• @Rottcodd@lemmy.world
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    1211 month ago

    Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

    This is what he’s done throughout his career - the only thing that’s notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

    It’s entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn’t bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn’t even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

    • P03 Locke
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      161 month ago

      Chris Roberts is still rich, and could probably retire right now without worrying about anything. He could tank the company, and he wouldn’t care.

      • lime!
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        251 month ago

        the wing commander series was famous for inflated development costs, freelancer was repeatedly delayed and eventually released like five years after it’s announcement, and since then… he’s been working on star citizen

        • SSTF
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          61 month ago

          Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.

          Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.

    • @Shadywack@lemmy.world
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      41 month ago

      I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He’s always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn’t know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.

  • peopleproblems
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    1161 month ago

    And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.

    I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.

    Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.

    • I Cast Fist
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      131 month ago

      NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn’t call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems

      All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.

    • ms.lane
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      1 month ago

      Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-

      They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.

      Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.

  • @Allero@lemmy.today
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    711 month ago

    That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.

    The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.

    Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!

    Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won’t be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.

    • @Astronauticaldb@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.

      Edit: clarity and conciseness: added “originally” to the end of the last sentence.

      • @Allero@lemmy.today
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        1 month ago

        Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.

        And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there’s plenty of buyers.

        Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.

  • @shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
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    651 month ago

    Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.

    • @slaacaa@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.

      Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.

  • Adderbox76
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    571 month ago

    Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never “release” a finished game, you’re not going to be blamed for “bugs” while still collecting money on in-game purchases.

    There’s a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It’s been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.

    • Scrubbles
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      51 month ago

      If massive universe sums like that were technically feasible all of the other studios would have done it. They were overly ambitious and didn’t understand the limits

      • @Scolding7300@lemmy.world
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        21 month ago

        In terms of immersion I think they’ve done a great job. Played during a free weekend. But they need to aim for a gameplay loop, polish, and release. Not this feature creep mentality

  • @alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.

    To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

    So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.

    This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

    • @G0ldenSp00n@lemmy.jacaranda.club
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      431 month ago

      This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn’t just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.

      • Agent Karyo
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        191 month ago

        I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.

        They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.

        You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.

        The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.

      • @Fades@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Classic, the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is SO sure that they know the truth. So much so they’re out here correcting people and handing out false info.

        so the engine they are building is actually pretty good

        Keep living in a false reality pal. I’m sure you k or so much more than the engine dev who replied to you.

        How much $$ have you wasted on star citizen lmao

    • Billiam
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      321 month ago

      To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

      In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.

    • sp3ctr4l
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      1 month ago

      Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!

      … Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?

      I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that’s almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.

      • @perslue@lemmy.ca
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        101 month ago

        After 10 years they increased the per server population from 50 to 100, but don’t worry server messing soon TM.

        So no.

        • @limitedduck
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          121 month ago

          Meshing tests have gone up to 2000 and the shards that were left on overnight were 300-500. The current evocati build of 4.0 has meshing enabled, just limited to 100 for now

    • Nailbar
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      101 month ago

      This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

      If you’re talking about Chris, he’s a coder too, and wrote some of the entiry container system for the game.

      I’m not sure where you’re getting your info about them scaling everything down and that being the cause for wonky physics, though.

    • Cris
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      1 month ago

      Wow… I’m pretty crap at making decisions, but like… not that crap 😅

      That’s like an impressively bad choice

  • @yamanii@lemmy.world
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    351 month ago

    I’ve genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There’s just no actual focus on getting the game done.

    We have a saying here that translates to something like this: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.

    • @Fades@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      My boss LOVES to throw that out all the time as a defense for when I inform him that he and mgmt are rushing something out the door that isn’t ready.

      It definitely has wisdom but it’s not something to wave around all the time either.

      Not that that’s the problem here, SC ain’t ever coming out and it’s not because of perfection. It’s because it’s a scam lol

      Read this fucking gofundme trash: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

  • Mayor Poopington
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    341 month ago

    Damn. I had really hoped my grandchildren would get to play Star Citizen in their lives.

  • @limitedduck
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    281 month ago

    Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they’re still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they’re going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1

      • @arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        Fun fact: If you take the year, add two, you’ll get the current planned release date for sq42

        This isn’t dependent on the current year

      • @limitedduck
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        111 month ago

        Personally, I don’t think they should be aiming for 100 anymore, even if it was promised. That number was for the original pitch and was arbitrarily high since it was for a much shallower and easier to create game

        • @fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
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          111 month ago

          I’d gladly take a single functioning system rather than wait another 12 years of my life for this Kickstarter project to deliver.

        • @arudesalad@sh.itjust.works
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          51 month ago

          Today they announced that it was cut down to 5 and they will slowly work their way back up to 100 after launch (whenever that is)

          • @limitedduck
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            51 month ago

            It was a good decision. It was also smart of them to review the initial 100 planet goal to add some much needed context

          • @limitedduck
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            1 month ago

            How are they gone? The current servers are hosted by CIG, there’s no p2p or player hosted servers. How would that even work for an MMO?

            • lime!
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              71 month ago

              dedicated servers == player-hosted servers, usually

              • @limitedduck
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                31 month ago

                I would say private server is more what you’re referring to, also CIG’s wording, but maybe agree to disagree. A quick search says that they haven’t cancelled that feature, but it’ll appropriately be the very last thing they work on

                • lime!
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                  51 month ago

                  the common understanding of “dedicated server” is a server binary you can download and run yourself. a “private server” is usually still hosted on the company’s hardware.

    • @SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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      141 month ago

      One of my ex coworkers has spent somewhere in the ballpark of 12k. He sells, flips and trades rare ships to sell back to people after the exclusivity of the ship has expired. He’s made like 4k. I don’t understand gaming anymore.

      • @ours@lemmy.world
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        161 month ago

        That’s not gaming anymore than people buying toys, leaving them in their boxes as an “investment” are into playing with toys.

        Meanwhile the rest of us are buying games, playing them, enjoying them, moving on to other games and so on.

        • @SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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          31 month ago

          Yea that’s where I’m at. I’m platform agnostic, and the only game I simp for is the original halo trilogy. Microtransactions are dirty. And making digitized items a financial value just to sell them is the same as what you said, like Funko pop collectors.

      • @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        21 month ago

        Lol if that game is ever finished, I bet there’s going to be some people who paid way too much for a ship that turns out to completely suck but seemed ok on paper. Kinda like a PT cruiser, except it looked ok on paper.

        • @SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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          21 month ago

          Lmfao the PT Cruiser! My Grandmother’s new husband has one, and he put flame decals on it as one does…backwards.

          Yes theres a shit ton to balance. Honestly no mans sky seems more appealing now adays. I might go fire that up on my xbone.

    • @throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world
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      131 month ago

      They got my $40 in 2012. I absolutely loved the Wing Commander series; Wing Commander II was an embarrassingly important part of my adolescense, I love space sims, and still had fond enough memories of the name Chris Roberts that I didn’t think he’d blatantly lie and steal from me.

      How people are still giving these clowns money I have no idea.

      • SSTF
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        1 month ago

        People are buying the dream. There is personal investment now- this isn’t a game, this is their game. Supporters tend to talk like this is a community project, not a transaction between a customer and a studio.

        Whenever the studio finally folds, I guarantee there will be whales lamenting that if they’d only spent a little more they’d have kept the game afloat.

      • @Summzashi@lemmy.one
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        31 month ago

        Same here. It was a much different time. Lots of games that originated in kickstarter became succesful. This just seemed like another one.

        Hindsight is 20/20

    • @reksas@sopuli.xyz
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      41 month ago

      i want to fall for it yet i keep waiting for further development, thankfully they occasionally do free flight events so I can actually test the game without having to pay

    • @ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netOP
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      31 month ago

      I used to be like you, laughing and enjoying life.

      The new director of technology we just hired a few months ago flexed about how he’s now hit 6-digit donations to Star Citizen. It’s still early and he hasn’t shown any results, but if he’s following the Star Citizen path of growth, my department is fucked.