Is Star Citizen Going to Crash and Burn?!

[Trik'Stari]

Elite, but I suspect you could apply the same to SC (I mean with those controls it's basically an FPS with free vertical movement)

Oh. I just found the controls for Elite to be unworkable. I didn't give try changing anything around though.

 

Biggest problem I had was trying to find the entrance to the damned space stations. Although the last time I played it was when it was still in what I would call a Beta.

[Commander Llama]

This PR campaign is certainly going to hurt Star Citizen, that's for damn sure. I haven't pledged since my initial KS one, and on my personal feelings... Things do feel like they are taking a long time.

 

However, my personal feelings also lack the sense of scale of this project.

 

What was Star Citizen aiming to get for funding back in 2012? 1.5 million total, iirc? 6 months before their projected initial delivery dates, they had surpassed 50 million dollars. That's x33 more than the thought they were going to get. The scale of the company and the project needed significant time to adjust. Contrary to popular internet belief, vastly increased funding doesn't mean developers can drop buckets of $100 bills into their PC cases to upgrade their game textures from 1.5K to 4K to 8K. It takes actual work, which takes actual time.

 

Now, as we speak, they're headed towards 100 million dollars. Which is just crazy amounts of cash for a video game. India sent a real space probe to Mars for less. The only examples people can conjure of game development projects getting this big are the biggest dogs out there: the GTAs, the WOWs, the CODs, the Halos, etc. Star Citizen, operating somewhat independently, is what I would call the biggest and most daring video game project in the history of mankind.

 

So yeah, it's going to take some time. Maybe a lot of patience. And they'll probably make some mistakes. And no matter what choices they make or directions they take, they will piss some people off.

 

Whether Star Citizen crashes and burns, or pans out, we need it to happen, and it'll be a huge milestone in the video game industry for a (human) generation.

 

At this point in time, it takes experienced and streamlined AAA studios about 4-6 years to produce a sequel to games they've already made 4-12 times. Star Citizen is quite a bit bolder than that, and newer and less streamlined, and the game is more complex, too. Time and patience.

 

And my closing point is that all game designers are terrible at projecting their game deadlines and all crowdfunders (and gamers) should be well aware of this. I personally never believed the game would ship in November 2014. In my head I basically doubled that, and that was before the game and company were x60 larger than they ever intended to be. Hell, what big budget games shipped on time in 2015, and were polished when they did? As far as Kickstarters go, I've funded somewhere on the order of ~15 projects total (some video game, some not), and maybe 1 or 2 shipped on time? More fuel for the "can't project deadlines worth shit" fire. In most of these cases, it's because the project ended up being at least 300% more popular than the designers anticipated. In Star Citizen's case, more like 5500%.

 

Back to my personal feelings, I'll be quite let down if Star Citizen did fail. Freelancer was one of my favourite video games ever, and that was in its "unfinished" state. Even a shadow of Star Citizen's projected goals will blow it out of the water. Good luck CIG!

[kuddlesworth9419]

Too ambitious. 

[TheMidnightNarwhal]

Well I don't care I only payed 15$ on that x-mas special.

[Yog]

the game was doomed from the beginning, bit of more than the could chew

I wouldn't say that. When it first started the kickstarter it had a reasonable set of features that could have been easily finished, it was only marginally more complex than elite dangerous. But the nature of kickstarter and their stretch goals leads to feature creep and since star citizen gained so much crowd funding it means they had a lot of stretch goals, a lot of feature creep.

[Praesi]

They had 95mio $. They better deliver.

Thats  why im very sceptic to Early Acces, they never finish the projects....look at DayZ..lol.

[Humbug]

Too ambitious. 

So what parts of the game would you say is technically not feasible?

[ACatWithThumbs]

Anyone who thinks it will fail hasn't followed the development of the game at all.
They release updates every week on everything from bugs to content and what each studio is working on.
The only thing that they aren't talking about is the campaign for obvious reasons.
The entire engine back end is also going far faster than expected because they opened a studio in Frankfurt that has tons of devs that created Cryengine in the first place.
The game is already shaping up great and that even though they are still doing major engine changes like currently a DX12 implementation:

 

[Humbug]

Anyone who thinks it will fail hasn't followed the development of the game at all.

That's what I feel too. They showed the multi-crew demo where this crew got into a ship, flew it on a mission, spacewalked outside and went into another derelict ship. And then brought it back. All seamlessly in the same instance.

 

I am not advocating that everybody pledge money to this. I myself am not a backer, I plan to buy it on release of Squadron 42.

But too many people who do not keep up with their progress updates are repeating bs that all they do is build and sell ships as a scam. Which seems quite insulting when you look at the actual work they have done...

[TopWargamer]

The problem isn't with CIG entirely but also with the engine they chose. The Cryengine just wasn't built for creating an 'openworld' space combat/simulator, as such they've had many problems with development

I don't doubt it will be released, in fact I hope it does, but will it live up to what everybody wanted it to be is the question.

Ya... To be honest I'm not sure why they chose Cry Engine. It's a great engine and everything looks shiny, but like you said, it's not exactly built for such an ambitious game.

Unreal Engine probably would have been better. Unreal Engine provides great graphics without the demanding hardware that Cry Engine needs. Plus it's fairly simple to use. There's a reason why so many developers choose Unreal Engine over Cry Engine, even though anybody can them.

And just for fun, here's the games list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

[NAP51DMustang]

Ya... To be honest I'm not sure why they chose Cry Engine. It's a great engine and everything looks shiny, but like you said, it's not exactly built for such an ambitious game.

Unreal Engine probably would have been better. Unreal Engine provides great graphics without the demanding hardware that Cry Engine needs. Plus it's fairly simple to use. There's a reason why so many developers choose Unreal Engine over Cry Engine, even though anybody can them.

And just for fun, here's the games list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Crytech was willing to give them support where as Epic wasn't. And Crytech was willing to sell them a full copy of the source code to CryEngine while Epic wasn't going to part with the source of Unreal 3. not to mention at the time of decision Unreal 4 was still very early in development and not an option and Unreal 3 is a far cry (no pun intended) from Cryengine 3

[ACatWithThumbs]

Ya... To be honest I'm not sure why they chose Cry Engine. It's a great engine and everything looks shiny, but like you said, it's not exactly built for such an ambitious game.

Unreal Engine probably would have been better. Unreal Engine provides great graphics without the demanding hardware that Cry Engine needs. Plus it's fairly simple to use. There's a reason why so many developers choose Unreal Engine over Cry Engine, even though anybody can them.

And just for fun, here's the games list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Unreal Engine isn't suited at all for a game like Star Citizen they would need to re-write everything including the lighting system.

And unlike with Unreal CIG has a studio full of Cryengine developers that developed the engine in the first place so they can just re-write the engine how they see fit.

Cryengine's phyisics and rendering system is very different from any other engine which is why they chose it.

Also they already implemented the large world feature into Cryengine there is pretty much no limit on the level size now.

[MEC-777]

Got this game for free (AMD never settle promotion) about a year ago. I'm still excited about the potential but I've kind of put it out of my mind for the time being. Until there's something substantial to actually play or do in the game, I have no reason for it to take up space on my hard drive. 

 

Will wait and see what happens...

[crystal6tak]

Do people not know just how insane it is to develop a mmorpg? A complex one in particular? The name has "MASSIVE" right in there and people think a few years will do it...lol...

 

Take World of Warcraft for example. The game wasn't even as complex or as graphically pleasing as Star Citizen is aiming to be. Also given that Blizzard was ALREADY an organized and structured studio before production, it still took them 4 years to complete enough to launch it WHILE the fact the launch wasn't even that great (if memory serves correctly) due to server back-end issues which resulted in them trying to prevent sales to slow down the ever increasing amount of players overloading their servers. Again, this is a company which is already pretty damn huge and well managed to begin with.

 

Now we have Star Citizen. Visioned to be more varied in game play, more pleasing in visual, more complex in economy, and probably more massive in world size compared to the first launched version of WoW. All this coming from a startup studio which began production WHILE growing to it's several split studio today. Seeing the bulk they have done today is enough to convince me the production of Star Citizen is going in the right direction but I'm guessing it'll take take 2-4 more years before the game is done. And by done I mean enough completed to give a great full experience as, like any other mmorpg, Star Citizen will probably continue to grow like WoW did after it's official launch.

[ADM-Ntek]

i also find it funny how people say it is taking to long look at the witcher 3 it took 4 years. and don't even get me started on fallout 4 they started working on that after 3 was finished in 2008 that is 7 years. and they probably didn't have to make as many engine changes.  

[unidentical]

i also find it funny how people say it is taking to long look at the witcher 3 it took 4 years. and don't even get me started on fallout 4 they started working on that after 3 was finished in 2008 that is 7 years. and they probably didn't have to make as many engine changes.  

Comparing CIG to Bethesda or CDPR is a bit odd. Both of the latter have released titles similar to the new games, of a similar scope with similar graphical fidelity and similar mechanics.

 

Star Citizen is a ridiculous project from a new studio in a genre that basically doesn't exist, based on an engine that wasn't designed with anything like this in mind, with a team led by a fellow who hasn't released a game in 12 years which was another overly ambitious project that suffered delays, cut features and was ultimately poorly reviewed in spite of its hype train. The last succefful game he released was Starlancer in 2000 which was a single player flight space combat sim.

Not saying they CAN'T pull it off, and I would love for them to pull it off, but this isn't a normal game from a normal developer experiencing normal challenges.

[ivan134]

i also find it funny how people say it is taking to long look at the witcher 3 it took 4 years. and don't even get me started on fallout 4 they started working on that after 3 was finished in 2008 that is 7 years. and they probably didn't have to make as many engine changes.  

It's the instant gratification mentality that's making people say such stupid things.

[Sparviero]

While I have concerns over who he has chosen to back as far as "vision" aka fanboy Ben over Wingman the entire reason we gave him money was to choose his own deadlines.

What I have issue with is their inability to deal with negative reaction which is the reason Star Marine is on forever hold. The space fighter portion can be forgiven its quirks however SM alpha would have been eaten alive instead of being seen as a tech demonstrator. So did CIG say guys have fun this will be broken for months or choose to say "it will be ready soon we promise it looks great" for a year? Sadly the latter.

[ivan134]

Comparing CIG to Bethesda or CDPR is a bit odd. Both of the latter have released titles similar to the new games, of a similar scope with similar graphical fidelity and similar mechanics.

 

Star Citizen is a ridiculous project from a new studio in a genre that basically doesn't exist, based on an engine that wasn't designed with anything like this in mind, with a team led by a fellow who hasn't released a game in 12 years which was another overly ambitious project that suffered delays, cut features and was ultimately poorly reviewed in spite of its hype train. The last succefful game he released was Starlancer in 2000 which was a single player flight space combat sim.

Not saying they CAN'T pull it off, and I would love for them to pull it off, but this isn't a normal game from a normal developer experiencing normal challenges.

I'm not sure why you're disagreeing with him when you're both saying the same thing. Maybe his punctuation threw you off? Idk. Basically he's saying that games on smaller scales like Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 took longer than Start Citizen and yet people are complaining about a game on a scale that hasn't even been thought off before.

[kuddlesworth9419]

So what parts of the game would you say is technically not feasible?

None of it isn't possible. It's doing all of them and putting them all together properly before money runs out. Most games only take one component and go with that Star Citizen is taking lots. War Thunder for example has Air and Ground battles. That is just two game components and they are both done fairly well. To achieve that has taken quite some time Star Citizen has more then just that to do. Granted War Thunder has an after penetration simulation which as far as I know Star Citizen doesn't have. Very different game though obviously. 

 

It's the same with Fallout 4 but a little different. fallout 4 has had much longer. I don't think Star Citizen has all the time in the world they will need to deliver ona product sooner rather then later. They don't have 5 years.

[NAP51DMustang]

None of it isn't possible. It's doing all of them and putting them all together properly before money runs out. Most games only take one component and go with that Star Citizen is taking lots. War Thunder for example has Air and Ground battles. That is just two game components and they are both done fairly well. To achieve that has taken quite some time Star Citizen has more then just that to do. Granted War Thunder has an after penetration simulation which as far as I know Star Citizen doesn't have. Very different game though obviously. 

 

It's the same with Fallout 4 but a little different. fallout 4 has had much longer. I don't think Star Citizen has all the time in the world they will need to deliver ona product sooner rather then later. They don't have 5 years.

good thing CIG is good on money till Summer of 2017 https://soundcloud.com/andre-peschke/runde-20-ft-chris-schmitz-nur-n00bs-glauben-nicht-an-star-citizen (note this is in german)

 

for English see https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3mvfjw/german_production_director_chris_schmitz_from/

also if anyone else wants to see the kind of person Derek Smart is, just read through these https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3murg7/psa_you_will_get_burns_if_you_try_to_defecate_on/

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3lj5nf/the_last_derek_smart_thread_well_ever_need/?

 

he attacks CIG staff on a personal level, questioning there accredited abilities, even dragging their children in from time to time. he even goes so far as to attack the fans of the game that disprove his ridiculous statements (in the second link above where Smart claimed to already have a law suite in the works with the FTC but a FOIA request proves that wrong) by calling out their clinical depression and making fun of them for it (which is funny considering Smart himself seeks help as well).

and on the subject of finances, go look up the number of tax liens Smart has against him, like the one he has in Florida. I find it completely bewildering that anyone here would consider anything this human being has to say with any shred of credibility.

 

[kuddlesworth9419]

good thing CIG is good on money till Summer of 2017 https://soundcloud.com/andre-peschke/runde-20-ft-chris-schmitz-nur-n00bs-glauben-nicht-an-star-citizen (note this is in german)

 

for English see https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3mvfjw/german_production_director_chris_schmitz_from/

also if anyone else wants to see the kind of person Derek Smart is, just read through these https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3murg7/psa_you_will_get_burns_if_you_try_to_defecate_on/

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3lj5nf/the_last_derek_smart_thread_well_ever_need/?

 

he attacks CIG staff on a personal level, questioning there accredited abilities, even dragging their children in from time to time. he even goes so far as to attack the fans of the game that disprove his ridiculous statements (in the second link above where Smart claimed to already have a law suite in the works with the FTC but a FOIA request proves that wrong) by calling out their clinical depression and making fun of them for it (which is funny considering Smart himself seeks help as well).

and on the subject of finances, go look up the number of tax liens Smart has against him, like the one he has in Florida. I find it completely bewildering that anyone here would consider anything this human being has to say with any shred of credibility.

 

I see. Well then I wish the best to them. Don't get me wrong I would love to see this game complete so I could play it but it's healthy to have some amount of cynicism (not the right word).

[rucdoc]

Just a few notes,

 

from Information I have been provided, by our community Forum Members of Linus Tech Tips have backed SC for over $250k US combined, including 8 idris.

 

I Personally have invested over $750 US, plus a bit here or there for support of the organization.

 

Star Citizen itself has one of the most open development attitudes of any I have seen, and I have seen a fair few.

 

CIG now employs more Cryengine developers than crytech does.

 

No they have not been perfect, things happen people get fired, people get hired, people find the enviroment suits them, or not, people get offered jobs they have dreamed about for their entire lives and leave to take them. projects start, are found non-viable and are stopped, technology improves and they redo the same ship 5 times because they find better ways of doing it.

 

but it works. I can log into the game, fly ships, shoot other ships, hope into the arc corp map and wander around.

 

No it's not a final game, but it does work better than several other games that have fully released in the last two years, and it's not even in an alpha state.

 

Yes there were problems with the large world demo, notably the constilation did too much damage to the retaliator and they had not yet coded in the functions to repair individual systems yet. However this also shows that they were actually playing the game, not some pre-rendered clip. someone went off script and did a little too well and then the game acted as it should.

 

so what am I trying to say, not much. However I will say this, Derek Smart, could be right, he could be wrong, it doesn't matter, he's a dick, and is a self described abusive person to people online because he thinks it's fun. For that alone he should be labeled as an abusive person, and discredited. to revive an old tradition. his name should be removed from history, because the worest punishment for anyone who seeks attention is to be forgotten.

[MrDynamicMan]

few things to point out, yes TOS get changed over time - what you should look at, seriously take a look, is what got changed; then ask yourself why is that

2nd thing: the executive producer walked out; Alex Mayberry left for "personal reasons"

and you're still telling me there's absolutely nothing wrong over there?! COME ON!

so what you're saying is a game was delayed and a guy left. "Personal reasons" could mean just about anything.

Yes, I am still telling you there is nothing wrong over there.

[HarmFull]

 

my take on this: I don't believe in crowd funding - period!

yes, I can enumerate a few games that have successfully launched but I can also point out the borderline frauds and the suits that got started because not delivering the product

the issue (as I see it) with Star Citizen is that the game should have a concrete date set in stone and abide by that

 

First of all, I do believe in crowdfunding as it has lead to some great games:

 

- FTL: Faster Than Light

- Banner Saga

- Divinity: Original Sin

- War for the Overworld

- Rimworld

 

What the main difference is between these games and Star Citizen?

The crazy amount of complexity that is Star Citizen compared to the games mentioned above. It has always been a very ambitious project and I've always been skeptical about the size of this project with the budget they've crowdfunded. Don't get me wrong but not even big developers would burn their hands on such a project and this team has bitten of way more than they can chew I think. They should try and create a presentable game from this point on and maybe add in more stuff later. 

 

I do agree that crowdfunding is a risk! It always is and therefore you should always be careful!

But it has lead to some amazing games that make every penny worth it, so 'not believing' is a bad way of thinking in my opinion.