I have never heard of this game and now I’m glad I had. This reads like a giant clusterfuck.
Star Citizen blows yet another release date…but Roberts says he’s just going to turn it into a 400 quadrillion cubic kilometer expansion of the main game.
By the time this guy is done, he’s going to have a vaporware too large for one universe to hold.
And OP never came back.
Spam seagull. Flew in, crapped all over everything, and flew away.:mad:
In a sane world, this thread would have been throttled in its cradle, but I guess since it attracted some commentary it has to stay. Apparently, as a warning to the uninformed. I guess that’s a form of fighting ignorance.
The referral links got removed, which is good enough for me.
Actually, in this case, it’s exposing what a total cock-up the game and company are and maybe some potential customers will find this thread.
Sometimes, spam bites back.
At the end of the day, I’m glad Star Citizen is a thing.
The game’s ridiculously successful Kickstarter helped popularize the idea of crowdfunding, and that has led to a lot of great products being put out. Star Citizen itself has been circling the drain for so long and in such spectacular fashion that its inevitable demise will not be an indictment against crowdfunding, but against mismanaged game design (not new or surprising in any respect).
And if it does end up producing a game that matches its own hype? Well, good for them and good for the rubes who have spent thousands of real life dollars chasing a digital dream.
Me, I’m happy spending 60 bucks on No Man’s Sky, which will likely also be a letdown in comparison to its hype.
Actually, I’ve been meaning to start a thread asking what the hell other people here thought about a long post by Derek Smart about what a boondoggle Star Citizen was turning out to be. I didn’t ever get in because everytime I checked in it seemed like the price of a decent starting configuration had gone up and it had a whiff of pay-to-not-suck. But now it’s looking like the problem is a lot worse than that.
Smart is looking a lot less loony after The Escapist’s expose, no doubt.
Somebody should turn the (non?)-making of this game into a movie.
Yeah, I suspect that some really interesting stuff will come to light if/when the game crashes and burns.
I would love to know how much of the investor’s money he spent on celebrity voice-overs instead of actual game development.
We all remember Duke Nukem Whenever, right? Seems like Star Citizen is the next one.
The thing about video game crowdfunding is that most games that crowdfund don’t crowdfund anything near their full budget. “Big budget” video game kickstarters are getting like 6 million (Shenmue 3) and 5.5 million (Bloodstained). And the backers look at them and go “These games made a fortune!” when in actuality, they are getting the lion’s share of their funding from other sources, and the 5/6 million they got is more of a “let’s see how interested people are” measure than an actual attempt to fund the entire game.
Other games that are Kickstarted/crowdfunded whatever are often very small teams working on relatively manageable projects, and even they often are doing a sort of “Welp, our team of four lads will be working on this in their spare time, because there’s no way that the money from this Kickstarter would keep us fed for the amount of time we need to make this game.” arrangement.
Star Citizen, on the other hand, seems to be trying to fund themselves, a fairly large studio, full time, on crowdfunding dollars. They’re doing it, for now.
I feel obliged to contest this - Chris Roberts has been basically making failed (at least, financially) versions of this game for a good long time. So it IS completely crazy to give him money for it. Yeah, Starlancer and Freelancer did eventually come out, but it would be unfair to call them successful. And now we have Mr. Roberts coming back promising everything bigger, better, biggerer, more impressive, more shiny, and WAY BEYOND the scope of any previous projects.
I honestly don’t think he can deliver. I looked at this project back when it was on Kickstarter and said “Yeah, this is WAY too ambitious. Especially for a brand new studio.” Nothing I have seen since leads me to believe I was incorrect in that assessment.
IIRC celebrity voice overs was one of the stretch goals that was met so they kinda have to do it.
Did anyone here actually take part in the free weekend? If so what was there to do and how was it?
Do you have numbers? For profit and loss, that is.
That order surprises me somewhat. I would have thought that the gameplay mechanics would have come first with only concept work being done on audiovisuals until the mechanics were fully worked out, up to and including making every level using programmer art.
As an analogy, I saw it as starting and finishing the frame, plumbing and wiring of a house before you get started on the drywall, fixtures and finishes.
In your experience, what do neophyte developers tend to spend too much time on? How about not enough time?
Indeed, it was a stretch goal and they have to deliver it, as much as they have to deliver any of the promises they made. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals ( 5M$)
However, it doesn’t need to be a high priority. It’s also a vague enough promise a few celebrities would have been enough. I don’t know how others feel about it but as long as the voice actor is competent and suited to the role, I don’t care who it is. So, voice acting should be at the tail end of priorities in terms of resources and time of delivery.
Unless, of course, their goal is to attach big names to generate publicity and more funding.
Is nepotism common within game developers? Chris Roberts making his wife a member of the team reminds me of John Romero doing the same with his girlfriend Stevie Case.
I just spent a bit of time looking at various Wikipedia pages connected to Chris Roberts, and they’re kind of funny. None of the posts are breathlessly worshipful, but they’re all written in the best possible light, even when discussing his failures. The cult of personality around this guy is strong.
I don’t (though it’s probably worth taking a read over the wikipedia page for Freelancer) but my general feeling from my lazy research is that while Starlancer/Freelancer were reasonably well received, they were never popular.
I’m curious if anyone here has ever played either of them, and how many people had HEARD of them prior to this Star Citizen stuff.
To put it another way: Chris Roberts is a man with big visions, but he hasn’t had a “hit” since the Wing Commander series ended. I’ll bet if you asked anyone what he was known for before Star Citizen, they’d tell you he was the “Wing Commander guy” not “The Starlancer guy”
I played Freelancer quite a bit. It’s actually a good game in the free spaceflight genre, although there is a definite story and it’s not as open as any of the Elite games.