Star Citizen will limit its roadmap, as players are getting upset over delays

It's like the Mormons in the Expanse with all the Star Citizen players going on a generation ship

I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18...

It's not realistic to handle an arbitrary number of players interacting within a small space, sure. That limit is probably in the hundreds. But a zillion players all within the same game world? Yeah, why not? That's really easy if you're talking about a big universe that doesn't have the entire population congregating in the same place.

These days I played "Everspace 2" and it felt great, controls-wise, the physics are not that good though. And I wanted a more simulator thing.

I then tired up all space simulators I could, played a little, tried to see if any scratch a specific itch, and found out the only ones that DOES scratch that itch, are ancient games, some that had Roberts involved.

The reason people is plunking money in Star Citizen is that people want a game that basically doesn't exist, and Star Citizen promises to be that game. (if it will actually pull that off is another story...).

Elite could have done it, but they didn't, their controls aren't that interesting and the entire series has the same repeating issues (of course, open source clones have the same issues).

X series are basically an RTS with first person controls, another genre entirely.

Evochron I didn't tried, but heard the controls are batshit insane and the interface is bizarre, the game is good but hard to understand.

Among open source stuff, the one that came closest to what I want is clones of Chris Roberts games (for example games using Vega Strike engine).

Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky, I couldn't get used to it or make it work with my mouse, and I don't own a joystick.

Now if you are willing to go 2D there are more options, sadly some of them are trying to screw themselves too (looking at you "Celestial Command" that started as a 2D realistic physics game and is now a 3D game with crap physics because they couldn't make the AI work properly).

The Wikipedia page states:

"Most game budgets are not disclosed, so this list is not indicative of industry trends."

I would expect ongoing major MMOs to easily exceed that number. For example WoW, but probably even games like EVE online.

There is a clearly a giant wad of latent demand-money sitting around waiting for someone to deliver on the concept, would be interesting if some studio with more traditional funding makes a go of it.

Cyberpunk is not that far away and it launched probably 2 years too early

It really feels like cashing in on nostalgia, put something barely playable together and keep cashing in. The fact that a lot of the development was outsourced.....

Someone monetarily buying into an idea + in communication with a large community who has also bought in + future promises = cult

It may be a productive cult, but it's still a cult. And has all of a cult's reality distortion effects on its members.

What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet.

I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.

I learned my lesson years ago with Chris Roberts games. Do not bother thinking about them until they ship. Strike Commander was my antidote for him. Overpromised, under delivered. He has been trying to make 'privateer' for 2+ decades at this point. He has shipped several iterations at this point 2 priv games and 2 others. This is number 5. That is what is kind of frustrating about it. He can ship games, and has many under his belt. But this one looks like a death march. Drags on much longer and they will have to do yet another engine switch out to keep the 'look' modern and not dated. Which would probably necessitate touching all the assets again.

edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing,

    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.

As somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.

Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs. Video games are more like “wouldn’t it be cool if you could do X”? And sometimes the answer turns out to be “no” when it’s actually implemented, or the actual implementation is just way watered down from your imagination. Backing something like star citizen seems like it’s begging for disappointment.

Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.

I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20060703160929/http://archive.ga...

Totally agree. I think they're addicted to keeping people engaged through upcoming features rather than an actual game. Fascinating.

What baffles me most about the whole thing is how much value SC fans are placing on the ideas versus the execution of those ideas. It's almost as if people think that other game studios just aren't as creative or haven't thought beyond the scope of what they've delivered in shipped games. Like the only reason Assassin's Creed doesn't allow players to start their own splinter group of assassins to operate within a robust, period-correct world economy and political system is because no one ever thought of it. What gamer hasn't sat down to make a list of features for her dream game and eventually realized what she was describing was just an 'entire universe where everything is possible' sim?

As with most artistic and technological achievements, the greatness comes from actually producing a game that manages to satisfactorily offer some portion of that dream list, not from coming up with the list itself.

That said, it's clearly well out of proportion to their funding. Some of the feature creep implies such horrible judgement by experienced game designers it would have been hard to predict.

“After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)

Otherwise all that’s left is the drivel, and you better like eating it.

The scam IMO is continuing to work on anything other than fixing the bugs.

“Good is the enemy of terrible.”

For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff.

I don’t think reductionist arguments are terribly useful for real things.

I doubt you’d have a case, since there is clearly a game being built, it’s just that the developers have done a terrible job finishing it.

I don't know, it seems like Croberts and his buddies have managed to live pretty comfortably for over a decade by selling spaceship JPEGs and promises.

CIG later announced they'd be creating what is effectively a Battlefield clone called Theatres of War. Originally shown off at citizen con 2019, It's now been 2 years later and even that doesn't sound like it's coming any time soon.

CIG go beyond just giving bad estimates, they're persistently found to be outright lying about the state of the game and at the rate of progress they're making we'll probably be dead if it ever releases.

SC might not be an intentional scam, but if it isn't then the people running it are so incompetent that it might as well be.

Now, that's quite likely not what happened, but from the outside, the symptoms look the same. Here's what I imagine is most likely version:

I've got experience making space games. I want to make another space game. I take a guess at how much it might cost to make (say, $23 million and two years), but I'm not actually any good at estimating cost and development time. I'm in way over my head, but I've got a LOT more money than I've ever had to manage before, so at least I can hire a lot of people. The people I pick aren't any better at this than I am, or I'm not listening to their advice. We're two years out from launch. No Man's Sky comes and goes and the reaction to the release is existentially terrifying to me. Gotta keep adding stuff! Oh god we're running out of money somehow, gotta get more money so we can finish this. Hire more people! Oh god our staff is up to 600 and people think we're a scam just because we haven't released a game yet. Put the whole development calendar online, we're working hard here, please please make this work. We're two years out from launch. Oh god how are we out of money again. Raise more money, hire more people! The early graphics look stale now, gotta refresh them. We've been two years out from launch for almost a decade. I'm still confident that the game will be out in two years, but I'm smart enough to recognize that I've been confident about this for six years and that fact fills me with dread.

But the worst that happens is you never actually get your ship, versus getting incorrect results and falling ill

concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt.

The problem is that game scope blows up much faster than you expect because it's disproportionately based on how many contradictions appear in the initial design. That is, if you introduce overlapping systems like "can traverse spaceship interior and exterior on foot", "can open and close doors and airlocks", and "other players respond to physics", every way in which one system has been hacked into being (which is most of them, in games) will carry over to hacks in the others, with correspondingly more time spent on assets, testing, bugfixes, etc. Repeat that across an "everything" game and you automatically get an impossible project that could only be achieved with a much more intensive simulation everywhere(which would exceed any plausible computation budget). The design has to put its foot down somewhere and say "we aren't going there" to resolve whatever contradictions it can. For example, replacing fully traversable environments with cutscenes and UI, or replacing lengthy animations with iconography. The games that can justify going really deep into their simulation end up being pretty niche, like Dwarf Fortress.

But actually making the resolution to settle on a more streamlined focus that would cohere well also breaks the hype of "sheer possibility". As long as you keep adding more, more continues to seem possible. Both creators and fans like staying in that zone. Nobody likes cutting their sunk costs, so they will rush to justify keeping stuff that doesn't work in the game until the project is cancelled due to lack of progress.

Serious question, like what?

cough Theranos cough