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Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

Last time I played Star Citizen, and granted, this was 1 year ago, it was so unoptimized and buggy that, when I went into an elevator in the star port, the floor I landed at hadn't loaded yet, and a fell through the geometry, into space, and asphyxiated. This was.... oh, about 5 minutes after starting play for the first time, on an i7 machine with a 2080 and 32 GB of RAM... Not a wimpy machine.

Star Citizen needs a release deadline, if for no other reason than it would force them to button up, fix bugs, and for godsake, optimize.

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I regularly watch Star Citizen gameplay videos on YouTube, it really progressed a lot in the last year. There are still some minor bugs with elevators, shafts, floors, etc. but overall game mechanics and the world they are building is unprecedented.

Have a look at more recent multi-player battles, prison escapes, salvage missions, just planet exploration. I was so impressed the images kept coming up in my dreams.

That's not really the problem. Even developers as incompetent as Hello Games are capable of tacking endless bonus content on their space sim - the issue is that Star Citizen continually lied about the features it would have and the date it would release. That, combined with the endless addition of things that nobody asked for has led most of the community to become completely disenfranchised with the game.

It's safe to say this game is stuck in development hell. Here, let's list all of the major features that hit the game in the past 3 months:

- Made many adjustments to the speeds of ground vehicles

- Window Interior Mapping Shader

- Added New Ship: RSI Scorpius

- Lighting Polish Pass for Hurston Volumetric Clouds

- Paints can now be stored in personal and ship inventories to allow players to move them around the PU. Added paints filter to inventory tabs.

I'm not sure if you've ever worked on a major software product before, but if this is the changelog for an entire quarter at your multimillion-dollar game studio, your project is doomed.

I don’t know anything about game dev, but if you look at other major software products, such as Windows, MS Word, VSCode, Photoshop, Spotify, are their 3 months changelogs more impressive?

Calling Hello Games incompetent is pretty unfair and kind of petty.

I guess so, I do feel a little bad about it. On the other hand though, their faked E3 demo and Sean Murrey's enthusiastic IGN interview will go down in history as the easiest-to-avoid mistakes in the industry. They've done a good job at turning around their reputation by dedicating themselves to NMS, but it's still a shell of a promised game. Sorta like Star Citizen, if CIG ever had the gall to release their game.

> They've done a good job at turning around their reputation by dedicating themselves to NMS, but it's still a shell of a promised game.

Sidenote: I don't know about the last time you checked out NMS, but by now it has way more than what was originally promised. And not just in quantity, but in terms of actual qualitative features and things to do.

"Incompetent" is a charitable framing. Less charitibly they deliberately and blatantly lied in order to generate hype.

Not really. They did pretty well on delivering what they promised. The problem is that they started selling the game multiple years before it was ready. That's not incompetent development, and I would not say they blatantly lied when promising future features.

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