That's twenty years old, which I count under "many, many years" ;+)
The Star Citizen Thread V10
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That's what you get for $211M+.
It's perfect.
You just don't understand it.
So basically, they spent 6 years, from 2012-2018 to conclude they need to go back to 2012 layout.
SC in a nutshell, actually.
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2012 Chris: "I want maximum simulation fidelity: screens, screens everywhere!"
2014 Chris: "SC is being released in 2948 so I want holoscreens, no more CRTs! Btw, some already fired guy forgot surroundings radar so add one, and remove some screens I never asked for screens everywhere!"
2016 Chris: "Erin is my brother so he must be right: he told me players must have more infos, I said OK let's add more holoscreens, but he said it could bring some problems like redesigning again too much cockpits (I refrained myself from firing me to question my authority but 'Ma Roberts won't be happy) I don't see the problem we have tons of money and plenty of time but whatever - so put many infos on the helmet already!!!"
2018 Chris: "I just had a meeting with Turbulent, they showed me GolgleAnalisy or something and they have graphs. I want graphs, graphs everywhere! What? Who said I wanted holoscreens? Must-ve been fired. Oh and don't forget to copy/paste some screens multiple times, I want the players to feel they're real army pilots so saturate cockpit with informations, even if fidelitized placeholder!!! Or I fire you as I fired the others!"
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I know it is typo, somehow the idea of CIG redoing all the displays using MDF strikes me as being a distinct possibility (Medium Density Fibreboard)
When you consider the howling of folks in "The other game" over the offset screen pillar in the FdL!
TRIGGERED!
I know it is typo, somehow the idea of CIG redoing all the displays using MDF strikes me as being a distinct possibility (Medium Density Fibreboard)
(Fondly remembers cardboard box spaceship. Curls up into foetal position)
That's an interesting assumption you've embedded within that insulting sweeping statement, especially in response to someone who just left because of insulting statements…
We all know that these numbers are made up and the 200 million dollars were never real. Just like the two million "citizens".
However with just that little "play money" no reasonable budget can be reached. It's no surprise CIG treats any backer below $1000 like free to play leechers. Without exploitative monetization and whales, who lost control over their lives, nothing of this would have happened.
Because these numbers were just made up. There was never a "secured release".
It's pointless and doesn't go anywhere without whales. Crowdfunding is not a viable method for financing video games and especially Star Citizen now proves this. In the end it's always venture capital investors and shareholders saving the day. Everything else is just pre-ordering and marketing blown out of proportion.
And yet I cannot think that all this is "necessary" because I do remember living in the stone age where games were made and released and then sold without taking on money from gamers in advance. Those basic and outdated ways produced some of the best games in history, maybe the frequency wasnt as high sure but the overall quality sure was better then what it is today.
The greed for money and increasing profit has changed the landscape but at no point do I believe that things like "whales" or "pre-orders" are necessary to provide good games. Thats just mind-gymnastics in my book.
You can bring up more then enough examples for games that would ve been impossible without these crowdfunging options. At the same time that number is being dwarfed by the amount of games that failed or are simply bad and only wasted resources instead of adding to the portfolio.
Whales are the result of a marketing scheme to extract as much money as possible. You always had people who were willing to pay more then the average or pay for advantages. These were not necessary to make games. They were easy to tap into for additional income. While some of that extra profit probably went into future games this extra cash was for the most part "profit" to make people richer, not the games better. Nowadays we are schooled to believe that without P2W, without F2P, without pre-orders and all that DLC stuff there would be no games so people accept the annoying stuff while comforting themselves with the illusion that all this is "necessary".
At the same time we have tiny indi studios consisting of 1 or only a few people funding development out of their own pocket for the most part coming up with mindblowing titles that rival AAA productions and while maybe not "as good as" those AAA games come pretty close. Only one of these games cost 5 millions to make and the runner-up cost 200.000.....do you see where I m going?
All this talk about "these things are responsible for what we have now" and "our world would be game-worse without these strategies" is just conditioning and helps to line the pockets of investors to an almost sick level...not making games better.
Jacques d'Orleans
Banned
I mentioned this on SA the other day....No takers though, not funny enough.
Are all the assets we see in the PTU just the virtual sets and props from SQ42? Is this why the train set
Not that it would make me wonder. It's not as if he would be unaware of the great financial possibilities the release of Squander 42 could have on supporting SC financially.
IMHO, it is more that they are far away from completing S42 or maybe have internally cancelled it already years ago, just using the already made SQ42 assets as trailers and slice of life videos to squeeze out more rubles from the wallets of the "truly faithful".
Regardless what the reasons are, for the non mentioning of SQ42, he obviously can't deliver SQ42. But given his past that isn't really surpising.
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Jacques d'Orleans
Banned
Ships, I see ships everywhere. /s
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
Hi
so am i right in saying that all the speil about the amazingly realistic physics in the game and how thrusters would work is now officially all horse manure and it is just as faked as the handing in elite dangerous?
i am not sure if i am relieved or disappointed to be honest. on 1 hand fun is more important that realism and if it was not working as intended then best to scrap. on the other hand i have had so many people over the last few years tell me how poor ED is because not proper neutonian and not proper physics in the simulation, due in large to all the stuff spoken by CR et al.... in star citizen, that i kind of feel scrapping it is a massive fail. It also makes me worry about what else could be scrapped.
Sorry, but that's nonsense - and in a non-insulting way. You are just falling victim to one of the most widespread biases, i.e. survivorship bias. You are seeing only the games that survived and are deemed classic and compare them to every today's game.
The beginning of the gaming era was absolutely littered by awful stuff - we just don't remember it (unless it's called "THE" worst, like ET). Never finished shareware, crap copies (of crap copies (of crap copies (etc))), unplayable games (literally), stuff with artificially inflated difficulty to just make it last longer, etc. You should dig deeper in old games (though big part of this is undiggable, as it simply died off with its consoles).
The games today, even when talking indie, are way above them. But if you talk indie, you won't get assets - and that's what SC is based around. You won't get huge fidelity and assets with indie, simple as that. You can get procedural and lore and so on (see Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft, or others), but you won't get polished ship models. And apparently, that's what people want to pay money for.
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It's the case that so-called "crowdfunding" doesn't work with "just play money". It's needs people ridiculously overspending and I can prove that.
Let me just pull out the Star Citizen Kickstarter to demonstrate this, because we have somewhat verified metrics there. Funnily enough the numbers displayed on the page don't add up, the top of the page show 34,397 backers, while the pledge tiers summed together have 34,151 backers. So for this example I work with the latter number.
Let's say, the 31,291 backers (discounting the 2,860 who just got a skin/plastic card) had just spent the lowest amount to get a digital copy of the game: $30. That's the typical recommendation: "Just give a little and make your dream come true."
That makes a merely $938,730 as a game budget. Is that enough to develop the pitched AAA game? Of course not, that's not even enough for a decent "indie game", which isn't just a one man show, but developed by a small team. This amount runs an AAA studio for about a week or maybe two.
That's simple you say, just make the standard AAA game rate $60 the minimum tier, that would at least double the sum and get near the original Kickstarter amount.
Doesn't work, because doing that loses you a whopping 22,836 backers or 73 % of the total 31,291. So after the remainder of 11,315 backers just spent $60 (still no whales), you end up with just $678,900 as your budget for the BDSSE - which BTW is 72 % of the $30 figure. Pareto Principle at work here.
Now you see the reality what only a few thousand whales spending up to $10,000 did in fact quadruple the "just one $60 tier" funding sum. And we still ended up with a laughable two million dollars for a AAA pitch. (The only verified funding number we have, everything else is out of the mouth of Roberts and we know how reliable that is). Nowhere near the alleged $65 millions which supposedly got the game "fully funded".
So of course Cayman Island Games had to set up their JPEG store in early 2013 to not run out of money within a few weeks. That's the harsh reality of funding video games. The Star Citizen Kickstarter was a total failure.
I see no Banu Merchantman.... there again, neither do those who paid hundreds of dollars for it either
Also, the poor Hull series of ships. A classic example of designing a ship before considering the landing/docking mechanics.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
To be precise, according to Pritchett's document the simulation system "works" but it has been tuned in a way that it produces completely unrealistic thrust behaviour in order for ships to fly as game devs want them to (because the pure physics based results produce unplayable behaviors). At the bottom line, this completely unrealistic thrust is in essence the same result as if you fully faked the behaviour for the ships in the first place, like most every other space sim does. So, this simulation is, at least so far, a big fat waste of time and effort and a completely unnecessary level of extra code and complexity.
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Jacques d'Orleans
Banned
I see no Banu Merchantman.... there again, neither do those who paid hundreds of dollars for it either
Also, the poor Hull series of ships. A classic example of designing a ship before considering the landing/docking mechanics.
For what exactly would you need a Banu Merchantman anyways in a half finished system?
Buy an Idris! /s
Granted....my insight as a kid into video games was pretty limited. First of all, germany was living "behind the moon" when it came to games, all the cool stuff came from the US. I didnt speak or read english at the time, often figuring out games by trial and error (even text based adventures, yeah....) and I only experienced what my sources could get me so I agree...I probably never saw the whole amount and never really cared to study this stuff. It got me through childhood and puberty. Nostalgia is a thing sure and I experience this often with stuff "out of my childhood" (mostly books and movies mind you...) which are far better in my memory then they actually are.
I will still stand by my assumption that the explanation that "we wouldnt have these kind of games without whales.." isnt the real reason but at best a consequence the other way around "we wouldnt have whales without these kind of games". Companies producing video games have changed. Not only have they become bigger and more complex but many also went on the stock market which increases investment = more money to produce games which in turn produces more profit. The more "money" became the focus (it always was the goal but not to this extent) the more things changed. And all this pre-order and crowd-funding stuff is a way to shift risk over to the player away from the producers. Its a wanted consequence for the investors and ultimately for the companies but its bad/bad for the player. We DO get games because of these things but I dare to say we would get the same games without them as well. The gamer crowd simply can be manipulated and directed easily. Many gamers are kids yet handle adult level money when it comes to games. So if you REALLY believe that all the games today would be impossible without the predatory marketing strategies evolved over the last 30 years then I d say thats what you are intended to believe and you swallow the catch hook, line and sinker.
IMO a "good" game is at its base an incredible idea and Indi studios often lack the capital to polish it as you say. Pixel graphics dont make a game bad tho. Graphics are at best the icing on the cake, its sweet and looks awesome but is a mm deep. Todays games blast away millions on visuals and the underlying game mechanics are mediocre or simply bad.
The development of these things did not happen because it was "necessary"....it happened because we, the gamers "allowed it" in the first place (and because many of us are as superficial as it gets as SC amply demonstrates). At some point you can just pervert the idea of making "bigger, better games" and end up with a goliath like Blizzard, a company which has lost its soul and obviously runs after the money instead of having good games at its heart.
Maybe if we wouldnt treat 60 dollars as if its nothing things would change. People proclaim "100 bucks are nothing to me, lol, are you poor?" and miss the statement they are giving. The non-chalance which which resources are spent that would cover a families expense for a MONTH halfway across the globe on luxuries sometimes makes me wonder as to the future of our species. Hey...do with your money as you wish, its yours. But if you treat it like its nothing or put down others who cannot afford what you can, thats crossing a line. Your (and I dont mean "you" specifically) "spending without thinking or care" is what shapes the current landscape more then the available money-pool. Well I m old-school and regardless if I earn 20.000 a month or a year, money has value and I like to make sure I get a fair return value for the money I spent. Thats why Star Citizen is a bad game for me. Thats why most AAA games today are bad games for me. Its too much icing and not enough cake. And tho I could understand the race to games on release when it was MMOs where even a single hour before the competition could mean serious advantages I m completely confused as to why single player games are selling so well with a pre-order system.
I dont care if I pick the game up a week after release, my available free-time will ensure I m limping after the cool crowd anyway but this way I make sure I get what I want. Just a little responsibility with the money you spent can go a long way and being "rich" is not an issue in this.
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So because some amounts of money are trivial it makes it okay to give it to some who lies to you? For almost a decade? Still hasn't delivered a game after 200+ million?
Plenty of people choose to selectively engage in morality, especially when it comes to personal convenience and having a good time.
Regardless of how much "fun" you squeeze out of something or how much a beer has cost you, you may have played a "Game?", but Chrillbarts definatly gamed the play.
If you'll knowingly support known liars and people engaging in fraud what else will you support in the name of your own personal fun and entertainment?
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