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I Wonder What Star Citizen Is Up To - Aftermath
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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Is this suppose to be an article? Or is posting tweets linked on a website a new fad?
I know SC is a game many people like to dunk on (sometimes for completely right reasons) but let's not pretend like there's absolutely nothing there and CIG somehow scammed millions of players.
If anyone is actually interested in the game, I'd like to stress that you can buy the cheapest package and have access to everything using in-game money. There are also free flight events, available multiple times a year, so you can try the game out and decide for yourself if you like what's there. So far, despite horrible technical difficulties that often happen due to stress on the servers during those times the number of players keeps growing. Take that as you wish...
As for the package... Is it ridiculous? Yes, absolutely. It's 100% worth dunking on.
I'll dunk on actually calling it a game. It's an alpha version of a game that's been in development for over a decade. They came up with the idea of securing funding past the kickstarter phase by selling ships with the promise that pledges wouldn't be in the final version. The end result is that every new player after release will start from zero in a world full of players with massive fleets. Huge disincentive to start. Additionally, release would stop the flow of pledges from the whales they've already hooked (assuming they even keep the promise to stop pledges). With that in mind, why would they ever release? They've made nearly a billion fucking dollars and people will buy shit no matter what they shovel out. Pretty sure they've even sold ships they weren't created yet.
They've expanded and revised and removed the road map so many times, but the game is still less complete than elite dangerous and infinitely buggier. I occasionally drop into the SC subreddit once every 6 months or so to look for release date cope, though it looks like most of them are reaching the acceptance stage and either quitting or enjoying the game as it is. I won't knock that per se, but spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a buggy unfinished game is... Worrisome. Especially since the scale is so damn huge, I've even met people that said they "only" spent 300 dollars on ships.
Just so we're clear, I'm not trying to convince anyone to buy (or even like) the game/alpha/whatever you wanna call it (personally I think if you have micro- let alone macrotransactions, "alpha version" defense doesn't hold much legitimacy). I absolutely agree that there were (and still are) issues with the development process and CIG's approach but let's not pretend like any developer could create what SC is aiming for in less time.
And I don't mean "has similar features" like in case of Elite - I'm sure it's a great game but they have a completely different approach even if many features are similar. SC aims for a borderline immersive sim gameplay in an MMO setting which, in addition to all their other goals, is a massive technical undertaking.
Officially (and yes, I'll stick to this wording as that's all we have) the last few years were spent on building the tech to do just that, as was shown during the last CitizenCon (I know, convention for an unreleased game). Some small parts of said tech were already added in the last patching cycle, many are suppose to trickle down throughout this year - will this really happen? We'll see.
For many people, SC is their dream game which is why they are willing to spend way, waaaay more than that. Additionally, many of those $300 or so purchases aren't one and done affairs but rather people who bought a cheap package and decided to upgrade throughout the years.
Next point is the fact that a good chunk of the player base consists of older IT folk (i.e. people with lots of disposable income). Finally, many people decide to throw money at the game after trying it out during free flights - one of the worst times to play due to overloaded servers, as mentioned in my original post.
And to reiterate, I'm not trying to excuse the spending, just want to add some context.
While for me SC is also a dream game I'm not a whale. I can't justify spending shit-ton of money on a game, no matter how good (especially an unreleased one). I'm someone who bought a $40 package (Star Citizen + Squadron 42) back when the only thing available was the hangar module - a simple, single player map where you could run around and enter your ship. That's it.
I enjoy what's there, take a break when I'm bored or annoyed, hope for the best and criticize CIG when they do something stupid. I don't expect SC to be perfect nor take everything the devs say as gospel. There are many like me but, as it usually is with online discussion, the ones most passionate/crazy for or against something are the loudest.
As for people starting with more ships, here's my take on it:
Having a massive fleet doesn't mean squat if you have no one to operate it. This isn't EVE where one person can control a whole capital sized ship and rule the world. Ships in SC require actual crew to be effective or even used beyond flying. Personally, I don't plan to upgrade to anything bigger than a two player ship for that very reason, and even when I do that, I'll stick to buying stuff in game.
At the end of the day, this is a sandbox - some people will aim to have everything, others will be fine having a basic ship and going about their day doing chill activities. For people with huge fleets to have advantage there needs to be some kind of victory condition and as of now, there really isn't - nothing beyond what you set out for yourself anyway.
Lastly, I'd like to add a quote from CIG included in this article from Polygon written in 2018 on the topic of the same package (different price though since it includes more stuff now).
Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to add some details to the discussion.
Are you legitimately trying to claim isn't in an alpha state simply because it has micro transactions? Lol that's just evidence of how shitty of consumers SC players are that they're willing to pay money for a game that probably won't ever get a full release.
Here we go again with the "no one else could have done this in less time" yeah no one would have tried because they knew it wasn't possible to do it. Or they would have used an engine like UE5 instead of trying to construct the engine from scratch. Either way, the idea that it's fine for a developer to keep dangling hundred dollar ships in front of people for gameplay loops they haven't even invented yet is ridiculous, why would they finish the game when they can just suck up your dollars with "Game Development as a service?" There's no incentive for them to finish and fully release this title, they'll just keep using the same tired excuses like youre doing to cope with the fact that this game has been in development since 2012, thats a 12 year dev cycle and almost a billion USD for what? A couple planets and a dream? Lol
Sorry, but I'll believe it when I see it. You guys are fueled with cope and are the reason the game industry has changed for the worse. You demonstrated corporate fellating loyalty to a product that doesn't exist and everyone saw that and went "hey! We can make money with broken unfinished shit?!? Why are we working so hard to make full games when we can suck the dumbasses dry with tech demos and early access vaporware?!?"
Now we're here. Thanks.
No, not at all. My point was that having microtransactions makes the defense weaker - if you want to get this much money from people for an incomplete product you shouldn't expect the benefit of a doubt. That was by no means an attempt to defend this practice.
There are a few things here to unpack:
I completely agree.
I'm a bit confused whether you even read my post. I mentioned multiple times I'm not trying to excuse their business practices nor convince anyone to play, let alone like the game. People can make their own research and decide for themselves. I have my own problems both with the game and the development process. All I tried to do with my post is provide context, that's all.
You hate the game, I get it but please don't take it out on someone who doesn't necessarily disagree with you just because they aren't as extreme.
I'm sorry for the ad hominem attacks you were the target of from that person, and while I cannot contribute anything to the matter at hand directly, as an outside observer of your discussion I must tell you that your take is very rational and that you should not let yourself be discouraged by their hostility.
It's all good.
SC is a pretty controversial topic, sometimes for good other times for poor reasons, so things tend to heat up quite a bit whenever it's mentioned in general discussion. I've been on this ride for years now so I'm immune to both hype and doomposting - until things are in the game they might as well not exist.
All I ask from people is to try learning about things they dislike - even it won't change your mind, you'll know exactly why and how it sucks beyond "well, it does". It's something I as well need to work on.
I'm sorry, I went overboard for sure on that last part. You seem a reasonable person, I've just encountered so many Chris Roberts zombies that will willingly spend money on this game that it's hard to believe that it doesn't have something to do with the severe left turn in the gaming industry like a year after crowd funding began and the new console generation dropped. Suddenly everything gets released with half its content cut and sold back as DLC, early access and live service became AAA endeavors instead of indie titles like prior.
No worries, I completely understand.
I absolutely agree about the state of the industy (one of the reasons I mainly play older or indie games), CIG's business model and how some people (in general, not just in case of SC) can get way too invested in something they come of as unhinged - that's why I tried to be as balanced and detailed as possible.
I might be a bit rusty since I had a long break from online discussion so some things might have come out less clear than intended.
I only keep up with it to see what the state of affairs are, and while they have marched forward considerably since the announcement that Squadron 42 is feature complete, the content creators keep using the phrase "when we get..." to describe like half of the game and ships at this point.
I don't think it's a "scam" in the sense that they will delete the game one day and take everyone's money. I think it's a scam in the sense that they'll never have the content they originally promised and it's unlikely they'll ever get a full release due to the fact that early access and alpha are crutches to lean on when people start asking why it's taken a decade and a half to do the job.
If I'm wrong I'll definitely buy it, I have loved the idea since I heard about it, it just seems unlikelier every passing year that it will be what they claimed and in my lifetime lol
Nah, that's a fair criticism. The whole "when we get there" can be quite infuriating, more so since vast majority of games doesn't even show up on people's radars (or ask for money) until it's way closer to being done. CIG wanted to share the development process with their players so they have to take both good and bad aspects of such approach.
I definitely feel that unless SC in its current form is something you're willing to put up with, there's no reason to spend any money on it. If something cool comes out of it in the future - nice. If not... well, backers gave them a chance.
I was also expecting something more from the article. This is 100% posting tweets on your website so you can drive engagement there by linking your article in a tweet on Mastodon.
The top comment has it right (for me that’s getting internal leaks). Getting a disaffected employee would be rad. I turned down CGI during the pandemic because, while I was really interested in seeing just how fucked it was on the inside, I could not justify wasting six+ months of my life siphoning money off whales making something going absolutely nowhere.
I'd be absolutely down for a proper article on the topic, especially one based on proper research into the pack and the company (that doesn't mean it has to be positive, apparently I need to stress that out). Twitter posting on the other hand feels like a bottom of a barrel "content" creation.
Don't you lose all that in game shit when they wipe the universe occasionally? Unless you specifically bought it with real world money?
They supposedly have been integrating their new "perfectly scalable dynamic server meshing" technology yet there still seems to be just as many networking issues as ever before during say... LevelCap's streams.
You do though wipes become less and less frequent - these days it can be over a year unless something goes seriously wrong or there's a big backend update (the only such thing recently was a complete rewrite of database storage to prepare for the server meshing you've mentioned).
To clarify, server meshing isn't in yet - it's currently being tested on preview channels. Recent update separated the gameplay server from the database server responsible for keeping all of this stuff in game (as in, if server dies all the changes stay online instead of getting reset).
IF they can make it work on the scale required for the game like SC it should not only help with stability but also make many of the planned features possible. For now they need to prove that they can actually do it.
That If is the whole reason I don't trust them when they say "super easy, barely an inconvenience!" When someone asks about the difficulty of taking this from a test environment to a live one.
Yeah, as if scaling from two rooms and ten people to dozens of worlds and multiple star systems is just a snap.
To be fair CIG never said it will be easy - they specifically said that scaling it up and implementing it in the actual game will be a huge challenge.
In general though I agree, until it's in the game (public servers, not limited access testing ones) it's not in the game.
Honestly if they successfully developed the technology that alone would be worth the wait, even if SC never actualizes. Since it can be used by other companies once it's reverse engineered. I've heard some people think they'll license the technology and make big bucks, but realistically their devs will get sniped and/or it will just be done by others.
While I don't have any more confidence in Hello Games as I do Cloud Imperium, the initial claims of Sean when showing off the game "light no fire" seems to indicate that they are going for something similar by allowing all people to play on the same planet simultaneously in once instance. If they can pull that off (and that's still a big If, considering their current multiplayer network instability of having four people play together) it'll be somewhat similar to what CIG is doing and then we might start seeing other companies try their hand at it independently or with programmers from these developers.
Based on dev comments CIG won't be looking into licensing their tech as that implies support and they have A LOT of work to just finish the game, adding more on top of that would be a bad idea.
I hope more companies try doing similar projects, even if not intended to be as ambitious as the mythical SC target. Competition is always welcome and can lead to many fun experiences along the way.