And this weeks ATV is up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ4mou4OR4U
I'm not even 2 minutes in and already on my second lulzbucket.
You are right its an awesome watch to have for sure. 2 minutes in he already announced that "3.0 will be more delayed then any other patch before" wow......such commitment and precision, even their delays and shortcomings are groundbreaking and never-have-been-seen-before stuff. Sounds like they are making this episode in a giant empty hall or something, a tad annoying but I m sure you cant help it when you drag the CEO and his wife out of their vacation (nice sunburns both of em) and slap together a few points. At least I m grateful that CRoberts changed his usual handwaving assault to headbobbing instead but maybe thats the stellar job of the cameraman zooming on on his face+shoulders.
Sounds like "Burn Down" will be ATV, Bugsmasher and Propaganda channel all in one. You think making all these episodes eats too much into their budget and freetime so this new format can replace all the others?
I feel a little weird when I hear Sandi use technical terms which she probably spoke for the first time of her life in front of the camera. I mean the way she pronounces is a lil off, clarity be damned. When they announced "secondary viewports" I was a lil confused simply because I had no idea what they meant or why they thought this was needed. But the "hint" cleared that up pretty quickly. So CiG after years of development and using multiple companies around the globe has managed to invent
MIRRORS and MONITORS into a computer game? Thats really awesome, I was astonished at the creativity of these people.
Seriously tho, I probably just dont recognize the potential of this new feature and I have problems following the verbal description or at least fail to see implementations that would justify diverting resources and attention to this tech. Can anybody help me out? A little later I spotted an ingame video drone capturing footage of an ingame NPC and transmitting that on a bigger screen. I found that indeed impressive but again....until its integrated in the PU we could as well drop the topic . The original question remains tho.....why?
After this ATV I m left yet again with the feeling that the general consensus is "sorry folks, we are so busy thinking of new tiny things and working on their prototypes that we simply dont have the time to keep working on the game itself". The biggest use of secondary viewports seems to be for immersion but really, shouldnt the combined effort of the teams not go into creating the game first then come up with such little things later? I get it, such things can be worked on parallel to the main project and nobody knows how many people and resources are tied up by this. CiG sure doesnt tells us. Its just a new "cool" feature to ooooh and aaaaah about but nobody is giving us any kind of date for this. Is it coming with 3.0, 4.0, next year? I dont fail to notice that in a period of time where the whole world is asking "where is 3.0?" they commit a full ATV to a new secondary feature that isnt even outlined in the 4.x roadmaps, something "new" and give the important news only a few lines of words. Of course the
groundbreaking aspect about this new feature is that it is
proper telegraphic projection. Again, desperately trying to make something appear special that isnt.
Also please note that the whole ATV is yet again about
stuff we hope to have inside the game at one point. Not a promise, skeptics can be swept aside with the usual "they probably only have 1 or 2 guys working on it, you know the idea team" but still, its obviously more important and newsworthy then actual news. The combined reply to this ATVs episode should be "GET THE BASE GAME DONE" but I already see from the comment section that CRoberts is again playing the crowd and its working. Really, watching ATVs is too depressing for me. I probably gonna wait for Rolans tl: dr instead. This one only was 16 minutes and I was thinking "get to the point" more then once.
That out of my system I ll spend the next hour or so going trough the comment section....thats always like ice cream after I just had a badly made menu.
The usualy response to this on the reddit sub is that CIG asked people and a majority voted for increased scope. Yeah, well, a majority isn't everybody.
30.000 something votes was it? Yeah thats obviously the majority of backers from a pool of 1.6 million (or maybe people "know" its just 50.000 backers total hehehe)
No. People gave them their money and they changed things based on what the majority of backers wanted. That's something any company would do for their customers.
No, I really dont think thats what happened there. Instead I stick to my idea that CRoberts ran out of time realizing that whatever he promised backers before was unachievable with what he had so he had to come up with something to enable SCs continual existence. And that was the "change of scope" which gave him 2 more years easy. The lack of ingame evidence and CiG continue to churn out new ideas and cool features while the old ones are not even a blip on the horizon only seems to support my thesis that its easier to distract a gulli then pay him
I kind of agree with Agony_Aunt that CiG seems to switch focus a lot instead of keeping its primary target in sight. Never mind that the presentation of these new things almost always is timed to another game which presented its idea "just before" CiG did. As I said in one of my last posts I think CiG has already reached the limit of their engine at least when it comes to live gameplay. They tried from the start to compete with other games and so far they ve fallen on their faces with their results. Flight model in SC compared to ED....dont even speak about it, FPS module and mechanics compared to BF or Doom....yeah. I m sorry, what else is there in the PU, stuff they have achieved that could be compared to other games? PG tech is a theory which we have no proof nor access to but their focus has changed from comparison with NMS to Elite, I guess barren planets without atmosphere are easier to do then the stuff we see in NMS. Networking capabilities are severely limited compared to any other MMO on the market. In the end, everything the PU tried to tackle has been underwhelming and is completely obliterated by a competitors result. None of it apart from maybe the ships can stand on its own and score any points for Star Citizen. I really dont know why CiG is not continuing to work on the lackluster flight model or FPS mechanics. Maybe its because they know they cannot come up to the same level of quality then these other games and instead of even trying they rather find new stuff to promote while hoping that their audience simply forgets these "past failures". It obviously works on a specific part of the crowd and as long as that part is handing them money without any return value required things will continue like this.
So...the same as 6 years ago the only thing we have in our hand at the moment is the
idea of Star Citizen because whatever they managed to release so far doesnt hold a candle to the roaring fire the idea itself represents. It seems that the idea alone is sufficient for some people to spend hours of their time in the broken and lackluster PU and keep reinforcing their commitment with other like-minded people. Its not many I guess if you see the streams of empty servers and attempts to get a SM match going because of lack of players.
Half-related bonusquestion: can an consumer make an informed decision if he is being lied to about its implications?
First of all, I didnt get your question at all in the beginning and had to spend a minute figuring out what you are asking
Depends if you talk about consumers or sheep. Sheep would be people who only listen to ONE source so their views and attitude can be directly controlled. Kind of like the people of North Korea who are refused outside information and are forced to commit to their impoverished conditions. Only in that case its enforced.
Sheep do it voluntarily and decide on their own to carry the blinders at all times refusing to listen to any voices that could shatter their dreamworld. An informed decision can only be made if you take the information of several disconnected sources and compare it with your expectation. Thats where I feel a lot of SC supporters fall into the sheep category when it comes to discussions. When these people participate in a discussion their opinion is usually formed before they even typed or read a single word. In such cases it doesnt matter what people like Mr.Smart have to say. The narrative before even reading anything of his posts is "he is wrong" and whatever they post in reply has only one goal...show the world how wrong he is. This "I am right and you are wrong" mentality is what prevents discussions in the first place and enables these echo chambers we see elsewhere.
You can come to the
conclusion that you are right and the other person is wrong but you cannot really start out with that opinion else you are sheep. Thats why I keep reading posts from Mole HD and Calrissian for example, maybe they can produce arguments that can change my opinion about what they have to say. One of em did btw
And then I ve given up on certain other posters to ever see anything else then propaganda from them but those guys are on ignore anyway ^^
Your Star Citizen t-shirt, mousepad and cap were all manufactured using backer funding, and then sold on.
That means that they are neither microtransactions or DLC, but something else entirely.
LOL sorry only +1 virtual rep for you man. Its an eye-opener isnt it? Milking has reached new heights ^^
Actually, all of what CR and CiG proposed for SC has been done before, and is being done now. Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky, and EVE Online are all doing what Star Citizen proposed. Before those, we had games like a Ultima Online, Shadowbane, and a few other late 90's, early 2000 niche MMOs whose names elude me right now.
I think its called "same old face in a new fancy dress" and the work itself is selling it as groundbreaking and never-be-done-before. Of course admitting to your examples would simply
crush a lot of SCs hopes so these other games simply didnt do anything CiG attempts now.
