Hey, Mods: Any chance we could get a strikeout line through the “And it’s free to play this week” part of the title? That hasn’t been true for months, and this thread still shows up high in the thread list.
I feel like we’re getting hung up on semantics here; Every time you add a new feature to your build, it’s technically a “patch” or a new version, or something. So you get lots of patches/versions/whatever.
I can’t point you to an example because most games don’t publish their Alpha-level patch notes. But why would development during the Alpha phase be any different from how things work in the “beta” phase, which you can easily see by looking at the list of patches for any Early Access game on Steam?
Pretty sure Czar is simply pointing out that the patch notes for Star Citizen amounts to little more than busywork so backers feel like Chris Roberts is actually doing something with their money. Other than furnishing his new LA digs.
The word “patch” evokes the feeling of an extant product. “Development update” does not. So they call them patches.
I have to stress that for all my honest negativity, it’s obvious Star Citizen would in theory be the coolest thing ever, if it was actually a functioning game. But this isn’t going to happen, not well, anyway. Perhaps it’s simply that the technology doesn’t exist, or that it’s going to require a company that actually has some money to make a similar game happen. Maybe it takes a few tries before someone nails it.
Clearly, there is a market for a game like this. “No Man’s Sky” was released to incredible fanfare and subsequent incredible disappointment. “Eve” has plodded along cheerily for years, and “Elite: Dangerous” is around, too. Someone will fill this market space sooner or later.
As I said 115 posts ago:
Patch does not imply post release in any way, there were hundreds of patches to that diablo game before you ever got your hands on it.
…I think that the whole Star Citizen thing is a giant boondoogle as well. But you are citing Derek Smart. Its a bit like citing Alex Jones on his opinion on what happened on 9/11.
More like asking William Rodriguez on his opinion on what happened on 9/11. 
Adding to all that, there’s also an element of MLM-marketing at work, as shown by the OP of this thread.
Edit: Forgot the OP had a referral code or something edited out. Thought it was weird to call it MLM without that.
He posted a referral link instead of a direct link, in an effort to get in-game bennies-in effect it was pay to post.
In a strange way I kind of feel bad for Chris Roberts. Yes yes I know he’s laughing all the way to the bank. But seriously, I feel like the Star Citizen is a victim of its own success. Had they made a good amount of money instead of the absurd amount of money actually raised, they would have simply made a great space flight simulator and called it a day. It probably would have been a great game. The problem was they got so much money they scope exploded, and then kept exploding and continues to explode to this day. There’s no chance of this ever releasing in a state close to what has been promised, if it ever even releases at all.
The early days of Minecraft worked something like this.
Thing is, Star Citizen does have a release build, that backers can play, and it is regularly updated. It’s not currently brilliant, but everytime I check it out more has been added, so it’s definitely advancing.
I still wouldn’t drop $750 on a picture of a ship though.
Edit: To be clear, early Minecraft released a lot of patches for an alpha game that had no planned release date. It did not continually ask for money for anything other than copies of the game.
I don’t really agree. The whole reason I didn’t back this in the first place is the insane level of ambition demonstrated even in the project as explained by the Kickstarter campaign. I know I’ve said this before somewhere, but if Chris Roberts had shown up and said “I’m gonna make a new Wing Commander game. It can’t CALL it Wing Commander, but that’s what it’s gonna be. We’ll add some online multiplayer dogfights and the ability to have another player as wingman via the internet, but it’s basically gonna be Wing Commander.” I would have said “TAKE MY MONEY!” but he didn’t. He showed up with this insane sprawling mess of promises that in the considered opinion of me from four years ago, was completely beyond what he had shown was in his ability to create. The fact that it has grown even more insane with feature bloat since then is just the disease following its natural course. I don’t think this game would have done better with more “reasonable” donations, because it was already insane when he started soliciting.
I tried the free fly, and it was disappointing and also made me feel kind of bad for Chris Roberts. It was visually impressive (minus the terrible frame rates in the persistent world), but none of it was fun. The dogfighting felt insubstantial, because there wasn’t enough feedback about whether or not I was hitting my opponent or being hit.
Five years in, I expected more. There was nothing in the game right now that hasn’t been done, better, in other games from 10 years ago. Reading dev blog notes that say they are going to have to rewrite even more of CryEngine in order to not kill everyone’s frame rate whenever a big ship loads does not fill me with hope.
Chris Roberts (or his management team) seems to be missing some important project management skills around defining objectives and minimizing risk.
I found this thread on Neogaf to be a useful background on Derek Smart.
It seems to me that what the crowdfunding is being used for is open-ended research and development, not a particular project.
The thing is…we should have already known this. Freelancer, at the very least, is exactly what happens if you do pretty much the Star Citizen thing, except you do it 15 years ago, and Microsoft steps in to save you from utterly failing. And my dim understanding is that Starlancer had some issues along these lines as well.
Chris Roberts has not demonstrated he can make a game more complicated than Wing Commander: Privateer. 
Star Citizen is now the third most expensive game ever developed with no end in sight.
How fucked is Star Citizen? Contrary to what was originally reported by Engadget, Econotimes says the word from Cloud Imperium is that transitioning from CryEngine to Lumberyard has not been smooth.
As I understand it Lumberyard is a fork of CryEngine. But The CryEngine the devs have been working with now included a ton of custom technology (like 64 bit indexes) And that was the main bit of work.
It’s done though, the transition is complete according to what they are saying.