The Star Citizen Thread v5

[CmdrKull]

What SC is doing is called by them open development...i would call it open marketing.
<snip for brevity>

Agreed on the marketing, but when you say it's a con I disagree, though I can see where someone who backed the project would form that opinion.

I think a few others here called it more accurately: Almost everything that seemed so revolutionary 6 years ago has begun entering the mainstream, and they feel an ever-increasing pressure to make it look better in order to compete. I wish they'd focus on making it play better but Chris has a history of focusing on the Cinematic Experience in games. The interview with Andy Sirkus and the alien languages...that's all really cool, sure, but I'm not going to lean Vanduul. It's going to be subtitled. I'm going to ignore it as background noise, and so are most other players. There will be a few that learn the language and add it to their ComicCon resume next to Klingon but gameplay value is essentially 0.

We'll get a Star Citizen game some day. It will probably have a few technical marvels, and the mocap will be amazing (that star Marine moves like Golum!) but the gameplay is going to be bad, and only the dedicated will put real hours into it. </prediction>

 

[Tuub t Tute]

Weren't the buggy races and the Anaconda crash site previewed in live streams before release? My memory gets a bit hazy. I do recall everyone going librarian poo over the static image that looked like it might be a PantherXL landing on a surface base.

Anyhoos, that was off topic. Anyone know if Pupil to Planet will feature in 3.0?

 

[Esvandiary]

Frontier showed a bunch of rendered cut-scenes. CIG has certainly shown a lot of those (often to great ridicule around here.)

So your point fails on that.

No, there was an entire series of livestreams called On The Horizon showing, for example, SRV driving on planet surfaces with multiple people and SRV combat, starting a couple of months before Horizons launched. Those streams showed the current state of how things were in-game, and in one or two cases even resulted in changes to the SRV's mechanics before launch after people asked questions about how it worked.

This is what I'd like to see from CIG. Not marketing fluff or showing off yet more shiny, polished assets created in the editor, but the actual gameplay - even if it's WIP - for how some of the things in 3.0 (e.g. cargo, extended missions, landing/walking around planets, some of the other locations around Stanton) are actually going to work in-game. Hell, I'd like to know how any of those will work in the actual game, not a part-scripted demo.

 

[Ian Skippy]

No, the point remains intact: that FDev could easly show in-engine and even in-game stuff that was “several months away,” which means that 3.0 supposedly being that far off is not a particularly good excuse for not trotting it out at this point.

The reason CIG get ridiculed is because they almost exclusively rely on pre-rendered dazzle reels which, at best, are in-editor and which do not really show off any kind of planned or presented gameplay. Also because anything they show off will invariably fail to materialise at the appointed time.

Exactly. And when FD shows in-game stuff months in advance, thats actually the quality you can expect. With CIG we've only had cutscenes pretty much, and pretty much none of them turned out to be in any way related to the actual game. After, again, more than half a decade. If Sq42 releases this year, they should have mountains of stuff to show already, entire parts of the game would be near complete by now. If they can show nothing, than there is no way on earth they are even close to going into any kind of beta, never mind gamma, forget about release. Sq42 is probably 2018 at best.

 

[Osmanthus]

Reddit link posted on SC, lqfish on his refund:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/5neekj/iqfish_gets_a_refund/dcdnt42/

I wonder if lqfish is getting an inkling of Beer's situation.

 

[Tippis]

Reddit link posted on SC, lqfish on his refund:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/5neekj/iqfish_gets_a_refund/dcdnt42/

I wonder if lqfish is getting an inkling of Beer's situation.

“Comparably small projects like GTA V eat up sums 5-6 times of CIGs budget.”

Is an absolute and complete inability to count or to stick to the truth a prerequisite to back this project?

 

[Osmanthus]

“Comparably small projects like GTA V eat up sums 5-6 times of CIGs budget.”

Is an absolute and complete inability to count or to stick to the truth a prerequisite to back this project?

Wow, how did I not see that? Alright, perhaps he's got an inkling of Beer as an ex-fan, but none of his understanding.

How can one screw up so badly, so many times in one sentence?

e: well, twice, but still

 

[Adept]

Frontier showed a bunch of rendered cut-scenes. CIG has certainly shown a lot of those (often to great ridicule around here.)

So your point fails on that.

Frontier showed us stuff that looks exactly like what we actually got in game. They in-fact showed us stuff captured from their internal alpha build of the expansion. CIG has a habit of showing stuff that has is just a cinematic trailer and nothing like how things actually work (or will work) in game.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

thorn-, as you are aware, CIG specially prepare those demos. There's good reason for that - they don't have actual gameplay to show - but at this point you would expect SOMETHING would have been shown. There's not.

That's why those cases are different. Is it good or bad that CIG hasn't actual gameplay loop to show - depends whom you ask really.

 

[Tippis]

This. When they started to taunt Chris as "teh creator of space sims", I remembered Wing Commander and was like...huh?

I was terminally bored, decided to take that quote very literally, and went out to see what kind of space sims were available before WC came out.

1980s(ish) first-person space games:

• Star Raiders (1979) — Atari 2600/5600/8-bit, Atari ST
• Cyber Strike (1980) – Apple II
• Cylon Attack (1982) – BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum
• Star Trek: Strategic Ops (1982) — Apple II, Arcade, Atari 2600/5200/8-bit, ColecoVision, C64, VIC-20
• Star Voyager (1982) — Atari 2600
• 3D Starstrike (1984) — Amstrad, ZX Spectrum
• Skyfox (1984) — Amiga, Amstrad, Apple II, Atari ST, C64, Mac, PC-88, ZX Spectrum
• Star Trader (1984) — C64, ZX Spectrum
• Star Luster (1985) — Arcade, NES
• Tau Ceti (1985) — Amstrad, Atari ST, C64, Dos, ZX Spectrum
• Total Eclipse (1985) — Dragon 32/64
• Space School Simulator (1986) — Amiga, Amstrad, Atari ST, DOS, ZX Spectrum
• Starglider (1986) — Amiga, Amstrad, Apple II, Atari ST, C64, DOS, Mac, ZX Spectrum
• Starstrike II (1986) — Amstrad, ZX Spectrum
• Star Raiders II (1986) — Amstrad, Atari 8-bit, C64, ZX Spectrum
• Rubicon Alliance (1987) — Amstrad, C64, ZX Spectrum
• Skyfox II (1987) — Amiga, Atari ST, C64, DOS
• Star Voyageer (1987) — NES
• Starglider II (1988) — Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, Mac, PC-98, ZX Spectrum
• Space Rogue (1989) — Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, C64, DOS, Mac, PC-98
• Lightspeed (1990) — DOS

1980s(ish) non-FP space sims:

• Invasion Orion (1979) — Apple II, Atari, PET/CBM, Trash-80
• Project: Space Station (1985) — Apple II, C64, DOS
• Starflight (1986) — Amiga, Atari ST, C64, DOS, Genesis, Mac
• Starflight 2 (1989) — Amiga, DOS, Mac


…oh, and there was some weirdo obscure vector-graphics space game from 1984 too, but it probably isn’t worth mentioning.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Time Gate - 1983

pew-pew, exploration, landing on planets, jump gates, and an incomprehensible background story

 

[shadragon]

There is little that is guaranteed to be more destructive to the build because it makes players focus more on what is coming, on what is promised, than what is there now. Asking for the info at this stage is unreasonable. More so because it is an ALPHA build. As such, it is far more subject to delay and change and problems over and beyond what published games might experience. Look at Elite....a lot of people were expecting us to be on 2.4 by now, if not 3.0. We're still 2.2.

Let's compare Elite and SC...

Elite kickstarted, went through alpha, Beta AND Gamma, then released over a year ago. Elite is 2.2 currently as a released game and is half way through their first major update with some minor delays.

SC kickstarted a year before Elite and is still pre-alpha or effectively a tech demo. It won't be considered a true alpha build until all of the promised features have been added. Right now SC is running with around 15% of promised content (as stated on KS), so 85% of the game is currently missing after four years of development. What is there, barely works. SC is not v2.6. It is 0.26a, at best. They promised open development and financial reports. Backers got neither.

Anyone who puts money into SC from this point (until a viable product is released) deserves to lose that money with only themselves to blame.

 

[killminster]

list

What about Captain Blood (1988)?

 

[shadragon]

He only really made three and a half games: Wing Commander, Strike Commander, Wing Commander III, and Wing Commander IV

(Under adult supervision)

- - - Updated - - -

It's a bit like that Engineer at Apple who came up with a new product (i forgot whether it was itunes or the ipod itself), only to have Steve Jobs tell him how stupid that was, and then later take credit for it. But my memory might be hazy about this.

Story is here.

http://www.cultofmac.com/303469/steve-jobs-drowned-first-ipod-prototype/

 

[ianw]

Hey guys - I'm not sure if I should say this - but I've been thinking about this project and I have a sneaking suspicion that things aren't going that well.

I know that probably sounds a bit weird but I like to think I'm a kind of a think out of the box sort of guy..

Maybe I just had a dodgy prawn or something...

 

[Tippis]

Time Gate - 1983

pew-pew, exploration, landing on planets, jump gates, and an incomprehensible background story

What about Captain Blood (1988)?

What can I say? Mobygames has very limited multi-filtering capabilities.

 

[Asp Explorer]

What about Captain Blood (1988)?

Alien languages, landing on planets, planetary destruction, space madness, it's got it all

 

[Zetta]

Let's compare Elite and SC...

Elite kickstarted, went through alpha, Beta AND Gamma, then released over a year ago. Elite is 2.2 currently as a released game and is half way through their first major update with some minor delays.

SC kickstarted a year before Elite and is still pre-alpha or effectively a tech demo. It won't be considered a true alpha build until all of the promised features have been added. Right now SC is running with around 15% of promised content (as stated on KS), so 85% of the game is currently missing after four years of development. What is there, barely works. SC is not v2.6. It is 0.26a, at best. They promised open development and financial reports. Backers got neither.

Anyone who puts money into SC from this point (until a viable product is released) deserves to lose that money with only themselves to blame.

Just a small correction, Star Citizen's crowdfunding started a month or so prior to Elite's. It was however, being worked on by a smallish group (<10) for about a year prior to its kickstarter.

 

[thorn-]

Frontier showed us stuff that looks exactly like what we actually got in game. .

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for from CIG?

[video=youtube_share;cy3_-KEULq8]https://youtu.be/cy3_-KEULq8[/video]

 

[Rolan]

Star Citizen Newsletter

Spoiler

Star Citizen Newsletter - Revealing Alien Languages January 13th, 2017

Greetings Citizen.

Week two into the New Year got off to a rolling start. I spent the early part of the week at our Austin studio to work with the team on outlining expectations for the year. Meanwhile, leads from all four studios flocked to our LA office where I joined them for the second half of the week. We had a flurry of meetings to set goals and refine the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 production schedules. Thanks to these meetings we’ll soon be updating our production report to reflect these changes. Also this week, the dev team continued to improve the current 2.6 build and iron out the stability and gameplay improvements we’ll be adding to the incremental 2.6.1 patch. We're still waiting on a few members of our team to return from the their holiday break this coming Monday to finalize the 2.6.1 schedule so look for an update next week on the estimated date and tasks. Finally, our community team is still hard at work looking at our roster of shows (refining old favorites and experimenting with potentially new ones) to see where we can make improvements. So stay tuned for updates in the next few weeks.

-- Chris Roberts

Weekly Sneak Peek: Explorer Spacesuit

Spoiler