Needs to give direction and then stop changing that direction every time he watches a new film.
Star Citizen Discussions v7
- Thread starter Brett C
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Needs to give direction and then stop changing that direction every time he watches a new film.
Seriously, whoever goes for an investment in Star Citizen after seeing stuff like this deserves to be ripped off. This is no different from a random home shopping channel selling revolutionary massage balls that magically relocate a slipped disc in your back, or the super pan that makes everything you cook taste 35% better. Who fights for the victims of home shopping by the way?
Factual line was this - in Gamescom 2016 Chris revealed next version will be 3.0 and "we aim for end of the year". During Citizencon 2016, there was 3.0/4.0 release schedule, with regular updates.
During that time 3.0 didn't contain full planets.
2.7 was promised before that and it was hinted it will contain revisited flight model. In fact, 2.7 sat in Evocati during 3.0 reveal, and was never released. Cue Star Marine and another update afterwards.
It is a mess.
During that time 3.0 didn't contain full planets.
2.7 was promised before that and it was hinted it will contain revisited flight model. In fact, 2.7 sat in Evocati during 3.0 reveal, and was never released. Cue Star Marine and another update afterwards.
It is a mess.
First of all travel times were a no no, grind was a no no.
Now things have changed and travel times are a good thing and grind is also well on it's way to being a good thing https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize..._assurences_do_we_have_that_cig_will_not_get/
Now things have changed and travel times are a good thing and grind is also well on it's way to being a good thing https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize..._assurences_do_we_have_that_cig_will_not_get/
Yes, just to make my point explicit: it doesn't matter how good the individuals of a “team” is — if they suffer under a bad leader, the team is bad. The team does not exist separate to its director. The director is part of the team and is such a crucial part, at that, that he's in a position to wreck everything no matter what else is going on.
There's a very important asymmetry here: a single bad person can ruin a team, but a single (or even an entire host of) good person cannot save it. The auteur game designer is dead. Indeed, he never really existed, but has gained some mythical status as that one guy that made all those good things. That never happened. Those mythical figures were always part of a good team, and were good enough (and in the right position) not to ruin that environment. On their own and/or in the wrong position, and that quality is gone.
Unfortunately, you guys kind of ruined the progression I was trying to create to next point
So I'll skip right to it: any single person and game that one might come up with that is part this supposedly “good team” (not actually) balancing out Chris would be questioned with “…and who else?” Because in each case, we'd be talking about a single minute cog in a complex game-making machine, and unless the entire machinery has been brought over, it doesn't suddenly turn something good. The indestructible (and nuclear-war-loud) Donald Duck clock I had as a child was supremely good at waking up the entire countryside, and I can still wind it up and wake up the dead to this day. If I took out its main cog — even if I also brought over the accompanying spring and apocalyptically loud bell — and tried to add those to my current clock radio, all I'd end up with is two busted-up time pieces. In this somewhat tortured analogy, the director is the actual time-keeping piece. It doesn't matter how exquisite the intricate design and precision of the pieces are, or how infallibly it wakes people up, if my alarm clock fails to keep time.
Chris does not have a good team behind him because, irrespective of who might be on that team, Chris' presence makes the team bad (and he's not the only one doing this, btw…). What others on that team have done is almost wholly irrelevant because they are not the team that made those things.
I don't find the rotting carcass of SC as fascinating as it once was so my information could well be out of date, but I believe Ben Lesnick is the only person who ever claimed to have played most of squadron 42.
That was a couple of years worth of delays and ship sales back though.
Yes.
The only person who I can see to blame for the troubles SC is having is Chris Roberts himself.
Try as I might, I cannot envisage any situation whereby any developer would intentionally make his work more complex and difficult by ignoring best practise for development unless he was either well paid and dragging it out (which would be unusual for game development) or deliberately trying to sabotage the game (which wouldn't really work). Neither of those situations is realistic or plausible.
That CIG is still developing its engine, that it is polishing a preAlpha, that it is engaged in a topsy-turvy world where development priorities are skewed tells me someone high up is doing something wrong.
I am giving CIG and Chris Roberts the benefit of the doubt by suggesting this is due soley to incompetence. That Chris Roberts simply is so focussed on his "vision" that he cannot see that his input and direction is causing more harm than good. That he is so out of his depth that he does not realise the harm he is doing.
The alternative is that that he is well aware of what he is doing, and is deliberately dragging out the development of the game through "poor practise" so as to get as much money off his backers as possible. That would, I think, be Derek Smarts take on the matter.
Personally - other than the shell companies and Hollywood style accounting, I don't think there is any malice or sabotage intended, but I do think Chris Roberts is out of his depth in managing this development, and the amount of money raised is something he sees as a validation of his approach as well as something that removes any incentive or push to change what he is doing.
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He was waiting for someone to turn up in an Idris so he could use it's fidelitous toilets. However since it was a commando-only test he was eventually forced to relieve himself at the edge of the platform and with the physics problems... well, I'm sure they'll have things cleaned up and back to normal soon.
I really like the design, though it looks like my next objective would be to scan some Shivans.
The moderation policies of this forum actually preclude me from giving a full and detailed explanation of my opinion of youtubers like that. Suffice to say that I think channels which deliver deliberately misleading content to that degree should be permanently banned, it's an utter disgrace.
I mean, that's not merely an over-enthusiastic fan ballooning about future content. That is someone who has carefully edited together in-game footage (the first minute) with footage from a con presentation showing content which isn't even close to being integrated in the game and then delivers a voiceover as if the whole thing represents current live gameplay. That's without even getting into his intro talking about what can be done in all of the places that exist only as circles on a map as of today.
I couldn't get past the second paragraph:
Whatever else people might say about him, Chris Roberts doesn't have a humble bone in his body. His entire career is founded on an almost maniacal devotion to self-aggrandisment.
Yes. Released because they weren't under the directorship of a control freak who is incapable of letting people do the jobs he hires them for.
See this is what I really don't get about you and your seeming confidence in this project (and note please, I'm not trying to turn this 'personal' because I'm not about to insult you here...) You're clearly an intelligent person but you seem to have something of a blind spot where Chris Roberts and his impact on this project is concerned.
Roberts has a long history of over-committing and under-delivering. There are accounts from people who have worked with him over a 20+ year period, not only the 'disgruntled former employees' that he characterised former CIG employees as when they criticised him, but going all the way back to colleagues from his Origin days. Just one of them was Warren Spector, a man who managed to deliver a game that is widely recognised to be a genuine milestone within the canon of PC gaming (Deus Ex) whilst working for one of the most dysfunctional game development companies that has ever existed (Ion Storm) which was headed by one of the few people in the industry that could be considered to be a bigger megalomaniac than Roberts himself, John Romero.
I think it's pretty safe to say he is in a far better position to make informed comments than you or I. There are many other people in the industry who have expressed the same opinion, in fact it's much harder to find someone in the industry who doesn't express that opinion.
Every single game that Roberts has been involved with, either as an employee or later with his own company, suffered from a battle between his 'vision' and the pubisher's need to ship a product within the timescales that had been agreed. Finding the balance between those two fundamentally conflicting forces is pretty much the single most important skill that a good project manager has; they need to be able to recognise the difference between things that are critical and those which are desirable and be capable of making tough decisions when the conflict between content and time reaches a tipping point.
The closest that Roberts has come to what he is doing with CIG previously was when he set up his own studio to develop Starlancer and Freelancer, both of which were to be published by Microsoft.
Although Starlancer was nominally a Digital Anvil game, most of the actual development work was done by Warthog who were headed up by Erin, the only member of the CIG team who does actually have a reputation for delivering games on time and within budget. As far as I recall, Starlancer was delivered broadly on time and it wasn't a bad game. Publishers happy.
Freelancer was developed in-house by Digital Anvil with Chris in the driving seat. It suffered from massive feature creep, was planned to deliver gameplay which the technology of the time struggled to deliver (let me know if any of this sounds familiar...) and was delayed again and again because Chris refused to compromise and just carried on designing his dream game despite the increasing body of evidence that it could never be released in the form that he imagined. That only ended when his despairing publisher actually bought his company out from under him and kicked him out of the direct production chain into a 'consultancy role', which can be broadly defined as 'sit over there burbling away whilst we get on with making a computer game'.
This time there is no publisher involved to jerk his chain. In Chris's head there is also no money problem because his funding model consists of thinking of a vague gameplay idea, getting his artists to knock up a 'concept ship', selling what is literally a dream to people for real cash and then using that cash to fund the next round of dreamcrafting. He has actually said openly and bluntly that it doesn't matter how long it all takes because he doesn't have to answer to a publisher, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that the reason for that is he has real people paying him up-front for a game which most of them expect they will be able to play before they're in their dotage.
Even a buy-out looks unfeasible in the event that things do reach a crisis point because the way the game has been 'developed' so far mean that even if any potential buyer put a complete block on any new content at all being added prior to release they would have to find a way of funding the significant period of development needed to address the enormous technical debt already present. Most of the concept ships themselves, plus literally all of the gameplay loops and mechanics required to make use of them (colonisation now for God's sake!!!) are still to be created, plus all of the current assets that so much time has been spent on would be between three and five years old with even a 2020 release (which itself would be absurdly optimistic, 2022 is more realistic) and so would need reworking, plus the mo-cap would be five years old and would need reworking, etc. etc. All whilst paying a huge development team. Even if the rights for the game and all existing development assets were sold for a penny it's difficult to see how someone could come in, fund all of that and then make a profit on sales after release (bearing in mind how many potential players have already spent all that they will be spending) without moving to the most exploitative kind of EA sales model that it's possible to imagine, or a subscription model which would provoke a backlash the likes of which has never been seen.
So that's what we have. A game that is ultimately under the complete control of someone whose entire track record would suggest has literally no chance at all of delivering what he is promising and which, unlike all of his previous endeavors, doesn't have any obvious deus ex machina waiting in the wings to either force his hand or deliver a rescue when required. It doesn't matter how many talented people he has working for him because as the Jennisson letter indicates, he isn't giving them sufficient control over their areas of expertise to actually use their talents to best effect. You can hire the best chef in the world but if you're going to try to cook your own dinner and then ask him to season it for you, you're not getting the benefit of his skills.
There's a saying in business which I think Chris would do well to remember. The fish rots from the head.
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Smart actually had much of it figured out from the beginning. His reasoning why the SC game as advertised can't be made makes sense to me. In the beginning CR started out using cryengine and the KS funding goals were modest. When they got extra funding far beyond their goals, then the feature creep started to take over. Maybe part of the push was due to ED releasing where the SC goals became even more bolder and bigger at least on stated goals which eventually kept being modified up to the present. However, in the blog article , Smart explains cryengine or its new variant "lumberyard" would still require massive modification as it was made primarily for level FPS shooters with well-lit and premium looking graphics. I've been playing sniper ghost warrior 3 and it's the first cryengine game I've played and I can see with the long initial load times a lot of the fps point of view "effects" and it's still a single player game.
Probably CR did not intend for it to get out of hand initially. Most ponzis in the real and financial world start out that way. The turning point is when the manager of the fund makes the ill-fated decision to keep going after severe mistakes or mishaps usually incurring major losses and try to keep the project going by seeking continual funding before the house of cards topple while pretending that everything is going fine. In SC's case, the project has become big and bloated with a lot of staff and a bunch of shell companies , reports of outsourcing, and expensive looking plethora of trailer ads.
The original blog here. Some thoughts on ED too: http://dereksmart.com/2015/07/interstellar-citizens/
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A minority does
But your point stands. There have been enough warning signs over the years and people pointing to problems and discrepancies you probably wouldnt have noticed by yourself. It allows for an educated guess or decision by now. Whoever falls for this project after all this has only himself to blame once it comes crashing down. Of course if you personally decide that getting nothing for a 350$ investment is "good fun" thats your right. After all I m sure a lot of people doing the shopping thing dont care about a return value but just indulge in their addiction. Things get a little awkward or weird when these people go out to other places and try to justify their views or decisions to others or actively try to lure in others into this scam by spreading blatant lies. Thank god the PTU doesnt deliver anymore so even the most invested realize that they cannot sell something that simply isnt there but descriptions about Star Citizen and its development have been very....imaginative from what I can read on "Trying to decide if I should buy SC....what do you guys think?" threads.
Uh very fancy looking, I especially like the exit animation. Neat. At least the "props" (propaganda pieces) can hold their own weight. Problem is of course that now people will expect this to actually be in the game. Like always the often-mentioned "technical debt" gets bigger each day.
Is this supposed to be in 3.0 as well or are we discussing things in the far future by now?
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Oi! My stoneware pans are actually quite nice, thank you very much. They also have the advantage of being Things That Actually Exist.
Oi! My stoneware pans are actually quite nice, thank you very much. They also have the advantage of being Things That Actually Exist.
The comparison stands if you consider that among ALL the home shopping only one or a select few actually sell faulty goods or deceits you intentionally. Not all games are bad and out to rip you off. And I got a lot of games which I consider worth the money. CiG looks like a game company to me that I should be wary of and think twice before investing anything.
Yes, it's valid point in general.
And the internet being what it is, there's little excuse for buying something rubbish: If you're a gamer, you have the internet, if you have the internet, you have twitch and youtube to check out the "game" before buying.But I still like my pans.
Exactly. Years ago there could be 'misguided consumers', now its just the gullible being ripped. There is no need to 'defend' or 'protect' anyone, you either drop this mess or stay for the lulz.
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