This will probably not be a well-liked response but I'm going to post it anyway.
I preordered Star Citizen back in 2012 or 2013. Whenever the original Kickstarter was. I've kind of forgotten about it. I've never preordered another game--or anything really. And I don't think this was a bad experience.
I haven't received a game yet, but I have played some demos that were really fun. I've seen hours of content (Sure, that content is freely available, but so is NPR), read some great stories, and had some great conversations about the game.
In 2013 I paid $60 for a game I have not yet played. That year I also went to a casino one night with $80 in my pocket. Both times I came away with nothing but a fun experience and some stories. In both cases I feel like I paid for some entertainment and received it.
This isn't a post to excuse vaporware titles on Steam Greenlight or preordering broken-on-launch games. Quite the contrary. I won't buy EA games until at least a year after they come out. I will NEVER buy a pre-release game on Steam. But I bought Star Citizen. I took a gamble, and I had some fun. I wouldn't have done that if I didn't think there would be some fun along the way.
Star Citizen could never come out, and I wouldn't really feel cheated, because I still got something out of it.
About the only game in Steams Early Access program I would recommend to buy is Factorio[0]. It is essentially a factory building/automation game that's constantly getting updated, with one big patch about a week ago and several bugfix versions since. They are also open about their development process, i.e. some devs playing the game live with streamers and answering questions from the streamers and the chat to the best of their ability. In one such instant IIRC they even said they're planning for the 1.0 release towards the end of this year.
All in all, this game is definitely worth your time and money if you're into this game genre.
There's even a demo version if you're not sure.
I have purchased/followed a number of Steam Early Access titles and very rarely have I been disappointed. I think the trick is, to wait a bit to see how often the devs update. There are some outliers such as RimWorld or Subnautica where updates happen only a couple times per year, but each update is game-changing and adds tons new content, features and bug-fixes.
Other titles which are still in EA but are releasing constant stream of information plus software updates:
- Space Engineers/Medieval Engineers (weekly YT blog)
- Rust (weekly blog)
- Rogalia (daily to weekly Steam blog)
- Project Zomboid (weekly blog)
- Kenshi (between weekly and monthly changelist)
- Factorio (weekly blog)
- Don't Starve Together (multiplayer addition to Don't Starve)
- DayZ (I only play maybe once per year but the blog updates seem quite frequent)
Titles which had a long EA period but ended up releasing IMHO amazingly polished products:
- Terraria
- Kerbal Space Program
- Prison Architect
Subnautica is a fairly unique project in a number of ways. One of my favorites is their public task boards and bug tracker: http://subnautica.unknownworlds.com/
Factorio has been an absolutely amazing EA. Rich and enjoyable for like the past year or more, and evolving fairly rapidly which makes it more interesting in many cases.
I think early access is a different situation from preordering, since the former gives you something right away, and that something is one which you can influence as a tester.
I've generally been pretty gung-ho with early access games if they have a Linux/SteamOS version available. Kerbal Space Program and Planet Explorers have taken weeks' worth of my time (and that time was enjoyable, even amid the bugs; in fact, the bugs were part of the reason why I enjoyed them). With both of those games, I had a chance to experience their evolution from alpha-quality-at-best to finished product. That's not an experience normally possible in the release cycle of a non-early-access game.
They've fairly recently published a schedule for the alpha 3.0 release (first public access to the procedural planet tech, among other things), along with a video about estimating timelines for the project. The folks who develop software for a living might not find it as interesting as I did, but it's a decent look at where the project is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjXfNnhxf0
I've gotten some fun out of the alpha game itself, but also quite a lot of value out of these videos and other info they put out. It's a fascinating look into game development, which is something I'm interested in but not looking to pursue a career for myself.
Thursday is "Around the Verse" day, so they should be releasing one of their status update videos tonight. These are rotating through the four studios and covering what a particular studio has been working on over the last month, followed by a deeper dive into some particular subject.
Last week was the Austin studio update and touched on growing the studio's build systems. Previously they've covered subjects like QA testing, ship designs, procedural planets, procedural space stations, and a lot more. It's usually really interesting to watch.
I think this week is the UK studio. They're the ones working on a lot of the bigger ships, so I've got my fingers crossed for a look at the Aegis Reclaimer. But they were late in getting the video up last month, so we might be waiting until tomorrow. It's already 11 PM over there.
I am not sure if that video is meant to be impressive. The first guy talking about how hard it is having to work with designers, developers, audio etc, um ok. Like every single game out there.
I just see so much cruft, so many useless people such as producers, talking a lot but not doing a lot. Taking all the credit, but not actually working apart from meetings.
I don't think it's meant to be impressive, it's meant to give people a window into how large game development projects work. Maybe it's like every single game out there, but the point is I don't work at any game studios and none of the other ones publish their production schedules or host weekly studio updates.
Watching Mark Abent demo bugs in his "handy dandy test level", all the "shenanigans" that result, and then show us the code and what the actual issues were, has been pretty much worth what I pledged right there :)
I HAVE played Star Citizen, and already had experiences on it that aren't actually possible in any other game. Will it meet all their promises? Certainly not. Is it going to "ever come out" insofar as a "release version"? Who knows, it's on 2.6.3 already, technically.
But the thing is, Star Citizen promised a level of capability of a game that has never existed up to this point. And I have backed it personally for... well, a lot. But even if it never comes out, I won't really feel cheated, because I know exactly what the goal is, and the challenges meeting it includes. It's not a scam if it fails, if it fails it was poor management and an impossible goal.
But I'd argue, seeing that even some Early Access games on Steam seem to have gained some Star Citizen-style features, that Star Citizen has raised the bar for what a space simulation game going forward should be able to do. And for that alone, it's worth it.
Well said, but I think you're missing the point. People aren't upset because they paid for something and got a nice experience (or not) out of it. They are upset because they paid for something and they still have not received it.
To use your Casino example, this is like going to that casino and paying for a shrimp appetizer, never receiving it but saying "well at least I got a nice experience and story out of it". People are pissed because they paid for something and still haven't gotten it (at least that's the story I keep hearing).
Having said that; if you believe that a game is about paying for an experience (not a disc or digital license), then you (and a lot of other people) have gotten their money's worth.
That's definitely fair, but I think if what you really want is a disc or a download, then you shouldn't back games that don't exist yet. Like I said, I won't invest in a game (or anything) that might not materialize unless I think there's some possibility for a payout--either the thing I want, or a nice experience.
So for those people who are mad, it's really more like going to the casino and expecting to get a huge windfall playing blackjack. Like yeah it might happen but don't think of it as an investment opportunity.
This is interesting, as I've had the exact opposite experience. I've bought more than a few EA games, and in every case I got something out of the deal, usually followed by finished product. (Although the quality of that finished product can be questionable)
Kickstarter on the other hand seems to deliver an EA game, which then has the same risks as a normal EA title. Often times you've just thrown away some cash without even a demo to show for it.
I'll echo that I'm in the same boat. I feel the development team has provided a very enjoyable experience outside of the game platform, as well as within. I have hopes for their 3.0 release, but if I never play again I still feel my money was spent on something that was far more artful than EA cramming another shitty franchise down my throat.
Your expectations are probably in line with reality, but Star Citizen does not sell itself as a casino. They entice you to spend money and promise you something great with little mention of risk. I really hope they create a great game, but like a start up that took on too much funding, I have grave concerns.
Is there development timeline really that absurd though? I'm sure there are plenty of AAA titles that have taken this long to get out the door, they just leave the announcement till sometime just before it's ready. I know that development times have drastically decreased in the past 10 years but still... I'd be skeptical if studio told me they were taking any LESS time with something this big.
Editing to add that we're not even mentioning the fact that they are basically building a global development company with studios sprinkled all over the US and EU to keep up with the new funding expectations, those things don't happen overnight.
> Is there development timeline really that absurd though?
It's not clear to me what their development timeline is, although constant Alpha releases are promising.
> Editing to add that we're not even mentioning the fact that they are basically building a global development company...
I think this is where a lot of the risk exists. Normally a development studio grows by successfully releasing games (in terms of money). Star Citizen is in uncharted waters in that regard.
That second point is true, though it's worth pointing out that the company has a tonne of experience in game development and a few other fields such as film production so I feel like it's a little different from a nobody startup trying to manage it all for the first time.
>Your expectations are probably in line with reality
I think this is the key. A lot of people are sucked into the idea that kickstarters are a sure thing, but you can't spend money that way. Kickstarter isn't a place to buy stuff, it's a place to throw money away and maybe get something cool out of it.
It sounds like the only reason you won't buy a pre-release game on Steam is because it's on Steam and nothing else. Every criticism ever levied against early accessed games is a criticism you just excused: "I paid for some entertainment and received it", "I wouldn't really feel cheated". But then you do a total 180: "I will NEVER buy a pre-release game on Steam". Whoa - never?
Nothing separates you from this community: http://store.steampowered.com/app/252490/Rust/ you would fit right in and you'd have just as much fun. Nothing you said passes scrutiny. You're in it for a ride with the developers, and that's what's fun to you. Not the product. And that's ok.
That's fair. I probably shouldn't have said "I would NEVER..." because that's false. It's more a problem that I don't frequent Steam Greenlight enough to see the kinds of things that I'd be interested in.
The point I was trying to get at was that I wouldn't buy an unfinished game (or anything else) and expect a "final" product. If I ever do buy a steam greenlight game, it'll be for the same reasons I bought Star Citizen.
I also should have mentioned that I bought Banished well before it was finished, but it was after I read a lot of that guys development blog, and was interested in the content of just that part, and wanted to support that. It was a fun ride, and in the end, a (I feel) very polished game came out of it.
I feel very much the same way about No Man's Sky. $80 (Canada) for a great gaming experience, but there was a massive blowback on that. To me, it was pretty much exactly what I was expecting. Many people complained of 'lies, false advertising, vapour' etc... but to me it was great value for money.
People complained about those things because the makers of No Man's Sky repeatedly said untrue or misleading things about what content and features would be in the game -- things that we now know they must have known were false at the time (e.g. the talk of how other games cheat by using skyboxes while No Man's Sky simulates physics).
Here is a Reddit post that covers in great detail the claims made by No Man Sky's maker about the game's content, as compared to reality on launch:
This is understandable, but there are people who have spent hundreds, or even thousands of dollars buying various virtual goods in the yet-to-be-released game. I'm not so sure they will feel equally satisfied if (or, at this rate, when) the game goes kaput.
That's likely true, but if the ride wasn't enough for those people, they shouldn't have spent money on it. It's like a person who chooses to spend $20 on lottery tickets and then gets mad that they didn't win. Don't pay unless the risk is part of the fun.
This attitude makes no sense to me. This is what kickstarter is for: you back high-risk projects, get some goofy schwag, and sometimes the project actually works, and how cool is that?
Why does there seem to be a horde of people who think kickstarter is for pre-ordering finished products and getting pissed when they don't receive them? That's just not what it is!
I'm sure this horde exists because kickstarter creators market themselves as if they're selling pre-orders of finished products.
In some cases they have no choice, because some kickstarters are really expensive. It might make sense to pre-order Ubuntu's $700 smartphone for example, but nobody would ever throw Canonical $700 for some "goofy schwag" and just hope they might or might not get a phone later.
That sounds like a generalization. There are probably lots of sound businesses that do not have access to traditional capital investment, and would benefit from being on Kickstarter. Additionally, there are businesses that do not clear a bar of "this is a sound business" that have had heaps of traditional capital investment. We are talking about sets with only some overlap.
There are different funding sites with different rules and different popularity due to those rules and the vagaries of advertising and attention. Kickstarter doesn't need to cater to every type of project or business.
The number of checks and balances people keep adding when someone is bad is taking it's toll on some industries. Safe guards are good up to a point... then eventually it gets ridiculous.
Yeah I am surprised they haven't added a rule that you can't give backers something that doesn't exist.
Being able to back something to get that thing seems to confuse to many people into believing it is a shop where you buy things rather than an investing in something you would like to exist, but may never actually exist.
Funny, people expressing their "concerns" became a bit of a meme on the Start Citizen forums in the early days.
As far as the meat of the article, I've been following Star Citizen as a backer since the Kickstarter days. My take on the history of the game's development is that Cloud Imperium Games was kind of unfocused and spinning some wheels for a while at the start as they attempted to build a AAA studio from scratch by partnering with smaller outsourcing firms for animation and modeling work. I think they misfired on some of their choices of early partners but that seems to have ended and they seem to be focused and moving forward.
The thing a lot of people forget is that the game was initially going to be: "you log in, you spawn in your ship/you are your ship/and...dogfight". As well, many of the ambitious features that they've been successfully implementing like seamless travel across millions of kms of volumetric space were player requests. I know I requested the ability to fly from space to planet surfaces and also expressed that I would be content to wait longer for the game's release if that was possible.
I don't really have sympathy for the folks who feel cheated or abused because from my experience, CIG has bent over backwards many times.
Anyways, I'll get off the soapbox. I'm optimistic and the game is already fun, with only a limited amount of the full content to come (especially in June when they launch an expanded PU).
I agree, it has definitely been a community driven scope creep as far as I am concered. We are getting what we asked for. Some of the communication has been disappointing but everyone is learning here, this is a big and new undertaking and there is no protocol.
I also don't understand how anyone could possibly want a worse game sooner outside of plain impatience. If you wait longer and the game is delivered near spec, it will be a better experience than if we get it earlier and sacrifice some features. To have both is ridiculous, it's not like they are twiddling their thumbs over there. They are progressing as fast as they can.
The original Wing Commander: Privateer had about 20 core team members and cost (guesstimating) around $3 million to make, inflation adjusted.
To put that in perspective, Fallout 4 cost around $150m to make (IIRC), and that was an amazingly frugal budget for such a large game (Several AAA titles have budgets twice that large).
To be honest, I would have been happy with something along the budget of the original Privateer. And that would have probably left him lots of wiggle room to experiment and engage in research-esque goals.
I cant be too angry at him for being ambitious, or even changing his goals, but the #1 thing Roberts did wrong IMO was accelerating to AAA-style development and growing the team to 400 large before even really knowing what he wanted to develop. Spending a $100k+ on mocap and acting as early as he did is like producing a movie and then writing the script for it after the fact.
I would say that Chris Roberts has always had a very good idea of the game he _wanted_ to build, but but the original plan was to only build part of what he really wanted. When the crowdfunding kept coming in, it enabled him to go straight for building the game as he envisioned it, rather than iterating after release.
It's also worth noting that CIG only hit 400 employees fairly recently. I know some of their major presentations have included employee counts over time, so you could dig up the exact numbers if you wanted to. I _think_ they had roughly 50 at the end of 2013, and maybe 150-ish at the end of 2014?
I've found this to be true not just of financing and money but of scheduling and time as well [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if this applies to many other resources, like employees in a company.
For example, given the task of building a complex system under a time constraint, it's easy to exhaust the time granted, be it a week, a month, or a year. A complex system can always be more perfect, so you can always spend more time on making it better. A limited resource (e.g. a week) can force you to focus on the essential solution whereas an abundance (e.g. a month) can lead to frivolous design and overengineering.
The antidote seems to be organizational restraint, concrete milestones, and constant readjustment to keep in line with greater goals. Scope creep, perfect-as-enemy-of-good, and bike shedding are all aspects of this behavior.
That was my initial thought as well.. build the $10m game, ensure appropriate hooks for expansion.. then build lots of expansions... open contests to fund developer expansions from other dev groups... There's lots of more effective ways this could be done then to try to release a 9-figure game from the start.
Actually the best route is to simply have a CEO/CFO who recognize this problem and are self-disciplined enough to divide the project into stages, and prioritize/triage what goes into each stage, starting with an MVP that can launch and actually provide revenue to fund subsequent stages.
This overspending problem happens a lot in startups too (though VCs sometimes pressure startups to burn fast for various reasons having to do with the next round, which isn't really a factor with Star Citizen and crowdfunded projects). It's crazy there aren't more widely recognized best practices for teaching founders how to handle this issue.
I feel like crowdfunding sites ought to force each campaign to have a 'maximum funding' value they have to choose. That would both force the people building whatever it is they want to build to consider just how much money is too much, and also signal to those funding the project the kind of ambition the builder has.
A sibling comment pointed out that they did their own fundraising, but this is still a good point. The limit could be set to the highest defined stretch goal + n% to compensate for non-payers.
Considering the crowdfunding platform makes its money from these kinds of runaway successes in funding, I don't suspect they have much incentive to offer such a feature.
Am I correct in my understanding that every dollar pledged essentially pushes the release further into the future since the developer is on the hook to add something extra with that dollar? Not that each dollar comes with a signed and sworn commitment, but more that the $500,000 game probably would have been out and actively enjoyed already.
That is how it has turned out yes. But do you want the $500,000 game now or the 140m game later? There are certainly other games to play while we wait, and we get the unique insight into the development of a game of this scale.
Also the new technologies being developed are truly quite interesting. Nested physics grids, context containers, a complete NPC AI ecosystem that itself is extremely ambitious.
The $500,000 game would have been fun, but just another space shooter. We have some of those already.
I may be misunderstanding too, but every time I read another story on Star Citizen's development, it certainly seems that way, and Robert's own comments suggest he will keep spending every dollar to make "the best possible" game. It certainly suggests that even if he isn't legally on hook to spend it all, he will try.
He's arguably painted himself into an unfortunate corner by not imposing a fund raising cap - morally/ethically you could argue he has no choice but to try to spend all the dollars - to simply pocket 'the extra' cash would leave a bad taste in backers mouths I imagine, especially when they are effectively donations.
I can't help but feel that when he reached 9 figures Roberts maybe should have considered closing the donations for a while...
I understand what you're saying, but... Why should it, though? The Linux kernel is an example of a project that's been ongoing for decades. If Star Citizen puts out a product/service that fulfills the basic requirements -- and they will; at some point they'll reset the persistent universe and it will be very much "live", even while they continue development -- why should they stop iterating on top of it to add new features or other bells and whistles? I would much prefer a situation where Chris Roberts is the good king (a la Linus) of a project that evolves over the rest of his life into a truly remarkable and unique and world-changing game. How fun would that be? I think there's a lot of pressure from industry insiders who have LOTS of money riding on The Old Way of doing things that want to see CR fail. I'd love to see not only CR succeed -- and in many ways he already has -- but to continually succeed for as long as possible.
But couldn't he have done iterative releases instead? Give all the backers more that just a little demo, but a real mini-game that demos the tech and can keep gamers occupied for a few days. Slowly add more onto it?
Or maybe release the game in 3 different parts?
I haven't played any of the demos but it does look like a really impressive game. I probably won't play it as I don't like MMORPGs, but I did really enjoy his earlier work in the Wing Commander series.
That's pretty much what the current Persistent Universe Alpha is. An actual playable version of the Star Citizen MMO half, with the currently built technology.
Heh. I don't think "rapid" is the right word. Last year they had said they were hoping for monthly-ish patches, but that went by the wayside pretty fast around Alpha 2.3 or so, when they began integrating the backend persistence systems.
The Persistent Universe Alpha is currently at 2.6.x. It currently includes one "limited" area of space around a gas giant in one specific solar system. (Note that "limited" here means that it's only a fraction of the planned final solar system, but thanks to CIG's 64-bit map size technology, it's legitimately several hundred million KM^3.) There's a few space stations, several quests, and some limited economy. All fully playable, but gameplay-wise, it's still mostly at the "tech demo" level in a lot of ways.
The "holy grail" version that we fans have been waiting for since last fall is Alpha 3.0. The /r/starcitizen subreddit has a ton more info on what it's supposed to include, but off the top of my head: a larger chunk of the Stanton solar system; several moons or planets that will be 100% "see it -> fly there -> land there"; the first iterations of several professions; and a whole lot more.
The current production schedule for Alpha 3.0 is at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report . They originally projected it would come out around June 29, but just pushed it back a couple weeks. Realistically, I would expect them to bump it back into August. Once that's out, they'll probably get out another couple good-sized updates later in the year.
So, definitely not "rapid", but given the scope of what they're doing, not surprising. (Besides, my laptop actually can't even handle playing the game right now, so I've just been watching the development progress. I'll probably upgrade later this year sometime after Alpha 3.0 comes out.)
IIRC Star citizen got started in funding around the same time as Elite:Dangerous.
It seems that the E:D approach has worked out rather better, in that they delivered an initial playable game that was rather lacking in some areas , and have been incrementally adding to that game over time in terms of both features and platforms supported.
As someone that bought heavily into both games, I have to be honest here when I say that E:D was a great short-term game, like many of those single-player games we're all used to. I quickly hit the grind part of E:D and stopped playing it. I should mention here that I'm an "explorer" subtype of game player, so the grind doesn't do it for me.
On the other hand, I am a very early backer of Star Citizen, and I regularly (about once a week, which is a lot for me) play the alpha and because I'm also an Imperator subscriber, I get rental credits for new ships and weapons and stuff, so there's always something new for me to try. Then there's also the knowledge that the full persistent universe ("game") is yet to come. I've got a lot of ships to fly, and an organization/clan with lots of RL friends to fly missions with. I'm stoked for all the accompanying lore being built into Star Citizen. This universe already feels lived in and detail-oriented. I am confident that I could play for a long time and still not hit the end of the road to satisfy my inner "explorer" player subtype.
I own elite dangerous and after visiting the subreddit after the last patch I really don't have much confidence in frontier anymore. It's becoming clear the game's codebase will never be able to support some of its ambitious promises (like not being your ship) and the features that are being implemented are shallow and broken, and then never further developed by frontier.
I think E:D succeeded at initially playable but is failing to scale. It's a really fun experience in VR but I'd much rather it had stayed in closed development a year or two longer if that's what it would have taken for it to have real depth.
I bought into SC when they promised Linux support. All this cool stuff that people are getting to play with early is Windows-only. I have significantly less patience with Star Citizen because so far as I'm concerned they've broken their promise.
It's not a reason I originally backed for but I've been increasingly more linux focused so it's something I'd love to see. PCI passthrough with KVM looks to be the solution for now, but it does mean having a chunk of machine resources reserved for windows :(
I'm not a backer, but it seems to me that Star Citizen is progressing well. There's still active development and progress to the actual game, there's been several demos released, there's been constant communication.
As long as they continually scheduling and releasing new Alpha builds incorporating their growing world as they flesh it out, I don't see cause for concern.
Amazing delusional quote, "But imagine — the game I can build with $140 million is going to be very different to the one I could build with $10 million."
Yes, it sounds like the $140 million game is not going to get made at all.
This is where the value of frugality really shines. The more money you have, the more bogged down in extra features and additional complexity you can get because of excess ambition or feeling of duty to your supporters.
It seems that because of overfunding, these guys are already suffering from the second-system effect even without having built a first system to begin with.
Yeah I think we're far past the gold-plating stage and into platinum-plating territory. At least they've delivered playable content to backers but expanding the scope so dramatically also dramatically increases the chances of never delivering.
Far from it for me to take anything away from Star Citizen hopefuls - I hope the game comes out and is good and fans have fun with it.
But when I look at the mind-numbing scope and ambition of the project... It will be very impressive if they can deliver everything promised, as good as promised.
That's why I am glad I backed though. We don't need another safe bet AAA war game. There is truly new ground being broken in the technology side of the project and that will filter out into the rest of the gaming industry, filling the metaphorical toolbelt with new tools.
The engineering is the biggest time sink so far and it's not surprising it's creeped and taken longer than expected. They have invented novel approaches to new problems and that is worth every dollar I backed to see happen.
I've played a lot of Elite: Dangerous it is unclear how much new ground is actually being broken here. I'm looking forward to and hoping SC succeeds, but let's not ignore the competitors that have already delivered.
I would recommend looking at some of the more recent tech focussed ATV episodes. There is a lot more to SC than there is in Elite, which is not to detract from Elite at all. It is a different game and excels where it aims to.
The underlying theme though is that SC is built of very finite systems that all interact with eachother. When Chris Roberts talks about fidelity it is often misconstrued to be about graphical fidelity. But it is equally applicable to the systems fidelity. In theory, after you have placed a cargo crate of goods in the cargohold of your ship and taken off, a pirate could shoot out your generator, hop out of their seat and pick up a gun off their gun rack, EVA to your ship, enter through a hole blasted into your hull and grab the individual crates to move to their ship. Later the pirate will store the crates in their homestead on a planet nearby, or pawn the goods at a market. Meanwhile you are left to fix your generator and ponder deep space.
But the fact that you could steal the crate from a disabled ship isn't because they put in a crate stealing game mechanic . It's simply intrinsic in the way they are developing the item interaction system and physics systems in the game. That wasn't a great example but hopefully it conveys what I am trying to convey.
This comment is also an example of how No Mans Sky disappointed everyone. Community based hyperbole. But I used only current features or 3.0 features to make it up so here is hoping.
In the 2.5 Alpha you can already disable a generator, you can already EVA and board a ship. In 3.0 there will be planets, planet outposts and markets, cargo to steal and nefarious people to steal it.
"Everything" promised is a completely unrealistic expectation. Even much smaller games with much more constrained concepts make changes during development to make a practical, functional product. They've already broken some "promises" and will surely break more.
The question will be, yes, if it reaches the level of scope and experience they're aiming for, even if specific goals change along the way.
The Star Citizen tech is really impressive looking. I love watching their demo videos because they just look amazing.
Their development process seems inefficient from afar. They've switched engines at least once, maybe twice? They've announced titles that then kind of fade into the background. They build really detailed systems for simulating light / gravity / thrust in ways that seem impressive & unrelated to gameplay.
It kind of reminds me of Overgrowth, though with a whole lot more money (and charging users a whole lot more as well). I'd be interested to see, in 5 years or so, what the final-ish product looks like (I don't mean they're 5 years from release, I mean in 5 years they'll be past release).
They've been on CryEngine since the beginning. They've heavily customized large portions of it, to the point that I think one of the devs estimated it was only 50% original code left. They also actually bought a full license to the CryEngine source, and stopped taking any real updates from new versions of CryEngine as the codebases diverged.
They did recently announce that they were "switching" to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, but Lumberyard is itself a particular fork of CryEngine. The switch was primarily about branding and sponsorship. CryTek has been having serious financial issues, while Amazon is busy putting resources into Lumberyard. CIG also just switched all their backend cloud computing from GCE to AWS, and I'm sure they're getting a deal on AWS costs as part of the switch from "CryEngine" to "Lumberyard".
If by "titles that fade into the background" you mean the Squadron 42 single-player campaign... yes and no. Yes, they've been deliberately very quiet about that, because as a single-player game they'd like it to actually be meaningfully new and interesting on release. Also yes, backers are getting a bit antsy wondering where SQ42 progress actually stands at this point. However, it's not like they've abandoned development on SQ42.
I'm a High Admiral backer from November of 2012, and I feel like I've got my money's worth, and I'm not really concerned about the opinions of people that haven't put skin in the game. "This game is taking forever to be developed!" I suppose if your frame of reference is every blockbuster made by every enormous shitty studio conglomerate, sure. But saddle up or shut up as far as I'm concerned. Play what's available, read the development timeline so you actually know what's going on with development and what's happened so far, and then I'll take any of these criticisms seriously. It's pretty stupid the number of people saying things like "I paid my thirty dollars a couple of years ago and I still can't play!" Well that's your fault for not looking before you leap. You have known two things if you've read the packaging before you bought the beans: 1) Development is ongoing and the final game is not released, 2) Development timeline is not rigid and inflexible like it is for giant studios cranking out titles. This is Chris Roberts being given ample time and money to create a magnum opus. That is what it's been the whole time, and what it's been advertised as since the beginning. Outsider opinion is worth nothing.
I thought about preempting your post specifically, because every time I mention that I've put investment into the game, someone mentions it. I think if you dig into my post history, you will find about six posts exactly like yours, link to more information included. Let me put it this way: I don't gamble with the rent money. That money is gone, and I'm not counting on a return. This is the way I think when it comes to this kind of thing, because any gains I see are a wonderful surprise. I started changing my psychology when I started going to war in my twenties: As I went out expecting to get hit, it was always a wonderful surprise when we didn't. It's pretty cool how that works for funding Kickstarter projects!
I'm not sure why they didn't just "Build the $10m game" and release that, then spend the rest on expansions to that game. Would have been a much more predictable approach (assuming the original game is setup to be appropriately expandable.
Funny enough, the tech that they're setting up right now will allow them to do just that.
All of their work to the cry engine has set them up to so that expanding will be much much easier in the future. They've reworked a big chunk of that thing so it can handle what they want to do..... of course that was no small task.
Once we see the 3.0 release things will appear to move a lot quicker, we'll start seeing more planets and professions being introduced.
The technology is the biggest reason I think. The foundation for the experience they want to provide is only just now getting to the point where they can shift focus to implementing the contet at a decent pace. There are ships that have been redesigned and reimplemented two or three times as that technology changed with the scope of the game.
Expansions to the $10m foundation would have to have been total technology and content rewrites to achieve what they are aiming for with the end release.
Or build the $10M game and return the remaining $130M to the backers, proportionally?
My question is: What would he do if he got an extra $300M? Increase the scope even more? At what point do you stop increasing scope and concentrate on shipping a product?
Why would they return it? Backing something is like an early purchase with risk and discount built into it. You are not an investor. All you are ethically owed (and not even legally) is the game with the stretch goals you backed. If they blow past the stretch goals they can keep the money if they wish.
How big a 'cut' does Roberts himself take as well? Given this endeavor is built entirely on the charity of the backers, I would really hope he isn't taking a percentage, but sadly wouldn't be surprised either if he is.
Why wouldn't he? All you are doing is buying something unreleased for a discount because of the built in risk. He gets to do whatever he wants with the money left over as long as he meets the stated goals.
I think many people would argue that ethically/morally it's somewhat questionable - he's taken donations, not investment, and as such lacks any of the oversight/due diligence external investment usually attracts. Similarly, I doubt even a majority of backers actually understand the business/charity model they are putting money into - that we are now at 9 figures certainly suggests these are not "sophisticated investors".
Was keeping a large amount of the cash for himself a stated goal? probably not, hence my curiosity. His business occupies a grey area between business endeavor and charity. Me in his shoes, I'd sure as hell feel bad taking a chunk of the donations. I'd have no issue with him pocketing the profits of traditional sales, should he ever reach that point - no one who donated was under the illusion a return would occur, but they should perhaps quite rightly expect that their donation at least pay for development, not lining Robert's pockets.
I think it's also debatable the extent to which backers have "bought" anything, let alone received a discount.
It seems like a safer use of extra funding is for free expansions. It may seem unfair to take $140 million and build a $10 million game, but people funded you with your $10 million game, deadlines included, in mind.
It reminds me of the people who put significantly larger amounts of money into the "Aido" home robot - a heap of unrealistic promises in an unrealistic timeframe for an unrealistic price - it's way behind schedule but has yet to pull the rug out.
Just for point of reference, here's today's episode of the weekly "Around the Verse" video update series, showing what the UK studio has been working on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADB-wpvTD0k . Just watching the initial UK update segment, looks like we've got examples of lighting effects, ship design and implementation, object interaction, and a lot more.
I have no problems with people questioning CIG's ability to hit deadlines, or wondering what exactly the status of Squadron 42 is. Those are totally fair critiques. But, as long as they keep showing progress updates like this, I'm perfectly content to sit back and let them make the game we want them to make :)
I ended up with a free copy of Star Citizen when I bought a graphic card. At the point when I got it there wasnt much to do. I somehow still get weekly email updates from them but I've been expecting them to stop over the last 9 months or so because it seems the full game will never be finished.
It seems to me that Star Citizen is more about the journey than the actual game. I'm sure it'll be released at some point, but the fact that people are able to justify their purchase says a lot about the game and the community.
I hadn't heard about this game until right after No Man's Sky, which ruined my eagerness to back/pre-order things. Except for Everspace I have no backed or pre-ordered anything else, forcing myself to wait.
As a developer working on a Steam game, I've decided not to let myself down this path. Kickstarter is tempting, but I'd rather release something when it's ready and build from there - if someone pays me, I want it to be for a product they can have now.
I wish Star Citizen to success. At least, the idea of a massive multi-player in the space, with economics, politics, roles, etc. it is very interesting, in my opinion.
I haven't bought into SC yet, but I do support them and have confidence they will deliver something worthwhile eventually.
Right now my main reason for support is that they are planning to go Vulkan only, and Vulkan is what is going to allow gnu+linux to become a real competitor in the pc gaming market.
Mostly negative across 73k reviews. I'll grant there is a lot of bandwagon hating, and that art is subjective. But this is the best data we have to use as a proxy for quality.
You're not wrong that it could reflect an angry minority, but it's far more reliable than "I know a couple of people who liked that," which is the competing metric in this case.
Not really. That's actually a better metric in most cases if you a) trust the person saying it and b) trust their ability to review friends choices.
Quite frankly I find Steam reviews to be one of the worst possible metrics and would trust the octopus that picked world cup winners more than Steam reviews.
> That's actually a better metric in most cases if you a) trust the person saying it and b) trust their ability to review friends choices.
How so? Whether or not I trust someone has no obvious bearing on whether their opinion closely matches the general consensus.
For example, I know someone who likes the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead better than the original. I absolutely believe her on this point. But it would be ludicrous for me to say, based on her preferences, that the 1990 version is widely considered the definitive Night of the Living Dead.
It's sometimes called a scam because the lead designer was making false claims about the game all the way up to its release, not because it's bad. That's a totally different question.
Anyway, it sounded to me like your initial point was that the game is generally well liked and the people who are disappointed should be dismissed as "a small number of people crying," which is both rude to those people and seems to be the opposite of reality. That's why I was like, "Whoa there."
I personally love the movie Spice World. I've known people who enjoyed literally getting punched. The fact that you know someone who enjoys something doesn't mean that thing is generally well-loved. I accept that Spice World was not a very popular movie. That doesn't take away from my enjoyment of it, but my enjoyment also doesn't negate its lack of popularity.
Any other examples? On the contrary, Elite Dangerous was received quite well. There is hype and scams all around in crowdfunded games, not just space ones, like Yogscast and Godus.
Before Star Citizen, Chris Roberts was working on Space Exploration/Trade/Combat game for Digital Anvil and Microsoft Game Studios - the Freelancer. He was ambitious, the features planned for game involved:
- dynamic economy based by station/planetary production of goods, demand and supply (influenced by distances and space piracy)
- known actors lending their voices to characters
- hundreds of items and ships
- massive universe filled with mysteries and lore
What happened instead was Microsoft stepping into the project and forcing changes to make ship plausible within a year due to continuous delays. Chris left the project. Universe was cut to 50 systems, bulk of characters gets killed off quickly after appearing in the plot, or have few spoken lines. There are omissions in items, like only only single top-class shield, whereas in every lower class there were three types of shields. Some commodities are sold on planet or few, but not bought anywhere in the universe, being useless for trade. Engine supports ship animations and plenty of ship models implement those, but they were eventually disabled. Etc. ect.
But game shipped, and besides cut content, it actually delivered quality experience, and even if it lacked replaybility, content or sandbox features of X-Universe games, it contained stateful multiplayer that resulted in game having long live in multiplayer thanks to Role-Playing mods and communities build around those.
I once read the Freelancer Wikipedia article, and started poking around. When Roberts announced Star Citizen a few years later, I recognized that it was what he had wanted to do about 12 years prior, before he wanted to do movies instead. I enjoyed Freelancer, and I joined in. All I've ever given him was $60: the price I would expect to pay for a very nice game.
Imagine what CR could do with ample time and money... Aaaand that's Star Citizen! It's been very exciting watching CR work, and playing the stuff he's built and released already for Star Citizen. Absolutely incredible opportunity to be a part of. I'm very happy.
I'd challenge the "received quite well". Profitable maybe, but the developers infamously walked back a promise to have single-player gameplay (after taking money on the kickstarter where that was stated) available.
There's a litany of bugs and brokenness that have been around for months, even years, but in the meantime, development effort is expended on Shiny Stuff to sell in the cash shop, and half-baked Shiny Stuff to release in expansions. Game-breaking bugs are fixed in weeks and months, rather than the traditional hours and days of any other MMO.
Communication with the devs is spotty and increasingly infrequent.
Sadly, it has no real competition either. And Frontier Developments knows this. E:D is a phenomenal and unique game, but it could be so much more if the devs would actually act like they gave a toss.
I don't think No Man's Sky was scam so much as it was a game where the hype far outran what was realistically possible. I mean, there's only so much a small indie studio can get done in a year or two, so people expecting the moon were just being unreasonable.
In the case of Star Citizen we're deep into gold-plating territory, wouldn't be surprised if it became a Duke Nukem Forever. But even then, Chris Roberts is genuinely trying to deliver a game, even if his ambitions may have gotten too large to deliver.
The owner/lead developer (I don't know what position exactly Sean Murray holds) straight up lied about features in NMS (e.g. multiplayer) that weren't there nor will be ever added so I'd say it was a scam.
If it's a scam, he's not scamming very well. A scammer would have taken the big payday and done little else. Whereas Hello Games has released a couple of large updates, and quite a few smaller updates / bugfixes, with more planned.
The evidence largely points to a developer who is good at his core job, but inexperienced at managing hype. And who was overly optimistic about what he and his team can accomplish in X amount of time. Based on how Hello Games is acting & communicating now, I think they've learned their lesson.
And I sympathise a little with them because I was once the overly optimistic team lead in my younger days, and had to get burnt a few times before I learned my lesson.
I don't know that he really lied, so much as he over-promised and under-delivered. Lying implies that he never intended to include some of those features.
In video game development, studios are frequently forced to cut significant content or features from a game for a number of reasons. That's why the smart studios are pretty cagey about promises until they're VERY sure they can deliver them. Sean Murray was reckless with his promises and that's what got him into trouble.
It's possible he outright never intended to deliver those features but I don't think that's the case. It's clear they tried very hard to deliver as much as they could.
Certainly, and perhaps I'm being a little unfair to the average consumer who got caught in the hype. As a programmer I looked at what they were saying they could deliver and figured that it was a bit too ambitious for the resources they were working with. Average people might reasonably expect that a video game developer would only show major features in demos that would make it to the final game.
Star Citizen is a lot of hype. But its not a scam. Even in the case that it fails and a product is never produced, that doesn't mean its a scam. A scam requires up-front intent.
They went big. They could have stopped at the few million they raised on Kickstarter, but they knew they'd need more to accomplish their vision.
I adore No Man's Sky, which accomplished something magical, and keeps expanding. I'd put games and DLC that are cheap imitations of what came before in the scam category; and there's probably less of that in SF games.
That's why they should never release Star Citizen. If they do, everybody will be disappointed. If they continue to release alpha previews, they can live on donations forever and all the fans will be still happy.
CIG raised about $6,000,000 on KickStarter if I recall correctly. Almost all of the crowdfunds came after they moved off KickStarter to their website: robertsspaceindustries.com
No need to rely on memory. From the KickStarter page [0]: "$2,134,374
pledged of $500,000 goal". However, it looks like the graphic showing $6M achieved combines the $2M from KickStarter plus additional funds they raised directly on their site.
My theory is scope creep. These guys have done a good job of convincing people that they can live the ultimate space exploration fantasy that's been talked about since the 80s.
It's the ultimate simulation. We know very little about space and even fiction (ex. star wars) seems to generate even more demand.
As people got excited and started throwing money at them, so did the scope obviously. I love Star Citizen's attention to detail but it's suffice to say that they've hit people's patience.
> “I’m already building the best game I can,” said Mr. Roberts, who acknowledged the bumps. “But imagine — the game I can build with $140 million is going to be very different to the one I could build with $10 million. If I can build a bigger and more robust experience, I will.”
My guess is they keep going until donations taper off and they're about to run out of money, then rush out a massively buggy release that disappoints everybody.
I used to work in a small indie game studio (in the PS2 days) and the games we made had tight deadline (less than 12 months usually from start to finish). And even with such time and money constraints Scope creep would always rear it's ugly head.
I can only image what goes on when the devs are let loose in the SC candy store with so much money and wanting to live up to the hype(so to speak).
I preordered Star Citizen back in 2012 or 2013. Whenever the original Kickstarter was. I've kind of forgotten about it. I've never preordered another game--or anything really. And I don't think this was a bad experience.
I haven't received a game yet, but I have played some demos that were really fun. I've seen hours of content (Sure, that content is freely available, but so is NPR), read some great stories, and had some great conversations about the game.
In 2013 I paid $60 for a game I have not yet played. That year I also went to a casino one night with $80 in my pocket. Both times I came away with nothing but a fun experience and some stories. In both cases I feel like I paid for some entertainment and received it.
This isn't a post to excuse vaporware titles on Steam Greenlight or preordering broken-on-launch games. Quite the contrary. I won't buy EA games until at least a year after they come out. I will NEVER buy a pre-release game on Steam. But I bought Star Citizen. I took a gamble, and I had some fun. I wouldn't have done that if I didn't think there would be some fun along the way.
Star Citizen could never come out, and I wouldn't really feel cheated, because I still got something out of it.