Star Citizen player reports CIG is making him sign an NDA before getting refund | Hacker News Reader

Star Citizen player reports CIG is making him sign an NDA before getting refund

massivelyop.com

25 pointsspeckx14 comments

While Star Citizen initially had the stated goal of being a return to old school game design, it has slowly adopted all of the worst aspects of modern AAA gaming: endless early-access, using the public as beta testers, insanely expensive "micro" transactions, pay to win, bloated budgets, endless roadmaps, and constant missed deliveries.

It's all horribly dysfunctional and hostile to its customers. In this context, this latest wrinkle is hardly surprising.

As someone who backed this project early (when it was at "only" $33 million or so) I'm not even mad anymore, just disappointed.

>using the public as beta testers,

Not true! It's still in alpha.

also, i think they scraped the dedicated server that were kind of implied in the beginning. Chris talked about running your own world on your server. I would have hoped for a renascence of dedicated servers for multiplayer games including some creative communities like Freelancer still has.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/12grru/comment/c6uzxz...

Totally forgot about that. There was so much stuff promised in that early fundraising that it was clear they would never deliver on all of it. But I expected to at least see a complete game by now.

The budget for this thing is absolutely insane and I have no idea how it's all going to end.

i had hoped for a cool looking freelancer. I backed about 30 USD initially and 60 more to get 2 more licenses for friends for SC and SQ42 - have not sent some money since then, so if it ever drops, it might be a nice surprise that did not cost too much.

Yup, I just wanted Freelancer 2 :(

>While Star Citizen initially had the stated goal of being a return to old school game design

What? In what way? What part of "We are going to build a giant space MMO" and spending like ten minutes worth of pitch time waffling on about how "look! Each of the 16 thrusters on this little spaceship are physically simulated! That's so important to someone playing a space MMO!" and right from the beginning allowing you to pay to win was "old school game design"?

Star citizen from the very very beginning was clearly a trap of "More immersion means more better", which is interesting because they really were not showing off anything especially immersive. None of the presentation for kickstarter really showed off anything that seemed like exciting space ship combat. It only really sold the kind of vague dreams that people have and never think through.

Then, after saying they wanted to build a giant MMO, they chose a game engine that could not even offer reasonable multiplayer performance and support. Years later Chris would waffle on in an update about how "Oh we had to go and implement object synchronization over the network" at a time when both Unity and Unreal offered that as built in functionality, as if that kind of statement from the Lead of the project is anything other than an admission of utter incompetence at choosing Cryengine.

But, they had to have the pretty visuals to sell the kickstarter I guess. Shows you were their priorities were.

I forgot about this game. It single handedly soured me on Kickstarters. I'm surprised to see that it's actually playable now, albeit looks like they are still calling it alpha.

I think it's just a small segment of the single player version that's playable. Nothing like what was promised in the kickstarter

Have they actually released some of the single player content? I thought they just showed a very buggy demo of the single player on stage recently.

Not really, the multiplayer works too. Models are buggy, and ground combat sometimes feels like arma 2 (very slow and methodical progression if you want to be effective, which I find boring, but some people like it). not worth paying for imho, but if you already did, I would advise to try. It is a mix of elite:dangerous, arma, and weird SWTOR rp.

The only way to salvage it is to stop all feature development and focus only on bug fixing. However Chris is incapable of doing that, the game is perpetual scope creep and it's pretty clear it comes from the top.

Most NDAs logically only place limits on what the parties will do from the moment of signing, so maybe check the wording and publish the information before signing the NDA?

The money is to fund development and gets spent in short order. No one should give CIG money that they wouldn't just throw away.

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