The Star Citizen Thread v5

[Tippis]

Citation needed. The man shat out successful space games left and right. Where were you in the 90s?

“Left and right” = 3, all of which were mostly copies of each other. Well, 2½ — he didn't do all that much on WC4. He created a little franchise, sure, but the highlights of that series were the ones where he stayed away.

Also, his first attempt almost ruined the company, so success was iffy there for a while, and his last attempt was so derailed by his caring more about movies than games that he ended up losing his company and just got into the move business entirely instead…

 

[Karhu Major]

Not really. He only had much input on a handful of them that were simple shooters riffing on Larry Holland's games. He quickly got bored and handed off the bulk of the games attributed to him to his brother to make and was way more interesting in FMV and a brilliant Hollywood career that stubbornly eluded him after a disastrous film and a string of bad investments in productions that didn't make money.

Wha... What? I somewhat agree with you on his flopped movie production career but man... Calling the Wing Commander series "simple shooters" "riffing" on Larry Holland's games... Ease the hate boner for a second will ya. First of all, Wing Commander was published BEFORE Star Wars X-Wing. It's also known as one of the, if not THE most successful game series in it's genre. I get it, you fellows here don't like Chris, but no need to talk stuff down like this.

I tend to prefer games more than cutscenes. He's had a few decades to strut his stuff and it's obvious CR ain't much of a storyteller. Whenever he talks about gaming and talks up his supposed innovations, it's obvious it's a man who has been in suspended animation since the 90s and missed out on what most of the industry was up to while he tried to conquer Hollywood.

This is all just subjective dribble.

“Left and right” = 3, all of which were mostly copies of each other. Well, 2½ — he didn't do all that much on WC4. He created a little franchise, sure, but the highlights of that series were the ones where he stayed away.

See above. Talking stuff down just because you don't like the man is quite immature.

 

[milligna]

I mean, how do these guys rationalize that in their head? The fact that the better "Chris Roberts games" have almost no Chris Roberts content or needed Chris to be kicked out of the building for the game to be finished years later? What does that say about the Chris Roberts brand?

"Oh I love Privateer..."

And his contributions on that were, what?

"Freelancer! I wish we could have Freelancer again."

We almost didn't have it the first time due to that blundering buffoon. They had to get rid of him and STILL needed another 3 years to actually make a shippable game that was still 1/10th of what he promised.

There's a reason why almost ALL of the old Origin crowd other than his brother and Tony Z -- have departed the project by now. Was I missing anyone? Seems like those guys moved on.

First of all, Wing Commander was published BEFORE Star Wars X-Wing.

Uh, so? OBVIOUSLY. I said they were simple shooters riffing on Larry Holland's games. Battlehawks: 1942 and Their Finest Hour were first, which Chris bragged about "reverse-engineeering." The X-Wing series merely slapped a coat of SF paint on it and royally trounced the Wing Commander games in the process. Lawrence did a bang-up job: they did better missions, they did better stories, X-Wing vs Tie Fighter did multiplayer way ahead of the curve. Hell, better networking than the PU.

Making 386s nervous, copying better games, and hiring former adult stars for his videos is hardly a great accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. I'd prefer better missions and gameplay. Funny how history repeats itself tho: he's back to unoptimized code, copying better games, and former adult stars.

 

[Stigbob]

Look to the new marketing approach of the "star citizens":

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/4z1enr/anyone_know_if_cig_will_reverse_a_refund/

That's what disgusts me more with this "community". It's the fact that they embrace strategies of deception to try to get more people to the cause.
Or maybe I am wrong.
Sounds totally legit, right?
LoL

Blatant propaganda. He uses the weird rarely used phrase "poppy cutter" which was thrown about a lot by one of the sock puppets from r/ds that swarmed the thread after Max left.

 

[Karhu Major]

Uh, so? I said they were simple shooters riffing on Larry Holland's games. Battlehawks: 1942 and the other Lucasarts games, which Chris bragged about "reverse-engineeering."

Apologies, I thought you meant Wing Commander copied the X-Wing series which is impossible of course.

The X-Wing series merely slapped a coat of SF paint on it and royally trounced the Wing Commander games. They did better missions, they did better stories, they did multiplayer way ahead of the curve..

Again subjective...

Blatant propaganda. He uses the weird rarely used phrase "poppy cutter" which was thrown about a lot by one of the sock puppets from r/ds that swarmed the thread after Max left.

You mean the obscure phrase mentioned in this video which has almost 10k views?

 

[jcrg99]

It's also known as one of the, if not THE most successful game series in it's genre.

Populous too.

 

[Stigbob]

You mean the obscure phrase mentioned in this video which has almost 10k views?

Yes that's the one, a phrase so obscure it has to be repeatedly explained at length.

 

[milligna]

Yes that's the one, a phrase so obscure it has to be repeatedly explained at length.

They are just steamed it didn't catch on. It's an awfully awkward construction, no flair for language at all. I suppose as a substitute for engaging in any of kind of honest debate, it works! Not without leaving onlookers going "huh?" and "poppy cutter sounds really damn stupid."

So! Star Citizen, then.

 

[Karhu Major]

Yes that's the one, a phrase so obscure it has to be repeatedly explained at length.

To 10k people, all the way back in may. But someone using it must be the same dude all those months back! /tinfoil

 

[Stigbob]

They are just steamed it didn't catch on. It's an awfully awkward construction, no flair for language at all. I suppose as a substitute for engaging in any of kind of honest debate, it works! Not without leaving onlookers going "huh?" and "poppy cutter sounds really damn stupid."

Its a shame as some poppies need cutting.

 

[Tippis]

See above. Talking stuff down just because you don't like the man is quite immature.

Chris made 3 space games: Wing Commander (designer, director, programmer; producer for the expansions), Wing Commander III (casting, director, producer, story), and Wing Commander IV (executive producer and movie director — hence why it only really counts as ½, the actual game part was done by others).

His involvement in WC2 was as a producer (i.e. he scrounged up the money and put his name on it; other people did the writing, programming, directing and designing — the actual game development), same with Privateer, WC:Armada and Starlancer. He had nothing to do with Privateer 2, Prophecy or Super WC. The person who appears the most in the franchise's many credit rolls is David Ladyman. If you don't own any of these games and thus don't have access to the written credits, you can check them out on sites like mobygames.

Wing Commander is famous for almost breaking Origin due to its staggering cost and poor returns. It was saved by a stroke of lucky timing: they released the voice pack just as sound cards were starting to become popular, and voice-enabled WC turned out to be a good game to show them off. At the same time, Chris himself is famous for swaggering around some expo, claiming that he had reverse-engineered Lucasart's engine for use in Wing Commander. Luckily for everyone, this turned out not to be true (because that would have completely obliterated Origin) — it was just him trying to brag about his programming credentials on the backs of other game developers.

Development of Freelancer started in 1997. Microsoft poured $75M into Digital Anvil, but all that came out of it was Wing Commander: The Movie (1999) and Starlancer (2000). So after thee years, Chris had to go and MS had to scramble to turn Freelancer into something that could be released — even then, it took three more years before it was ready(ish) for the market.

I'm not talking down the man because I don't like him. I don't like the man because he has a long, long, long history of mismanagement, wastefulness, and taking credit for other people's work. If you want to talk about immature, let's discuss this thing called “history revisionism”…

 

[Archvillain]

I am very sad to notice how Frontier completely missed the opportunity to increase the team and to not do the same amount of work in faster times.

Seriously? To me that sounds like not a lot of experience with game dev in big studios. Frontier has already set a cracking pace for developing Elite (in the past I've wanted them to slow it down because new features were being built and released faster than it takes to properly tune and polish them). Amp it up any further and the advantages in speed you expect will fall victim to diminishing returns as the right hands can't keep track of what the left hands are doing and the dependency chains tie themselves into labyrinths. But there will be no matching diminishing of the accelerated costs, so the budget might be prematurely exhausted and we all lose out. I think you're under-estimating how much nine-women-can't-make-a-baby-in-a-month applies to game dev, and it goes double for game like Elite which require inventing more new technology than the average cookie-cutter game, giving less knowledge ahead of time of what you'll be working with.

I don't know but I assume that this was part of SC's mid-project struggle - so many people on the project that money was burning much faster while production was only happening incrementally faster (due to the additional problems that result from a sprawling project.)

Frontier have been doing respectably fast development so far. (I would have said "admirably fast" except it might have been coming out of the hides of their employees if some the of exit reviews are to be trusted). Sometimes too fast.

 

[1500]

Yes that's the one, a phrase so obscure it has to be repeatedly explained at length.

And when you do look it up you realize it does not apply, and they are using it incorrectly.

 

[Mu77ley]

this is not a matter of complex project or whatever.. this (SC) is a project where you need to add the more details as possible.
and the number of employed can make the difference.

I am very sad to notice how Frontier completely missed the opportunity to increase the team and to not do the same amount of work in faster times.
but this happens when you don't know, exactly, how to do a proper marketing of your own product, i guess.
when they started the crowdfounding (or kickstarter, name as you wish) something doesn't went very well.

Chris Roberts made an incredible marketing stage and he continues to increase the budget month after month.
That is not wrong as someone (in early days) had thought.
Selling the ships was the correct (and very smart) way to have a fast crowdfounding.


what else to say..
haters gonna hate...

https://files.shroomery.org/smileys/biggrin.gif

I'm not joking, you need to read that book as you clearly don't understand how this development stuff works...

 

[Tippis]

And when you do look it up you realize it does not apply, and they are using it incorrectly.

Wow. How do they manage that? It may be ever so slightly obscure, but tall poppy syndrome isn't exactly hard to apply. [blah]

(And please don't ask me to read reddit to find out because… well, that would entail reading reddit posts.)

 

[Karhu Major]

Chris made 3 space games: Wing Commander (designer, director, programmer; producer for the expansions), Wing Commander III (casting, director, producer, story), and Wing Commander IV (executive producer and movie director — hence why it only really counts as ½, the actual game part was done by others).

So you're admitting he came up with Wing Commander, coded parts of it himself, set the stage for the series and even filled some minor roles in the sequels? Pretty impressive if you ask me. Spin it all you want, the guy left a legacy. I didn't know about the reverse engineering claim though, would be interesting to read about. Thanks for the info. A quick google search returned nothing but I'll look into it later.

His involvement in WC2 was as a producer (i.e. he scrounged up the money and put his name on it; other people did the writing, programming, directing and designing — the actual game development), same with WCrivateer, WC:Armada and Starlancer. He had nothing to do with Privateer 2, Prophecy or Super WC. The person who appears the most in the franchise's many credit rolls is David Ladyman. If you don't own any of these games and thus don't have access to the written credits, you can check them out on sites like mobygames.

I know who David Ladyman is, yeah. Quote from the article:

I arrived a Origin a few months after Ultima VI and Wing Commander (I) shipped. As editor, my name was on every product that shipped from that point until I left, in 1997.

Or, as you would say it: i.e he didn't do any programming, directing, designing or writing, all he did was edit - no actual game development. Hm, tearing down someone's achievements is rather easy now that I try my hand at it.

Wing Commander is famous for almost breaking Origin due to its staggering cost and poor returns. It was saved by a stroke of lucky timing: they released the voice pack just as sound cards were starting to become popular, and voice-enabled WC turned out to be a good game to show them off.

So the game made smart use of new technology as one of the first in the market? What a stroke of luck indeed! Also it sounds pretty familiar if you ask me.

At the same time, Chris himself is famous for swaggering around some expo, claiming that he had reverse-engineered Lucasart's engine for use in Wing Commander. Luckily for everyone, this turned out not to be true (because that would have completely obliterated Origin) — it was just him trying to brag about his programming credentials on the backs of other game developers.

Interesting, and dumb. Building an engine from scratch seems harder to me than reverse engineering an existing one.

Development of Freelancer started in 1997. Microsoft poured $75M into Digital Anvil, but all that came out of it was Wing Commander: The Movie (1999) and Starlancer (2000). So after thee years, Chris had to go and MS had to scramble to turn Freelancer into something that could be released — even then, it took three more years before it was ready(ish) for the market.

The man has ambitions, no doubt about it. I remain confident he learned from his mistakes.

I'm not talking down the man because I don't like him. I don't like the man because he has a long, long, long history of mismanagement, wastefulness, and taking credit for other people's work. If you want to talk about immature, let's discuss this thing called “history revisionism”…

I am not revising anything; I just see all this in another light. Every (bad) thing that happens you accredit to his bad nature, as if he does it on purpose. Once you do this the bias is set. Due to confirmation bias every next event will also be seen in that dark light. Opposite goes for me: I am biased to see everything he does in a more positive light. I see a man with ambition, a man with a passion for space games (which spawned this whole discussion btw; backer42 claimed Roberts doesn't care about video games), a dreamer and someone with the ability to shape a universe (which he already once did).

     on on his achievements all you want; they're not going away.

 

[briguy168]

I didn't. That's why I didn't mention it. I was discussing their much-vaunted open development, which is apparently so open that the backers aren't told how the game is supposed to work. I don't know how you made the leap from there to FLOSS.

Guess I fail to understand your implication with this sentence "Ok. That's one reason: money. It's a very bad reason when you try to brag about the whole 'open development'..." because to me it reads like you think that studios who use the open development paradigm shouldn't be allowed to acquire money. Perhaps you should be clearer about what you're rantings (I used open-sourced because that is mostly attributed to free software and development).

Then perhaps he should have said that, rather than try to make some kind of argument about treating them like publisher or being exceptionally open, don't you think? After all, if that's all they're doing, they have no more claim to this being “open development” than, say, Microsoft.

Not an excuse but perhaps they wanted to write something that is both poignant and artsy at the same time. Or they probably wanted it in the same narration that legal documents are written up to give more gravitas. Point being there could be a number of different reasons why they written the pledge the way they did and unless you were there in the discussions of what to say, no amount of deduction will make it fact.

It's not. How is it so hard to understand that you shouldn't be polishing assets when it's not even clear yet what purpose those assets will have in the game or whether the engine can even support them?

It's one way, sure. An entirely backwards way that creates massive waste of time, manpower, and money. It also makes it far more likely to incur engineering debt because you stubbornly hold on to previous creations for some reason or another (for instance, because lots of people have given you money for it) when it would be in everyone's best interest to drop it because it doesn't actually fit…

Seems pretty subjective to me. Sorry the only way this can be quantified is if a project fails and, objectively speaking, the project is no where near that. Doesn't matter how long it takes, so long as the project finishes.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Wow, this thread turned into SA pretty quickly

1500 and Tippis, you're both right and wrong. It's both parties fault; the reason why it's the devs fault is because they didn't temper the hype generated and it's the consumers fault for believing in that hype instead of staying objective. It's a two-way street and no one group is totally at blame but I guess that isn't reductive enough for many of you though.

 

[Tippis]

So you're

Saying that “shat out left and right” = 2½. Not as a way to talk him down, but as a historical fact. Let's not kid ourselves about who this guy is and what he has done, and more importantly what he hasn't done and still gets undue credit for.

So the game made smart use of new technology as one of the first in the market?

Nope. The company was only barely saved by jumping on an expanding market as an after-thought, years after Lucasart (remember those guys) and Sierra had done so, when it turned out that their huge investment wasn't paying off.

I am not revising anything; I just see all this in another light.

Good for you. Nevertheless, there is a very strong and very ignorant tendency for Chris' fans to inflate what he did in the '90s, often as an argument for why he's supposed to be good at this whole game development thing. The reality is something quite different, of course, but acknowledging that would put a huge dent in the Chris myth, so they go for the revisionist approach instead.

Every (bad) thing that happens you accredit to his bad nature, as if he does it on purpose.

Not really. It's a classic case of Hanlon's razor. But that doesn't mean that his bad nature is any less bad or that it has in any way improved over the years. He very clearly stopped caring about video games some time around WC4, where all he did was the movie part. After that, he wasted tons of money on an absolute z-grade movie rather than on the game he was promising everyone. After that, he made the jump to Hollywood complete (only to keep his bad nature intact, which eventually made him over-promise and under-deliver to the wrong people and got thrown out of that industry too… so now he's trying his hand at the less interesting game business again, where he keeps focusing on the movie-like side and on repeated occasions slip up by calling his game a movie).

 

[Tippis]

Guess I fail to understand your implication with this sentence "Ok. That's one reason: money. It's a very bad reason when you try to brag about the whole 'open development'..." because to me it reads like you think that studios who use the open development paradigm shouldn't be allowed to acquire money.

The implication is that, since they're supposed to be some kind of beacon of open development, focusing on razzle-dazzle as opposed to actual development insights would need a really good reason. “Money dear boy” isn't one.

Not an excuse but perhaps they wanted to write something that is both poignant and artsy at the same time. Or they probably wanted it in the same narration that legal documents are written up to give more gravitas. Point being there could be a number of different reasons why they written the pledge the way they did and unless you were there in the discussions of what to say, no amount of deduction will make it fact.

You're right. It isn't an excuse. At best, it's an explanation that points to a worryingly incompetent, perhaps even deceptive, messaging about the product you're offering. Either way, as 1500 and I were aggressively agreeing, if you say these things, you set up an expectation that will have consequences if it's not met. If they didn't mean open development, they shouldn't be crowing about open development — they should explain what, exactly, they meant and roll back that entire narrative. If nothing else, because it stops the fans from fawning over said openness when they should instead be demanding more actual solid information.

Seems pretty subjective to me.

It really isn't. It's software development 101.
And how long it takes matters, because time costs. If the customers spend $200M on seeing the game released, they'll rather expect it to be a $200M game. If it turns out to only be a $40M game because everything was done backwards and had to be remade five times over, you're going to need to buy a whole lot of ceiling-suspension devices to turn all those frowns upside-down…

 

[Karhu Major]

Saying that “shat out left and right” = 2½. Not as a way to talk him down, but as a historical fact. Let's not kid ourselves about who this guy is and what he has done, and more importantly what he hasn't done and still gets undue credit for.

Why don't you just say it was about my wording from the start - would have saved us both a lot of time At least I learned some stuff so it's not wasted time.

So he "only" deserves credits for 3, sorry, I mean 2½ (god, just typing this out makes me cringe at how nit picky that sounds) games. Still more than I ever accomplished or hope to accomplish.

Nope. The company was only barely saved by jumping on an expanding market as an after-thought, years after Lucasart (remember those guys) and Sierra had done so, when it turned out that their huge investment wasn't paying off.

In the end, a market decision paid off. Ascribing it to luck is again discrediting an achievement just because you are trying to prove something.

Good for you. Nevertheless, there is a very strong and very ignorant tendency for Chris' fans to inflate what he did in the '90s, often as an argument for why he's supposed to be good at this whole game development thing. The reality is something quite different, of course, but acknowledging that would put a huge dent in the Chris myth, so they go for the revisionist approach instead.

If you see someone slip up; by all means correct them. Spreading lies (even because of ignorance) is not something I would be proud of. But arguing semantics and nitpicking everything the man did just to get a few more "see he wasn't all THAT good" points comes across as rather over-zealous, as if you hold a personal grudge.

Not really. It's a classic case of Hanlon's razor. But that doesn't mean that his bad nature is any less bad or that it has in any way improved over the years. He very clearly stopped caring about video games some time around WC4, where all he did was the movie part. After that, he wasted tons of money on an absolute z-grade movie rather than on the game he was promising everyone. After that, he made the jump to Hollywood complete (only to keep his bad nature intact, which eventually made him over-promise and under-deliver to the wrong people and got thrown out of that industry too… so now he's trying his hand at the less interesting game business again, where he keeps focusing on the movie-like side and on repeated occasions slip up by calling his game a movie).

I can see why you would think that, I just don't share your opinion. I enjoy conversing with you though.