Star Citizen 1.0 'Twinkles on the Horizon', Dev Says — 12 Years and $669 Million Later
Star Citizen 1.0 'Twinkles on the Horizon', Dev Says — 12 Years and $669 Million Later - IGN
Its crazy that they burnt through almost a billion and theyre nickle and dime'n people for ship insurance/ single player. If I gave their crowdfund a penny (and waited 12 years), I'd be demanding a free game.
If you did fund it early, you got ships with unlimited insurance and the single player game is part of your package.
At this point it will be a retirement gift
I mean, Chris didn't say theyre getting ready to hit 1.0 soon, just that they took a look and probably created a roadmap for getting to 1.0 release. I suspect it will still be a while to get to 1.0, but I don't know how far behind the current PTB is in comparison to the version the developers have.
Either way, its going to be nearly impossible to outbomb Suicide Squad, Forspoken, or The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
Even if they release a road map to 1.0 have they hit any of their goals on previous road maps?
Are they going to give us a roadmap of when they'll have the project roadmap? Again...?
Funny to see this here, I actually played this last night for the first time in a year. I have a friend who is a diehard and wanted to play so I finally gave in as he's played helldiver's with me a number of times recently.
Anywho, the game is still unoptimized and buggy as shit. We did some new mission where you fly to the same base you've seen 5k times and take an elevator underground then you attempt to upload data while servers are overheating for some reason, and NPCs randomly spawn in elevators. Glitched out getting on the elevator and fell through the floor, adds spawning in elevators would just sit there and do nothing staring at the wall until you shot them. Got killed once, did not respawn in the ship as I had tied my identity to the bed - instead spawned back at my origin base - later found my dead body under the med bed in the ship. Enemy NPCs rubber banging all over the place, so we're my buddy and I the net code clearly has major issues. Tried to pickup a container at one point and for some reason that injured me. The inventory system to loot guys is difficult to use / buggy as all hell. The same terrible interaction system where you hold F and use mouse to interact with things is ridiculously janky. The star navigation system is the same broke crap I remember from years ago, you can never smoothly set destination or even find the destination you want to go for. They've changed the flight controls for the 578th time for no reason. NPCs in my home spawn were walking into walls and glitching on stairs. I could go on.
Still no news on Squadron 42, still no firm release date, no new significant content in years (except ship sales!!!!), pyro still not playable for non bootlickers, no jump gates, all the ground bases look exactly the same, no compelling gameplay loops you shoot shit in space jousting or you go to one of 700 identical basses on the ground to pickup boxes or shoot laggy NPCs. There is no "game" here it drives like crap for a project over a decade in the making with that much money wasted. I have no idea why people are still "playing" it, and no idea why so many continue to throw money at it.
This perfectly summarizes my experience every time I hop into the game after a year.
You're saying that physics based coffee in mugs and new cape physics didn't fix all the major issues when they implemented those two years ago? I swear they prioritize the dumbest work possible.
Just wait for server meshing bro /s
Oh there's a good reason for the flight controls change. Because the fucking neck beards who spend $10k on a "realistic flight sim" setup demand that their loud whining be accommodated or they will never stop whining on the official forums because their idiotic controllers couldn't beat people flying with a keyboard and mouse. Because, you know their Cheeto stained fingers obviously know more about how futuristic space combat will work than actual engineers designing a space combat sim.
This is basically why I stopped playing. The willingness to let idiots dictate game design and balance made the meta insufferable and impossible to follow.
Because the fucking neck beards who spend $10k on a “realistic flight sim” setup demand that their loud whining be accommodated or they will never stop whining on the official forums because their idiotic controllers couldn’t beat people flying with a keyboard and mouse.
Back in the late '90s, there were a lot of PC flightstick-based flight sims, as well as space combat games. The Wing Commander series, from whence the lead on Star Citizen comes, was among these, and it was the idea of a new Wing Commander that was part of the appeal.
I think that it's probably reasonable for a lot of people who put money into the game to want a viable flightstick-based game, given where they're coming from, since that's presumably what they were hoping for.
'course, given the huge amount of money Star Citizen's taken in, it's gotta have significant mainstream appeal, and not everyone is going to want to get a flightstick, much less other pieces of hardware.
I'm a little sad that there isn't much when it comes to open-source combat flight sims, because I think that that'd be fertile ground for people putting together all sorts of neat control setups. FlightGear really focuses on non-combat flight (not to mention not being in space).
“Dev says”
So it’s not happening then, gotcha
Star Citizen is one of the biggest scams ever in the gaming industry. Stop pumping money into these greedy fucks.
These “scam” comments are getting old.
It’s not a scam in the sense they are deliberately taking your money and not deliver anything in return. I am confident the people at CIG want to create something unique and amazing.
It is a very complex project though and you can argue about if it has been managed properly.
I check this game out once a year maybe, but there are lots of people playing this game daily and enjoying it even in its current alpha state.
In no way in hell is it worth the amount poured into it. Which leads to the only conclusion that the money is being mishandled. Put simpler: it's a scam
Let me guess, you’ve put more than $/£40 into the game and want to find ways to justify it?
I wonder if now they have enough money to refund me the 40usd I spended back then on their kickstarter, when I still believed I could get the next Privateer/Freelancer.
Call it an unintended scam, just like Peter Molyneux.
It’s not a scam in the sense they are deliberately taking your money and not deliver anything in return.
The definition of a scam is essentially a trick or deceiving maneuver that someone uses to take advantage of you, usually for their own personal gain.
So if you gave me $5 for oranges and I gave you orange-painted rocks, it's still a scam.
You could've said that in 2015. Now? It's a scam, plain and simple. Give me Squadron 42. All of it, not some bullshit episodic type of release.
All this new news about the game must mean they are running out of money and need to drive more rubes into the wallet grinder
Probably closer to a billion but christ this might be the biggest bomb in history potentially. I just hope it either bombs or is great because I get entertainment either way.
"Bomb" as in "not selling" ? That ship has sailed a long time ago, hasn't it ? They made hundreds of millions through that "crowdfunding" scheme of theirs already.
It could be complete garbage and then people file a class action over the ships not being in the game or something similar, lots of money has been invested in this game.
If Star Citizen adds twinks to the game, I might consider getting it.
It's Twinkies, so a little different, but still tasty.
As long as I get to the cream in the middle, I'm happy.
Star Citizen is the game of tomorrow and it always will be.
What's the vision for this game? In my mind it's like they want to create some massive P2W MMOFPS that somehow casuals will want to play despite some whales having paid into it for 10 years for game breaking advantages?
I admit I know little about the game, I'm just not sure how they're going to attract that user base.
They wanna make a space life sim, basically. Right now you can buy ships with cash to support them, but can also use in game $. If you helped with cash, then you get certain perks like 1 off paint jobs, or lifetime in game insurance on the ship you bought. New mechanics have been slowly added to the game, in which if you have bought any cash ship, from $40 - 1000s, then you get their single player game when it releases, and immediate access to the games current online alpha.
The online alpha was SERIOUSLY impressive last I played, and that was early 2019. I bought a $35 starter ship pack very early on. I thought, "if this game succeeds then it'll be very worth it, if it fails or is a scam, I only lost $35." Which is what I think everyone's attitude should be towards it.
Same here. I haven't fired it up in ages though, and don't even have my gaming rig up at the moment (nowhere to set it up with ongoing renovations at home). I should probably take a look this summer or fall when my network is finally up again. Apparently they've progressed a fair bit. I still have to agree that the amounts and time sunk in that thing are bordering on the insane, whatever the end result is.
It's been in development for about 12 years. This was 6 years ago:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/star-citizen/star-citizen-pack-27000-dollars
For a game that isn’t technically out yet, Star Citizen is doing very well as it continues to rake in huge sums of money, and now there’s a new way to plunk down a bunch of it at once. The new Legatus Pack, which includes most of Star Citizen’s ships and a bunch of extras, is available for $27,000 USD.
Sure, that sounds like a lot of money, but consider what you’re getting: 117 ships, including the Anvil Carrack and Aegis Sabre, plus 163 extra items like the digital soundtrack and a digital copy of the Star Citizen novella.
I don't think that they started out intending to "scam" players. I think that what happened was that they just mismanaged a development project, and every time they slipped and missed where they intended to be, the only way to dig themselves out was to keep making more-extravagant promises and figure out ways to take in larger sums of money to "fix" things. And what actually happened was that they kept digging themselves deeper into a hole; there's no way that they're going to deliver something that someone who spent the kinds of money that they've taken in is going to be happy with, not to mention all the physical items that they've promised to develop and send to people and haven't. The developer doesn't even have a good way out if things go badly -- the developer can't cut off the process without the people who have committed money for all the promises feeling ripped off, and no one potential customer can end the process, can't say "well, the publisher cancelled the project".
Many years back, a traditional game development process would have had the publisher, someone familiar with the game development process, say "this project has gone off the rails" and have cut them off from more funds, but because they're getting funds by making more promises to players, they can keep going as long as players keep committing more funds. There's an increasingly-large divergence between promises and what they can do.
I think it just highlights why the traditional game development process makes sense. That is, there's a legitimate reason for having the publisher raise the money, have experience with the development process, and have oversight authority and milestones on a project and a single party with the ability to cut off funds if things go badly. If you're a developer, it may chafe to have a publisher breathing down your neck, but...
And don't get me wrong. I totally would like to have a good new space combat game too, like a lot of people. And I think that there's room for a business model where players who really want to see a sequel to a much-loved game are willing to commit a (limited) amount of funds towards it.
But I also think that it needs to be made extremely clear that any given project may fail, that the business model needs to involve oversight from someone like a traditional publisher with the ability to say "this project isn't working", milestones, someone with expertise in the field running the numbers on the financial side, and some mechanism to stop the developer from just trying to buy their way out of the hole with larger promises.
The game development process does have a certain amount of risk. Part of doing game development is managing it and relatively-gracefully dealing with failure. I think that it might be nice to have someone produce some kind of intermediate model, something where a would-be customer can choose to expose themselves to risk, but also where there's a route to kill the project if it isn't going well. That protects the developer as well as the players -- the developer can't commit themselves to something that they can't do, and the players can only lose so much.
I read this as "twinkless" and was like "well I'm not interested then."
I bought the single player thing forever ago, played the PTU for 60+ hours and enjoyed it a ton. I got my money's worth. But I'll be even happier if single player comes out, I still watch the trailers on occasion and get all jazzed up.
I'm sure it won't be StarCitizen at all........!?
Quintuple A game?
I don't get why people are always so negative when a game is publicly developed for such a long time. It doesn't really matter so long as the launch product is good.
In this case that seems to be the crux of the issue. Star Citizen players pay top dollar for mediocre ingame content.
People who take money are expected to deliver equivalent goods.
While I can't say I've paid more for less as a whole, I've definitely had a higher fun to dollar with SC than many other more finished, flashier games. It's what you make of it and the people you meet along the way, just like any other MMO. It definitely has its warts and issues, but I think a lot of people also hate it because they were told it was bad and evil and I don't think that's really true. It has the trappings of any large game service products which people call greedy but it does cost a lot to run. I think a lot of the criticism boils down to that's a lot of money and not a lot of fast progress, and that's fair but this game is also unique in being public from a far too early point of development and many other games with smaller scopes are just as slow when developing a new engine/IP (relative to the scope) but the public doesn't see much until we get to just about this point in development.
But it's not been launched. It's kind of like all the people that were bashing Skull & Bones or Rainbow Six Extraction before they even came out.
Sure, now that they're actually out you can say people were right but I also wonder how much of that is self fulfilling prophecy. If you literally kill the PR for a product/game, it's really hard for any studio or company to come back from that.
Nowhere has this studio said the game as it has been seen by players is "done" or the launch product.
Isn't it basically a "X4: Foundations" plus multiplayer?
Not really no
Except X4 is actually released with multiple expansions to boot.
Rainbows twinkle at the end of the horizon
I thought it was c-beams...
This is going to be an interesting one.
They decided to wait 10 years to reach 1.0, instead of putting out an 0.5 and spending the next 10 years releasing apology patches like No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077.
Lots of SC hate in here and a lot of it deserved... but also its a prety good game Fyi but demanding on specs as its not very optimized.
I’ve been watching this game from the sidelines for like 10 years.
See you all in another 10.
I can't imagine that people will keep shoveling money in for another ten years.
It sounds from the article like they're starting to lay people off.
See, that's what I thought after the first hundred million with basically nothing to show other than being able to walk around your spaceship. Yet here we are.
It's like Bethesda or Rockstar.. We can surely trust their greed