I think it's well past time to finish my reply to this:
Elite Dangerous fan, and long time Star Citizen fan here, backed in Feb 2013.
Without wanting to throw a grenade into this, what do people here actually think of Star Citizen? i like both these games, i don't see them as competitors, they are different enough that there is room for both.
I'll give an explanation of what i think of it later
it has its good points and its bad points.
First some background:
Back at the end of 2012, I backed three games on Kickstarter. One was an indie game from a truly start-up "garage developer" creating their first game that had a cute, though ambitious, idea I liked the look of. The second was for a sequel to a game franchise I liked, with an established development company and a known name heading the project. The third was a "spiritual successor" to a game franchise I liked, with an established development company, a known name heading the project, and most importantly: the game was nearly ready for alpha, and "only" needed a few million to flesh out the game for release in 2014.
They were, in order Stonehearth, Elite Dangerous, and Star Citizen.
At the time, I was riding high on the results from previous "early access" titles like Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, and
at the time, Mechwarrior Online, my "cockpit game." MWO is the reason why I learned how to program scripts for my CH HOTAS, because the game was
designed as a FPS with mechs, and it took considerable effort to adapt my 2nd order controllers to work
well with a game designed to use 1st order controller input. So after quite few non-game Kickstarter successes, two failures, and one "failure" that
eventually made good on their promises nine years later and then some, I decided to "save" a little money by backing these three games.
Stonehearth I backed because I liked playing "god view" building games, the visual style looked cute, and they had a novel approach to the genre: the construction would be
completely AI driven, who would also have their own personalities.
Elite Dangerous I backed because I liked the original Elite, I was a
huge fan of its sequel: Frontier: Elite 2, but was a bit disappointed with Frontier: First Encounters. There was one problem with it: it wouldn't have all the features of FE2 at launch. In fact, based on their stated development plans at the time, it wasn't likely to even
approach that level until 2020
at the earliest, and I thought they were being overly optimistic at the time. So I backed it, and added it to my watch list.
Star Citizen I backed because Piranna Games, creators of MWO, had already started walking back from their earlier promises, many of which were features that had attracted me to the game in the first place. It was gradually devolving into Battletech themed area-based FPS, and I wanted another "cockpit game" to fill the gap between when I tired of MWO, and when I felt ED would add planetary landings to the game. Unlike ED at the time, which was just a skunkworks project, Chris Roberts
claimed he had already done the
hard phase of game development: creating the game engine and core game loops, and was at the "expensive" phase of game development: hiring enough artists to flesh out the game world.
If
only I had known at the time that Chris Roberts was lying through his teeth in that Kickstarter Pitch.
As 2013 progressed, I was tracking the development of all three games. Stonehearth would periodically release their latest Alpha candidate, which added upon the existing framework of the game. I’d test the release for a few hours, submit any bugs I found, and move on. In ED, I was able to read the archives of the game loops that Frontier was planning on adding to the game... eventually... no promises or guarantees. Meanwhile, over in SC land, Chris Roberts was making grandiose promises about what would be in the game at launch in Nov 2014 for a few million more, and fantastic videos to sell them with... but for some reason, I was paying more and more attention to ED rather than SC.
As the end of 2013 approached, and along with it the anticipated SC and ED Alphas, I started paying attention a bit more to what was going on at SC. Unlike ED, which was about to release its first phase of the Alpha, SC just kept making more and promises and videos to sell them with... and none of those promises were about the core feature of SC: Squadron 42. The
promised time for the SC Alpha came and went, and I'd barely noticed, because I had ED to distract me.
After all, at the start of 2014, ED was in Alpha! It had VR! The videos I could see looked fantastic! I had tired of MWO a lot sooner than I'd anticipated, and I was no longer spending money on micro-transactions in that game. And then came ED's "hurry up and take my money" moment. What I was seeing in the Alphas looked
fun, just like the Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program looked
fun. And Frontier offered to upgrade my beta access to Alpha, along with an LEP. So I joined, and much to my delight (and later dismay) it was everything I'd hoped it would be. I say
dismay, because over the years Frontier had dumbed down ED considerably. Good from a business standpoint, I'm sure, but bad for me.
By the end of 2014, ED had had its full release, and I was having fun. There were parts it could do better, and there were parts that
were better before release, but had been watered down by Frontier, but SC, meanwhile, had released a "hanger module," and an "arena shooter." Not the long-delayed promised Alpha. Not the originally promised release. Not Squadron 42. A
hanger module, to look at the
art assets, and an arcade game.
Stonehearth was also still in alpha development, and slowly adding more and more gameloops and elements to their game. Its pitched release date had already passed as well. Each build was fun to play, but only had about 10-20 hours worth of gameplay before things became repetitive in a save. Still, it had procedurally created maps, basic AI, building planning tools, and a handful enemies to fight.
By the end of 2015, I started to realize something seemed very
off about SC's development. By that time, I'd participated in quite a few playable alpha and early access games, so I was fairly familiar with how
successful ones operated. SC was pretty much the antithesis of those games, with the sole exception of tons of successful
macrotransactions. So I started digging.
Stonehearth, meanwhile, released in 2015... to
early access. It was still adding game loops and content, and the AI "hearthlings" were starting to develop personalities. It was kind of fun to "people watch," in that game. The developers released to early access because things were taking longer than they expected, and they needed to bring in more players if they wanted to continue development, because the original $750,000 from the Kickstarter was almost gone. They also needed to redo the AI scaffolding routines. Players were planning
far more complex structures than the AI could handle.
Throughout 2016, investigating SC became a hobby of mine... primarily because the game I'd backed in 2012, wasn't
anywhere to be seen. And what I learned was alarming. I'd learned about Chris Roberts' previous history of project mismanagement. I learned about Chris Roberts' sudden displays of wealth. I learned about Chris Roberts' attempts to keep his blatant nepotism a secret. I learned about how the terms of service kept changing, becoming more and more restrictive. And I learned that that I couldn't trust CIG whenever they made a claim about something,
especially when they claimed that Squadron 42 was almost ready for release.
Stonehearth, meanwhile, continued in early access, adding more features and fleshing out the AI hearthlings. They now remembered events in the game, and even had "conversations" that would be displayed as pictures. My favorite moment in the game was watching a hearthling run off in tears, after another one insensitively reminded her of her pet rabbit, which had died during a goblin raid early in the game. Thankfully, a military patrol I had set up had just killed some zombies in the direction she fled, otherwise...
In 2017 I had my "Hurry up and
refund my money" moment in regards to SC. It wasn't the Crytek lawsuit. It wasn't learning about the fact that Chris Roberts had no near-Alpha build of the game in 2012, nor a team of developers, but a Cryengine machinima video that had been made by Crytek... for free. It wasn’t the evidence deeply unethical activities in regards to Star Citizen by his long-time business partner Ortwin. It was the dozens of shell companies. This screamed of a Hollywood Accounting scheme, which is way of draining profits from a project to rip off the people who worked on the project, which I considerable to be thoroughly unethical (but sadly legal) business practice. Only in this case, it was pretty clear that the Roberts Clan were the ones who were benefiting from this, and the people being ripped off were SC backers. Part of Chris Roberts' initial pitch, after all, was that money contributed would go 100% into SC's development, and not into the pockets of evil publishers.
Stonehearth, on the other hand, seemed to be nearing full release. Which alarmed some of the original backers, because a few of the more
ambitious stretch goals didn't seem to be even in development. This was fine with me, primarily because I wasn't interested in the promised multi-player, and the core game was pretty decent for the $15 I'd payed for it. It finally released in 2018, and after a couple of bug fixes, the very small team of developers announced that development of the game was completed.
So what do I think I think of Star Citizen? I think it began life in 2010 as an honest desire of a used car salesman named Chris Roberts to relive his glory days as a “rockstar” game developer and Hollywood insider, and finally build his dream game... who had blamed all his previous failures on everyone but himself.
It became a dubiously ethical attempt to make the game when he, along with his long-time business partner Ortwin, convinced a failing and desperate Crytek to provide a game engine license and labor for a machinima video... for free. I’m sure the fact that Ortwin was Crytek’s legal counsel at the time played into that ludicrously lop-sided deal... which Chris Roberts would later reneged on.
Roberts then shopped his idea around to various publishers, with no success. The industry had matured the 20;years he was out of the business, and they recognized a bad pitch when they saw one. His previous track record didn’t help him any. But he learned from his failures, and turned to a new model of funding, one that would bypass those “evil” publishers and their long memories and practical expertise: crowd funding.
It became a downright deceptive attempt to make his dream game when he re-edited the Crytek machinima video to create the illusion that the game was
much further along in development than it really was. And his deceptive sales pitch succeeded far beyond his wildest dreams. Grandiose empty promises and slick marketing had succeeded where traditional pathways had failed. And that is the business plan that CIG follows to this day.
Star Citizen isn’t an early access game. It isn’t a “playable now” alpha. It’s a whitewashed tomb, a fair face that disguises the rot within. It’s a facade that is similar enough to an actual game to keep the money flowing. The focus has always been on the art and visuals, because people associate polished visuals with a polished game. Very rarely do consumers see what games look like during the core tech building phase, because a game development company’s focus is on the tech, not the visuals. That comes later, when the tech is finalized, and they
know how many resources: time, money, server side, and client side, is left for visuals and other fluff, CIG wastes their resources on visuals, and hopes to cramming the core tech into what’s left over.
CIG is approaching half a billion dollars in funding, most of which is via crowdfunding. I’ve seen games whose core tech is more developed, more dynamic, and much more advanced, from small developers with less than a percentage of what CIG has wasted today. Seeing what other games can do, I gave to wonder why CIG struggles so much.
But at least the screenshots look nice.
