Won't happen unless A. New Era would release as total disappointment&mess. B. CIG finally starts addressing a vast number of serious issues instead of adding layers upon layers unneeded fluff. It is not about bugs only, but where is the game?
Star Citizen Discussion Thread v11
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I never played, but I did buy in... back in 2012. I decided to get a refund back in 2017 when I learned about the dozens of shell companies that the Roberts family & friends have created over the years, and I got one thanks to never having played, and thus never accepted their radically changed TOS and its restrictive return policies.Even more cynical than me...but a fair assumption...considering you don't play or have never bought in
I can see creating separate companies for their studios in the US, UK, and Germany. It's the rest of them that has my hackles up. Between the literal shell game they play with people trying to get a refund, the selling and renting of game assets between the various companies, and of course the Roberts family & friends earning money by being on the board of directors for each of those companies... all I can say is that Chris Roberts seems to be using this project to play out it Hollywood Fantasies, and a big part of Hollywood is the use of shell companies to drain a motion picture of all profits, so they can stiff all the talented people that makes the films.
I wasn't thinking so much about repair the hull mini game as a projectile going through the gunner - you know, the dudes actually being in the ship instead of just being disembodied spirits like in Elite. Crew being ejected to space when the ship breaks apart (though apparently you can simulate that in SC by taking a train ride).
I'm not even suggesting any features (this isn't, after all, a SC forum) here or expecting something to work gamewise, I just like the thought that the crew is actually there - one of the more interesting aspects of space legs.
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Time heals all wounds. I never said it was coming soon or "suddenly", but with so many people working on the game and a lot of the groundwork seemingly in place, I'd think it's doable for them, no matter how incompetent I see people say they (employees or more likely, management) are. They have just moved slow enough for people to forget the desolate, actually unplayable position the game was in years ago.
Glad to see you think so highly of me. I don't normally buy early access games, so I don't see myself caught in that net just yetand people were wondering earlier where SC were still finding newsuckersbackers
. Like I said, I don't agree with their business model at all, but I appreciate the game they're building, and I'd be lying if I said it doesn't appeal to me.
Lolno. You're just making the classic mistake of assigning to SC the normal effects of the passage of time — it's the same as all the silly people saying that SC has ever done anything new.
Nothing is in place, especially not at any kind of groundwork leve. All they have is a bunch of rapidly ageing art assets strung together with string and even more rapidly drying chewing gum — that's why even the stuff built into the engine are breaking down further every time they try to add anything. The number of people working for them is a negative here: it's probably the top third reason why they are incapable of actually producing anything useful, after the incompetence of the management level and of the employees.
The only thing that is doable for CI¬G is more art, more sales, and more shell companies. None of which contributes to any kind of development progress.
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Except death from old age
This is where you’re being bedazzled friend. They’re incredibly far away from being in such a place.
Here’s what they’d have to do to hit even the most basic MVP:
In terms of what they've pre-sold and pledged to deliver, almost everything is missing
But more pragmatically, if we were to forget all the grand sales pitches, not discuss whether the existing game mechanics are good/bad, and focus purely on what is missing for an absolute Minimal Viable Product?
- Persistence: Money and kit disappear on a whim. Hell, sometimes avatars change gender mid-session. Any accrued earnings or ship purchases are reset between wipes. (The last aspect was supposed to receive a partial fix in 3.8, termed 'baby long term persistence'. It hasn’t worked particularly well to date.)
- Stable Servers: The current system is a half-built Frankenstein concoction which falls over with regularity. '30k' crashes, massive desyncs where you can pass through your ship and watch the general game functionality melt around you. The theory is that this collection of half-functions will be assembled into standard instanced server regions at some point, which may work better. (And then the genuinely 'never been done before' server meshing is supposed to happen, creating a unified player space. This was supposed to happen in 2019. It is currently nowhere close to happening.)
- Functioning AI: The AI is currently woeful. Supposedly due in part to the state of the servers. The ground NPCs are the most amusing. In FPS they can shoot through walls, or be rendered immortal, or all run at you in a mad mob, or just not react to your presence at all. The more decorative ones at stations frequently just stand in stationary collectives in doorways, or stand looking wistful on chairs. Or curve their heads down in a rubberised way to look at their own armpit. It's weird. Not that they really have a function, but somehow they manage to anti-function. Several of these issues have been 'fixed' previously only to regress.
- Bug Squashing: The accrued bugs in SC are legion. Ones like ships spawning without their components (doors, engines etc) are ancient. Others like players spawning without their head, or in an invisible state where they can't interact with anything are almost as old. But the list is absurdly long. You can break your legs, have a heart attack, or simply fall through the floor doing the most mundane of actions. Random decompressed areas will kill you, lifts will kill you, duplicated trains will trap you in an eternal limbo. Ships will Quantum Travel directly into the heart of planets, which are explicably filled with water (explicably for reasons that are too long to mention), and kill you. On and on and on it goes. (If your UI disappears a popular voodoo fix with the community is to change the colour of your eyes. This probably says a fair bit about the state of the game
This may all seem hard to believe, but it really does seem to be that janky at a functional technical level. See Mole's post above yours for a recent 'review of the year'
This is all just keeping it brief though. If you want a long list of all the more glamorous gameplay that they've pre-sold but are absolutely nowhere close to delivering, then that would require a lot more words and pictures
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Appreciate the discussion. I definitely don't know as much as a backer of the game or some of the people who discuss it here do, and I'm definitely not here to be the game's defender at all. Let me ask you this, do you think CIG are capable of finishing (as in, meeting their own promises, not just MVP) Star Citizen? As someone who has very sparingly watched it's development over the years, all of the new stuff each year, not just shiny ships, but technical things as well definitely bedazzle me. They are seemingly free of all time constraints, so unless they just begin to run out of the precious green to retain their developers, I don't see how they don't finish the game, if a finished game of that scope is even possible.
Bedazzling is what CI-G do best
Because when it comes down to actually delivering - what you actually get differs vastly from their shiny promotional material. Now, that is of course to be expected to a degree - but in CI'G's case it's truly excessive.
The best part of all is - what they give us as players is easily apprised and analysed by us players - and a great deal of us have technical backgrounds which enable us to peek into that and put together a fairly clear picture of what is going on.
Now - I am not the most technical peep out there, and internet credentials and opinions are worth precisely what you paid for them, but as seems to be the current fashion; I'm the CEO of a Fortune 500 Lulz company - and let me tell you I know lulz when I see it.
Because when it comes down to actually delivering - what you actually get differs vastly from their shiny promotional material. Now, that is of course to be expected to a degree - but in CI'G's case it's truly excessive.
The best part of all is - what they give us as players is easily apprised and analysed by us players - and a great deal of us have technical backgrounds which enable us to peek into that and put together a fairly clear picture of what is going on.
Now - I am not the most technical peep out there, and internet credentials and opinions are worth precisely what you paid for them, but as seems to be the current fashion; I'm the CEO of a Fortune 500 Lulz company - and let me tell you I know lulz when I see it.
The problem is not if they are capable of finishing the game, when almost a decade in they don't even know yet what game they want to make. Seeing the unending plethora of shiny ships and fancy side features constantly thrown in your face, and then hearing them arguing on trivial stuff like network code and gameplay loops as things "we'd like to do", "we hope to do", "we envision it as", "it should be sort of"....you can build an absolutely majestic roof on the ground, but good luck in building the rest of the majestic house under it afterwards.
Not the person you're replying to, but: absolutely not. Their list of promises over the years is fairly legendary, here's a very small few of a much larger list:
- Private servers and modding support
- VR support (in a game with forced animations all over the shop)
- Space battles with 100+ (with occasional mentions of a thousand?) players supported in a single area of space, in a single shard (they can currently manage ~50 people on a single server, at all, anywhere in the system)
- 100+ star systems full of content (in a game which currently has part of one system and a fairly small amount of content)
- Capital ships requiring a crew of players or NPCs to function properly
The thing is, CIG are very good at making everything look shiny. They add new locations for people to visit, they very reliably add new ships for people to buy, they put on events, and add a smattering of game mechanics that they can achieve with their current networking setup. But that last part is the killer; they're missing several key features which they claim are going to enable these huge space battles - but lots of veteran developers (and no, not just He Who Shall Not Be Named) and generally people who know how networking works, are fairly convinced what they're describing simply isn't feasible given current PC specs and home internet connections. These features have been "in progress" for quite a few years now, seem to move very slowly, and don't typically have the desired outcome when they eventually appear. Now of course, if they take another decade over it then who knows... the technology might have caught up.
... but that brings me to your comment about being free of all time constraints. I really don't believe they are - they sure do bring in a lot of money, but 600+ employees and four (?) offices do a pretty good job of shovelling plenty of cash in the other direction too. There's been more than a little speculation about their burn rate over the years, and really who knows, but it's got to be high. That's supported by them taking out a loan in the UK (which they haven't paid back yet to the best of my knowledge), and picking up a total of around $60M outside investment from the Calder family in the last year or two. Chris Roberts said from the start that this was all about being independent and not beholden to anyone - so if they didn't need the money, why go looking for it?
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Imagine watching bridge engineers start a new bridge by trying to lay the roadway, without even considering the support system (suspension bridge? arch bridge?). You would know without a doubt that they will never finish the bridge.
Star Citizen as an MMO is never going to happen. Roberts is a conman (confidence man). Eventually the project will collapse under its own weight, when the long passage of time inevitably undermines the confidence of backers. My guess is roughly three or four more years.
New PTU patch incoming:
robertsspaceindustries.com
Star Citizen Alpha 3.9.1e PTU.5250536 Patch Notes - Star Citizen Spectrum
Star Citizen Patch 3.9.1e Alpha Patch 3.9.1e has been released to PTU and is now available to test! Patch should now show: VERSION 3.9.1-PTU.5250536. It is strongly recommended that players...
robertsspaceindustries.com
That's a really easy one. In terms of meeting all of their claims, categorically: no. They have simply promised far more than is possible from the very start, and have never stopped selling further technical additions on top.
There's a reason that the running joke goes:
Is X in Star Citizen?
Yes.
Is X in the game now?
No.
The 'tracker' linked in the prior post can give you a reasonable overview of just how far shy they are of those aims in total. But honestly it's only when you start delving into the list that it becomes really clear, and it would take far too long to delve into all of it. But just as a fun overview:
Some of the added stretch goals that are nowhere close to being realised in game:
- Player owned capital ships
- Command and Control of capital ship fleets
- 100 star systems at launch (they currently have 1)
- Landing on planet Earth
- The MISC Endeavour with its detachable workshop, deep space telescope, farming gameplay, and supercollider for overclocking ship modules
- Ship modularity to change roles completely
- The Hull C ship that folds out to hold cargo externally, and dock with stations via other means (all of which has confounded their physics grid system to date)
- A mobile mining platform that has its own refinery (and external storage like the Hull series, but they spin...)
- Salvaging gameplay (originally roadmapped for 2016, and on most every roadmap since, seen as the patron saint of all of the many, many unique pre-sold ship roles that are yet to be added. As to date they've added trucking and mining.)
- Exotic Pets
Some stuff that they've pre-sold since:
- A ship that creates land bases
- Many exploration ships whose selling point is that they can scan and map the 100+ systems
- Many more capital ships, including the $3000+ Javelin with its 80 onboard crew.
- Even more elabourate Hull series ships
- A giant mine laying ship
- A capital-ship killing torpedo boat that can't kill the most expensive ships currently in game even in swarms. (Because it's far cheaper )
- Tanks.
Some general stuff they've said they'll do:
- Have a 9:1 NPC to player ratio simulated across systems & realised in NPC form, indistinguishable from players, with a PvP slider allowing players to choses their online engagement level (down to 'solo' play)
- Create a better system than the SoM 'Nemesis system' for generating persistent enemies from this backdrop
- Have complex fauna across the planets including procedural birds.
- Author the planets rapidly via the prog gen tools, with artists finishing a moon in a day. (Reminder that they currently have one system. The last moons added took months. This was a great improvement.)
- Add VR support.
- Player-hosted private servers
- Extend the 100+ systems from launch on via discoverable jump points.
And really I'm just breezing through some fun stuff and not even touching the sides of the technical additions required to meet all their actual pre-sales and broader claims.
You can lay some caveats in here, in that they say some of the more recent ships aren't expected to make launch. But the technical requirements of those ships often need to be factored in in many cases, and have a backward impact. The $2000 Kracken Privateer, sold from 2019, for example requires the proposed economic & AI simulation [still not in] to allow for mobile capital-ship sized markets that can be visited & used by said NPCs. This was never in the original or interim pitches. It is yet more scope creep, and just the most recent example
Throw in aspects like the near mythical Server Meshing, supposedly providing 100k player shards, and the launch pledges to have 10x the polygon counts of competitors, and the claims to have a physics-based flight model (currently not so seemingly), and to be a competitor for high end shooters on the FPS mechanics front (spoiler: the FPS functionality is not hugely lauded in the community, notably in the stand-alone Star Marine module). And, just, nah
. These claimed end games are contradictory, too vainglorious, and very-much not in evidence in the game currently I've paraphrased a bit loosely at points, but I can essentially link you up for all of this stuff (if I could be bothered
). And there is so... much... more... I guess it would help if you said which technical aspects are the most eye catching to you. And why you think they've either achieved their functionality already, or that their completion is a foregone conclusion.
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I tryed some space combat aaand it is by far the worst space combat experience I have ever experienced in a space sim, and I have played a lot.
This alone would have to put an end to this farse. All this discussions about SC beeing good or bad are only a waste of time.
I really can't understand how someone who like space sims, and SC players would have to, can even bear to play this game.
This alone would have to put an end to this farse. All this discussions about SC beeing good or bad are only a waste of time.
I really can't understand how someone who like space sims, and SC players would have to, can even bear to play this game.
That's actually one of my favourite parts of this: even with all this money and the vast array of features they're trying to add, the central core of the game (and, in my opinion, one of the only reasons that ED has had such staying power over the years) is still absolutely dire - the act of flying the spaceships. The flight model might as well not exist - it feels very much like instant thrust everywhere for the most part, you're never really having to fight anything.
There was that video posted a few days ago of people managing to kill an Idris (by luring its AI to crash into the ground, which apparently did no damage, then shooting it through a hole in a turret?!) - all the ships there were just sort-of magically suspended in mid-air at whatever angles they liked, in-atmosphere, on a planet with apparently fairly significant gravity. There didn't even seem to be any thrusters firing on most of the ships to keep things in the air from what I could see - they were just sort-of being held there by space magic. Feels really weird that so much effort is being spent on things like having bartenders who pour drinks that are appropriately affected by the direction of gravity ... and yet the ships feel like that.
Those of us who've been backers of this thing for some time already know this...that's why some of us do other things besides pew...can't put it more simply than that. If you want a pewfest...there's plenty of more competent games out there...Star Citizen isn't one of them
And that's the difference between streamers and testers...we don't go into a PTU fawning for other folks attention or entertainment. We find the bugs, workaround those we can and report the ones we can't...maybe if they kept this shyte off the PTU...and restricted all the frankly useless streamers who probably have never filled in an IC report to the PU, the rest of us who are testing might be able to just get on with it. That's what the PTU is for and why it isn't the PU...it's not about wearing silly virtual hats, wasting bandwidth and mining for other folks subscriptions
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And that's the difference between streamers and testers...we don't go into a PTU fawning for other folks attention or entertainment. We find the bugs, workaround those we can and report the ones we can't...maybe if they kept this shyte off the PTU...and restricted all the frankly useless streamers who probably have never filled in an IC report to the PU, the rest of us who are testing might be able to just get on with it. That's what the PTU is for and why it isn't the PU...it's not about wearing silly virtual hats, wasting bandwidth and mining for other folks subscriptions
lol, its about murdering people in game who think they are testing.
Do you think CIG are capable of finishing - MVP?
Yes, it's likely 3-4 years away - going on previous pace, depending on when Sq42 releases and consequently how many resources get moved onto SC. See Golgot's great summary of the core tech needed, then add on basic versions of the various gameplay mechanics/professions needed (refueling, repair, science, farming, land & factory ownership, Org control, etc). Naturally will need the continued funding.
Do you think CIG are capable of finishing - meeting their own promises?
Probably, it's likely 7-10 years away - see above but orders of magnitude more.
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