this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
34 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
1495 readers
1 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think people kind of just like laughing at how ridiculous Star Citizen is, and kind of rightly so. Over half a billion dollars and a decade in development just for what they've got is pretty wild.
To be clear, what they've got right now with sharded persistance and asset streaming is extremely novel on a technical level, but there's no real substance to it yet as a game, just an impressive engine with an absurdly large scale and a tech demo running on it.
If they ever actually stop fiddling and make the damn game it'll be impressive, I'm sure, but so will the earthshattering cost and scale of waste getting there. Then 2 years later someone else will put out something 90% as impressive for 1/100th the cost.
They also scaled from a handful of people to several hundred employees over multiple offices around the world. Scaling up like that isn't cheap compared to a dev team that's already established. The Squadron 42 leak last year looked pretty damn good too. Still, all in all it's starting to border on the absurd with how much money they've made vs their output.
Scaling up as a game developer (or any software company) is hard, but not "it takes a decade and half a billion dollars" hard.
Ya, I agree that what they have is promising. I really do hope they can finish the game as I'm really excited by the ideas they have.
People like to call the game a scam, but they've actually delivered something tangible. I personally don't think I'd enjoy the game in it's current state (and it kind of shocks me the amount of money people have put into Star Citizen), but the fundamentals seem to be there for a real game. They just have to "finish the owl," so to speak.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It's nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it's sharded, so it's not even synced between shards/servers. It's literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where's the novel technology? They don't even have server meshing yet.
It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.