it's crystal clear. You don't allow a dreamer to be a project manager. They get bogged down in the dream and never finish the damn project. At some point, the dreamer has to hand off the dream to the doer, and let the doer go get it done.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I don't disagree with that. I think in practice, the reason the campaign was so successful initially was that players wanted the dreamer to be in charge of every aspect of the project and to dream big... so once you get locked into that cycle, it's really hard to get out of it, even if you are someone who's good at delegating, which isn't CR's strong suit. Knowing when and how to hand off "your baby" is harder when you're getting all that positive affirmation that people are really excited for you to do it, and your name and reputation are totally riding on living up to gamers' expectations. It's a sort of self-reinforcing trap, and I'm not making excuses for the excesses of hubris, but nothing would have happened if not for that hubris to begin with. I guess if there's one conclusion I could draw it would be that dreamers need to be balanced by a practical co-founder with equal power in cases like this. But that was never a real possibility here.

xbar 4y ago

Many have died since pledging to Star Citizen, waiting for its release. But that does not make Derek Smart right—space sims are within humanity’s grasp.

midislack 4y ago

I’m still convinced Frontier was the very best most complete fun space sim. Bar none.

trh0awayman 4y ago

Star Citizen is the pretty much one of the only visionary MMOs since the mid 2000s (except for maybe Darkfall). I first read about it on Hackernews years ago - and ended up doing a deep dive on starcitizen_refunds. I watched a bunch of those videos about what a big failure it was. I kept wondering why people still supported it. My fundamental takeaway was that people didn't actually want their money back. For whatever reason, I didn't realize the game was actually playable. The way people describe it makes it sound like it doesn't exist. Once I read about the vision for it, I decided to try it. I was blown away. I'm not really into space or space games, but getting into a ship and flying it into space was insane. Probably one of the most interesting things I've seen in video games in the past 20 years. I stopped playing it but decided to subscribe to the $10 per month tier to support it. The game itself is playable and fun (they need to tweak a bunch of economic parameters once they're ready to leave alpha, because right now it's too easy), the MMO part is lacking (and it's an unsolvable problem based on their current vision). There are tons of bugs. Some of the simplest things don't work at all, like the overworld map, or even the game downloader. In spite of all that, it's fascinating. You don't get worldwide meetups, videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU or other Beatlemania fanaticism for other games for a reason. The biggest thing is that Star Citizen is meant to be a high-fidelity simulator first and a game second. There are tons of people in the community who don't realize this and just want another pew-pew, instant-gratification space shooter game (of which there are many) with good graphics. Those are the loudest people with the least understanding of the vision. Here's what I think needs to happen: 1) Put out the single-player version. This could realistically be done in a couple years and will surpass every space game ever made 2) Get rid of "sharding" completely, add caps to number of online players. 3) Change the mechanics for the MMO in a way that makes server meshing make sense. Develop some game mechanism similar to Asheron's Call portal storm that prevents mass gatherings of more than the server max. AND/OR 3) Something crazy like create a city-based MMO. Make Star Citizen ISP in NYC, pilot the MMO there. Would solve some of the networking issues. A lot of what Raph Koster has talked about in the past 20 years is being created in Star Citizen. It's the only thing that comes close to the vision of a "world" rather than a "game", that UO was able to capture.

intothemild 4y ago

I read this link with a huge grain of salt. Derek Smart is or was kind of an oddball. Anyhow. Here's something from the good days of Something Awful https://youtu.be/tIn1_9YvGds https://youtu.be/tIn1_9YvGds