Interesting video here

Fun to see shots from 10 years ago. Fairly objective assessment, at least IMHO

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I think it’s a fair look. Thanks for sharing!

That is a very good video. It really describes the bittersweet experience that has been Star Citizen so far.
BTW - are there any plans for an OTG meet-up for Invictus week?

It was an interesting perspective. I enjoyed the analysis of the backer responsibility, though the perspective he came from was from the back end. It’s easy to say “the backers should have known” when there was no way we could have known in 2012. 6 years later it was obvious, but by that time they already had our money. And he didn’t even cover the playability lies that have been sprinkled around through this tumultuous decade.

And the technology issue was something I was pondering about 5 years ago. Remember when Mass Effect Andromeda launched with graphics that looked awful compared to games like Witcher 3, made by studios 1/3 the size, a few years earlier? How is Lumberyard going to compare to UE5?

This video (Imagining the NEXT Cyberpunk 2077 | Unreal Engine 5 HD 4K 2022 - YouTube) is a fan made “trailer” for Cyberpunk 2077, re-envisioned in UE5, and it’s INSANE. I see the wax mannequins in SC and it already appears outdated. And we’re hearing 2-5 more years at a minimum. End of this year the nextgen graphics cards are going to come out, and we’ll see UE6 in 2 years, how can SC stack up? Or will we hear in 2 years from CIG that they’re going to re-engine the game in UE6 and it’ll take 4 more years? Milk the backers for all they can, for as long as they can?

He mentioned the “sunk cost fallacy”, which I most certainly feel, but I think that goes both ways. CIG has put so much into this, they’re so deep, they couldn’t get out of they wanted to. If CR stepped up and said he was wrong, the entire industry would collapse, lawsuits would pile up, it would be a feeding frenzy. I envision him sitting in meetings, face in his hands, trapped by this thing he created, unable to escape. We’re going off this cliff Thelma and Louise Style, CIG and its backers, together.

I can’t watch a 45-minute video, it’s too long. Star Citizen looks like an interesting game, but as someone looking from the outside in - it looks like Chris Roberts is just taking all of the money from backers without wanting to deliver a final product. To me it looks like the flow of money will stop once a final product is released. The fact that CIG has made $400 Million already is mind-blowing. This game will never release because it’ll always be in game in-progress, constantly in development. This is one of the biggest fund raising video-game scams in history. The longer this stays in development, the richer Chris Roberts gets.

It’s not a scam, to this day I still don’t believe it, and I say that in light of all of the lies. HIs comparison to Musk in this video is a solid one, he opens his mouth when he shouldn’t, commits to things he shouldn’t, etc, but I still do not believe that, at any point, there was ill intent. No one is sitting back, laughing and twirling their mustache at their evil scheme, because there are MUCH better ways of doing that then hiring 400+ people on 3 continents. CR genuinely felt like he could do this, then proceeded to over-reach, again and again. I love Sandi, and do not feel like she did a bad job, but someone early on should have realized that they needed a REAL marketing exec, hired one like they hired TZ, and that person should instantly have duct taped CR’s mouth shut and controlled the narrative. Let the genius sit in the back and be the genius, but don’t let him talk to the public, because that’s not his skill set.

At this point it can’t afford to launch. If SQ42 launches and it bombs, it’s over, the lawyers will descend upon that company and no 2 bricks will be standing together when they’re done. Even if it’s only “meh”, people will KNOW what SC is about and no longer buy ships. The only way SC will survive the launch of SQ42 is if it’s a stellar launch, a truly spectacular one. We’re all old gamers here, can you tell me the last game you remember that had a stellar launch? I mean a truly memorable one, where years later we’re like “Wow, why can’t all companies launch like that?” I can’t think of a single one. Every game I’ve ever played, MMO or otherwise, had issues. Even Witcher 3, one of my absolute favorite games, had an awful launch, where the graphics in the game where nowhere near as good as they were in the E3 trailer.

I really hadn’t thought about it until that video laid it out plainly. The moment SQ42 launches, CIG changes, one way or the other. If it’s fantastic, they sell 10 million copies of SQ42 to new players, a huge influx of cash, but all of those new players are casuals, the people who play a game for 3 months and then stop, so if SC isn’t immediately available, they’ll uninstall and move on to the next shiny. That’s how this market works.

But if SQ42 bombs…Derek Smart was right, 10-14 years of nay-sayers were right, everyone who backed was a sucker, crowdsourced games across the industry will suffer, and the lawsuits will start. It’s not like ME:Andromeda, a mature studio with numerous titles and IPs to its name. Nor is it like Hello Games where No Man’s Sky had a horrible launch but years later is doing really well, because that was their 1st game and while they did say it had things it didn’t, they only did that for like 6 months and quickly retracted it, then fixed it so it does. No, this is 10-14 years of making claims and failing to make them, over and over, promising things and then retracting them, selling the sky, aggressively, continuously, in the face of significant adverse press…and then not delivering. I’m honestly not capable of imagining the shit storm that will descend upon CIG if that happens.

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So… Anyone planning to check out Invictus week?

A timely communication from Chris Roberts. Maybe he saw the video?
Letter from the Chairman - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42

Probably just a coincidence :slight_smile:

And yeah, I’ll log in for Invictus, I enjoy seeing the ships.

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@macallen it sounds like SC will never launch then, from your explanation. CIG is damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. This game has 400+ people employed on 3 continents, and development cannot be completed? To me sounds like gross mismanagement. In any case, this is why I refuse to support (or purchase) Early Access games.

BTW two MMOs that had good launches (in my opinion) was Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. I can’t recall having any issues with those games whatsoever at launch.

Mismanagement, for sure. Over promising and under delivering, for sure. In my opinion they need to stop adding features, freeze scope/feature development, and glue things together while fixing the most egregious bugs that have existed for years.

Having said all that, the game looks absolutely stunning. For me the main issue is that the UI drives me insane, which means I just can’t play for more than 15 minutes before I want to stab my brains through my eyeballs :stuck_out_tongue:

As I’ve said before: I still have hope, but little faith.

Again I want to clarify 2 things in my position:

  1. This was not intentional, no one ever even considered this being a scam. CR’s enthusiasm and intentions were 100% genuine, and I’ve always felt that, unwaveringly so
  2. This was not the result of incompetence. CR is a genius, TZ is a genius, there are a great many people at CIG, most of which are brilliant. I have the utmost respect for everyone at CIG or I would not have given them my money, and that has not changed.

What I feel happened, put as simply as possible, they grabbed something they thought was small and fuzzy that turned out to be a 600lb Bengal Tiger. This is clearly evident in the original pledge goal of $300k, all of which know could not be used to make anything, much less a decent game. What happened next exceeded their goals, then their expectations, then their imaginations, and then just sanity in general. Now that they have this tiger by the tail, what do they do with it? If they let it go, it will turn around and eat them, and they know this.

I’m here for the ride, I’m in for more than a penny or a pound. I gave up long ago seeing my money, or my money’s worth, and that’s fine. I will absolutely jump on the dog pile if it fails and join the class action, I’ve thousands invested, I’d like to see some of it back if it all goes tits up. I really do want them to succeed, but this video crystalized thoughts I’d been having for awhile now and made me realize what’s actually happening…CR has no clue how to get this out the door without destroying his company.

Someone just made a UE5 video re-imagining Skyrim, Starfield comes out early next year, newer games with better graphics keep coming out, and SC looks basically the same. Players notice that, and every year that goes by is just 1 more older that Lumberyard gets.

I finally made it to Port Olisar last night. I’ll be heading down to Orison sometime today.
Looking forward to touring the UEES War Hammer.
Anyone been there yet?

Was on just a bit ago. Watching the Warhammer descend through Crusader and dock at Orison was awesome. Definitely worth seeing, also got some good pics of the fleet doing a fly-by of Everus Harbor

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Excellent video.

Thank you for sharing

I always try to explain the journey of Star Citizen to people instead of telling them about what it is today.
Because what it is today is NOT at all what it was pitched as 10 years ago.

Originally SC was supposed to be a MUCH MUCH MUCH smaller game. It would have 100 star systems at launch but those systems would have been a fraction of the system they have in alpha today. Free roam across planets was not part of the design, and instead it would have been zones for landing and exploring. Much of the space flight between locations would have been automated and even more of the flight within a system and especially down to a planet would have been automated. Basically, the flying would have revolved around combat only.

But even in that limited design the backing poured in. The idea of another game from CR with current graphics and capabilities was an easy sell for many people. And in 2015, when the backing had reached hundreds of millions the company decided to redesign. They basically went back to the drawing board and with so much more money at their disposal they increased almost every aspect of the game. This is the point where most people scream scope creep but they would be very wrong. Scope creep is when you have a set design and continue to go outside of that scope in order to add more features. Star Citizen has had the same feature set since its redesign in 2015, and much of that was not new features but expanded features.

I agree there has been mismanagement with CIG, but not with the game itself. The design management has been spot on. What we have seen though is very poor resource management. There are teams that should be producing at 4 to 5 times the rate they are producing due to poor management. The money they have wasted on very poor marketing makes me cringe.
And yet, they continue to bring in record pledges year after year.

Star Citizen will absolutely leave alpha into a beta and eventually a release. It will not be because the money stops coming in so they finally put a beta tag on it. This is silly and anyone paying attention to the company for the past 10 years knows that. But that brings up the issue of time. So many times you will hear that SC is long overdue and way off schedule. Again, not entirely true, though fair to assume. When the 2015 redesign came about, a new schedule was also put in place. And CIG struggled to keep up. Technical hurdles became almost impossible to overcome. This is not a surprise since what they are building has never been done before at this scale. But still, they ran late. And then just as they were getting into a good stride and putting out regular updates, really starting to get their legs under them and make good progress…COVID hit. And just like every other company in the world, their progress took a hard nose dive.

Now in 2022 they are starting to get their stride back a bit. There are still management issues with resources that can easily be seen from the outside looking in. But they are working to get content out with each quarterly patch, which they meet without missing a single patch in the last 5 years even during the worst COVID times.

I have spoken in person with many of the devs. I have met them at CitizenCon, talked with them in the forums and helped them test in game. There is not a single person that I have met that works on this game that is not 100% committed to getting it to beta and release. They want to make the best possible game they can make and they are not willing to sacrifice anything along the way. And that means it is taking time to build. Ten years may sound like a lot, but do a little Googling and see how long the typical open world MMO takes to build. Then multiply that by 50 or so, because that is the scale of SC. Scale seems to be the one thing most people cannot grasp about this game. The scale is unheard of in anything else out there. And the detail from the scratches on the head of a bolt on a door to a ship all the way to the volumetric clouds wrapping a gas giant planet and every step in between. Scale and detail are simply beyond anything anyone has ever seen before.

Now, I am a long time backer and a fan of the game so obviously my opinion is biased as such. But I also am not one to just loosely throw money around. I believe in this project, even though it has frustrated me as well at times. I do my best to be objective about it, but I also tend to get riled up when I see misinformation and even blatantly false accusations made. CIG is a company of people, like any other. They have made mistakes along the way, but they are pioneering something amazing in game development. For me, that is worth a little extra time to get it right.

This game will never release. Correction: This game will never officially launch or be finished. Edited before someone declares it’s actually released. I don’t need semantics.

Thank you for your baseless and utterly useless comment.

If you would like to actually join in the conversation please do so at any time

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