$600 Million And A Decade Later, Where Is Star Citizen?

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

 

 

Quote

The fantasy to go out and explore the vast expanses of space; I’m sure you’ve dreamed of it some time too. And what better way to do it but rely on video games to fulfill our imaginations? A major part of Starfield‘s appeal was this point. But before there was Starfield, there was Star Citizen to raise our hopes for an authentic and appealing space exploration adventure.

However, while Starfield became a reality, there is still no sign of Star Citizen. The game is available in its alpha state with limited features, but we have no release date for the full version yet, and apparently, the development is in quite a troubled state. From what little it has displayed, the game shows considerable potential and I just can’t wait to experience it in its entirety. It has been in production for over a decade, and I hope it’s here sooner. - https://exputer.com/

 

• Star Citizen is a space MMO, crowdfunded project that has accumulated over $600 million and has been in development for over a decade now with no release date in sight.
• Although the Alpha has some interesting points, the game’s development hell has attracted a ton of controversies over the years.
• The Space genre is currently booming due to Starfield and more games like Star Wars Outlaws on the way. It’s the perfect time for Star Citizen to land among all the existing popularity.
• Over the years, Star Citizen has accumulated insanely high expectations, and the more time it takes, the higher fans’ demands and expectations will go

 

 

Quote

CryEngine was no longer suitable to accommodate it, and thus they had to rebuild the entire engine with 64-bit positioning, according to Sean Tracy. Completely revamping an engine is easier said than done. CIG had to rely on taking in ex-Crytek employees to better work with an engine they were completely unfamiliar with and make it compatible with the game. And on top of that, the developers had problems like the Crytek lawsuit to worry about, too.

 

This links to the next problem; features becoming obsolete due to long development time. As I mentioned the game slowly grew too big for CryEngine to handle, but even with established assets, aging became a strong factor. Since the Alpha was opened to the public and is still ongoing, features and mechanics from let’s say 6-7 years ago would not be up to the modern mark, and thus have to continuously improve on top of completing the final product.

 

For contrast, i started these threads as back as a decade ago on this forum, i recall people defending and being angry at the posts regarding Star Citizen's critique saying that it is common for a game to take years of development, do people still have the same belief? 

 

 

 

 

 

source : https://exputer.com/exputer/star-citizen-600-million-no-release/

[Middcore]

I guess it's supposed to make it easier for people to just skim but the way they've bolded phrases in every other sentence in this article is really distracting.

 

Anyway, there's nothing much new to say about this compared to every time it's come up (not just on this forum but anywhere) the past several years.

 

I don't think it was meant from the ground up to be an intentional scam like some people do but as long as they can get people to keep throwing money at them without delivering a finished product, what incentive is there to deliver one? At some point it becomes functionally indistinguishable from a scam even if it didn't start as one, doesn't it?

 

Plus I think even if the developers sincerely want to finish it, they know that nothing they could produce would ever be able to live up to the expectations of the most devoted fans, it would make the hype inflation for Cyberpunk 2077 pale in comparison; if this game ever actually released and didn't bring about peace in the Middle East and cure cancer it would be a letdown. 

 

So whether due to grift, fear, or feature-creep, or (probably) a combination of the three, everything is against this game ever getting done. Star Citizen is the counterpoint to the "a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is forever bad" quote people love to trot out. Without somebody (a publisher or whatever) holding a financial gun to developers' head saying You need to ship something by (date) to keep the lights on, this is what can happen. 

 

Meanwhile, as more games actually come out that offer at least part (if not all) of the type of experience Star Citizen claimed it would offer, Star Citizen gets less and less relevant to everyone except the true fanatics. 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

It's quickly approaching Duke Nukem Forever levels of production timelines.

 

I do think someone found a way to use it for money laundering, but the production studio is more than happy to just keep developing. Unlimited resources has kinda ruined Roberts' head perspective.

[Middcore]

Just now, Taf the Ghost said:

It's quickly approaching Duke Nukem Forever levels of production timelines.

 

DNF had the "excuse" of changing IP owners and developers a couple times, at least. 

[NF-F12]

Star Citizen is a wishing well, many have thrown in coins.

[Fasterthannothing]

Someone is pocketing the money plain and simple. That game will never be developed. I remember a few guys in my dorm building buying ships for hundreds of dollars and when I ask them about the game it was all I could do to keep from laughing when they said it wasn't done yet but they wanted a limited edition ship before release. All they could do was look at the virtual ship what a absolute disgrace the game and the people pouring money into it are.

[TrigrH]

Look I'm not trying to say this isn't bullshit but for years if you pay for star citizen you get access to the current version of the game.

 

Yes its not finished, and its a bit of a different story for the kickstarter backers. But I feel I can argue right now you can play a version of the game if you pay. Where is the scam in that?

[Zando_]

36 minutes ago, Rohith_Kumar_Sp said:

do people still have the same belief? 

I mostly do still. If a couple more years pass and they don't have at least a starter version of server meshing working, and refuse to try any stopgap solution so people can actually play in the new systems they've spent years creating, that opinion will probably change. As of now they are indeed working at things, but from some allegations I've seen their management personnel and systems are quite inefficient, even to the point of wasting projects done by entire teams. Sadly not an uncommon thing in the industry (a lot of big games are bungled by bad management), so it remains to be seen if they fix that or no. I guess as others have pointed out, problems caused by "visionary" (I don't use that as a show of respect/fanboyism/whatever, that is just the correct word to use for that kind of person AFAIK) leadership with no-one practically-minded in a position of sufficient authority to drag them back down to earth.

 

[StDragon]

There's moments of brilliant creativity and vision. That alone sold it, but it doesn't carry it forward. What's missing is substance, story, background, good writing.

The problem wasn't enough money, rather it was too much dragging it along on life-support without budgetary reforms to change direction and focus on a deliverable worth gamers time.

I think the biggest question is if it can be salvaged or the IP just rolled into a whole new engine (UE5)?

[Helly]

The biggest problem causing the long development time has, is and always will be the public version everyone can play. They have to make it playable which is basically “finishing” that version. Every single alpha version they create.

i have said this almost every time this bullshit comes up. No game production in history has ever been like this game.

Have my thoughts on the game changed? Absolutely, i no longer follow the development at all. I dont really care about star citizen at all anymore. The only game i care about is squadron 42. Which they never really say anything about. Thats what annoys me more then anything else right now.

This game has not, is not and never will be a scam. No one will ever convince me of that. Unless they come out themselves and straight up admit it.

[RejZoR]

Well, it's called Starfield now and it is a finished game lol. I wonder what kind of expenses Bethesda had with Starfield for comparison.

[Xkillerpn]

I play Star citizen, and all I can say is for the 45$ price you cant get this experience anywere. Yes its an alpha , yes loads of missing features and etc. But if you play the game for sometime you will understand how good it is and how big it will get. People have diferent opinions but I think if you play it then you can make one, or you can see some recent gameplay on youtube. I wish it will come out someday, even if not I had my 45$ of fun. Just to add its a very heavy game and only the X3d cpus give your gpu the headroom to scale . 

[Monkey Dust]

Sometimes ambition exceeds ability. I think this is one of those times.

 

If it were a scam, nothing playable would have been released. And arguably, by releasing a half finished buggy mess, they are giving you a AAA gaming experience...

[Eight_P]

I don't think the whole "it's a scam" thing is fair.

 

The amount of money you can spend on virtual things like ships is absolutely insane, but in the end you don't have to.

 

If you like the game right now, then you get what you pay for.

 

But if you buy the game bc of a promise that it will be better one day instead of waiting for that to happen, then that's just not very smart.

 

Same with the "when is it gonna release", I mean, it's not a single player that you're just done with at some point,

they will most likely continue Star Citizen as a service for as long as people are playing/buying it.

 

You can already (most of the time) play it right now, the question should be: When does the game become stable and fun to play?

 

And not: When does some arbitrary number go from alpha to beta or release?

 

 

I think a big issue with CIG is that, while they seem capable of making software, I'm not so sure if they know how to make games.

 

They have a lot of in-depth and complicated mechanics that a lot of other game devs would never try or bother with, but they are missing the part that makes it fun to play.

 

They build mechanics without a reason for them to exist or be used

 

They are making this live simulation, hoping that one day it will all come together, but so far it doesn't.

 

The game is cool, but not good.

[Kisai]

11 hours ago, Middcore said:

 

So whether due to grift, fear, or feature-creep, or (probably) a combination of the three, everything is against this game ever getting done. Star Citizen is the counterpoint to the "a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is forever bad" quote people love to trot out. Without somebody (a publisher or whatever) holding a financial gun to developers' head saying You need to ship something by (date) to keep the lights on, this is what can happen. 

 

Meanwhile, as more games actually come out that offer at least part (if not all) of the type of experience Star Citizen claimed it would offer, Star Citizen gets less and less relevant to everyone except the true fanatics. 

 

 

The irony is that Chris Roberts is responsible for the Wing Commander series, which under Origin shipped buggy, but under EA shipped broken. EA aquired Origin mainly for the WC series and Ultima Online (that we are led to believe) because this same issue also plagued the Ultima series since the beginning as well.

 

So the expectations I had were somewhere between Wing Commander Privateer, Starflight (another game published by EA, and the precursor inspiration to Star Control and later Mass Effect) and Mass Effect.

 

Starfield is actually pretty good at hitting all of these, adding planet base building and building your own ships (albeit you can't build a capital ship ,only a 80m corvette at most) which are things we haven't seen before, or haven't seen done well (Fallout 4 has base building in nearly the exact same way, but you can break the game if you actually use it.) 

 

But I've stopped tracking Star Citizen's progress years ago. Starfield hits about 80% of what I wanted in every category, and I only knew about it since April of this year. It's been in development for three years less as long as Star Citizen has (2015 for Starfield vs 2011 for Star Citizen.)

 

It's also unfair to compare these. The ships in Star Citizen are not modular (and every funding round has been with a sale of a ship design from what I remember) and the storyline for Star Citizen is still effectively in the Star Lancer universe (Star Citizen -> Freelancer -> Starlancer) which the storyline will sound familiar. Star Lancer itself is still based on the Wing Commander storyline-mission structure. So you're only ever flying fighter craft in these games, usually have quests to protect capital ships and couriers that are about as strong as a wet paper bag. And my least favorite thing in the WC games are the asteroid and mine fields, which usually obliterate your small craft in one blow.

 

Meanwhile Starfield, you encounter an asteroid, it your ship shields just absorb the hit and sometimes break up leaving minerals you can collect. There is nothing in the story (that I've seen) that involves protecting other space craft. The game is oriented around exploration, and most of the exploration is really done on foot. The main quest of the game involves you landing on planets looking for anomalies. The companion quests involve you basically solving a mystery from the companions past. The faction quests are all basically "go somewhere, do a thing", UC quests are about finding a solution to a... invasive species. The Freestar quests are about bringing criminals to justice that usually end with a cowboy firefight. The Ryujin quests are about corporate espionage, the crimson fleet are about piracy more or less. There are also some fairly long sidequests, and dynamic quests when you land on planets where a map marker will appear for an active/abandoned facility, cave, mine, or something, usually filled with spacers (think bandits), Crimson Fleet pirates, Ecliptic mercenaries, religious zealots, a special enemy you only encounter in the main story, and sometimes you just run into the invasive species.  Likewise when you are in space, you can encounter most of the same. Friendly places are actually very rare to find and are mostly the faction's home bases, and storyline locations, along with some outposts run by NPC's.

 

As some have said, Starfield feels empty. Which realistically, is probably more reflective a reality where humans have only been exploring space for less than 200 years. Star Citizen however has over 600 years.

 

But I haven't been paying attention to the Star Citizen development, because at a certain point I just gave up on it. It's starting to look too much like a grifty-griefing type of game like how EVE is. Something I expect of F2P garbage.

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

No Man's Sky, Starfield, The Outer Worlds, a couple more indie games... at this point, everyone found their methadone. Sure, Star Citizen can continue to promise "all that combined and more!", but the ever-growing "all that" implies that the promised "and more" keeps locking them in a Half Life 3 state. The game they can launch today will never be as good as the game they had to promise yesterday for tomorrow. In fact, putting so much stock in scope may actually render it impossible to make a game that delivers on the promise and is good as a game.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

albeit you can't build a capital ship ,only a 80m corvette at most

Starfield has an amazing ship builder, but it's held back by the building rules and the modules, restricting you to mostly flat ships. I look forward to a mod to relax restrictions and add modules! I want to be able to build the Homeworld mothership!

Ship fighting is broken if you split your ship in two halves connected via corridor, because the AI aims for the center, and all hits miss.

[Kisai]

12 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Starfield has an amazing ship builder, but it's held back by the building rules and the modules, restricting you to mostly flat ships. I look forward to a mod to relax restrictions and add modules! I want to be able to build the Homeworld mothership!

Ship fighting is broken if you split your ship in two halves connected via corridor, because the AI aims for the center, and all hits miss.

It's my hope that they remove restrictions on it to allow building starbases, capital ships, and even interesting weapon-ships. Sure the storyline has nothing to do with this, but what I really want is to be able to build such things.

 

Like if you wanted to build "The Enterprise" , A or D, Voyager, you are SOL, you can't even get half way there. If you wanted to build capital ships from another game, you pretty much can't. But let me also build DS9 for fun.

 

Like the interior space of the ships doesn't have to be perfect, you can make a Voyager that simply has a "Bridge section" that connects directly to the landing dock. Even "the Protostar" (139m) is still too big. The rest can just be hull/storage pieces.

 

I think part of this frustration lies in the fact that most fictional space craft we see in Scifi TV shows are in fact capital ships of some kind. Even the Serenity (Firefly) is still 85m) and that's probably the closest to a starfield ship.

 

Meanwhile ships from Wing commander are pretty big themselves:

 

https://www.wcnews.com/news/update/12408

https://www.deviantart.com/dirkloechel/art/Size-Comparison-Science-Fiction-Spaceships-398790051

 

Comparatively, the ships you can assemble in Starfield are at most 8 pixels by 8 pixels on this image.

 

[Mark Kaine]

17 hours ago, Helly said:

The biggest problem causing the long development time has, is and always will be the public version everyone can play. They have to make it playable which is basically “finishing” that version. Every single alpha version they create.

i have said this almost every time this bullshit comes up. No game production in history has ever been like this game.

Have my thoughts on the game changed? Absolutely, i no longer follow the development at all. I dont really care about star citizen at all anymore. The only game i care about is squadron 42. Which they never really say anything about. Thats what annoys me more then anything else right now.

This game has not, is not and never will be a scam. No one will ever convince me of that. Unless they come out themselves and straight up admit it.

"its not a scam unless the scammer admits it!"  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Eaglerino]

The sad part is there still isn't a space game that matches what Star Citizen is capable of. I hoped Starfield would be a lite version of Star Citizen, and it ended up being Outer Worlds with JRPG levels of useless dialogue

 

Star Citizen had to remove a planet at some point because they "ran out of space" or something. I imagine we don't have the current technology to make Star Citizen the way they advertised, or if we do they would have to start all over. Worth it? Which way should they go? I have no idea, but I have a few fond memories in Star Citizen that quite literally could not have happened in any other game, so it was worth the money and brief play time to me

[ToboRobot]

Crowdfunding this level without escrow and milestone payments is crazy risky.

[Zando_]

23 hours ago, StDragon said:

I think the biggest question is if it can be salvaged or the IP just rolled into a whole new engine (UE5)?

... Why would they roll it into another engine? What would that fix? Visual rendering/multithreading/general performance, they're already quite far into their work on their new renderer. Toolset, they've spent years building their own tools to the point they have entire studio locations just to use them, and they are continuing to build more as they need them. Engines are modular bits of code you can rework as needed, switching their entire workflow over to a completely different foundation would just necessitate rebuilding all of their tools and re-learning how to work, would be an unfathomable waste of time and resources for 0 benefit.

4 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

The sad part is there still isn't a space game that matches what Star Citizen is capable of.

That's why I still hop on every now and then. Nothing has done spaceships or space/space-to-atmo travel as well as SC.

4 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

Star Citizen had to remove a planet at some point because they "ran out of space" or something.

My beloved Levski, yes. It never truly belonged in Stanton (for those who don't know the names, SC currently has 1 playable solar system, Stanton), it's a planet from the Nyx system that they had shoved into Stanton for testing purposes. They removed it to lessen the load on the servers so they could run their live events (Xenothreat, Siege of Orison), just having that additional port and players going to/from it was too intensive I guess. I do regularly miss it for both the aesthetic and the utility of another crimestat-agnostic port so you aren't stuck with only GHex as a safe haven.

[Brooksie359]

On 9/27/2023 at 8:17 PM, Middcore said:

I guess it's supposed to make it easier for people to just skim but the way they've bolded phrases in every other sentence in this article is really distracting.

 

Anyway, there's nothing much new to say about this compared to every time it's come up (not just on this forum but anywhere) the past several years.

 

I don't think it was meant from the ground up to be an intentional scam like some people do but as long as they can get people to keep throwing money at them without delivering a finished product, what incentive is there to deliver one? At some point it becomes functionally indistinguishable from a scam even if it didn't start as one, doesn't it?

 

Plus I think even if the developers sincerely want to finish it, they know that nothing they could produce would ever be able to live up to the expectations of the most devoted fans, it would make the hype inflation for Cyberpunk 2077 pale in comparison; if this game ever actually released and didn't bring about peace in the Middle East and cure cancer it would be a letdown. 

 

So whether due to grift, fear, or feature-creep, or (probably) a combination of the three, everything is against this game ever getting done. Star Citizen is the counterpoint to the "a delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is forever bad" quote people love to trot out. Without somebody (a publisher or whatever) holding a financial gun to developers' head saying You need to ship something by (date) to keep the lights on, this is what can happen. 

 

Meanwhile, as more games actually come out that offer at least part (if not all) of the type of experience Star Citizen claimed it would offer, Star Citizen gets less and less relevant to everyone except the true fanatics. 

 

I think feature creep is the biggest problem that a game would have that would necessitate a company to force the devs to finish a game. If you have a clear set of deliverables and a game plan on how to get there I don't see how in the world you would need a company to force the devs to release a half finished game. Obviously there needs to be a certain tolerance in what can be released because yes you could potentially spend forever perfecting things. You do need some type of metric to say the game is good enough for release which clearly these companies don't have or it's super off base because what most AAA devs release is actually not even beta levels of finished. 

[SansVarnic]

-= Moved to PC Gaming =-