[HN Gopher] Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
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Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
Author : doener
Score : 153 points
Date : 2021-06-25 10:16 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (robertsspaceindustries.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (robertsspaceindustries.com)
| aeturnum wrote:
| This makes me think of the unofficial promise tracker which has
| been going for years: https://starcitizentracker.github.io/
| thereddaikon wrote:
| This game is the ultimate example of the danger inherent in
| feature creep. The original goals of an expansive FPS/Space Sim
| MMO with unprecedented player count and the largest crafted non
| procedural game world seems lost.
|
| Which is a shame because that's what I was buying in to. I wanted
| massive player counts in a persistent and evolving universe. I
| didn't want "dynamic door alignment" and "Face over IP". My hope
| was Star Citizen would be the game to break the mold that WOW
| created 20 years ago and gave us the next generation of MMO.
|
| They cant even finish the single player campaign which they did
| all the mocap and VA work for years ago. Is Mark Hamill going to
| still be alive when Squadron 42 is released?
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > This game is the ultimate example of the danger inherent in
| feature creep.
|
| Feature creep is their entire business model, that's how the
| make money. Their game(s) is mediocre and certainly not up to
| part with the budget they got for developing it, so they are
| going to stall to get even more money from their fans.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Instead of a game, they release a roadmap. The development of
| this...I can't even call it a game...are just ridiculous at this
| point.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| The version numbers say everything (example: 'Alpha 3.13.1').
| InternetPerson wrote:
| Gather round, it's time to talk about Star Citizen again! Tell
| us, when did you first realize this game would never ship?
| smudgy wrote:
| I'll admit I bought in to Star Citizen - I am/was in a good place
| financially and the money spent isn't something I fondly miss.
|
| I remember the early days where Chris Roberts would say anything
| to folks asking for things like "can my guy be left handed to
| shoot but right handed to right?" or "can my character have a
| tattoo that isn't visible to anyone?" - these aren't really
| examples but they were the level of questions I remember folks
| asking. He'd answer "yes" to anything and everything.
|
| I quickly realized that the game would become a chore when folks
| were euphoric that you'd have to manually load cargo on your
| ships. It felt like folks didn't want a space game but a second
| life and there was already a great space game that didn't waste
| my time doing stupid loops that I didn't want (Elite Dangerous,
| though they did add stupid loops with Engineering).
|
| After that I kept following the project's development and having
| a giggle as the madness increased over time.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Has someone made a variant of Valve Time[1] for SC?
|
| [1]: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
| moonshinefe wrote:
| Seeing the >$300mil donation bar for that site always makes my
| jaw drop. It's incredible that people wasted so much money on a
| scam / vaporware that repeatedly over promised and changed the
| rules to weasel out of releasing or giving refunds. Seriously,
| give it a read on wikipedia sometime.
|
| It's incredible this wasn't labeled a scam and shut down. Warm
| fuzzy intangibles like "community" and "the idea of a game"
| aside, imagine what good in the world that $$$ could've done
| otherwise.
| wpdev_63 wrote:
| I would be pretty cool if there was a mass effect mmo imo. I
| prefer the lore of that game over whatever is in star citizen and
| bioware has actual experience developing AAA.
|
| If EA had half a brain they would beatup robert and take his
| development money.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Star Wars Online is the closest you'll probably get, also made
| by Bioware and probably what sucked the life out of the ME team
| at the time.
| jdhn wrote:
| Star Citizen has proven one thing to me, and that is that
| dreamers (Chris Roberts) who are developing incredibly ambitious
| need to be held in check by good PMs who are willing to push back
| when necessary. This thing has been developed for so long, and it
| seems like there's always excuses as to how there's something new
| to be added and that's why it's taking so long to even get to 1.0
| status.
| jerf wrote:
| It's a problem across the artistic genres. Authors who become
| too famous to be edited often have a bad decline in their later
| years, because they really need to be edited. (One of the
| things I respect Larry Niven for is his insistence that he be
| edited, even though within his niche he reached the point where
| he could have done the same thing.) Movie directors that become
| too big to say no to often turn out to not quite have been the
| raging individual talents they thought they were, but instead
| have been the front person for a talented team; I think there's
| good reason to believe that this is what happened to Star Wars,
| for instance, that George Lucas is in fact not on his own a
| supreme talent but instead turned out to be a good person to
| have on the team. A whole HN thread could be filled naming the
| flabby, overcomplicated, self-indulgent movies that directors
| have made when they got large enough to be allowed to do
| whatever they wanted. It would be a much smaller thread naming
| such movies that ended up good in the end. I think there's a
| few. But in my opinion, as much as we complain about studio
| meddling and such, the track record on just writing a blank
| check to a creative isn't actually that good either.
|
| I'm not sure it's possible, no matter _how_ good you are, to
| ever get to the point that you don 't need someone else
| assessing what you're doing and willing to be critical, at
| times even harsh if necessary. You will _always_ be too close
| to your own work. Cultivating a dispassionate attitude can
| help, but you 'll still be too close to your own work.
| endominus wrote:
| Absolutely agreed. The other big example I can think of is
| Kojima, one of very few game directors I personally consider
| a true auteur. I just wish he still has people around him
| that could tell him, "So the player defeats the boss, learns
| about her genuinely heartbreaking tragic backstory as victim
| to vicious war crimes, and then... takes photos of her in
| lingerie? While she walks around and makes suggestive poses?
| Is... Is that really the tone we want to go for at this
| point?"
|
| It's a shame, considering how on-point a lot of the messages
| in his earlier games were (the speech by the AI on the role
| of automated systems filtering human knowledge to "create
| context" out of endless junk data streams - in a game that
| came out in 2001! - always sticks out to me), even if
| sometimes his actual scientific knowledge was a bit shaky.
| (You know why Solid Snake never lost his full head of hair?
| Male pattern baldness is a dominant gene!)
| ionwake wrote:
| > and then... takes photos of her in lingerie?
|
| That was a hidden easter egg - breaking the fourth wall and
| unrelated to the story and gameplay.
| xbar wrote:
| Is the lack of a PM the problem with Theranos? I think the
| problems are the same.
| caleb-allen wrote:
| Well, one is a mismanaged entertainment product and the other
| is fraud against healthcare patients.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| I guess they're similar in that they both had problems
| shipping a product but I think the similarities end there.
| Jedd wrote:
| Is Starfield (only recently saw an announcement from Bethesda
| about this) going to bite into the massive-universe and do-all-
| the-things market?
|
| I played Elite (the original) on the C64, and loved it. I've been
| 'meaning to play ED for years' - but still haven't. I bought No
| Man's Sky, was disappointed, as were many, at the time, but about
| a year ago started playing again - got excited (again) and then
| lost interest due to the heavy time commitment required to do
| anything useful.
|
| I suspect games like Red Dead Redemption II would be a similar
| time-sink without an awful lot of ersatz (in-game)
| accomplishments. I'm tempted, but wary.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| RDR2 is, overall, a more enjoyable game because you can dip in
| and out of it; with Elite, No Man's Sky, etc you're pretty much
| expected to play it for a lot of time with little happening in
| the meanwhile (with more stuff happening in NMS in the same
| amount of time).
| dstick wrote:
| I half expected this to just say "When it's done" :D
| saboot wrote:
| Doesn't look too great on mobile, can we get a "Star Citizen
| Progress Tracker" Progress Tracker as well?
| dainchi wrote:
| You joke, but for a while they had an actual "Roadmap for the
| Roadmap"...
| cge wrote:
| On desktop, meanwhile, it apparently assumes that you're using
| one maximized browser window. If you aren't, eg, if you're
| using half of a 16:10 screen, it pops up an enormous modal
| overlay warning you that you're on a mobile device and should
| visit the site on a desktop. Apparently, the only detection
| mechanism it uses is browser width.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm amazed they decided to rebuild Jira or Trello instead of
| focusing on getting something out the door.
| xwdv wrote:
| I feel Star Citizen is a bit of a meta game where the way to play
| is not by playing the actual finished product but rather by just
| bikeshedding feature after feature and seeing how many you can
| cram into a game, never really finishing.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Is there an actual game to play now? When I backed this a decade
| ago I kind of expected to see this game before I turned 30.
| RGamma wrote:
| Maybe you'll be able to bridge the rest of the time with Half
| Life 3. Oh wait..
| Deestan wrote:
| In my view, Half Life 3 did come out. It was just called
| Wolfenstein. For all practical purposes, there is no longer a
| HL3 shaped hole.
| dainchi wrote:
| Given all the prep work HL:Alyx did, I wouldn't be
| surprised if there eventually was a HL3, it's just going to
| take another decade or so until enough people have a VR
| headset(or future disruptive equivalent) to make it worth
| it.
| chmod775 wrote:
| You can see people play this on Twitch, but it'll only be fun
| if you have a bunch of buddies to roleplay with in the world.
| Not much of a "game" yet for lack of interesting gameplay
| loops.
|
| Here's a bunch of people having a good time and making a video
| out of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31v7sSGfTm8
| kowlo wrote:
| Poor PNC sentenced to forever walk into that wall
| https://youtu.be/31v7sSGfTm8?t=470
| gmueckl wrote:
| For all the vastness and detail in it, this world is still
| only a partialy complete single solar system and an even
| tinier fraction of what was originally promised (about 100
| handcrafted star systems). At the same time it is empty,
| desolate and devoid of fun things to do. The sheer size of
| everything, which sounds so cool on paper, is a fundamental
| curse for the gameplay: PvP relies on players encountering
| players. PvE or anything with NPC involvement needs to be
| handcrafted to be fun. Generated missions always have a bland
| structure and get repetitive and boring fast.
|
| The end result is that there is no really good way to
| actually make use of all that empty volume that the game
| already has. And that ratio is only going to become worse if
| all the other solar systems get added. And Star Citizen
| revels in that available playground with excessive travel
| times, low ship ranges, few ways to discover and intercept
| nearby ships, etc.
|
| For comparison, Elite: Dangerous has an even vaster playing
| field, but it does three things that make it work: the vast
| majority of the galaxy is designed for lone explorers
| cruising out there and trying to survive without assistance.
| The rest of the gameplay is contricted to "the bubble", a
| tiny part of the galaxy that contains civilization. There,
| all the PvP and PvE gameplay is concentrated. Little tricks
| help focus most of the gameplay on very few spots in each
| solar system, forcing encounters to happen quite naturally.
| Arrival in a solar system is always at a specific point near
| its star. Likewise, trading and resupply happens at only very
| few places in each system. These are the places you need to
| reach as a miner or trader to make money. And these are the
| spots to stake out as a pirate or bounty hunter. Supercruise
| also turns the vastness of space within a system into a
| playing field of reasonable size that also reveals most of
| the traffic.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Do they even have a flight model yet? Last I played (a few
| years ago) the flight model was worse than that of Asteroids.
| dainchi wrote:
| They're on the 5th(or 6th?) iteration now, and the flight
| model still feels like crap. Part of that is that they have
| to rebalance every ship with every Iteration, and they keep
| making more ships...
|
| Also, the large size of the world kind of destroys any kind
| of balance, given that ships need to travel at 1000+ m/s to
| make travel possible, but combat at those speeds is
| basically a dps fest where you click on a small icon in the
| distance, with no dodging or outflying the other pilot.
| They've tried to adress this in like 3 different ways at
| this point, and nothing has worked.
|
| Regardless, I will never understand why they didn't just
| massively reduce weapon ranges and copy ED's flight model,
| given that it is pretty much the best in the "WW2 dogfights
| in space" business, and has been out for over 8 years now.
| jiofih wrote:
| That actually looks amazing. Hope they can get it to an
| appealing state before the engine is outdated again!
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| They still on Lumberyard ???.
|
| Reminds me of Duke Nukem sequel who never was released
| because the dev team kept switching engines every few years
| because of envy.
| Ralfp wrote:
| Gearbox eventually released that game, and it was
| complete mess of outdated gameplay and unpolished things
| cobbled together to fill the game time somehow.
| anoraca wrote:
| Squadron 42 was supposed to be a stand alone game that was part
| of it, still not ready
| https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/28/22203055/star-citizen-squ...
| cletus wrote:
| Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money can be
| a curse.
|
| Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous came around at roughly the same
| time but Elite has been a complete game for years. Elite did
| things right in the sense that they released a complete game and
| added to it.
|
| I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems
| they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I
| can think of is that this sounds cool but why are you spending
| any effort on this before you have a core game?
|
| star Citizen development just seems to be completely unfocused
| with periodic sales of ships to top up the coffers. How much
| better could it have been had they decided on core features that
| were a complete game and then just added content releases every
| 6-12 months?
|
| For anyone who just wants to explore without the grittiness and
| over-realism of Elite Dangerous, check out No Man's Sky. Side
| note, there's a great Internet Historian video [1] on the
| redemption of NMS after over-promising on release.
|
| Also, I see another game that seems to be falling into the trap
| of being too ambitious before having core gameplay and that's
| Ashes of Creation, sadly.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ&t=26s
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I am a huge E:D fan, but they really botched the last
| expansion, to the point I no longer play at all. I get the
| feeling they are starving for programmers and designers.
| cletus wrote:
| I've honestly been meaning to get around to playing E:D for
| years but it never happened. First I tried No Man's Sky at I
| think the Atlas patch, which is the point where it started to
| become really good. And then... other stuff.
|
| Part of me was turned off by how long it seemed to take to
| travel between systems. I saw some streamers play this and
| taking an hour to do something like that is just way too much
| for me.
|
| I was excited about the idea of the new expansion. Like being
| able to walk around in a world you can fly in seems like such
| a good addition but I've come to realize that you're really
| developing a completely different game with almost no
| crossover.
| lokedhs wrote:
| That's true, and I think FD knows about this. After all, it
| took many years for them to deliver it, and it's pretty
| much presented as a hame of its own.
|
| But they had to develop this. The fans have been asking for
| it since forever. I think that what the fans actually
| really want, isn't just the ability to walk around their
| ships and look at space stations up close. The FPS game
| that is built around it isn't actually that interesting to
| most ED players, and I think the people who will be playing
| it is a different category of people.
|
| I haven't done much walking around since it's giving me
| single digit performance on my 4k screen, so I need to get
| a new graphics card. The flying part is perfectly fine at
| 60 fps at 4k.
| apetrovic wrote:
| My main problem with E:D is that you can't casually jump in
| and play for 20-30 minutes. I'm just a casual player who
| juggle work, parenting, some side projects and occasionally
| I have enough time to play games. But if the pause between
| two E:D sessions is more than a month (and usually it is),
| I need to sit down and do my homework - where am I
| currently, what I want to do and then start playing. So
| when I have time to play, I usually don't have patience to
| do everything I need to do, and just get Oculus and hop in
| in some training mission to look around for couple of
| minutes. The game is so pretty, and Frontier somehow nailed
| ship physics, at least for me.
|
| (To me Elite Dangerous is _the_ VR experience. Anyone who
| love space and have a chance to try E:D in VR absolutely
| should do it. I refuse to play E:D in 2D, and I 'll
| probably give Frontier money for the new expansion even if
| I will not play it for many months just in hope that the
| game will stay around in years to come to have a chance to
| scratch my space itch)
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I just hate how much they say "screw you" to those who want
| to get money through combat and how freaking grindy the game
| is. They've taken the freemium model of "basic advancements
| should take weeks to save up for" instead of "players should
| get to have fun"
| EarlKing wrote:
| I'd say Star Citizen is more of a cautionary tale about putting
| blind faith in someone just because of previous results. Chris
| Roberts has previously delivered, but in all cases where he has
| it's been where he's been under someone else's direction.
|
| Without someone to constrain him he tends to constantly expand
| the scope of his projects. If people knew about his involvement
| in the debacle that was Starlancer/Freelancer then they
| would've seen this coming.
|
| So no, it's not a matter of being 'too ambitious'. It's a
| matter of shifting the goalposts and expanding the scope of
| your project to the point that it never actually ships. When he
| had someone to stop him from doing that he delivered. Without
| that, he just keeps soaking up money as long as people will
| enable that behavior.
| [deleted]
| bane wrote:
| It's also a leadership problem. Too much money can be a good
| problem to have, but it requires leadership that can drive
| focus and delivery. It's clear that isn't what Star Citizen
| has.
| rm445 wrote:
| Also, for anyone who just wants to fly and shoot without the
| grittiness and over-realism of No Man's Sky, check out
| Starlink: Battle for Atlas.
|
| I love that there's this spectrum of space games in the last
| few years. Starlink is a fun little game, with a bad rep due to
| the toys-to-life aspect. (Though also, if you like the toys,
| they're cheap/clearance nowadays).
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems
| they're adding like being put in prison and escaping
|
| On its face, this seems like an obviously awful idea. Escaping
| from prison the first time sounds awesome. Escaping from prison
| the fifth time sounds super boring.
| dreen wrote:
| They had a weekend of free ship flytesting or something. I
| wanted to check the game out so I configured my joystick but
| had a bit of trouble starting and ended up crashing and going
| to prison. I was annoyed at the quest, I just wanted to fly
| around not do an RPG, that should come way after youve had
| time to get hooked by core mechanics
| wavefunction wrote:
| Next time play the Arena Commander mode which is a game
| within the SC/Squadron42 games and functions as a simple
| ship combat sim and a great tutorial for folks like you who
| want to just mess around in a ship. There is a similar FPS
| mode for people who just want to try out the FPS combat.
| zionic wrote:
| It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you're a pirate who
| has been to prison multiple times you really don't want to go
| back... so your behavior is different.
| cletus wrote:
| Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is
| the biggest mistake game designers make.
|
| History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in
| the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their
| killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it
| never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in
| favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds).
|
| This focus on PvP is my biggest concern with Ashes of
| Creation.
|
| The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People do
| things in PvP because there are no consequences. You don't
| really die. You can communicate outside of the confines of
| the game. You know there are no consequences. This leads to
| antisocial behaviours like griefing even though the griefer
| gets nothing in-game for doing so.
|
| Many have tried to make in-game consequences to deter
| griefing and they never work and (IMHO) never will work
| because in-game isn't reality. Death isn't permanent. Even
| the permanent death of a character isn't permanent.
|
| Game designers spend so much effort on these systems to
| appeal to the minority of players and it literally kills
| games. But no one seems to learn this lesson. Or it's just
| hubris that "my game will be different".
|
| So what Star Citizen should do is just not have open world
| PvP, at all. That requires no development effort
| whatsoever. Maybe you could have an arena or some BG like
| concept but those are optional and can be added later.
|
| No system will eliminate pointless griefing and you just
| alienate those who don't want PvP.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Agreed with all this. There was at one point a notion of
| a "PvP slider" that you could turn down to reduce
| encounters with other players (I assume via instancing)
| but it's gone away in favor of a totally in-universe
| "crime stat" and law system.
|
| Predictably, it does fuckall because the defense turrets
| on stations can't even hit anyone.
|
| I think the plan is for all landing pads to eventually be
| replaced with hangars so at least the pad ramming
| greifers will have to wait until you've gotten in your
| ship and taken off before they can ruin your fun for
| cheap entertainment.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > The reason it doesn't work is because of people. People
| do things in PvP because there are no consequences.
|
| The reason so many games want "as open as possible" PvP
| as possible is because of people, too. There are plenty
| of people who's most fun in any multiplayer comes from
| acting upon other players and making other players
| miserable is a very "rewarding" action to them.
|
| That's an entire quadrant of players (Killers) in
| Bartle's now classic diagram and of the studies that have
| been done in the past there's a pretty equal distribution
| of how people self-describe themselves to the four
| quadrants (and how their stats seem to align in MUDs that
| used to track such things). Assuming that hypothesis to
| hold, that's a fourth of the potential audience they lose
| if they don't have PvP at all, and within that quadrant
| it always seems like the most vocal in what they play is
| based on how "open" the PvP is and the raw statistics of
| the number of people they can act upon ("grief").
|
| I get the impression that many of those vocal "Killer"
| players that strongly prefer open world PvP are possibly
| over-represented in MMO design efforts. Two of the
| quadrants ("Achiever" and "Explorer") are often pleased
| enough with single player games (and single player game
| design) to not even see a need for multiplayer games in
| their lives, and the final "Socializer" quadrant these
| days is just as often left by game designs to fall
| through the cracks to "non-games" like Second Life or
| Discord.
| shadofx wrote:
| Small studio MMORPGs focused on PvE don't exist because
| they can't compete with WoW and FFXIV on content
| generation, small studios don't have hundreds of artists,
| quest designers, and programmers needed to churn out
| enough content to compete in that field.
| korse wrote:
| What about Eve online?
| bluescrn wrote:
| It's a PvP game, and a brutal one. There's some token
| PvE, but mostly aimed at teaching new players the game.
| leetcrew wrote:
| yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as
| "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is
| pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's
| prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve
| player in high-sec.
| kiksy wrote:
| Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous.
| By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't
| afford to lose.
|
| The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk
| and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for
| me.
|
| I wish more games took a similar mature approach.
| bserge wrote:
| They would lose a lot of potential players.
|
| I used to be a pretty hardcore PvPer when I was young
| then got tired of griefing, being griefed, fixing and
| getting better gear, spending hours to craft stuff that
| would be gone in minutes.
|
| Basically, wasting a ton of time.
|
| That may be fine when you're in school, but not when you
| have a job and a life.
|
| EVE was an outlier probably because they could afford to
| be with what looked like zero competition in their
| heyday. Now they sold the game to Pearl Abyss, must have
| been doing pretty poorly.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Honestly I really enjoyed open PvP when I played WoW what
| now seems like ages ago. It really adds a lot of
| interesting tension when I'd encounter players from the
| opposing faction.
|
| Are they hostile? Do they see me? Should I try and
| stealth kill them? Are they just passing through?
|
| Eventually one learns to deal with the murderhobos and
| cope. Then it becomes even more fun.
| afrodc_ wrote:
| I would counter this and say that my greatest time
| playing MMOs in my youth was the UO days where outside of
| cities, everything was pretty lawless. In the early
| stages you might run into a player killer intermittently
| while out mining or harvesting whatever other material or
| in a dungeon but the community formed around that aspect
| was really cool.
|
| There was a bounty hunting system where killed players
| could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-
| rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out
| people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would
| also be permanently marked red in their name and banned
| from cities via the guard system. I think that whole
| aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of
| the game and felt so organic.
|
| Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly
| designed from head to toe in a game design doc.
| vkou wrote:
| > There was a bounty hunting system where killed players
| could put cash on the head of the killer.
|
| What stops a griefer from just putting cash on the head
| of someone they want to torment?
| afrodc_ wrote:
| I remember you would explicitly be presented a screen
| after you were killed by a player where you could take
| your funds from the bank to put towards the bounty of the
| person who killed you.
| opencl wrote:
| Bounties can only be placed on criminals in UO. Players
| are marked as criminals when they break the law, for
| example by attacking or stealing from a player who isn't
| a criminal.
| atoav wrote:
| This is a question of gameplay. You could build entire games
| around escaping from prisons that people would totally enjoy
| playing. There have been far simpler ideas that people play
| even after a decade. Heck if you do it the right way I could
| see players _want_ to go to prison just to play the escape
| thing.
|
| So there is nothing inherent to the topic that makes or
| breaks this. On an very abstract level it is something that
| forces you into a different kind of gameplay as a punishment.
| Whether that different kind of gameplay is engaging or boring
| is a different can of beans.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I disagree. If it's a rewarding experience, then it's not a
| punishment. The difference is between making prison break
| levels, and actually implementing a prison system as a
| player punishment. The goals are conflicting. In general
| forcing a player to do content they don't want to do is not
| good.
| [deleted]
| wavefunction wrote:
| >escaping from prison
|
| Don't get caught. And yeah, that's an option, if you're leet
| enough ;)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Why? It's a mechanic in TES games like Skyrim; commit a
| crime, you get the option to either pay it off, go to jail
| (and lose some stats), or try and fight a whole town worth of
| guards.
|
| I mean you start most TES games in prison.
| branon wrote:
| Or go to jail, escape from jail, steal your equipment back,
| and assassinate a few guards on the way out.
|
| Yeah, going to prison in video games can be quite fun and
| dynamic to the point where the scenario is replayable.
| Helps that there's a different jail in each major city in
| Skyrim as well.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm not very interested in TES, but how often do you choose
| to go to prison? I can't tell if you're saying going to
| prison is just lose stats and then cut to the end of it, or
| lose stats and have to break out.
|
| If it's the former, maybe you tank the stat loss and deal
| with it. If it's the former, how many times are you
| actually going to tolerate going to prison rather than
| loading your save file from before you got caught? In a
| multiplayer game that's probably not an option. Breaking
| out of prison multiple times is both annoying and immersion
| breaking, especially if its the same prison over a short
| period.
|
| Obviously the concept of a prison break is fine for
| gameplay. There are whole games dedicated to it. But
| implementing it as a punishment is by default going to be
| viewed as either not a punishment, due to it being
| rewarding, or tedious, because the player doesn't want to
| do it. Generally speaking, there's intrinsic loss to being
| put in prison already because you're forced to stop what
| you were actually trying to do already. Ocarina of Time had
| the gerudo sequence where you could get thrown into prison
| if caught, but then hookshot yourself out immediately.
| That's probably the better choice for most games because
| having to deal with consequences of prison are very boring.
| If the system to escape is easy, it should be very short.
| If it's not easy, you have to question how annoying it is
| to the player and whether it actually makes the game
| better.
| admax88q wrote:
| I think its less a tale about too much money, and more of a
| cautionary tail about the importance of project management.
| MR4D wrote:
| > Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money
| can be a curse.
|
| Star Citizen should be a B-school case study about how to raise
| money and make a good living doing what you enjoy.
|
| The fact that they _continually_ raise money over years is
| telling that RSI is a huge success. [0]
|
| [0] - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-15-star-
| citiz...
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I think it is interesting to see how much people want the
| dream of a game, the evolving story, and the community. It is
| a great example of the things people want from gaming-- and
| life I guess.
|
| The closest thing I can think of is Minecraft, which IMO is a
| 100x better game but still you can't play it forever. People
| loved the creativity of it, but even more they liked the idea
| and the story of the creativity. How many times did you see
| in a feed that some kid made a computer in minecraft, a
| display, a life size battleship or tv spaceship. I am sure
| people see those stories-- think I could do something like
| that-- and go back to the game. The dream informs the play.
| jarcane wrote:
| When someone continually milks customers for more and more
| cash on the promise of something never delivered, that's
| called "exploitation" and "a con job."
|
| Minecraft launched into EA with a game that was still
| actually fun to play in itself, and asked a moderate fee
| for access to ongoing improvements.
|
| Star Citizen isn't selling a dream, it's selling plots of
| land on the moon.
| platz wrote:
| Making a computer or a display or many of the huge replicas
| in minecraft isn't creative. They are just technical
| achievements.
| handrous wrote:
| Do you feel this way because the behavior's largely
| imitative, or because it's happening on a computer? Is
| designing and building a replica of a Boeing 747 with
| LEGO also not creative? Or making some kind of Rube
| Goldberg machine with LEGO Technic parts and junk from
| around your house? I would expect not, under this
| framework for what is and is not creative. Where's the
| line, though?
| platz wrote:
| It's not because it's happening on a computer. It's
| because the behavior is largely imitative or following a
| script.
|
| The initial folks who figured out how to build a computer
| a minecraft were very creative.
|
| Rube Goldberg machines I think do involve a fair amount
| of creativity. it's not because they are physical per-se,
| but because the physical environment tends to force
| individual and creative thinking to solve the problems
| unique to that environment. Physical environments tend to
| be less homogenized and predictable than digital ones.
|
| Designing and building a replica of a Boeing 747 is less
| creative than a rube goldberg machine, but depending on
| how many decisions you made yourself while building it
| makes it more or less creative.
| handrous wrote:
| Got it, that makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
| ds206 wrote:
| I disagree and think that learning through imitation is
| itself a creative process. It opens up possibilities that
| didn't exist for the imitator beforehand. It shows how
| things work and creates new conceptual models in their
| minds. At the same time, I do think that creating from
| first principles is the most creative.
| hluska wrote:
| I agreed completely until I started playing Minecraft
| with kids. Once they taught me how to play, I got to see
| the amount of creativity within the game. From my
| perspective, it's a really amazing way to start
| instilling mathematical literacy in kids and the best
| part is that they have so much fun they don't even
| realize it. As an example, thanks to Minecraft, my five
| year old already has an understanding of exponents. I
| didn't do that.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > thanks to Minecraft, my five year old already has an
| understanding of exponents.
|
| Wait, how ?
|
| Where are exponents used in Minecraft ?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| ... Think about it. Blocks are cubic. You lay 2 blocks by
| 2 blocks down, that's 4 blocks. If you add a second
| layer, you have 8 blocks. He probably meant something
| like this.
|
| 2^2 = 4
|
| 2^3 = 8
| platz wrote:
| understanding of exponents and mathematical literacy is
| great but it's not the same thing as creativity.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| You are correct- but they do complement each other very
| nicely, and Minecraft as a game has many properties that
| encourage both creative and analytical thought.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> but still you can 't play it forever_
|
| Says you.
| falcrist wrote:
| Yea, Minecraft is a huge sandbox with lots of features.
| Players often come back to it over and over again years
| later.
| cbozeman wrote:
| There are still enough EverQuest players for Daybreak Games
| to continue to make expansion packs for the original
| version.
|
| That game came out in March 1999. It's so old, it's creator
| is dead.
|
| You _can_ play something forever if you 're dedicated
| enough.
| crooked-v wrote:
| For even more of a classic, the Avalon and Genesis MUDs
| (text-based multiplayer RPGs), both created in 1989, are
| still running.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| EA don't think that. See what they did to kill the
| servers made by the community when they plug off the
| Battlefield 2142.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| The anticipation of an experience can be more enjoyable
| than the experience itself.
| hluska wrote:
| This is a great idea - Star Citizen would be a perfect
| marketing case study on the power of story. This is a really
| exciting idea - thanks for sharing it and getting my mind
| working this morning!!
| MR4D wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| You know, as much as I see people complain about their jobs
| or companies they work for, Chris Roberts has been able to
| figure it out. His delivery isn't the best, but many people
| love the work he does, and that gives him a job for life
| that he loves.
|
| I think it would be great if everyone on HN would be able
| to crowdfund a job they love. Some will deliver better than
| others, but it would probably reduce the stress and
| frustration about companies that people have.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| > 7 weeks: Enabling support for AI janitors to use multiple
| tools in either hand.
|
| I think I see your point.
| wiz21c wrote:
| cletus i'm bored... ? ah nnaaah... Klytus I'm bored !
| bob1029 wrote:
| In my opinion, constraints (especially money & time) are
| critical for sustaining the creative spirit. If you aren't at
| least a little bit hungry or challenged, your brain is going
| produce some lazy uninspired trash that only happens to look
| fun on a 3 minute youtube trailer.
|
| If you are constantly trying to push some notion of a gigantic,
| ever-expanding open world, then someone is still going to have
| to paint within those confines in order to build a meaningful
| experience. The bigger you make it the harder it is to do this.
|
| If you find yourself in this position (tons of money & time),
| maybe double down on the idea that you might suck at building
| engaging creative experiences, but do have the ability to
| produce profoundly capable tooling & engine code. License the
| tech out to someone who has a more reasonable creative vision.
| dash2 wrote:
| OK, but what about Dwarf Fortress? Tarn Adams has been
| working on it for 20 years, and though without making much
| money, money wasn't really the constraint. And he really has
| created a gigantic ever-expanding world.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > If you aren't at least a little bit hungry or challenged,
| your brain is going produce some lazy uninspired trash
|
| This resonates with me. I know from experience that being
| comfortable stifles your creativity. I've felt more creative
| and focused while uncomfortable, be it by resource
| constraints, heartbroken, lonely or angry. At my age I prefer
| comfort, but I understand why some artists deviate from the
| norm, and even behave as if they were deliberately seeking a
| tortured life.
| have_faith wrote:
| No Man's Sky has come a long way and you can call it a complete
| game now but they seem to have pivoted somewhere along the way
| into focusing on base building, multi player aspects, etc
| (going after the younger minecraft crowd?). It's still fun but
| the planet variation, story and minute to minute gameplay is
| very shallow even after all this time. I find it hard to feel
| motivated by anything in the game. It is a great looking game
| though and exploring can be fun until the repetition sets in.
| spookyuser wrote:
| I have been waiting to play No Man's Sky for so long and
| after all the good stuff I've been reading about how much
| better it had gotten I just assumed it would be incredible
| and that I would love it. To my surprise, when I downloaded
| it on Game Pass - I was extremely disappointed it just felt
| so empty. I uninstalled it after like 2 hours.
| skohan wrote:
| I also found the game to be extremely underwhelming. It seems
| like they have added a lot of features, but there's still no
| core compelling gameplay loop. Also it's the worst type of
| procedural generation, where after a while you can
| practically see the perlin noise everywhere.
|
| IMO the most interesting thing about NMS is their marketing
| story. They were able to achieve enormous hype before launch,
| and since then they've been able to continuously grab
| headlines with the redemption narrative. I would love to know
| who's doing their marketing/PR because I believe they are
| very talented.
| cletus wrote:
| It's interesting you say they've focused on base building
| because (IMHO) they need to double down on this. It's come a
| long way but it's still so awkward to build bases and do
| basic things like flatten ground, snap a lot of base
| components to wood/cement/metal sections and so on.
|
| Also they do things no one asked for like limiting teleporter
| range.
|
| I understand your point about there not being a lot to do. I
| mean you're not wrong and if that's what you're looking for,
| I understand it may not be for you. To me, NMS is really
| about just chilling out and doing stuff. That stuff is
| largely self-directed like finding the right kind of planet
| ofr a base, building that base, getting the ship you want and
| fully upgrading it. You don't need to do any of that but if
| you enjoy that you can.
|
| Being open in this way is a key part of fostering emergent
| player behaviour.
|
| It's also completely OK to play it for awhile and then decide
| you're done. Personally I've played >200 hours. Every major
| patch changes and adds to the major storyline so it can be
| worth starting a new game to see what that's like.
| xioxox wrote:
| There are also the X3 games from Egosoft (e.g. Terran
| Conflict/Albion Prelude), which are great fun for building a
| space trading empire, exploring, waging war or being a pirate.
| Warning: they can suck up a lot of time. They aren't the
| easiest to learn games and there's a lot of modding potential.
| They started with a lot of bugs, but are much more playable
| now.
|
| X4 Foundations is the new release, but I haven't tried it
| personally yet.
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| I had heard great things about X3 for years, so I picked up
| X4 on release.
|
| Major mistake. The game was buggy, and the worlds cold and
| lifeless. The fanboys excused it as "well, every Egosoft game
| is released like this... but it gets better after a few
| updates...."
|
| Haven't played X4 in a long time. I've heard its better, but
| I would caution people interested in purchasing the game to
| do their research, _and only buy it on sale._
|
| And never buy an Egosoft product within 6 months of release,
| at a minimum.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| Yep did this as well, but knew full well it wasn't ready.
| Checked back this year, lo and behold a full and wonderful
| game.
|
| It's just how Egosoft works apparently.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems
| they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I
| can think of is that this sounds cool but why are you spending
| any effort on this before you have a core game?_
|
| This has been my impression too of Star Citizen for years now.
|
| I won't be surprised if they soon jump on the crypto bandwagon
| and start auctioning off ships as blockchain NFTs. Still can't
| use them in a working game, but you can trade them on crypto
| markets.
|
| It could be interesting to see markets apply sophisticated
| valuation tools to the net present value of future Star Citizen
| cash flows. I bet clever financial engineers could figure out
| ways continuing the funding and delaying Star Citizen's launch
| indefinitely.
| Zenst wrote:
| Feature creep, though in a way in which that feature creep is
| used to keep people hanging on and reel in new investors. It
| has in near on become it's own business model. Difference from
| releasing and then adding updates every so often, they just
| keep tweaking, tuning and when you keep going on feature creep,
| you end up striving for perfection, which makes getting a
| balance right very hard. However, they seem too of done all-
| right as a business, even if they have a rolling beta. Though
| as it's beta - people are more accepting of bugs than they are
| if released and they await a patch/update to fix bugs. That in
| itself makes things different from a user perspective in a way
| that advantages the writers, also less pressure.
|
| Elite Dangerous took the more release and then add updates to
| maintain momentum. A more common approach and how many
| investors would hang on for all these years, yet for Star
| Citizen, when the investors are users and the extra's the offer
| sure do tap into that Whale momentum income and really does
| seem like a whole new approach to business the way it is
| panning. Though Kickstarter seem to of coined that.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| i've come to accept that this IS the game--an idea that backers
| get to observe, are included in the development, and play the
| game in their imagination. You're paying for the buy-in to be
| part of a development process and feel like you're making a
| contribution via feedback and alpha gameplay.
|
| the company has made massive investments tech just around this
| feedback loop and to entertain these backers. it's a core to
| what they're doing.
|
| unfortunately, this is not how it was sold when they first
| launched but that ship has sailed.
|
| this is like WWF of game development. it's fake.
|
| now you get a progress tracker that's fukin versioned to
| further feed you packets of endorphins to build up this
| imaginary world that doesn't exist.
| wavefunction wrote:
| What was sold when they first launched was boring af but...
| the promise beyond that was worth backing the game. I logged
| in a few days ago (and I won't lie that they have a
| significant amount of work ahead of them) and I enjoyed
| myself. As I always do. I have enough real life commitments
| that my entire identity is not based around gaming, buying
| games, or complaining about games.
| lowdest wrote:
| Echoes of 2003 when we were forming corporations and
| organizing ranks and building websites for EVE Online before
| it was actually released. Except that game actually released.
| neversaydie wrote:
| Yep. Never had much hope for Star Citizen and only moderate
| interest as a consequence, but my particular remembrance is
| some random line in one of the dev updates a while back. It
| mentioned how environment humidity would affect character
| endurance. Coming on top of many, many similar lines, that was
| pretty much the "yeah, this isn't going to work out" moment for
| me. It's stuck in my mind as a one-liner memento mori of sorts
| ever since.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| Mine was their video of how they decided to spend months
| building their own headview algorithm instead of using the
| industry standard. The best part was that their end result is
| comparable and wasted months of effort getting it.
| Grakel wrote:
| Every time I reinstall No Man's Sky, I immediately go "Nope,
| not gonna stand here and mine with a laser for hours at a
| time." What a lame mechanic. It should be like StarCraft where
| you have drones do it from the beginning.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I thought so too in the past, I was ridiculing Star Citizen,
| I've called it a scam, now I'm happy that someone is not
| releasing another space game - Elite works - but tries to do
| something very very ambitious, something beyond everyone else.
| We'll see if they can generate money for the next 10 years, I
| hope they can.
|
| PS: I've bought Elite but not Star Citizen ;-)
|
| PPS: I've also bought Elite in 1984 and was blown away.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > We'll see if they can generate money for the next 10 years,
| I hope they can.
|
| Even if they keep going to 10 years, they're doomed. To be
| relevant 10 years from now, SC is probably going to have to
| switch engines. That will probably mean starting from scratch
| on many game systems and assets.
|
| There's a reason you don't see many (or any?) successful
| games that have a 10+ year development time.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I don't know if they have to switch engines in ten years.
| You could have made a game in 1997 with Unreal-- I can
| verify this because I was in a meeting with a demo at
| Activision where we considered this-- and Unreal is still a
| viable engine in 2021.
|
| Game engines went through a period where they evolved very
| quickly, and they are still evolving. But the rate of
| change is slower, like word processors. It starts to make
| more sense to evolve them rather than replace them.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wait, it's the same Unreal evolved over the years, rather
| than brand new versions started from scratch ?
| m0llusk wrote:
| They already have plans to switch engines in the near
| future. That is in the progress tracker mostly as
| "renderer".
| zlynx wrote:
| That isn't exactly switching engines. That's the Vulkan
| renderer they're working on. It is a component of the
| same engine they're already using.
| jerf wrote:
| But that doesn't contradict what cletus said. Even if they
| wanted to be ambitious, with such a large scale there simply
| is no way there isn't some way to carve out a coherent core
| to deliver early and then iterate on.
|
| I've done some ambitious things in my engineering career...
| nothing like Star Citizen in absolute scope but relative to
| the resources I had they were ambitious. But I always made
| sure there was some core I could show off before the project
| was complete.
|
| If nothing else, Agile (by which I mean more the orginal
| manifesto rather than any specific thing like "scrum")
| recommends this sort of approach for a reason. The more parts
| you develop in isolation in your "ambitious" project, the
| higher the odds are that when it comes time to put them all
| together, they _won 't_ go together. Games have the extra
| problem that they can both _technically_ fail to go together
| as expected, but they can also _artistically_ fail to go
| together as well, making it even riskier to do this in
| gaming. Many is the game where the obvious fault lines
| between the various pieces are plainly visible in the final
| product. (Heck, The Ubisoft Game(tm) that they keep remaking
| and just slapping new skins on is all but a game structure
| designed to make this approach possible, which is basically
| why they keep remaking it over and over; it 's not that
| they're artistically committed to it, it's that they've
| probably structured their entire game making organization
| around it and the rest is just Conway's Law.)
|
| I still see little reason to expect Star Citizen to ever be
| anything like the hopes and dreams. I still expect that
| whatever finally comes out of this process will be profoundly
| disappointing. The process just can't work.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I do think if they "deliver early and then iterate on."
| people would lose interest and it would be much more
| difficult to raise money.
|
| PS: I've introduced Agile in several companies as CTO, no
| need to convince me ;-)
| jerf wrote:
| In this situation, I'd fully expect them to deliver
| something early, and then sell another game in the next
| generation, or sell DLC, or something like that. It's
| more-or-less a proved revenue model; nobody's _quite_
| doing something exactly like Star Citizen, but there 's
| plenty of games that are "the previous game's engine and
| possibly content, but more". It's popular to hate on
| sequelitis, but I actually often enjoy those games,
| because the developers are not struggling just to get the
| engine to do what it is they wanted or learn how to do
| the basics, and are now creating a game quickly and
| confidently based on experience.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "It's more-or-less a proved revenue model;"
|
| Excatly, and it will exactly produce the games we
| currently have.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| That just invites the disappointment of Star Citizen
| being like other games. As long as it is never finished
| it can potentially be completely revolutionary.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| I have a feeling that star citizen will also release in 3d
| the same time as time 2d release..
| username90 wrote:
| The goals of ashes of creation are relatively modest though. It
| is basically a regular mmorpg but with a few different game
| design decisions. Many of the features looks big at a glance
| but when inspected further you realise that they don't do that
| much. Games with fully player built towns, sieges and
| destruction already exists, you just take one of those and add
| some pre crafted buildings to towns, and so on.
|
| Still, making everything required for a regular mmorpg takes a
| lot of time and effort and most doesn't deliver a quality
| product, so it is still very likely it wont be great.
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| lol musk will have colonized mars before this game is out
| liaukovv wrote:
| How many years has it been?
| duskwuff wrote:
| About ten years now. It's not quite up to Duke Nukem Forever
| levels yet (15 years), but it's already one of the longest
| development cycles for a commercial game.
| beardedscotsman wrote:
| I've moved full to Mac since I purchased Star Citizen. I guess
| I'll never get a chance to play this.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Don't feel bad, no-one else will get a chance to play it either
| ;-)
| liaukovv wrote:
| Mac support feature added, release date pushed back by 5 years.
| warpech wrote:
| I love the UI aesthetics on the timeline. Anyone knows of a
| components library with such sci-fi look and feel?
| amarshall wrote:
| Maybe Arwes
|
| https://arwes.dev/
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24282270
| arduinomancer wrote:
| This feels like that scene from Malcolm and the middle with Hal
| fixing the lightbulb.
|
| They're making a game but first they have to build and launch a
| progress tracker website?
| Ardren wrote:
| CIG know what people really want to know about the development
| status: When is the estimated release for S42 or Star Citizen.
|
| They know what this answer is, but they will go to great lengths
| not to share. For example, this detailed look at what each
| team/person is doing, but only for 9 months. With no idea how
| they relate to an actual release.
| falcolas wrote:
| Frankly, at this point, I don't believe that CIG has any
| realistic idea when it will be done. I'd say it will be when
| they run out of financial runway, but they keep extending that
| by selling hopes and dreams.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > When is the estimated release for S42 or Star Citizen.
|
| At the rate at which the scope of the project has been
| expanding? Never.
| danso wrote:
| So the "Core Tech" for the year are:
|
| - volumetric clouds
|
| - interior/exterior culling
|
| - "dynamic door alignment"
|
| - ship engine swapping
|
| So looks like they won't be completing their magic millions-of-
| players-on-a-single-instance tech any time soon. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-
| link/transmissio...
| manigandham wrote:
| Star Citizen is no longer a video game, it's a sci-fi simulation.
|
| Definitely a vast change in scope, and probably disappointing for
| early backers, but I'm actually intrigued and excited about how
| far they can go with this.
| yb17178 wrote:
| Looks like less is done now than before. Chris roberts and sandi
| Gardner are theives and prey on the dreams of hopeful space
| gamers. Shame.
| platz wrote:
| The plot of any game like this is going to be the most bland,
| insipid storyline ever imagined. It will speak to absolutely no-
| one, but it will have some filler cinematics that have nice
| graphics.
|
| In general, this is the case the higher profile and more money is
| poured into it.
| least wrote:
| I bought a ship relatively late, in 2013. I also built my gaming
| PC that I'm still using to this day around then hoping to have
| something beefy enough to play Star Citizen. Obviously that was
| stupid, lesson learned.
|
| Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely
| love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before
| being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of
| those huge ideas he has always wanted to build on but now with an
| essentially unlimited budget funded by idiots like me that
| believed he'd actually be able to deliver an actual game.
|
| Seeing a progress tracker for it is just a slap in the face. They
| aren't being held accountable by anyone but themselves and
| they've proved time and time again that they're incapable of
| sticking to timelines. They'll just create more awesome looking
| tech demos that are probably not even linked together into a
| fully realized and playable game.
|
| If Star Citizen could actually deliver everything it promised,
| it'd be a damned near perfect game for a nerd like me who loves
| science fiction, outer space, and epic space operas. The idea of
| zooming through the cosmos on my ship "Freelancer" with a group
| of friends doing whatever we feel like, exploring new worlds,
| fighting space pirates, and getting a drink on an old and
| decrepit space station built a century ago sounds like everything
| I ever wanted in a video game.
|
| Sadly, Star Citizen will never be that game.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > If Star Citizen could actually deliver everything it
| promised, it'd be a damned near perfect game for [...]
|
| The thing is that this can be said about many games, but
| something that will always hold true is that "potential",
| "vision" and "promises" are not worth much (basically nothing)
| when it comes to games. The loop of overambitious (or false)
| promises -> failed execution and delivery is as old as games
| themselves.
| sen wrote:
| Another vote for Elite Dangerous. It might not be quite as
| flashy and beautiful but it's depth is seriously awesome.
| There's so much to do.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| Jumpgate scratched the itch years ago and I was hoping this
| game would too. But its just not really a game yet.
|
| Star Citizen is pretty much the proof that unlimited resources
| is not necessarily a good thing for a project. Constraints can
| help keep things focused.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's probably the worst and most notable example of scope
| creep I've ever seen. They could have released a game years
| ago, but instead they chose to keep piling things on, then
| realizing their game is already outdated before release so
| back to the drawing board.
|
| Massively mismanaged project, and not just because it was
| overfunded.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| We're almost to one complete star system! Crusader and Orison
| look pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZDrCUwHclg
|
| Along with that in 3.14, new power management and missile stuff
| that will hopefully make multi-person ships effective compared
| to each person in their own ship.
|
| I'd like to think this lets them finally settle on a flight
| model and figure out combat balance, but not optimistic because
| the planned ship armor/damage system isn't in yet. I'll
| continue to fire it up for a couple of hours every patch to go
| sightseeing, but it's a ways off of gameplay that I'd want to
| sink real time into.
|
| All that said, you can get in for $45, and I've paid more than
| that for worse games. I'm looking forward to my next
| sightseeing trip to the volumetric clouds of Crusader.
| least wrote:
| I wanted a game and I believed deeply in Chris Roberts vision
| because it's something that matches my own idea of a perfect
| game. Enough so to spend $120 on it sight unseen, without
| even the hangar demo being out for it. Eight years later and
| there's still nothing but a bunch of ever-increasing and
| ever-expanding 'systems' they want to show off.
|
| I'm not interested in tech demos. I don't care about how
| they're adding one more new system into the 'game.' I don't
| care that they've figured out some beautiful lighting or
| entry into a planet or gigantic dune-like space worms or an
| FPS system or a prison system or anything like that. I'm not
| interested in going sightseeing, even if they are very
| impressive to behold. My computer that I bought for Star
| Citizen can't even really run it competently the way it is
| now.
|
| I've given up on it. if they ever do release an actual game,
| I'll reevaluate then. But frankly I can't share your
| enthusiasm for it.
| twic wrote:
| The cathedrals that are the most visible surviving monument to
| the culture of the middle ages took a century each to build.
| Perhaps the truly great video games of our era will take just
| as long.
| arp242 wrote:
| I think Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana showed us that
| longer dev times don't necessarily produce better games.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Not a bad thought. But this looks more like a project that
| has been mismanaged like DN4. They have raised well past 370
| million at this point.
|
| They are basically making Wing Commander Privateer 4 at this
| point. Game wise they would have been better off shipping
| something years ago that worked and then iterating on it.
| However, it seems money wise the route they are going is
| their business decision and that is doing very well. There
| are a lot of tall 'promises' made that are not going to live
| up to the hype.
|
| I personally gave up pre-buying any games ages ago. I have
| plenty of existing games that work. In some cases I have not
| played some for 20+ years and I am going back and playing
| them again and it is a blast as I do not remember much of it
| other than a vague 'I think I liked this one'.
|
| What game I do see looks very nice. But there is not a lot of
| meat on those bones. In its current state looks like a very
| solid tech demo. When they finally ship I look forward to
| seeing what they got. But at this point I do not expect much.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Cathedrals are built of stone and cement - materials that are
| durable and whose properties change little over centuries.
| Video games are built on ever-changing hardware and graphics
| APIs. Consider that, at this point, Star Citizen will span
| Windows 7 - Windows 11 and three console generations. How
| much code has changed in SC just to keep up with the march of
| progress around them?
| admissionsguy wrote:
| It's funny to think the development of Star Citizen started in
| the same year that Falcon 9 first launched.
|
| I like Star Citizen for being the one constant thing in life.
| Wherever I am, whatever I do, I know there will always be a
| Star Citizen roadmap to look up.
| zerd wrote:
| Falcon 9 1.0 was announced in 2005, launched in 2010 and cost
| about US$300 million [0].
|
| Star Citizen was announced in 2010 and has raised over US$300
| million [1].
|
| It's wild to me that it takes twice as long and similar
| amount of money to make a game launch than a rocket launch.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_v1.0 [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen
| Sebguer wrote:
| John Carmack once said that launching a rocket is actually
| easier than modern game development.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| Or at least a roadmap for the roadmap.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/313367-star-citizen-
| deve...
| slfnflctd wrote:
| It's a significantly different beast, but No Man's Sky started
| development in 2013, and I've considered it basically feature
| complete from the time of the Atlas Rises update (2017). Since
| then, there have been _nine_ additional free updates, making it
| much more fleshed out than most games out there.
|
| It's hard to look at all that and think what RSI is doing still
| makes sense at this point. It seems like someone is being a bit
| of a perfectionist. I can relate, which is why I agree with
| other comments that a Project Manager who can pull Roberts back
| from this tendency would be a huge improvement and probably
| make him less stressed as well.
| bovermyer wrote:
| Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream,
| what with the new expansion.
| falcolas wrote:
| They're dropping VR support in the new expansion. That sucks.
| If there's any game perfect for VR, it's space sims - as the
| prior release of E:D showed.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What, Elite: Dangerous? VR would be the only reason for me
| to go back to it, and me playing it in VR at the time was
| one of the best VR experienced I've had.
|
| Is that all because they can't make walking in space work
| in VR? I mean they could say "you need to play normally"
| when switching to space legs.
| spjwebster wrote:
| I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording
| of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR
| support for the core feature added by the latest
| expansion: on-foot gameplay. The existing VR support (in
| the ship and in the SRV) remains and is currently one of
| the focus areas for fixes, but when you disembark your
| ship or SRV you're presented with a floating virtual
| screen.
|
| There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that
| want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature
| request, but I think they're underestimating how much
| effort first class on-foot VR support would be to
| implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase
| would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in
| VR.
| sbarre wrote:
| A word of caution that the newest expansion is still pretty
| buggy for a lot of people.
|
| The console release is in the early fall, and that's when
| most of the community expects the PC version to reach a more
| acceptable level of stability.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| More than being buggy, the expansion is bleeding players
| because the on-foot gameplay loops are super grindy (even
| for Elite) and not very fun in the first place. The xpac
| has absolutely zero new ship-based content, so people are
| just going off to play other FPS games that don't suck. The
| PC community is already more or less dead just a month
| after it's release; Steam player counts are lower than
| they've been in years. Dropping VR support was the final
| nail in the coffin.
| sbarre wrote:
| Yeah given what the core player base seemed to be
| enjoying about this game (space exploration) I always
| kind of wondered "who is asking for this?" when they
| announced they were basically adding a B-tier FPS to
| Elite..
|
| I suspect internally someone pitched the "FPS is more
| mass appeal and will draw in new players!" idea and it
| just went ahead uncontested?
|
| I've also read rumours (but enough from different places
| that they're likely somewhat valid) that Frontier as a
| company has had a lot of engineering turnover in the last
| 2 years, which no doubt has an effect on extending and
| maintaining an in-house engine and product like Elite.
| spjwebster wrote:
| To be fair, on-foot gameplay (nee "space legs") has been
| on the promised roadmap since the original kickstarter
| campaign, and it's a natural extension of the landable
| planets and SRV gameplay added in Horizons.
|
| Frontier definitely tried to appeal to the typical FPS
| crowd with the on-foot conflict zones, which was a huge
| misstep: it was never going to be good enough as just a
| small part of a much larger game, and a lot of the
| existing players are much more interested in the space
| stuff.
|
| If you ignore the shooty bit of the on-foot gameplay,
| though, it really does (or at least has the potential to)
| add to the core gameplay. Being able to walk around
| station hangers and concourses, prison ships, planetary
| installations and the planet surface itself is definitely
| increasing my enjoyment of the game.
|
| The general hope is that they're leaving a bunch of the
| content releases - hints of new ships, SRVs and new
| thargoid-related gameplay - until the console releases
| for Odyssey in the autumn so that a large chunk of the
| playerbase isn't left behind. Sadly that means that us PC
| players are currently beta testing Odyssey, but after the
| recent patches it's just about performant and stable
| enough to enjoy.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| I actually think this release is different. Killing off
| VR is a big one; while it was used by a small percentage
| of the player base, they were the ones who were really
| into the game and kept the community alive.
|
| And more than most games, Elite basically requires you to
| use third-party tools built by the community to do the
| more complex stuff like long-distance navigation or
| trading. Many are already long in the tooth, and Odyssey
| is rapidly pushing away the most dedicated part of the
| community.
| leetcrew wrote:
| that game leaves a lot to be desired imo. there are a ton of
| things to do, but each "thing" is a pretty shallow loop.
| important components/ships are locked behind lengthy grinds,
| and you need them to be viable in pvp (which is itself mostly
| confined to combat zones and random interdictions). it feels
| more like a bunch of mini-games glued together than a single
| cohesive game. they did a good job with the basic "fly around
| in space" thing, I'll give them that.
|
| imo, eve is the best current implementation of "be a real
| person in space". much less in-your-face grinding, since
| skill training happens offline. a few noobs in cheap ships
| can be a serious threat to an experienced player in something
| expensive. player actions can have serious consequences in-
| universe. although the last time I played, there were some
| issues with capital ship spamming in alliance wars. not sure
| whether they've done anything about that; it's been a while
| since I played.
| rozab wrote:
| I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how
| difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun.
|
| It can take months to physically travel to another player
| (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes
| multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be
| difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space
| legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way
| they've done it is a bit wonky. The FPS gameplay looks
| supremely uninteresting, I think they should have focused
| more on the roleplay and exploration aspect.
|
| On the whole it's a really great game, but no game will ever
| really play like a personal movie or novel.
| vsareto wrote:
| EVE, Elite, and Star Citizen have all done the walking
| around + ships and it's all been pretty meh (with the first
| never really going live except for an apartment). It's a
| cursed feature apparently.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It can work, but not in a procedurally generated /
| sandbox game; you need to add a campaign, a story, custom
| designed environments, etc.
|
| One example where things do / can work is Space
| Engineers, where players can build and program maps in
| the sandbox for others to play.
| williamtwild wrote:
| Don't forget No Mans Sky
| Ekaros wrote:
| Walking around in ships sounds like those cool things for
| one or two times and after that they become chores... It
| really becomes the part of it in gameplay loop. Are you
| making FP or TP game where environment is critical part
| of experience, or is some other thing the most important
| part?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| It's hard enough to achieve that in any game unless you put
| the player on rails. Even games the size of a city tend to
| have massive immersion breaking compromises (look at any
| Bathesda game, Cyberpunk, etc.) Now try scaling that to a
| whole non-procgen universe!
| Ralfp wrote:
| > make tradeoffs between realism and fun
|
| Isn't part of goal for SC to be far more realistic because
| that's only way to be immersive?
|
| I don't know how much truth there is in it, but I've read
| that there's a planet that has player spawn in one area,
| with space port where their space ship is being in other
| area, and you need to get to train station, wait for the
| train, ride the train to space port to get to your ship,
| entire process taking 10 minutes to complete?
| sleepy_keita wrote:
| I still play Freelancer sometimes. It's a great game.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Yes, and so easy to mod. The cancelation of the sequel broke
| my heart.
| Ralfp wrote:
| Sequel would break your heart even more, because it was
| going to be completely different animal with much more
| linear game and Xbox360 exclusivity.
| beckingz wrote:
| It's so good to see the Discovery servers still running
| after all these years.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Still running you say? Hmm. I'm stuck in a hotel for a
| week with nothing but a Cherry Trail tablet. I think I
| know what I'm spending my weekend doing.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Outside the MMO, Earth & Beyond, cancelled way before its
| time, I have a hard time naming any space game that so
| effectively captures the wonder, mystery, and fear of space
| travel as Freelancer.
|
| I remember cruising through a desolate system brimming with
| the broken hulks of battlecruisers to be ambushed by alien
| Nomads as I tried to beat a hasty retreat with my cargo bay
| full of high-grade weapons salvage.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Functionally equivalent to my countries debt counter.
|
| It's there to be pointed at but achieve nothing
| notum wrote:
| The game I regularly forget I own.
| bilekas wrote:
| This is an incredible ongoing project that just sums up all of
| the pitfalls in development.
|
| Bad initial design, change of engines, licensing issues,
| unbelievable feature creep, questionable management..
|
| And I'm not sure exactly, but this progress tracker suggests the
| game will be complete by March 2022 ? Its just begging for
| criticism.
| gmueckl wrote:
| This progress tracker only shows the planning until Q1 2022. If
| you expect a final release then, the joke is on you. The
| planning timeline will always be extended. Features will always
| be added. It is a proven business model. Releasing a finished
| game, however, not so much.
| bilekas wrote:
| ok
| screecwe wrote:
| They haven't changed engines. Lumberyard is just a fork of
| CryEngine 3.8
| wavefunction wrote:
| They had to adapt the changes they had made to CryEngine to
| Lumberyard which were different versions of CryEngine if I
| recall correctly.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| How do they have so little done after so long? And with so much
| money? I understand game development is very difficult but I
| don't think games normally take over 10 years to make.
| ud_0 wrote:
| There has been an absolute mountain of work done on Star
| Citizen, it's just not in the areas you would expect. As far as
| I can tell, all the money went into building an engine that
| generates more money which in turn allows the project to drag
| on, with all other considerations being secondary.
|
| That doesn't mean they're not working on an actual game (or
| games), but it follows that almost all the effort goes into the
| in-game asset sales funnel. Creation of new assets and selling
| them.
|
| What you and I would likely consider core parts of game
| development, namely focusing on technology and gameplay, has
| never been a priority except in short bursts. But even during
| those short burst of priorization, development seems to have
| been hampered by duplication of effort, incompetent
| programming, and absent project management. Judging by what's
| being accomplished, the often-repeated reasoning of "it's just
| very complex and ambitious" is not enough of an explanation. On
| top of this, I believe there is actually a disincentive of
| making gameplay progress too quickly, because much like many SV
| startups there is probably more value in keeping the unicorn
| phase going.
|
| That being said, I don't think SC is a scam. It's just a victim
| of its overall design in some respects, while continuing to be
| very successful financially.
| imtringued wrote:
| >Judging by what's being accomplished, the often-repeated
| reasoning of "it's just very complex and ambitious" is not
| enough of an explanation.
|
| It's not. You grow your game organically and incrementally
| and release early if it is too complex to be ready at launch.
| moritonal wrote:
| Maybe from the fact they have a bespoke custom progress
| tracker? Seems a lot of time's been spent on looking good on
| paper.
| jgoldshlag wrote:
| Look at the times on some of that stuff too. 5 weeks for one
| dev to make a tool to close old JIRA tickets? WTF?
| gorbachev wrote:
| Because they're redoing large chunks of the game every few
| years when the stuff already in is decided to be obsolete.
|
| There are items on the progress tracker for replacing the
| rendering engine even now. It's insanity.
| a-nikolaev wrote:
| Star Citizen becomes http://progressquest.com/ 2.0 ?
| ghastmaster wrote:
| I paid $45 for a ship a long long time ago. The "game" was as
| buggy and incomplete as they get. I had an incredible time
| playing around.
|
| I'm still in awe at what they have achieved. You really do feel
| like you are in space. I can float around the station for an hour
| and not get bored. I walked into a space ship and got lost inside
| of it one time. So much if it is realistic. Nothing compares.
|
| Sadly, it's just a great tech demo. That's all it will ever be. I
| wish RSI would be more honest.
| nirui wrote:
| Well at least this thing has reached v1.0 LOL
|
| Joke aside, I want to say something controversial here: I don't
| think the release date/progress matters much anymore for the dev
| team at this day and age. At least not as matter as it used to be
| when the game plan was just announced. The same point is somewhat
| true for their backers: they are not in a hurry as well, they
| want to (emotionally) see Star Citizen success one day (Or they
| just don't care anymore).
|
| (Assuming they're actually building a game, instead of doing
| something else with that money, of course)
|
| Remember [Freelancer]? It was released back in 2003, some people
| are still playing the game today, and they even go as far as
| creating an open source version of it called [Librelancer].
|
| [Freelancer]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)
|
| [Librelancer]: https://github.com/Librelancer/Librelancer
|
| The scale of Star Citizen is way larger than Freelancer, and the
| potential of the game is greater as well since you can do many
| things in the game. If one day Star Citizen releases and
| delivered what's promised, the game will last for a very long
| time. So for the fans, the wait maybe worth it.
|
| (And hopefully it will be released before Elon Musk, NASA, ESA,
| CNSA or ROSCOSMOS etc give us the real-world version and make us
| actual 1-heart space-slaves LOL)
|
| For the non-fans, however, the market is largely fulfilled by
| Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky etc.
| Krasnol wrote:
| > The scale of Star Citizen is way larger than Freelancer
|
| No it isn't. It's also not even clear it will ever come even
| close to it at this point.
|
| I also seriously doubt that there are so many backers fuelling
| this space video production company. It's pretty well known
| that there is a significant amount of whales who carry this
| thing around.
| eghad wrote:
| I don't know how you can seriously mention Freelancer without
| mentioning that it was completely taken out of the over-
| promising grip of Chris Roberts. Great game, but I despise the
| fact that people attribute the work of those programmers who
| worked to actually put the thing out (when he got his golden
| parachute and all they got was more crunch) to that huckster.
| aseipp wrote:
| And if you read any of the profiles of Chris Roberts or
| people talking about working at RSI on Star Citizen (Kotaku
| did a multi-part series on it years ago), you'll see an image
| of nothing more than a petty, micromanaging boss who does
| nothing but interfere in literally everything, resulting in a
| dysfunctional studio. This isn't surprising; any cursory
| glance at their roadmaps, their former promises, their
| history, their delays etc, clearly paints a picture of severe
| mismanagement, no matter how much fans excuse it.
|
| In fact, one aspect of Freelancer that's been left to history
| is the fact that when Microsoft bought some equity in his
| studio before acquiring them entirely, some producers claimed
| he later used part of that money to fund his failed movie
| ventures instead of Freelancer, which were also later held
| afloat by a weird German tax fraud scheme (the mastermind of
| which later went to jail, which also resulted in German law
| changing and his whole excursion into the film industry
| collapsing instantly). His response to this was "it's fine,
| because it was general equity stake and not earmarked for
| Freelancer." The fact they had to wrestle Freelancer away
| from him is absolutely not surprising when he quite literally
| was dicking around on C-tier shitfilms like Wing Commander
| while people busted their ass.
|
| People here are mentioning the notion of auteurs, of
| visionaries, etc. I disagree; that's an insult to actual
| creatives. Hideo Kojima is creative and has proven himself
| time and time again with both his repeated success and his
| wide array of unusual work. Everything I've seen of him
| indicates to me that Chris Roberts is, essentially, an overly
| ambitious child of a man and petty boss who was lucky Richard
| Garriott ever gave him a chance, and has ridden on almost
| nothing more than his legacy at Origin Systems, and has been
| desperately attempting to capture that again ever since.
| bluescrn wrote:
| > Well at least this thing has reached v1.0 LOL
|
| But now somebody has to support and update the progress tracker
| indefinitely...
| sleepy_keita wrote:
| Whoa, TIL Librelancer! I'll have to check this out. Thanks!
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Interesting... Also, some day I would like to play again
| Starlancer (the previous game). Really cool game and the best
| game on the genere that I played since the Tie-Fighter and
| XvsTie games
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