12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 80 points –
12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?
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As bug ridden and feature incomplete as Star Citizen is right now, I really can't deny how beautifully detailed the ships and cities are. It is actually quite difficult to ignore.

It's easy to ignore actually. Where game? I don't care how pretty your tech demo is. Where game?

I was playing the game/tech demo yesterday. It seems to be there and I was having a lot of fun.

Oh it's not one tech demo, it's several. They aren't connected. If they aren't connected it isn't a game. People just don't want to admit they were scammed when they "bought" that fancy ship in that "game".

I have spent £40 on this game. That is £30 cheaper than some AAA games, about as buggy, and a lot more fun.

Are you mad that parts of a game arent coded as a unified whole l? If those individual parts work, and they seem to be maintaining enough of a player base to continue funding the game, why are you actually mad? Are still trying to keep the meme of "Star Citizen Bad!" going when it is clear that the game doesn't care what others think, the players don't care, and no one is copying your sentiment?

That must be tough.

I'm not mad I just don't trust the Devs of Star Citizen. I think their monetization as a whole reeks of a scam and I don't understand why people defend it.

I don't think it's a scam but I agree with some of these points, cig can't be trusted with a deadline, you are setting yourself up for a disappointment if you think something is being released on time.

They have some obvious cash grabs, like the atls, which takes the tedium out of the newly tedious cargo update. But that purchase isn't necessary and was made possible to buy (for very cheap) with in game money in the patch that released yesterday.

I think people can take issue with the funding model while still believing in the development effort as a whole. The funding model can change, after all.

Wow, the cope is real. People have to be mad to call out the problems with a game?

Be honest, how much money have you spent on it?

The problems they're calling out aren't really specific to anything though. They're just kind of generalizations that sound like they got formed from news articles rather than observing the development progress.

What tech demos are you referring to specifically and how are they not connected? I guess there's flight tech, fps tech, cargo tech, economy tech, etc, but you can walk to your ship, fly off, land somewhere, shoot guys, loot some cargo, put it on your ship, fly back to a city, and sell it, all in one go. One thing that's actually disconnected is Arena Commander, but that's specifically for people that want more traditional, arcadey pvp.

I'm sure there are a lot of people that wouldn't consider just flying around, exploring, and doing the current missions a game, but you could say something similar about early Minecraft. In sure some didn't see the point without more structure or features, but that didn't stop them from enjoying what was there and looking forward to the future

Early Minecraft was made by a single person and was in development for 2 years before it released (and had a fully playable game loop even before then).

SC has $700 million dollars, hundreds of devs and still hasn't released anything as feature rich or playable as MC in 12 years. It's fair for people to expect more at this point

I'm not comparing their scale, just the ability to enjoy something without it seeming like there's much there to others. But if you want to compare, I was imagining MC back before even the Nether. I had plenty of fun just mining and stacking blocks to build whatever, nothing like what became available toward 1.0. SC is kind of in the same situation, but their timeline is just 20x greater because of the scope.

I don't know, they don't seem much better than Elite Dangerous, which is a game that's released. And those ships don't take a real life mortgage to afford.

You have the option to buy most ships with real money, but the general cycle is about 6 months after release into the persistent universe the ships are purchasable with in-game money. The only reason to spend real money on SC is if you can't wait those 6 months, want to support development, or don't want to bother with in-game money for whatever reason. There are some exception ships though.

As for the detail, there are big differences between SC and ED. For one, SC ships have completely modeled interiors since the intended gameplay is for you to manually board your ship from outside. ED has no ship interiors as far as I know, just cockpits and exteriors, no matter how big the ship is. SC also has more ships than ED even excluding all the SC ship variants, ground vehicles, and ships that don't do Quantum jumps, the frame shift equivalent of ED.