Totally on me for misreading the first “SF” as “SC”, which reportedly has base-building capability reminiscent of 4’s settlement-building.
I guess I’m an official player of SC but haven’t gotten that far into it yet. I’m currently occupied with a number of other space games (like Space Engineers) and looking forward to Starfield. Doesn’t mean I won’t come back to SC at some point.
There is a really good series on YT “Overclocked” that uses SC for machinima video captures. They’re up to 8 episodes now, and are IMO at least as good as anything on Netflix.
Maybe No Man’s Sky, but that died on release because it failed to deliver on its developer’s promises. Starfield is the first AAA competitor that I can think of, but I don’t follow the genre too closely.
You’re overlooking Elite: Dangerous which iirc launched right around the same time as Star Citizen and delivered much the same sort of gameplay.
It is using an entirely new engine. I am pretty sure it will be the first game on Creation Engine 2, so yeah, there will likely be bugs. The really bad news is that Creation Engine 2 is based on the engine that Bethesda has made so many of their RPGs with, and that they never figured out how to release a non-buggy game with even after so many years…Yikes.
It didn’t die on release. The developers put out a steady stream of significant updates. According to SteamCharts, it’s at #119 in active player count. They get a decent boost every time they release a new update (once or twice a year, it seems).
It’s no Counterstrike or anything, but it has pretty good numbers for a title like that. I still play it from time to time.
For sure. NMS is the single greatest redemption arc in video game history. Hell, I’ve tracked a lot of that arc in this thread as a comparison to SC. Sure they biffed their launch, and hard, but it’s impossible to argue they haven’t made it right several times over.
Critics: “ugh, it’s just Fallout 4 in space.”
Fans: “it’s Fallout 4 but in SPAAAAAAAAACE!”
Put me very much in the latter camp.
As long as it’s “Fallout 4 in space, but you don’t have to scrap crap every… fucking… time… you start to build a settlement”. Every time I decide to give FO4 another go, the first time I have to start scrapping to build up Sanctuary for the starting “settlement” quests, I decide I have better things to do… well, until I finally found the “Raze My Settlement” mod.
ETA: Not that it matters, I’m planning to play Starfield day one. Even if I have complaints (like with Fallout 4) I still put HUNDREDS of hours into Bethesda RPGs. Why the hell can nobody else develop such engaging open-world, first-person RPGs, anyway?
I didn’t mind the scrapping. It was like clearing land in Stardew Valley.
I think I did use a mod to do it for me on a second play, though. Also a mod to automatically build walls around each settlement.
So much that Roberts appears to be in a perpetual game of catch-up.
The first thing I do when I re-install Fallout 4 is get a mod that lets me scrap more things. I legit want a Fallout game where base building is the primary game loop, and the ultimate goal is to repair all the ruined buildings and fix abandoned power plants and patch roads and basically rebuild civilization by actually building things, not just by shooting X number of bandits in the head.
Heck, I’d love a “Fallout” game based in sixth-century western Europe, trying to rebuild from the collapse of the Empire.
Or a perpetual game of fall-even-further-behind.
The people who give them money believe they’re getting something from them - and a lot more than 20% of what they were promised. Why do you think people keep on paying them over and over again? The majority of people who pay televangelists think they’re getting something in return. Does that make it Ok?
Sadly this is also true of folk who fall for scammers (be it Nigerian bankers, beautiful women or guaranteed crypto.)
Star Citizen has simply not delivered what it promised (even after decades and vast sums of money.)
To be fair, the game started production in 2011. Although it has been an obscene amount of time, it hasn’t been “decades”.
It might eventually take decades if they don’t just stop development at some point, but they’re not there yet.
No video game has ever spent decades in development. The world record is 14 years, set by Duke Nukem Forever.
Just consider though, in a few years Star Citizen will officially be the longest development for a video game of all time. Maybe they’ll have champagne ready.
I’d say it was already there. In the case of Duke Nukem, the IP had been passed around a lot and they basically redeveloped from scratch at the end rather than having a continuous development cycle.
It’s almost more accurate to say they made the game in about a year or two and the previous 12-13 years were for several different failed games that never got close to seeing the light of day.
Star Citizen doesn’t even have that excuse. Roberts has been closely involved from the beginning and this thread documents the development saga most of way.
They’ll have a tentative plan to present a general outline for champagne by 2029, hopefully.
Also maybe a healthy dose of the sunk cost fallacy.
Judging by the article linked in post 920 and the Wikipedia article, crowdfunding has been accelerating.
Funding from backers exceeded $300 million in June 2020,[118] surpassed $400 million in November 2021,[119] and $500 million in September 2022 .[120]
I wouldn’t be surprised if they hit $600 mil by August.