How can this game be so sluggish?

[Majestic]

4 hours ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

I'm not really sure how you can compare an Alpha to a finished (debatable) game. I get that you're uncertain about SC but how fast were you expecting it to be made?

> ITS IN ALPHA DUDE

> proceeds to excempt product of all criticism. 

 

You know, i'm really starting to despise this kind of defense. It's the reason early-access and crowdfunding is so ripe for abuse, because buying into something causes human beings to start acting irrationally and tribalistic. When they have an invested interest, that means their purchase decision can't have been a wrong one. And they will defend it tooth and claw from anyone who tries to shatter their little narrative. Let's start with the notion that CIG can keep calling the game "alpha" indefinitely, does that mean criticism is postponed indefinitely? No. Especially since CIG doesn't give out dates, so therefor you can't argue it should be out of alpha. 

 

My problem with CIG isn't that the PU isn't done. I understand that creating a universe takes time if you're not an omnipotent deity which only needs 6 days. My problem is that for whatever reason people think he's being funny when he doesn't want to give any dates, deadlines or goals. Why not, is his planning that terrible he can't give a rough estimation? Shouldn't you be held responsible for not meeting deadlines? Is it maybe because he expected 2 mill, got 120+ mill 140+ million instead and perhaps got in over their heads and starts cramming in more and more features that bog down the progress? After 4 and a half years, you should have enough data on workflow to determine your estimated time of completion. Unless you're constantly adding features. But since he doesn't need to abide by financial investors, he can get away with this. Any professional invester would've pulled the plug if he couldn't give an estimated time of completion.

 

My problem is the danger for feature creep and it turning into CR's egoproject. The sheer amount of monetization even after they've ranked up 140 million. All the while squandering tons of money on added PR events, fancy offices, and cringy online content to aquire even more money. Why are they so desperate for money? Do they plain require it? Is that why he doesn't give any dates?

 

And frankly whatever is out now is just really not up to standards. It runs poorly, it doesn't add any function or features over even free-to-play games except for looking better and taking place in a larger map. But i'll take gameplay and framerate over a pretty skybox any day. There is a fly-around-and-press-ICC-probes. There is a mundane shooter and a dogfighting module. If you want dogfighting, go play luftrausers. Shooters are the plenty at the moment.

 

Where do these staunch defenders draw the line? It's now been 4 and a half years since the kickstarter (for reference, GTA 5 took 4 years to make). When do these "it's in alpha" people start expecting something resembling a playable experience. 6 years? 7 years? Who determines this arbitrary point in time when it is reasonable to expect something? Based on what, on which dates, on which lack of progress. This isn't something you can answer, it's all down to belief and faith. And I currently don't have enough to justify $140, or even $50.

 

I'm comparing SC to NMS because it's riding the same hypetrain. Because of the same vague promises and basically creating invested interest so people stick with the product, even when it doesn't meet their expectation. Just like how pre-order works.

 

Here is Razorfist to end it off.

 

 

[2FA]

6 hours ago, Majestic said:

snip

It's called and is an alpha because it is the base version is still being developed. As for your timeline point, I think Chris doesn't want to be bogged down by due dates or even estimated dates. Chris has given out dates before, most notably the original promised date of Star Marine which wasn't met by almost two years. Giving out estimations has backfired which generated a lot of hate and at this point I think he prefers uncertainty.

 

The fact that SC doesn't have a set due date is a bonus for me in a way, many games have failed to live up to their promises because a publisher forced to the cut content in order to make the release date.

 

Being able to play right now is just a bonus, not something to base everything off. I'm not sure what standards you're using but I'm guessing you don't have much experience when it comes to early alpha builds of games (not early access games on steam, most of those never get completed).

 

GTA 5 had the backing of a publisher and investors that demand due dates be set. The studio is also highly experienced and overall gameplay isn't much diffferent from previous GTA titles so they knew exactly what they were working towards. They also weren't creating entirely new tech and concepts. SC also didn't fully get into serious development until a year after the kickstarter so in reality it's only been 3.5 years.

 

If you really want some idea of a time line (not confirm able but better than nothing) here you go. http://imgur.com/a/BhUxp

 

I fully expected 5+ years for a game this size.

 

Side note: I find your signature ironic since you believe it's basically a pipe dream at this point even though we can't objectively say whether it is or not.

[Majestic]

55 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

It's called and is an alpha because it is the base version is still being developed. As for your timeline point, I think Chris doesn't want to be bogged down by due dates or even estimated dates. Chris has given out dates before, most notably the original promised date of Star Marine which wasn't met by almost two years. Giving out estimations has backfired which generated a lot of hate and at this point I think he prefers uncertainty.

 

The fact that SC doesn't have a set due date is a bonus for me in a way, many games have failed to live up to their promises because a publisher forced to the cut content in order to make the release date.

 

Being able to play right now is just a bonus, not something to base everything off. I'm not sure what standards you're using but I'm guessing you don't have much experience when it comes to early alpha builds of games (not early access games on steam, most of those never get completed).

 

GTA 5 had the backing of a publisher and investors that demand due dates be set. The studio is also highly experienced and overall gameplay isn't much diffferent from previous GTA titles so they knew exactly what they were working towards. They also weren't creating entirely new tech and concepts. SC also didn't fully get into serious development until a year after the kickstarter so in reality it's only been 3.5 years.

 

If you really want some idea of a time line (not confirm able but better than nothing) here you go. http://imgur.com/a/BhUxp

 

I fully expected 5+ years for a game this size.

 

Side note: I find your signature ironic since you believe it's basically a pipe dream at this point even though we can't objectively say whether it is or not.

And you just accept the fact he doesn't like giving dates, because he can never deliver? You don't see the big overarching problems this highlights? It means there is immense feature creep and overhauling taking place behind the scenes. If you have project runtime data for more than 4 years, you should be able to make a rough timeline. You know workflow, througput speeds. The only reason you couldn't is when the modules you're delivering are forever fluid and there is a indefinite goalpost shifting (feature creep) taking place. CR is a dreamer, and it will never be perfect.

 

That is some grade-A post-purchase rationalization if I ever saw one. Yeah screw holding the person you gave a 140+ million to standards. What? ...

 

Neither have you, because outside of early-acces this is one of the only games to do it. The only reason they're doing it, is to keep players invested. It works the same as pre-ordering. It means when the game drops, people have already spent hours into the game and are less likely to bail or demand a refund. It's called the foot-in-the-door technique. There is nothing friendly or altuïstic about it, it's cold hard psychology.

 

Yes I know, that's why shit gets done. CR/CIG has almost zero demands from said publishers, in the form of the backers. Because they say things like "i don't mind I don't have dates, it's a bonus". Or the ever popular "It's in alpha!". Or other rationales to justify their invested interest. We all want this game to succeed, but for fuck sake stop being so unconditionally defensive and lacking in criticism. Because without holding CR to standards, he will continue to make this his ego project. It will never be perfect, and thus he will never stop tinkering with it. It's like George Lucas syndrome. 

 

 Those are update notes, not dates. No deadlines. I wonder why nobody is asking themselves why he isn't able to give out dates. And how after 4+ years of development that reeks of poor management. You don't have to be Derek Smart to figure out something is off here.

 

That's about a half year from now, it was already in development at the kickstarter.

 

PS: You demonstrate that belief is the death of reason, how is that for irony.

 

[2FA]

7 minutes ago, Majestic said:

because he can never deliver?

That's a bold statement considering Star Marine just launched.

 

10 minutes ago, Majestic said:

Those are update notes, not dates. No deadlines. I wonder why nobody is asking themselves why he isn't able to give out dates. And how after 4+ years of development that reeks of poor management. You don't have to be Derek Smart to figure out something is off here.

Because they don't make deadlines as I already pointed out, that's why they don't announce them.

 

11 minutes ago, Majestic said:

That's about a half year from now, it was already in development at the kickstarter.

Oh please, that was barely a tech demo. They weren't even sure of the scale of the game at that point and they weren't feature locked yet. The only thing they were working on then was Arena Commander which for intents and purposes a tech demo. All of the upcoming updates are supposed to be actual feature packed which the slides showed. Everything before now was more of the groundwork game mechanics, not gameplay/feature mechanics.

 

15 minutes ago, Majestic said:

PS: You demonstrate that belief is the death of reason, how is that for irony.

An unironically ironic statement, how ironic.

[Aytex]

2.6.1 should be releasing shortly which focuses alot on performance fix

[Helly]

15 hours ago, Majestic said:

snip

So "we backers" supposedly defend this game till the end you say. Well what the hell are you (and ppl like you) doing? You're just attacking it, hows that any better? No we don't have a finished game and won't have it for another few years at least. At least all the real backers already know this. All you're doing is screaming that this game is never going to be released. Meanwhile CIG keeps releasing updates and new features, all while also giving us weekly updates on how the development is going. EVERYTHING CIG does goes directly against EVERYTHING you say. So how are we suppose to believe people like you who say its a giant scam?

 

And then you post a video from rageaholic to somehow convince people that its all a scam and we shouldn't give our money to it. That guy rages on things for money, its what he does. Why should i even watch something like that? If he doesn't rage on something he doesn't have a video. No i didn't watch it because it doesn't matter, with a name like that its a pointless video that serves no purpose other then entertain the haters of this game, who already believe this game is a scam.

 

I don't know if its a scam or not. Nobody does, i just don't believe it is and like all the backers i WANT this game to happen. That's why we all backed it, and with every update we get a little closer to what we all want, and also a little closer to proving all you haters just plain WRONG. That alone is worth it to me.

[Archeval]

just to piggyback on DeadEyePsycho, Majestic you don't seem to know what it means for something to be in alpha. 

 

When a game is in alpha the game is in constant flux, nothing is set in stone as demonstrated by their planned change to Lumberyard (Amazon flavor of CryEngine for game devs), and the constant addition to and development of the universe and ship count.

 

All this takes no small amount of effort especially because nobody has done this scale of game before, it's the equivalent of 4 games in 1 (Arena Commander, Star Marine, PU, Squadron 42) all needing to communicate and mesh well together, which isn't something that has been done before to my knowledge, so i'm not surprised it has taken this amount of time and everything so far has like DeadEyePsycho has said just frameworks and foundations to use to make the final product.

 

Also i'll list a few games that took longer than 5 years as GTA5 is a horrible example.

 

• The Last Guardian
• Team Fortress 2
• Owlboy
• Final Fantasy XV
• Duke Nukem Forever

All of these games took longer than 5 years to develop and in some cases longer than a decade, with varying amount of success. Point being you can't always expect a quick turn-around especially since they're essentially custom tailoring an engine to suit their needs to the point to where it's practically a new engine.

 

I wholly expect this game to be in development till 2018/2019 maybe even 2020. If that's to long for you then you can't be helped to understand the gravitas of their efforts

 

Edit: Additionally the development process usually entails building the intended feature first to the point that it works (stable), then refine it so that it performs more smoothly. (this is not from personal experience just from dev interviews and dev discussion boards.)

[Majestic]

On 8-1-2017 at 0:26 PM, Helly said:

So "we backers" supposedly defend this game till the end you say. Well what the hell are you (and ppl like you) doing? You're just attacking it, hows that any better? No we don't have a finished game and won't have it for another few years at least. At least all the real backers already know this. All you're doing is screaming that this game is never going to be released. Meanwhile CIG keeps releasing updates and new features, all while also giving us weekly updates on how the development is going. EVERYTHING CIG does goes directly against EVERYTHING you say. So how are we suppose to believe people like you who say its a giant scam?

 

And then you post a video from rageaholic to somehow convince people that its all a scam and we shouldn't give our money to it. That guy rages on things for money, its what he does. Why should i even watch something like that? If he doesn't rage on something he doesn't have a video. No i didn't watch it because it doesn't matter, with a name like that its a pointless video that serves no purpose other then entertain the haters of this game, who already believe this game is a scam.

 

I don't know if its a scam or not. Nobody does, i just don't believe it is and like all the backers i WANT this game to happen. That's why we all backed it, and with every update we get a little closer to what we all want, and also a little closer to proving all you haters just plain WRONG. That alone is worth it to me.

I'm not saying all backers do, but there is always that loud minority that is active on all the boards that vehemently defend their invested interest. I've also not expressed a desire for the game never to be finished, this is one of the teltale signs of your zealotry and inability to read. Aswell as not being able to take any criticism.

 

I expressed a grave concern about CR's egoproject with a few examples; 

The feature creep causing the project to crawl forward

The lack of any responsibility he's taking to financial backers (financial reports),

The dubious spending on frivolous things (large events, more ships, more features, cringy online content, bigger offices)

The utter lack of timetables or deadlines 

Monetization over adding core features (core gameplay is extremely basic at this point, still)

 

 

Yes he mentions he "gets shot for not delivering things on a schedule", but that's the whole problem. What, suddenly we're supposed to believe that you can't have timetables for ambitious projects that have never been done before? Human kind has concluded far more ambitious projects in the past and they also used deadlines. It's what gets shit done. You know the saying right? 80% of the work gets done in 20% of the time. Crunchtime is when stuff actually gets finished.

 

No deadline, no crunchtime. And due to this plethora of caveats I retracted my pledge recently, just got confirmation. But merely questioning the survivability of the project is enough to ruffle the features of the zealots. As is demonstrated here. You people could've provided evidence to refute my concerns, but by the staunch defense I get, I'm guessing there isn't any. So attack my character instead of my points, you're just proving mine.

 

On 12-1-2017 at 9:00 PM, Archeval said:

All this takes no small amount of effort especially because nobody has done this scale of game before, it's the equivalent of 4 games in 1 (Arena Commander, Star Marine, PU, Squadron 42) all needing to communicate and mesh well together, which isn't something that has been done before to my knowledge, so i'm not surprised it has taken this amount of time and everything so far has like DeadEyePsycho has said just frameworks and foundations to use to make the final product.

 

All of these games took longer than 5 years to develop and in some cases longer than a decade, with varying amount of success. Point being you can't always expect a quick turn-around especially since they're essentially custom tailoring an engine to suit their needs to the point to where it's practically a new engine.

 

I wholly expect this game to be in development till 2018/2019 maybe even 2020. If that's to long for you then you can't be helped to understand the gravitas of their efforts

 

I know, the feature creep is one of the main issues. And this "it hasn't been done before" is not an excuse. It was Chris Robert's idea to expand the scope of the project. Backers in the early start pledged for something simpler and quicker to produce. Look at the Battletech people, they received funding and created that which they promised to make. How is it benificial to the backers that CR turned into a megalomaniac.

 

None of those games had to answer to backers, but to publishers and investors. I'm sure they've had some very harsh meetings during their development and kicks in the butt. Which is what i'm asking the community to do, instead of unconditionally coddling CR. Again, it was CR's idea to continously add in more features and almost indefinitely delay the alpha phase. This is not an excuse to not uphold your responsibilities to your backers.

 

Fuck me, that sounds almost religious, are you ok?

[Helly]

1 hour ago, Majestic said:

I expressed a grave concern about CR's egoproject with a few examples; 

The feature creep causing the project to crawl forward

The lack of any responsibility he's taking to financial backers (financial reports),

The dubious spending on frivolous things (large events, more ships, more features, cringy online content, bigger offices)

The utter lack of timetables or deadlines 

Monetization over adding core features (core gameplay is extremely basic at this point, still)

You're strongest point, as you see it, is this feature creep you keep mentioning. What exactly has creeped in there according to you? I only see things that have been on the stretchgoal list since the beginning. Is it the 4 games in 1? Because that was the whole basis on which they started this project. So i dunno, maybe i've missed something so please inform me.

 

Financial reports? really? Doesn't take a report to know what they're spending it on. You even name a list of things they spend it on. lets go through it....

large events are to let people meet and see the game and a bit of the development first hand. It is something for the backers that are interested. Tickets are sold for these events so not all if any money from the funding is spend on that.

 

how are more ships a bad thing? Everyone always wants more ships. These are made by a different team then the one that works on the game itself. It does not slow down the development of the game itself. All these ship have also been mostly announced for sometimes years. This game has a lot of different alien races who all need their own unique ships because alien... then for the humans there are a lot of different companies who all have their own unique style of ships. Seems logical to me to have so many different ships, if you expected them to stop making new ships a year or more ago then its just you who's at fault....

 

more features is not a new point here.. isn't that the feature creep you keep mentioning? Or is this something else? So again, all features have so far been announced long before and mostly in the stretch goals.

 

Cringy online content? Don't even know what that means. You keep throwing things out there hoping at some point it will convince us you're right. Random things like this that we don't know what you're talking about is not gonna convince anyone.... be more specific.

 

Bigger offices are needed because the team is constantly growing to make the development go faster. So they do something that should stop this "crawling forward" and its not good enough? You're just unhappy it takes over 4 years so you're just grasping at straws here for some excuse to get a refund.

 

The lack of timetables is because any developer (and i'm one to, just not for SC) hates timetables and deadlines. It's why they went with crowdfunding. There's no "We're cutting your funding because its taking to long, just release the game and fix shit after.". Which in my opinion is a good thing. A game like this would never have been green lit by any publisher because its just to big, to ambitious for them. Also they did release a timetable a few months back for 2.6. But unfortunately they haven't updated it yet for 3.0. So they do have deadlines and schedules, they're just not always shown to us. They've also missed the deadlines they have told us to many times so they found it unfair to keep giving them to us only to not make the deadline again. Since the funding is still coming in i'm guessing here that most of us can live with that, just not you and people like you.

 

Monetization over adding core features? what does that even mean? Another random thing that's suppose to convince us of something. You have to start with the basics and move up from that. If the basics aren't done it's pointless to move on. Once the first star system is complete, the amount of content in the game is going to explode and expand rapidly. Since everything they need to make it is done and they just need to build new systems which at that point can be done really fast.

 

on a side note here:

I never said you didn't want this game to be finished, i said "All you're doing is screaming that this game is never going to be released." Which you are, because you asked for a refund because you don't believe CR is going to release this game outside of alpha releases... which means its not finished but lets ignore that little fact shall we?

 

So don't tell me i don't read what you're saying, it just mostly makes no sense and completely fails to convince me of anything other then that you have some problem with CR and don't believe in his project (which you call his ego project).

[Majestic]

4 hours ago, Helly said:

The lack of timetables is because any developer (and i'm one to, just not for SC) hates timetables and deadlines.

Topkek mate. 

 

Yeah I can see why someone would 'fail to convince' you when this is your cognitive bias. Just utter rationalization. We're done, zealot.

I can't wait for another meltdown of fanboys once SC turns into NMS. Fuck me, i'm going to need a ton of popcorn.

[rentaspoon]

On 14/01/2017 at 3:21 PM, Majestic said:

Topkek mate. 

 

Yeah I can see why someone would 'fail to convince' you when this is your cognitive bias. Just utter rationalization. We're done, zealot.

I can't wait for another meltdown of fanboys once SC turns into NMS. Fuck me, i'm going to need a ton of popcorn.

You know for someone who accuses people of defending something they've put money into of being fanboys or denialist, your going out of your way to prove your point. Must be post refund regret right?

 

Has it ever occured to you that people might actually enjoy the game at a happy 60fps? And that the "lack of content" is made up by the actual skill of a flight model that isn't in another game? Fanboy or not, I've got my moneys worth out of the game and am still enjoying the different iterations in every patch. I'm sorry you didn't, I hope you get your refund. For the sake of us all.

[Mihle]

Btw when I played a free week thing, I got more FPS on medium settings, than I got on low.

[WhiteSkyMage]

Hey guys,

With this crazy discussion of defending the project and if it's a vaporware or not, some people pointed out some points but I think some ignored them. So again, you have to think about those before you throw criticism against CR and his team.

1. First look at what the game was when the project began its kickstarter, the people they had and the goals for the game. It wasn't "STAR CITIZEN" back then, they wanted 2 mil for just "Squadron 42" single player game. "Star Citizen" was born after the kickstarter shot upwards and CR promised they won't have a publisher if it reaches 20 mil. Well - *looks at the AAA scene* - aren't we all fed up with publishers with the way they cut content & give it as DLC, bad ports, broken promises and....more nightmares? Yes some of them REALLY DO come with good and finished games (CD Project RED). The Witcher 3 came out almost without bugs. HOW MANY YEARS did it take them? What I have seen in recent years from publishers is nothing less than that they are doing the MINIMUM to satisfy the gamers and get the big money (because investors don't want to risk on bigger projects). If this is the case, then when are we going to get an ambitious project like Star Citizen to ever come out of a publisher? I don't think this will be even possible...

2. You know, Chris Roberts is a visionary...

On 1/7/2017 at 8:15 PM, Majestic said:

CR is a dreamer ...

... just like many other "dreamers" (ex. Steve Jobs). Do you think he would ever be able to satisfy the investors with his dreams, if CIG ever had a  publisher? He would have ended up kicked out of the BoD, just like Steve got kicked out of Apple. Star Citizen would then be released with 1/3 of the features promised, it would receive a lot of bad reviews and it would end up unfinished, just like Freelancer (not saying that Freelancer is a bad game - but it's not finished by CR) and end up as NMS. When you have a publisher, you can't have an ambitious project with unknown budget / features (which is what Star Citizen IS essentially). However, let me give you a quote, which many of you, I'm sure, will criticize, but this can't be more true, especially for Star Citizen: "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad" - Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo.

 

3. @Majestic I agree with you that they are constantly overhauling the ships and adding new features, I can not deny that, it's true, and the weekly Around the Verse shows exactly that....and it also shows that flow of new features, not that some of them make the fans think that it's a waste of time putting them in the game (toilets, showers, vending machines....yeah...there's more!). But even if people think "oh no that's not a useful feature for me - I won't use a toilet" - IT DOES NOT MEAN that it slows down progress - perhaps it may even be part of the actual gameplay that Chris is thinking (we don't have a copy of his brain plugged into a computer to know what he is thinking). Remember this is a crowd funded project and they are aiming to "satisfy everyone", so obviously you will keep adding features when you have a million people, everyone asking questions and suggesting stuff - those may not only be CR's ideas, it's people's too - the issue is that satisfying everybody will be an impossible task - the only question is, when are they going to draw the line? - and i think your answer would be "never".

 

In that case, just as many people do - wait for it. Don't buy a pack, don't invest, but just wait. This is really the best thing you can do to stay safe. Or only invest the minimum you can if you really want to play alpha. I am also $140 in and yes i agree - it's not worth spending that much.

[JH275]

On 25.12.2016 at 4:54 AM, Tocsin_786 said:

I understand its in Alpha, and they are switching away from CryEngine, but I should not be getting 48 FPS at 720p, on low graphics settings in Star Marine, on a 970. I could deal with the 24FPS on area 18 at 1080p, because It was a massive sprawling city based map. But Star Marine is an FPS shooter, and the map has nothing really special in it for me to get such low frames that I had to change my resolution down. 

They aren't switching away from CryEngine. They're just swapping to amazons version of it. An engine change wwould not be practical at any point in game development.