Vapourware Star Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

Except looking at the rate ol' Chris is growing, it might actually be the other way around.

 

The game is taking a long time to be ready.
Some people are wondering why it is taking so long.
Every milestone was missed - the original full release was Nov 2014.

After three years there are only "modules" that don't seem connected and the core (the galaxy) of the game does not yet appear to exist at all. This delay has created anxiety in some who wanted to believe that an amazing game would have a development cycle of a year or two.

Star Citizen employs some 200+ people and therefore has a burn rate of ~2-3 million a month in salaries and overhead.

Someone estimated that there was around 8 million in the bank (so around three to four months if they receive no more monies.)

A known agitator started "investigating" how the money was being spent - it's an easy target since there were and are clear management inefficiencies. Plus every milestone was missed so it's even easier to ask questions like, "What is happening? Why is the game delayed?" As an "industry expert" he claimed that what Star Citizen was going to be could not be done for anything less than hundreds of millions (I think the figure he used was around 200 million? something like that.)

The game has raised ~90 million to date. That's a lot of money when looked at as a lump sum. Most people don't know the cost of having employees. If they are paying out 2 million / month (which is a reasonable and conservative amount it's probably closer to 3 million at this time) that's 24 million a year. Three years - that's 72 million. If there is around 8 million in the bank that leaves 10 million "missing." The number is an easy target for simplified math that can be spun in a questionable manner.

Since the number is large there is a fair amount of... room for "softness" in the budget. This means there is a strong possibility of monetary mismanagement and waste. Chances are they have mismanaged their money. Even if that was "only" 10% of the budget that's still 9 million that was wasted.

Now ex-employees who were disheartened by their experience at the company have spoken out on their complaints. They are being given a platform.

Is it all true? Probably to an extent but is it the end or a total catastrophe? I don't think so. A game like what Star Citizen wound up being is going to take a long time to make - based on the development cycles of MMOs and other large projects. I wouldn't be surprised if it would take some five+ years to complete given the scope of the project. Unfortunately instead of communicating that Cloud Imperium continues to insist that the game is just around the corner and with a little more support... at least that's how it seems to me. I could be very wrong since I don't follow the game that closely. For all I know they could have the stated completion date to be in 2017.

 

Thank you. How can this game have had so many people working on it for so many years? He initially planned everything on a 5 million budget, how big must be the scope. A space sim shouldn't be that hard to develop, space offers limited physics, graphical challenges and you can't land on planets no?

He could have easily run away with 80 million at least and let a smaller dev team develop something of a limited scope. Not even a good scammer.

 

You are not looking at procedural generated space sim with ships made out of 5 polygons.
Point of SC and budget behind is to make proper hand crafted space sim in vein of FreeSpace or Wing Commanders.

That isn't cheap or easy to make. Especially not at scale SC tries to do it.
I think on next SC event they will finally talk about on SQ48. Chris said that after multicrew live demo.

Persistant universe will be still far off but SQ48 should be next year i think or half of it as by Chris commenting it said that they will release first first set of missions or something like that.

I think people who ask those question should always watch first trailer we got when game was announced. This is the vision for the game. As grand as possible, kind of statement. "We go all in for space game and this will be the biggest baddest space sim game ever !"



This is why people donate money for it and funded it in that first month. To get proper funded space game not some cheap knockoff that emulate old 2000 era of space sims.


TLDR:

They want to make this:



edit 2:

ESTIMATED SIZE FOR SC WILL BE 100GB+. And almost nothing of that will be video files that could swell up instalation.
Kind of says a lot about project.

I this will be the first game that will require SSD drive to play properly or even NND storage (1,5 GB transfer rate vs SSD)

 

Perkel, everytime i see your posts, i wonder if you believe that Spaghetti Monster will come and save you?

Its like somebody comes to you and tells you the Sky is blue, you know its blue, but you tell everybody is green, because otherwise you will go mad.

 

Feature creep. FFS, they're adding an FPS to their space sim. Who wanted that? I'm also sure that there's a lot of people working on making very big and detailed spaceships that they can sell for thousands of dollars each. And there's probably more people working in marketing than working on the game.

 

Feature Creep is probably indeed the biggest danger for this project.
Normally, you have pathological NO-sayers somewhere up the chain of managment that have to be dealt with before you can add something new (which is both a hassle and a boon), but if your Alphamonkey is a "GIMME MOAAAAR"-Type, there is a real danger of spreading your budget out to thin.
The shooter part is something that would have been put into an addon/dlc/later patch in a company with working Qualitymanagment, and rightfully so.
It doesn't add to the key-experience of the game but binds a fuckton of ressources.
Besides, designing a Shooter experience that is not utter boring is quite the task, trying to create a good space sim and a good shooter at the same time in the same game is just asking for trouble.
I mean, its a fun idea and probably nice when its working, but seriously, concentrate on the core of the game before you add half-assed layer over layer of additional stuff.
That usually doesn't turn out well.

 

I think the fps part can work well doing in advance. Keep in mind he will release a linear space opera game before he comes up with the freeroaming part. Having a WC / BSG kind of game with additional missions on foot could be really cool.

 

No. I simply think people overreact because they see 30-40-50-60-70-80 mln and they simply don't know what to think.

IF RSI would do their work behind closed door then it would be justified to call them scam artists. Problem here is that SC is to date best archived development of any game ever beside direct videos of people working on a game.

They produce almost weekly videos and talk shows on what they are currently doing and they don't only talk about it but show that stuff, models being done and so on.
You could argue about it being scam when there wasn't arena commander or other stuff shown but alas they are here to see.

Those milions they keep getting IS because people see that they are not scam artists. They see progress, they see content, they see game being made and this is ultimately reason why after almost 3 years they still get like 3mln monthly in hard cash.

Yes they have delayed things a lot. But those delays were made because of change of scope. They got more money their scope simply increased. They had to even scale back streachgoals to simple stuff like new painjob because project rose to quickly.

If someone can be worried about something it should be actually technical aspect of for example persistant universe like net code or other stuff like that. Not that game is not actually being made. Feature creep is also big worry which i will handle in response to post below.

Feature creep, yes. But it all depends on how it will be handled. If this will be just small part of game then they can do that reasonably well without hindering other stuff.

To make comparison.

Anyone played X-Rebirth ? If you had balls of steel for bad game you would totally see why FP in that game didn't work.

Problems:
- Lack of content. If you want to have FP you need shitload of different content or you will be walking is fucking same spaces for shitload of time which is completely devastating to gameplay
- Lack of any meaningful actions. If whole point of FP is to get to UI screen on station then FP is needless. X-rebirth proved that.


Is FP right idea ? Does being avatar and using equipment could be part of meaninful experience instead of being just a ship shooting lasers ? Does other stuff not connected directly to flying ship could be fun ?

We won't know it until we will see full game. At this point we can only assume: IT will fail or we don't know. There isn't any game to prove that mixing proper FP game with space game could work. Games who tried that failed or focused on different things than being space sim game.

I mean this is why they are doing FPS module:



FP part of game is as important for this piece as flying a ship itself. Without FP you would have standard mission to fly to seoctor get close to ship wait a while and go back after some fighting to station.

 

We've had shooters flooding the market for over a decade, without any space sims in sight. People got excited for Star Citizen because they wanted a space sim, finally. After all those years. And now, they're going to get it years later than they were supposed to, at best, and probably never. Because Roberts decided to make a fucking FPS.

 

The game concept was really graphic intensive spaceships in space.

Basically a wing commander game with high resolution ships in a galaxy that players could interact with one another in. Think what Elite: Dangerous currently is. That's what the plan for Star Citizen -was-.

Somewhere along the line instead of focusing solely on making great spaceships in a spaceship environment they switched over to making characters who could interact with the galaxy at all of its level. So instead of you buying a ship and being in the ship you're now a character who could walk into the ship or in a station or on a planet or...

This shift led to the issue of how to interact with other players - becoming a first person perspective game. This then led to creating a FPS sub-game that turned into a FPS game.

Currently, it looks like they are developing three or four games and trying to mesh them together only to discover that there are problems with doing that. That leads to having to redo all kinds of things - even scrapping months of effort simply because of a moving target within the design.

Imagine being asked to write something about the First World War. Then, as you are writing, the person who asked you to write it says - hey, you're going to combine what you're writing with this other person who is writing about the first hand experience of a soldier on the ground. The two pieces have to mesh seamlessly. Let's say you were writing in the third person and more of a historical fact thing while the other person was writing from the first person perspective more like a memoir. To combine the two you'd have to pretty much start all over. The information remains the same and you could reuse many of the ideas however the combining of two separate things requires a total rewrite.

Now, to follow that up with what Star Citizen went through let's say you've begun the rewrite and you're about a third of the way through when the order comes in that you need to combine your combined stuff with yet another person's work. That other person, for whatever reason, was writing in the present tense and was writing from a raccoon's perspective.

Once again you'd have to go back to the start and I suspect you'd probably feel a bit frustrated. I know I would.

That's what appears to be happening inside the development of Star Citizen.

Each time a major shift in focus / design happens a whole lot of stuff has to be redone. And each time that happens some people will get so frustrated that they'd quit. When a person is replaced there is a lead time to get their replacement up to date with what's happening - so things progress slowly.

 

You are talking to dude who played space sims even when they hit lowest low (like x rebirth).

All it depends of implementation. If they will keep it as gameplay option (like in case of boarding) and for few story missions or briefing and stuff like that it will be ok.
If they will create that part of the game just to have Q3a style thing or some other shit, then it will be fucked up and will detract from game.

They are using cryengine which is basically FPS engine and default kit for it handles from start shooting and stuff. So it is not like they had to change their engine or something to do that.

Imo question is simply how much resources they pull to do that. At 90mln bucks they right now have whole studio dedicated to this part of the game and by end of this year they will brake 100mln+. They have money that is certain.

Feature creep is real tho and could fuck up things. Especially for net code which will probably now have to fight with other parts of game.

 

Some people coded an FPS into starcraft. Star Wars Battlefront had that too. It can't be that hard to do, I can't see a lot of resources going into it. Graphic wise a space sim purely in space should be easier to pull than Mass Effect where they had to cover a wide range of assets, atmosphere and program their own engine, care about optimization. Here this guy is going for cry engine, pure space, no planet and for big systems.

I see those big models for the ship, but a lot of these were already in concept and modeled, and not that it would blow more than a small team when you work with the same assets and textures most of the time. There's a bunch of pilots with the same uniform and asteroids? The interior of the ship will be reusing the same assets, just change in shape, can't be that hard to do either. The RPG systems can't be that costly to implement?

I just don't see the 100Million budget, if I compare it to any other game that had a 100Million budget solely on development (skyrim style marketing campaigns not included).

What I'm hoping is that this guy did not use that much money and just carefully sent it into a bank account and is planning a comfortable retirement in the Bahamas. This is what I would do if retards paid me 20 000 for a pixel.

 

This makes more sense that way. Too bad. I'm still hoping he squeezed a little 40 million in Switzerland.

 

- SC was never supposed to be Elite. Elite games are just sandbox spacesims where SC was supposed to be throw back to 2000 and pre 2000 era of space opera sims like Wing Commander or FreeSpace2. Elite is completely different type of game. Persistant universe part of SC is supposed to be game resembling Elite but that part is for later and done completely differently (procedural vs handmade aproach). SQ48 is what people mostly funded.

- First person view was part of design from start. There wasn't any point SC developement where there wasn't walking avatar this goes back to original demo from 2012 presented at GDC. Whole point of SC was to create atmosphere in which you are pilot of ship not ship itself. So going to briefings, maning up ships, etc were part of game from start. Difference here is that in earlier games there wasn't simply manpower and power in PCs to do that and space part of game.

- Their modules are just therms for their milestones. Like you i had problems with it. I mean can they mash things together and not brake anything ? Answer for that came with Multicrew demo i posted above. That demo featured all of their modules (including FPS module ((just without guns)) and they worked well (live demo) aside from janky third person animations (they apperently have completely new animations that are being finished up and old ones will be thrown out)

But yeah they increased scope of the game a lot mainly for Persistant universe part of game.

If you are like me waiting mainly for SQ48 then i think it is safe to say they will deliver on that front.
If you are waiting for persistant universe then i think you are about too see clusterfuck for at lear 2 years since release.

Literally cryengine they are using to make this game is mainly FPS engine and comes with default package that is barebones FPS at click of a button.

Actually you can see that in animations they currently use. They will change them because they were made for FPS in which you can't see 3rd person and they look weird as fuck. They will be replacing all animations soon and rerigging whole animations systems to handle proper 3rd person view.

I mean look at this (crysis)

 

In Wing Commander Prophecy there was a mission where your captain infiltrated an alien station or ship by foot (while you were defending the outside), and you got video transmission of him advancing in this area from his point of view, eventually being attacked and killed by a slimy alien creature. Well, it was then when I thought it would be nice, if the player could have participated in this infiltration.

 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/art...ns-Its-Star-Citizen-Sources-Vetting-and-Respo

 

This is a load of cock.

WC I and II had Bluehair, you WERE Bluehair and the ship have different rooms, sure it was basic (WC I was the bar and fellow pilots were talked to there, there was the briefing room door that launched the next mission) but it both evolved and devolved in the series, III and IV had several different screens of the ship, two simply had a load/save barracks and plot was progressed automatic in scenes).

Dont give me the crap "player was the ship", this is a load of bullshit as it was clear Bluehair/Balir was the pilot we controlled and the game make very evident of that.

What the fucking point of rendering the ship interior when a screen does the job just fine? Its simply adding tedious because realism that the most idiotic bullshit as if walking around a ship doesnt get real old real fast.

 

I just remembered, this FPS/space game combo has been done before... by Deep Shadows

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precursors_(video_game)

It's actually pretty good.

You can use it to dry your tears when CIG declares bankruptcy in 2016.

 

I wouldn't call Precursors good. It's decent, but has a lot of rough edges.

 

Backed this game because it seemed like he was going to make a Wing Commander 5/Privateer 3/Freelancer 2 mash-up. And because it looked bloody ambitious just by trying to accomplish that. I liked that.

By now it seems the ambition got the better of him and he ended up throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the feature list. I got little hope of this ever being a real game. Still, if he pulls it off...

 

That's why rich people have a charity foundation for their wives to manage and keep them far away from their enterprises.

I was on the edge of backing it, because I like pretty spaceships and good old WC. But in the end, the sales pitch was too confusing. Their grab bag approach of cinematic campaign, persistent world, realistic economy, first-person shooter and so on seemed to bee too fuzzy and either lacked a coherent and strong vision or at least failed to communicate it.

So I guess, it's back to Wing Commander Saga or watching CIG's 8 hour twitch stream for the 25th anniversary of Wing Commander.

 

I often wonder if people who backed Star Citizen and now bitch about feature creep are actually retarded or they just pretend to.

That's the only way it could explain how they didn't realize FPS BOARDING WAS IN SINCE THE KICKSTARTER CAMPAGIN WAS STILL RUNNING, YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!

It was the 3 point fucking 5 million dollars stretch-goal. At 4 millions they had outside the ship combat and melee, at 20 they had planetary combat. That was a long time ago and the FPS part was a thing from the beginning.

I think a lot of you missed on the fact that they didn't push feature creep as money poured over, but "content creep". The stretch-goals post 20mils were mostly new ships, new weapons or new systems, with the occasional new enhanced tech or adding pets.

If it was a problem, it was from day 1.

I don't think people realize that making an AAA game of this scope comes with a shit-ton of bloat. GTA V was made in 4 years or more, with a vastly bigger crew and budget, more experience from previous games and a headstart in general in tech. Same with WoW. Shit, Starcraft 2 is apparently in development since 2003, and it's still two months away from being completely released, with all expansions.

So the problem here I rather think is that Chris just couldn't handle that bloat. Between fucking his own game design-wise with selling all those ships and shit and having 4 studios all over the planet? And in charge a guy like Chris who hasn't done a game in a decade?

I've seen it personally how bad managers, designers and planners act. They almost always overcompensate for their small dicks. With new "inventive" way to tackle solutions, "keeping a dialogue" and coming with all sorts of mumbo-jumbo and bullshit instead of getting the job done. They always manage to complicate an already too complicated line of work.

Look at the quotes in the jobs section of their website, it's filled with pedestrian bullshit about visions and challenges. When you get all these hipsters and people with minimal real-life experience developing games at all, let alone space games ... then you have a problem no matter how big you are.

Like others have said before, the scope of this project was not really THAT big. It's still essentially Eve Online lite with good combat and a little FPS mechanic thrown in. Genres have been combined successfully before and it's not that hard if the FPS part is a bit more barebones than usual.

No, the problem was just the team behind the project and its scope. Of course, maybe they'll still do it, I still give them 1 or 2 years until I call this project completely hopeless.

 

But it was never a problem. The issue is not that they have stretched themselves beyond their capabilities. The issue is that they don't seem to have any focus at all. Making an FPS/Spacesim hybrid with that kind of budget would have been a piece of cake for a solid, well organized development team. Deep Shadows did it and they are a fucking ghetto company.

Of course, there is one thing that needs to be pointed out there. Chris Roberts is a producer, not a game developer. What if the people he hired suck to begin with? Are there even designers capable of making a Wing Commander type of game or a solid FPS in this day and age? What they have shown of the FPS portion of the game is very reminiscent of modern shooters. That may have less to do with Chris Roberts "selling out" and more to do with modern devs not knowing any better.