Chris Robertson has a supporter I see. What there is so far is a money pit of laggy/buggy actual content, that gets boring in a few hours of play. What the focus is, is conceptual; art and everything else…in concept. I’ll admit I bought 2 variants of the hornet but I don’t see the game taking off.
People are backing away from a poor excuse of something that’s been in development for 6yrs! I get trolled much less now when I say something negative on social media.
So in the end we have a buggy intro around a gas giant that bores one quickly, some ships that are all basically rectangles with different stats and jpegs of again, concepts.
Needless to say, I’m not supporting the farce any longer.
Plus I’d hate to see what anyone with a medium to low end system gets out of performance. I run an expensive machine with all the latest…from a 1080ti to m.2 drives and 32GB RAM. Now they’re pushing people to buy the I9 cpu’s, which are $1200 to start let alone the motherboards needed.
It’s the only game that stresses my computer and it’s completely needless. I’m not going to lose any tears, but I learned that Chris Roberts lied, and nerds cried. Plus, it’s spreading.
Do you mean its too long in develpment basically?
But have you seen how the stuff looks? I know there are people who are not graphics guys, but they want to push limits as much as they can.
They want the game that looks like the best thing you have seen on NASA photos. As money is not an issue, the future is just more time spend on it. That may sound ridiculous, but CIG people and Roberts himself are crazy in what they do, always have been this way, and there are people who love them for that. You may want to see how the previous work involving Roberts looked, He is insane and he likes to go above impossible. Looks like that is where he is heading when money are not a problem.
2 Likes
Which is all great and admirable, except it said nothing about that in the kickstarter.If I tried running it on the machine I had when I first backed it would run like a god. And that was a laptop I could simulate an Oracle RAC cluster on inside multiple virtual machines.
Just deliver a playable game written in such a way that it can be upgraded as time and funds allow
Think they are engaged in a continuous development model, it will never be ‘finished,’ only opened for access at some point, with a list of known issues (as it is right now, with the alpha test builds.)
One way to look at SC funding, is as direct support for one of the biggest jobs programs in the gaming industry. I bought-in for the basic package and that’s as far as I’ll go. This supporter / detractor self-evaluation wheel infographic is classic.
Its good that in every concept sale, they make it clear the buyer’s advantage will be short, every jpg they sell today can be earned in-game, whenever they decide the economy system is stable enough. (That itself is a huge design challenge, since they want NPC agents to help steer the market via a “subsumption” Ai system.)
1 Like
Star Citizen seems to be quite a different animal from Eve, it is a far, far more indepth experience but no where near on this scale. I imagine if SC will ever have mass PvP, 50-100 players will be tops and will be considered “mass pvp”. Or PvE for that matter.
The feature and development creep of SC is just unreal, I do wish them all luck. If they pull this off, this game will be awesome, but as new stuff comes into play and development time keeps on stretching, a lot of those features will be outdated by the time the game launches.
I would actually love to give it a go, but after looking at its current state, just no way. That is not for me. Perhaps when it enters beta.
In the meanwhile, while not a space / sci-fi type of game, I am keeping my eye on Camelot Unchained. Its a sandbox based RvR game, from the ground up. It is much more realistic then SC feature and progress wise, and while it does have some crowdfunding, the majority of the funds are from regular business investments. + I already have a group of people that I will be playing it with when it launches.
1 Like
In response to your quotations I believe it’s losing support from it’s core audience, yes. Many are saying wtf CR, where is the game already!!!..Release something playable with some depth already and build on it. As I think I said, the gas giant and it’s moons don’t give too much in play time vs fun.
I’ll drop the cash for an I9 cpu, but they’re still quite pricey. I have a liquid cooled i7 6700k, which admittedly is the oldest thing on my machine. But even liquid cooled, it’s getting in the high 90C’s which will shorten it’s life considerably when I play star citizen. My liquid cooler is oldish and I have bought a new one, just not installed yet as I’m lazy. Hopefully it helps.
If you have optimism, I’m glad because at least I’ll have my ships for when it comes out. I just feel no need to play it in it’s current form. The other thing was the first person shooter, it reminds me of something I may have played on a playstation 1…perhaps 2. They should stall on that and move strictly forward with the space sim for now. It feels tacked on…at best.
One last thing, a sign of lessening interest would be the multiplayer arenas…I can hardly ever find a group or partner for the battle royales/fighting scenarios. Plus I don’t want the rental credit…or whatever. The graphics are nice as I have landed on some of the moons for investigation missions.
Interest is vaning as I see it too in trends where people search for stuff related to star citizen. This may be a good thing as it could make Roberts close on the package of features known as minimum viable product. Actually, as I am wiritng this, probably I am already late with that idea and somebody in CIG thought about that before. I dont know what role init can have Squadron 42 tho. If released first and being good, it could serve as additional income for further SC development. In that case, the amount of developers and features worked on will probably even get bigger.
1 Like
Thing is its kinda all tied together. For example a group PvP scenario where a large vessel launches its ships vs a group. one of the group is some sort of a troop carrier / transport, and you want to do the whole boarding thing. You kinda need to have the shooter game mechanics to transition from one to the other.
But I do agree, I would like for them to focus on PU, then Squadron42, and the Marine thing the last instead of all at once.
Also there are just far too many basic game mechanics and systems in place for me to commit into backing it. And all those are PU side, not the other 2. So its not just that SC is losing backers, they are also not gaining as many new ones as they could or should.
1 Like
Performance will improve as they get closer to a milestone where they have less need for debug code. At this stage, and for the next 2 years I think, looking at the roadmap… its full of extra logging, counters, phone-home telemetry. And just not optimized in general. You need the fastest CPU available, to brute-force through all the overhead it has right now. (I haven’t even installed an alpha build… its like EVE on some days: that game more fun to read about.)
A first segment of SQ42 could be released before the persistent universe, because it is a subset… but technologies needed for both, hold up both. They are still refining so many basic things, like UI and object interaction. A release of any decent quality would obviously drive more funding, but with expectations so high, some part of it is bound to be disappointing.
There is always something dissapointing. I have seen stuff in EVE that dissapointed me always, even now, and I am still playing the game. For SC and Squadron 42 it would be the same thing.
Cant have everything I suppose, there is no game perfect really for everyone, just compromises.
1 Like
Have you ever gotten involved in any alpha/beta games before? Code optimization does improve performance, but never by very much. Would be interesting to see actual statistics, but my brain is screaming 10% would be considered exceptional. Then they typically seem to end up adding more visual nonsense to eat up that 10%, and then some, leaving them worse off than when they started. If a game isn’t designed from alpha to have good performance, it never will, no matter how much hardware you end up throwing at it. This bit of performance info is interesting to me… I haven’t been following SC. (Which, philosophical sidebar, can a person follow something that doesn’t exist?) Among all the other reasons the game won’t ever even exist, this is the reason I won’t ever be playing it: It won’t be playable.
That’s the rub there, isn’t it? Typically, once a studio goes bankrupt and their officers imprisoned for fraud, their video games are rarely released.
lol… very true. But I don’t think the case would stand up… there’s a mountain of evidence that a game is in development, hundreds employed, external studios contracted and delivering (and reworking) assets… so a case of fraud is harder to make. Underlining every purchase is a disclaimer checkbox that looks like this (one I had to click for the basic game package last year.)
I don’t know what is in their code, I just read their forums and watch some of the development videos. I have worked in non-game software development, and seen what seemed like a kludgy mess become much more responsive, as if by magic, in the last 2 weeks when logging and telemetry started coming out. (Not just code optimizations.) SC is nowhere near that stage of development, the public roadmap looks quite daunting, and so I’m tempering my expectations for another 2 years.
All this talk here gave me an idea:
Someone should make a corp in Jita called The Amazing Star Citizens, lead by a CEO called Captain Amazing ChrisRobs, which corp sells single run unresearched T1 destroyer and cruiser blueprints for 50 up to 250 mil ISK each, through contracts which have the description “Limited Edition Crowdfund Backer Reward”.
3 Likes
Why should a freighter be able to fight back? The point what ccp wants is that you should interact with people. How would it make sense for a ship designed to haul a lot of stuff to be able to take down even 1 ship? Or a barge designed to mine should be able to kill a bomber? Only thing i would change pvp wise is the cyno module.
The problem is that people has given them 185 million $ worth of development and the development achieved is well below what that kind of money should have bought. He’s making a 50 million $ game with 185 million $ woth of money -that’s a lot of wasted money.
CR essentially guzzled and wasted 4 years and 130 million $ before actually delivering what he’s delivering now… which is nothing like what the original pledgers pledged for, and is becoming smaller and smaller in scope with no foreseeable finish line. Not to mention the funding method of promising ships you could fly in 3 years, just the money is being spent to somewhat develop the ships that should have been flying 3 years ago and already don’t… it’s easy to figure that some people will not get their ships ever.
Fun. That’s how it would make sense.
If there is one thing I dislike in EVE is the trap of the prey mentality.
Part of the game wants you to willingly become a defenseless prey and lure you into it through stupid profit.
I think this is what will be the downfall of this game, mining, PVE passive/boring/regen fits, exploration.
All other games will offer more opportunity to be the hunter, or just to be active, while EVE will keep losing players to prey gameplay in a misguided attempt to replicate the reality that most people try to avoid by playing a game.
Until the day a Point or Scram is needed in PvE, more mining ships must have combat fits and have an active gameplay, and T1 Explo ships can defend themselves while doing their tour, until that day EVE won’t be able to compete with the other games.
I always find it amusing when someone cites an aspect of the core game design as “the reason” Eve is going to fail. Eve has featured predator/prey game play for fifteen years now, and has outlasted almost all its contemporary MMOs, and seen the rise of, and then buried, at least two generations of space-themed MMOs. If any thing, this distinguishing feature of Eve has been part of its success, not some oversight the devs haven’t gotten around to fixing for a decade-and-a-half.
Will Star Citizen actually compete with Eve? All signs point to ‘probably not’ given what the SC team says they are going for - the games are very different, but at this point, even the most sunk-cost fallacy committed fanboy must be question if they will see anything approaching the promises, or even if the game will be released at this point. But when it does, it isn’t going to be the player-driven, empire building and destroying game that Eve is, so I imagine they will co-exist just fine.
I agree with that quite a lot. The 2 are different games, however, it will compete but more indirectly.
As most people know, there is a large chunk of player population here that is dissatisfied to a great extent with a lot of the game mechanics. As you pointed out, those that prevent you from fighting back in particular are just bad. It happens on all scales and everywhere in this game.
Smaller groups have too many problems taking out larger groups, and as has been brought up countless times before, various function ships such as mining, hauling, have no way to fight back here. Not all, but quite a large chunk of player base who fall into these categories are just itching for somewhere else to go to, and they will.
If SC launches and is still reasonable to play, its features will still be somewhat up to date at launch time (which may or may not happen due to development time), then these players will “jump ship”.
SC in particular strikes me as far better suited for exactly this, smaller gangs from here will have a much better time over there, there will be more active gameplay. Even the mining system over tehre requires active gameplay, can’t just AFK or blindly automate it. I’m sure there will be some bots developed for it, but they will have to be a lot more elaborate, harder to use and quite possibly easier to detect.
Likewise with blowing up ships, if you want to make profit of off piracy you’ll have to start looting and selling that loot or board enemy vessel and pick it up. And when you board it, well, player or 2 can take you out, thus not completely defenseless.
Right now a lot of the mechanics are still not there, especially for profitable piracy with meaningful consequences, but there will be.
So I think a lot of the people that do smaller group stuff or feel trapped due to the undefendable situations they are put in here are going to leave. And this is how SC competes with Eve.
If this portion becomes large enough it will spiral and take a life of its own. Just think about what this game will look like in HS for example when the only thing left for CODE to gank will be Goon / PL alts / freighters. What will code do then, gank itself ? LOL
This just a thought off the top of my head ofcourse, while I brought up code, thats just an example, then repeat this many times over.
2 Likes
I try to keep the wall of text to a minimum, sorry tooooooooo loooong, didn’t read.