Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

I think my biggest beef with the game is how unstable it is.

The game design is a bit grindy, whatever, lets grind away then, however any time I start to make any progress the game crashes. After two or three of these I loose interest. Only to try again in 6 months to much the same results.

They appear to be following a long term slow burn development plan, nothing wrong with this many of my favorite games follow this same pattern, factorio, valheim, however these games follow the cardinal rule of public development which is "keep it stable" it has been 10 years and star citizen still is a crashy mess.

They have a lot of neat tech in their engine, seamless space to surface to inside to instance is not trivial. But I wish they would just sit down for a quarter and stabilize the thing. I like to joke that the elevators in the game are probably some of their most advanced tech, the punchline is that if you have played the game you know that most of the crashes and other weirdness involve elevators. but I am only half-joking. because the elevators really are connecting zones and instances in a cool seamless way.

To this day the whole game feels like an FPS mod, and a poorly tested one at that.

Every so often, when a new update comes out, I check out some let's player who will, in a span of an hour, will run into some incredibly basic and fundamental bug, like clipping through an elevator and getting ejected into space, or being unable to get through a door that's supposed to open.

Honestly the whole game feels years away from release.

That's it, a lot of early access indie games are built using the lessons learned from agile methodology; Factorio recently released a video showcasing the ~6000 tests they have to verify all their complicated systems work as they should, and their velocity is incredible, fixing over 600 bugs in the span of a month (few of which were game-breaking btw, a lot of their bugfixes are fairly trivial).

But Star Citizen has all the hallmarks of too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management. They have over a thousand people working on it and have for a long time now. And that scale isn't the problem - Rockstar did the same with RDR 2 and will likely exceed it with GTA VI - but while the main guy has some games under his belt, they too had problems with development and actually finishing.

> too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management.

The main problem in this case was SC's game director. He was around for nine years and set the scope/goals/roadmap for the game before being abruptly fired 9 months ago and replaced. Through the grape vine I've heard he never provided a long-term vision for the project internally whilst constantly promising new things to the community (ie scope creep).

The new game director, Rich, is well liked within the development team and much of the recent CitizenCon event was spent cutting back scope and providing an actual goal for SC 1.0 to release as.

I think the problem is too much money.

Yes and no. The same problems can exist in any org. If there isn't much money, it does and we don't hear about it. But if you have a lot of money, you can stay on the runway for a long time befoure you run out.

The problem with too much money is that it allows for lazy project management practices.

And at some scale, it's difficult to determine if you are actually making slow progress or deluding yourself and rebuilding the same system for the third time.

Similarly, infinite runway means you can infinitely postpone worrying about stability. "We're still working on features" etc.

money (payment for goods and services) is a good signal that you are doing good. If you don't need to pay attention or the money comes in regardless of the quality of the product, it's easy to go off the rails.

Doesn't it bother you that even if the game will be complete to the say, beta test levels, it would still be an insane pay2win product? Like not even "sense of pride and accomplishment" pay2win, there ingame stuff cost "only" tens of dollars per item. Here it costs hundreds and thousands of dollars per ship. If it was a EA or Ubisoft game, they would been eaten alive just for such monetization. While for SC it is ignored by the actual players.

Their monetization strategy appears to be largely modeled after flightsimulators. DCS specifically comes to mind. As in DCS you don't buy the game you buy the plane.

On the one hand I am fine with this. on the other I vaguely expect DCS levels of systems simulation from the ships and I don't see that ever happening.

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