this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Gaming

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I remember when Star Citizen first started being talked about I was worried I wouldn't be able to run it on my GTX 770 lol. Both that gpu and any desire to play star citizen have been gone for years.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

To be fair, your concerns about it not running on a GTX 770 turned out to be legitimate!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Absolutely no way Star Citizen isn't a massive scam. I mean, people can be incompetent, but

over $580 million

...seems like it has to be some kind of upper limit of incompetence?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's subject to absurd feature creep and overambition, in addition to regular ol incompetence.

The design goals for Star Citizen are kinda absurd. It's like how the No Man's Sky devs claimed at one point they'd individually simulate air molecules and a unique periodic table, except the difference is that NMS axed that (or more accurately, were never actually doing it) instead of spending the next decade trying to make it work.

At the same time, it helps that their supporters have essentially given them a financial incentive to keep adding feature creep instead of releasing, because if they release a game they can't keep asking for more donations for increasingly lofty goals.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This game is going to be No Man's Sky 2.0. I'm calling it now. Watching that whole demo the other day, all I could think of was, yep, no man's sky of 2023.

No disrespect to No Man's Sky, because they got that game pretty much sorted. Not sure Bethesda will ever throw that much resources, especially with this news, at Star Citizen. I'll be waiting for the first Steam Sale, and only if they have it mostly sorted by that point. Their track record isn't awesome, in that regard.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You're definitely thinking of Starfield, which is the new Bethesda game. Star Citizen won't be No Man's Sky 2.0, because Star Citizen is never going to come out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It’s a different kind of beast.

NMS released. They put it in a box and said “This is the finished game”. It was then torn to shreds and the long road of updates was a redemption story for an already released product.

Star Citizen will NEVER be done. It will always exist in some weird development alpha-beta limbo. It’s never going to go on Steam or shelves as a finished product. This allows the developers cover to always say the game is in development as a shield against any and all criticism. From their perspective it’s kind of perfect. Fans throw money at it endlessly and the development never really needs to reach a coherent state of being finished. Why would they ever want to actually release a finished game?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think you're thinking of Starfield?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Like a fission reaction between cope, capitalism and hypetrain grease. Compels me though 🤔

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

To have spent that much money and yet not have anything really resembling a game, just a glorified tech demo, is pretty sad.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a friend who just got into Star citizen and I just don't understand why. There are actual games to play.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I know what you mean, but even the idea of "getting into Star Citizen" doesn't make sense to me because, well...what in the world is there really to get into beyond the few demos they released?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Don't forget all those jpgs they have too!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do you mean, just a glorified tech demo? I thought it's almost done??

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think you're thinking of Starfield, because Star Citizen is nowhere near done. They only have one solar system, with only a few people per instance, terrible optimization, only a fraction of the planned features, etcetera. It's very immersive (aside from all the glitches and low FPS) but there's not much actual content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I dunno, seems incredibly competent to me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It's just revenue, the game is never being finished.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I was a $20 Kickstarter backer of this complete disaster.

Though, at this point, it's been a decade of absolutely hilarious drama, so I really do feel like I got my money's worth out of it even though I literally have never installed nor played any of the "betas".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm so glad I never spent any money on this game and just got a free ship with my old AMD graphics card.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will never understand why how much a company spends on their products is considered newsworthy. Blows my mind.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Scaling up as a game developer (or any software company) is hard, but not "it takes a decade and half a billion dollars" hard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wanted Star Citizen to work out so badly. In 2012(ish? I don't remember exactly) when I first heard of the game I backed it because a space game where you weren't just your ship but could move around and board other ships sounded like my perfect space game. Now it looks like Starfield may fill that want perfectly. Who knows though maybe one day in the future Star Citizen will actually release.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've been playing Star Citizen pretty regularly for years, and still do. While it's not progressing as quickly as I want it to, it's definitely progressing... and so long as their current funding model keeps the game evolving, I'm happy with that.

The thing that concerns me about Starfield right now is how little they've shown of flight mechanics. I'm starting to get the feeling that space flight is going to be a half-baked afterthought and atmospheric flight might not be a thing at all. We'll know soon enough, but I am still not going to let myself expect anything more than "Fallout/Elder Scrolls in Space".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Does anyone realistically expect this game to come out?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its supporters bounce between “It’s already out!” and “Developing such a huge game takes time.” depending on which stance is more convenient in an argument.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, I wonder how much time is wasted refactoring with software and hardware that has been invented post the start of their development. Considering how long their development has been.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, you’re shifting from a fan POV to a developer POV here.

From the developer POV, it’s not wasted time. They are getting a constant stream of money. As long as they can tread water and make their motion look like progress they have an endless source of income.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And put on a consumer hat next. How about an offical release for people that have funded a game. Be that a 1.0 release with promised features in later updates. Their model at the moment is confusing for anyone outside of they diehard fan base. But why should they care right? As long as their commercials work, that’s what it’s all about.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh as a consumer I, personally, am not touching this thing with a ten foot pole.

I think the people who do continue to fund this thing are sucked in by the dream of what it could be and have developed a kind of personal ownership of the project in their heads. They are psychologically invested in seeing it succeed and you can’t convince them it’s never going to. And the developers are cynically sucking money out of them like cult leaders.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The development of this game makes construction of a nuclear power plant look timely and cheap.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes and no. There's a sort of playable game there. But Chris Roberts is sort of infamous for his feature creep.

So more and more gets added to the game and then parts of the base code have to be rewritten to support the new additions, and then you get a 13 year development cycle with no actual end in sight. I think that the feature creep is currently under control, but with everything that's been planned, it's still going to be a couple of years before the game releases.

I am assuming that it will eventually release... Which is a large assumption at this point.

But until then, you can play a game that feels a bit like a first person shooter, and has some ship to ship combat, and some missions, and some other stuff, but isn't as fleshed out as any of those things could be if the focus was strictly on that one thing. Basically it's too many things at once to be really good at ony one of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Someone call Derek Smart here, lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

All I want is that kinda standalone side 'campaign' which has Mark Hamill involved. How they could make that and sit on it is beyond me!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Star Citizen will go down in history as the biggest gaming scam ever.

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