Star Citizen is actually the perfect game for me. What I’ve noticed over the years is that I almost enjoy the wait for a game more than when its released and I get to sit down and play it. I love reading up news about games, seeing announcement of new features and developer blogs. With Star Citizen never properly releasing I get to watch youtube videos of people dissecting new systems etc and looking forward to the new tech coming in a few years.
The moment Star Citizen releases I know for a fact I will lose all interest, so keep up the current pace CIG!
I've never heard anyone articulate exactly how I felt about Planetary Annihilation and Overgrowth: the only two games I bothered to pay for prerelease / dev news. In general, I think I've grown to enjoy reading about interesting projects more than playing games anymore, so it's almost like getting to go spend time at an interactive art exhibit after fawning over their work.
Is Star Citizen the first truly modern religion? This is basically the business model of a cult whose members gather every year for the end of the world, but when it never comes they just get more excited for the next one
It's like the Mormons in the Expanse with all the Star Citizen players going on a generation ship
It sounds like the kind of game I'd like to watch other people play, with how big and expensive everything seems. Why would I want to spend $1k and wait to be bad at the game, when I can instead watch someone else who spent $10k and does cool things?
Backed this in 2013 on Kickstarter, I try to play it once every few years but never get past installing the latest update and figuring what my login is.
How else would you explain why people play the lottery? It's well-known that the expected value of any given ticket is negative (except in rare cases), unless you place some entertainment/fantasy value on playing.
The expected value of insurance is also negative (it has to be, or else insurance companies wouldn't be able to pay their expenses), but people buy it for the same reason: the rare payoff is life-altering, while the much more common cost doesn't make much difference in comparison.
I mean, this is why I chuck 5 bucks in every once in a while. I know, realistically, I am not going to win, but the fantasy is a fun activity. The human brain is weird.
As a software project, Star Citizen seems like a complete debacle — a project promising the basically impossible (tens of thousands of players on a single server/shard) and yet failing so far to deliver even the feasible-but-difficult (rudimentary AI crew, ~100 star systems). But as a marketing campaign, it feels like an astounding success to attract record-breaking fundraising year-over-year despite diminishing development milestones.
To be honest I understand perfectly well why it exists.
These days I played "Everspace 2" and it felt great, controls-wise, the physics are not that good though. And I wanted a more simulator thing.
I then tired up all space simulators I could, played a little, tried to see if any scratch a specific itch, and found out the only ones that DOES scratch that itch, are ancient games, some that had Roberts involved.
The reason people is plunking money in Star Citizen is that people want a game that basically doesn't exist, and Star Citizen promises to be that game. (if it will actually pull that off is another story...).
Elite could have done it, but they didn't, their controls aren't that interesting and the entire series has the same repeating issues (of course, open source clones have the same issues).
X series are basically an RTS with first person controls, another genre entirely.
Evochron I didn't tried, but heard the controls are batshit insane and the interface is bizarre, the game is good but hard to understand.
Among open source stuff, the one that came closest to what I want is clones of Chris Roberts games (for example games using Vega Strike engine).
Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky, I couldn't get used to it or make it work with my mouse, and I don't own a joystick.
Now if you are willing to go 2D there are more options, sadly some of them are trying to screw themselves too (looking at you "Celestial Command" that started as a 2D realistic physics game and is now a 3D game with crap physics because they couldn't make the AI work properly).
Not trying to gate keep or anything but if you go into a space sim, or really any kind of simulator genre with just a KBM and not the appropriate controller you are going to think the controls are bad and insane. KBM works great for some types of games but sims are not one of them. I couldn't imagine DCS without a stick or iRacing without a wheel and pedals. Its simply a suboptimal experience and one the developers will never put all the much time in to because full fledged simulations cater to the type of player who is willing and able to invest in a specialty control setup.
> Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky
To each his own, but I would kill for a modern expansion remake of Privateer with FreeSpace controls and physics.
And you don't really need a joystick for it, but finding a comfortable configuration scheme... takes time.
Easiest would be to have the ship movement on the /keypad/ cursor keys for a coarse directioning and mouse for a fine targeting.
That would give you 13 additional keys for the most often used functions:
target next
target in the reticle
target next missile
target subsystem in the reticle
afterburner (KP_INS)
countermeasures (KP_DEL)
match speed (KP_STAR)
full speed (KP_SLASH)
have a power management nearby (INS through PgDown block) and shield management on the regular cursors.
/Not that hard after all.../
Also FreeSpace is a space /fighter/ sim, it is somewhat another subgenre of spacesims with it's own peculiarities.
Speaking about Roberts - take a look at Rebel Galaxy Outlaw [0], even by the video you will see what it is clearly a modern Privateer in everything except setting/license.
Don't expect Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen... but it's made by just one developer.
For that it's amazing, and honestly, for me it's come closest to capturing what I want out of an Elite-style game, even though it's still got a long way to go to meeting its potential.
I really like the basic concepts of Astrox Imperium, but the fact that almost the entire game revolves around getting from station to station in a desperate attempt not to run out of air was a big turndown for me.
It eventually made the game unplayable for me, as I found myself in a savegame where no matter which direction I went, there simply wasn't a single station closeby enough that provided air, so I was essentially stuck and had to start a new campaign.
"almost the entire game revolves around getting from station to station in a desperate attempt not to run out of air was a big turndown for me"
That's not been my experience at all.
Just invest in buying life support equipment upgrades whenever you find them and you won't have any problem surviving your trips from station to station, even in the most hazardous star systems.
Also, don't go in to hazardous star systems unless you're sure you have the necessary life support equipment to survive there and get back.
There is a timer at the bottom of the screen (if I remember right), which tells you how long your life support will last inside the star system you're in, and if you see it very low when you enter a new system just go right back out.
To me it sounds like you either ignored that warning, didn't notice it, or thought you could get away with surviving in a very hazardous system without enough life support, but turned out to be wrong. Just don't do that and buy life support upgrades whenever you can and you'll be fine.
I did play the game in october 2020, and from I remember there were no life support upgrades back then. And back then I don't think there were "hazardous systems": it was just that some systems were completely empty (no stations at all), while others were not, and the only way to know was to actually go there. So you might not realize you were without air until you're 3-4 systems away.
Well, the game has certainly changed a lot since then, as it's under very active development: see the latest dev log from Jan 18, 2022: [1] More here: [2]
Now the game has not just life support, but four different life support systems. You will need one or the other of them when you're doing different things.
I just get all four of them upgraded as much as possible whenever I can, and don't really worry about which one is for which as I pretty much always have enough no matter what I am doing.
Though, whether you actually have to worry about a particular life support system will depend on how you play. For example, if you wanted to go mining for fuel from a star early on, or you happened to go in to particularly hazardous star systems early on, then you'd definitely feel your lack of a particular type (or multiple types) of life support.
The way I played last time (where I got far enough that the game basically stopped being a challenge to me) was that I'd stayed within safe star systems and just upgraded my ship as much as possible, focusing on mining at first, then combat and that let me upgrade pretty much everything to max and buy the most expensive star ships.
I didn't get in to having multiple ships and mercs, nor in building structures or manufacturing or refining, so there was still a lot more to do when I got bored, but that was after dozens of hours and lots of fun up to that point... and by the time I got done I could go in to the most hazardous star systems (or even up to stars to mine their fuel) without worry about my life support.
If anything, survival is a little too easy and mechanical in this game.
Have you played Elite Dangerous recently? They made a misstep with space legs (bowing to public pressure from a public who aren't game designers), but other than that it's pretty darn solid.
Also Angels Fall First, a FPS where you can also command/board capital ships, fly fighters, invade planets, etc. Unfortunately the dev has disappeared recently.
Their goals were ambitious, but hardly impossible.
It's not realistic to handle an arbitrary number of players interacting within a small space, sure. That limit is probably in the hundreds. But a zillion players all within the same game world? Yeah, why not? That's really easy if you're talking about a big universe that doesn't have the entire population congregating in the same place.
Especially in a unicast environment. There are ways to handle it though, like let only a limited number of people land or enter a given stations.
The real world has capacity limits, both physical and rule-based (fire-codes). Implementing these shouldn't be very hard and wouldn't necessarily break immersion.
Lots of ships congregating at a random point in space could be a bigger issue though.
It's higher than hundreds. I had 150+ player raids on a private L2 server I hosted back in the day on an Athlon X2 with 4gb of ram. I had 50 player raids when that server was hosted on a spare P3 800mhz 512mb ram box I had in the closet.
This was not efficient software, l2j had so many issues I recognize now that I've worked a decade in the software industry, but it worked!
Why? The networking code is entirely on them to get right. What does Cryengine have to do with efficiently updating a giant number of players with movement / action information?
All the while, I have been enjoying Elite Dangerous, which ticks a lot of boxes. Frontier Development is building from the ground up, and even though it’s not without problems (they just had a year of fixing their bodged Odyssey release) , they seem to have a running space simulation.
I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.
Playing it in VR, I get a ton of enjoyment from the ship interfaces. (I wish it supported hands for pretty much that reason). It's a beautiful exploration of how this kind of sci-fi FTL travel would work from a UX perspective. Assuming, of course, ships are the equivalent of racing cars and will gleefully sail into the nearest sun if you look away from the controls.
The way your ship warns you if you're doing something foolish, and you need to plot your route in advance and filter through mountains of data in order to park your ship, is extremely neat to me. It's a perfect "tinkering with toys I don't fully understand" game.
I want a game like Elite with the depth of MSFS. Aviation is decade upon decade of old systems built on the shoulders of the previous ones. Aviation is _hard_.
Space travel should be similar, with the appropriate help of computers.
I have dreams where I'm alone on a spaceship hauling cargo, so I was really hopeful when I started playing Elite. But it just bored the stuffing out of me. I guess it's a temperament thing.
It has problems with events, although they are reworking the event system so it can branch more. The problem with Elite is that they tend to make a great functionality, but then stop developing the content for it.
I adore flying in Elite Dangerous, but holy shit it's such a grindfest I feel like I'm playing a free to play game.
I shouldn't have to minmax some community derived mining plan just to get a ship worth playing in.
It seems like they developed the grindyness of the economy back when there was very little content in the game in order to artificially increase playtime, and haven't fixed it now that there is a lot more content.
Planetside 2 was able to handle hundreds of players in the same location as a first person shooter without issues. That was almost a decade ago. No reason to believe with new advances in CPU single core perf, lockfree concurrency techniques, vectorization, etc. that 1k players wouldn't be possible.
To clarify, based on my reading of the article: CIG is not reducing the scope of their planned deliverables^[1] for a v1.0 release. Rather, they are going to reduce the granularity of the roadmap info they share with the public so that people will complain less.
^[1] For a game that has been in development for a decade and blown past every planned release date by a comical margin.
Star Citizen is a topic I sink a bit of time into every year or so, because I find the whole phenomenon incredibly curious and somewhat unique to our times.
They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project, broken promises, and delivered nothing that resembles what most people would qualify as a playable game. They've only given evidence that they will continue wasting resources.
For some really entertaining coverage, I'd highly recommend:
"Sunk Cost Galaxy", an amateur YouTube series made by former fan/investor/associate/!?: https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA
And LTT's more recent feature, which definitely pokes fun but is still overly generous IMO: https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo
Wow, that's been ten years already. If that 339M USD figure is accurate, they could have partnered with a few companies to launch a real space ship. Shades of the never-ending train of hype and mostly lies that was Battlecruiser 3000 two decades earlier. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD )
There is a clearly a giant wad of latent demand-money sitting around waiting for someone to deliver on the concept, would be interesting if some studio with more traditional funding makes a go of it.
Going from "we're going to make a game about space ships" to "we're going to launch a real space ship" would be a feature creep deserving of a monument.
I don't think MMOs should be counted as a single project. Each expansion should be counted separately, at the very least.
Star Citizen hasn't even released the base game, and the fact that they haven't segmented off any of their feature creep into future expansions is itself a story of project mismanagement. Part of a successful project is knowing how to divide it into multiple sequential projects.
I wouldn't be surprised if WoW has spent more money by now than Star Citizen has, but WoW was announced in 2001 and shipped a release version in 2004. The added expenditures are all game updates, new campaigns, and general recurring expenses from running arguably the most successful MMO of all time.
Star Citizen, by contrast, was announced over a decade later in 2012, and has gone through its hundreds of million dollars without shipping a release version, or even a beta version (they dub what's currently shipping an alpha). So it seems reasonable to hold them to a different standard.
(Granted, it's not impossible Star Citizen is also profitable, all things considered, but that just raises more questions.)
From Wikipedia: "[World of Warcraft] has grossed $9.23 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing video games of all time, along with Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Street Fighter II."
Yes, that's revenue. Parent's post neither claims WoW is a failure nor that WoW has taken in/made lots of money-- just that they've probably spent a lot of money and no one knows how much.
That "Sunk Cost Galaxy" series is quite good. I didn't know much about this before.
It really feels like cashing in on nostalgia, put something barely playable together and keep cashing in. The fact that a lot of the development was outsourced.....
Ehhh that list of game dev costs seems really suspect; Star Citizen is only notable because they released dev costs when everyone else holds them tight to the chest. Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie. AAA video games over the last 10 years typically have as much if not more budget than tentpole movies (and corresponding revenue draw).
Yes, but never at the level of detail that is being discussed here. You won't see the costs for the latest WoW expansion broken out in the R&D line items in Activision-Blizzard's financial statements.
"Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie."
Are voice acting costs that huge?
It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?
From what I know, talent is usually cheap enough relative to the total cost of a game, it's the whole pipeline around integrating voice acting and motion capture into a game that's really expensive. In this[1] episode of that podcast they talk a bit about the costs around that. If you decide to do voice acting and motion capture you also have to adapt the whole game and writing around that decision, which balloons costs a lot since you've decided you want _that kind of game_.
[1]: https://youtu.be/cTejdjnf-jI with Mike Bithel dev of "Thomas was Alone", Troy Baker celebrity video game voice actor, Austin Wintory composer (Journey), Alanah Pearce writer
Not the good ones. There are definitely top-tier voice actors out there who command good salaries. The ones on fivr are for like, recording audio books or radio commercials.
However, even if you just adjusted all the other dev costs in that list by a factor of two or three - Star Citizen would still easily remain in the top five.
My point was mainly- Compare CIG's efforts to other studios that have spent hundreds, or even just tens of millions!
I had a heated discussion with a friend in 2013 about StarCitizen and that it was a scam. They believed it was real and that their early investments would pay off. They bought stuff multiple times and were very mad that I would insult what would be such an awesome game.
It was so curious to me back then. I need to ask them about this as I can’t believe people still pay any attention to this as I think it will never happen.
I think there are some pretty solid reasons why certain types of people remain very interested in it. If you're a space sim nerd then it ticks a lot of boxes. I played it about a month ago for the first time, after a decade or so of mocking it every chance I got for all the usual reasons. I was looking for something new and saw enough videos that seemed to suggest it had reached a point of being interesting to me. My space nerd creds go back a long way: wing commander at release, freelancer, eve, various flavors of X3, elite, ten minutes in no man's sky, etc. I'm one of those people who wants to immerse into a game world where I can do all the things CIG promises. So I dove in.
What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet.
I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.
I think they will eventually ship. Just not soon like DN4. I am not spending a dime on it before then. Even then it may not be a game I am interested in anymore.
I learned my lesson years ago with Chris Roberts games. Do not bother thinking about them until they ship. Strike Commander was my antidote for him. Overpromised, under delivered. He has been trying to make 'privateer' for 2+ decades at this point. He has shipped several iterations at this point 2 priv games and 2 others. This is number 5. That is what is kind of frustrating about it. He can ship games, and has many under his belt. But this one looks like a death march. Drags on much longer and they will have to do yet another engine switch out to keep the 'look' modern and not dated. Which would probably necessitate touching all the assets again.
I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up.
Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.
edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing,
While Star Citizen is currently in the Alpha stage
of development, it is playable now. New content,
features, and fixes are consistently added as
development continues, with a major patch released
each quarter.
As somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.
Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s a mess. My big issue with playing regularly is that it’s better with friends but as you add people the odds that one of you is experiencing issues at any given time approaches 100%. So you’re trying to group up, but first you fall down the stairs and die, then your friends ship spawns with its landing gear in the floor, does a few flips and explodes. When he replaces it, the engines are missing, so your other friend goes to pick him up instead. But they fly too close to the moving space station rings that are out of sync between the client and the server, and now their ship blows up too. Meanwhile you finally get you ship into space, and one of your friends respawns, falls down the stairs, and dies.
I hope they finish it, and I feel like I’ve gotten my relatively small amount of money’s worth out of it. But if I were one of the people who’s bought in for thousands of dollars I’d definitely be worried.
I’d say both yes and no. Some aspects, like a trip to Security Post Kareah to hack off a crime stat, are definitely more amazing as a new player from that story compared to someone who’s been playing for a while. It’s a chore, half the time you have a crime stat it’s because of a bug, and if a bounty hunter gets you during this process you wake up in jail. Neat the first time, could do without it after that.
Other parts you’ve done before but still enjoy because it’s a part of the game that you like. Box delivery missions are relaxing sci-fi sightseeing to me, and that’s only going to get better as the universe expands. The places we already have in the game are pretty amazing and a lot more is planned. I’m not into truck simulator games, but put it in space and heck yeah I’ll fly boxes around.
And then the third category is stuff that we’re not playing at all yet because it keeps getting delayed. So that’ll be a new experience even if I’ve been playing Star Citizen on and off since it hit alpha. Salvaging is the running joke here, but even that is kind of an ongoing distraction from the many professions that are supposed to come after it. https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/ngke3m/salvage_soo...
For some reason SC seems to have nailed the crimes and punishment which sadly is not working as well in Elite, which in turn really needs it due to some obnoxious ganking.
It sounds like the definitions of "playable" and "alpha" really matter here.
When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software.
I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms.
From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.
Chris Roberts discovered Steam-by-another-name: it's more profitable to make hats than games.
And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.
It really is an interesting phenomenon. The game has released several versions. A game that rolled out at a similar time, Elite Dangerous, declared itself released a ways back, with a drastically narrower feature set, and since then has constantly moved towards adding what Star Citizen claims to be. In theory, if both continue to develop in perpetuity, their feature set will eventually be pretty aligned, but one calls itself pre-release and one calls itself receiving updates.
I am not sure there is a lot of difference besides the certain expectation of polish.
There are parts of Star Citizen which, if released standalone, would be indistinguishable from release-grade games. Arena Commander is excellent, and plenty of full games are comparable to this sub-feature of Star Citizen, and Star Marine, the built-in FPS probably only really lacks in terms of playerbase: It's excellent and the touches in it's game mechanics are amazing.
I think your'e mistaken, In my mind its unlikely that Elite will ever get a new expansion again? The last one was not.. lets say enthusiastically received.
Also Elite is built in a way where they have a lot of parallell systems that _do not interact_. This makes the game very shallow with a few gameplay loops, but they are really more akin to mini-games with the universe as background, than real proper games. And I don't see how they could ever make the universe more realistic without having interactions that was never foreseen, and prboably cant be fixed. For example the economy is all fake, its not based (much at all) on what users do. "Powerplay" is a totally separate game system that I at first thought was connected in some way to the rest of the game, but no. You can rank up inside separate factions, and sure it does affect some things such as which ships you can buy, but its all still very shallow. A lot of things is not interchangeable using money, which in reality almost everything is. You can't transfer wealth between players etc.
The sad thing about Elite Dangerous is that its still a totally fun game with other players providing some content, but the netcode is just not made for "massive" multiplayer but instead sort of randomly caps out at a few players interacting at the same time, with no fix likely ever coming.
It's playable, but it's nowhere close to being a complete game. It seems like most of the value people get out of it at this point is fucking around with its half-broken systems.
There's some really bizarre tribalism that develops in the Kickstarter/preorder realm. I back a fair number of board games and see the same thing there.
Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.
I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.
I think thats human nature to some extent. Some people really don't like being wrong/disapointed. Especially after spending money. So narrative to make it alright.
Someone once said "I was wrong about this. I've been wrong before. I just try not to dwell on it..". I'm wrong often too.
I pre order board games. I’m looking forward to ISS vanguard and have been doing so for over a year. I wouldn’t do so with video games.
Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs. Video games are more like “wouldn’t it be cool if you could do X”? And sometimes the answer turns out to be “no” when it’s actually implemented, or the actual implementation is just way watered down from your imagination. Backing something like star citizen seems like it’s begging for disappointment.
But that’s what I enjoy these platforms for: I want to precommit some small sum of money and if lots of us do it this guy is going to take an honest shot at it.
Since it’s so little, I get no equity and I just get one unit of product. Fair deal to me.
Disappointment isn’t that they tried and it sucked. It’s only if they don’t try. But to be honest, I don’t even feel disappointed then because I usually make a satisfactory judgment as to the likelihood of success so if it fails, that’s just a failed bet. And nothing wrong with failing on a bet.
What happened there? From the outside I thought it was pretty smooth and successful. Delivered what was promised and only a couple months late.
I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.
It seems quaint now to be upset about Star Citizen. There are so many "games" being promised now to people buying NFTs that don't even seem to be trying to be plausible. Like: No one working on our team has ever really made a game before but we plan to make a revolutionary one before the end of the year. Sure. At least Roberts Industries is trying.
A Reddit discussion highlighted one important way Star Citizen is not like an NFT; there's no supported resale of the virtual assets. If you want to buy a fancy spaceship to stare at in your hangar you pretty much have to buy it from Star Citizen and the revenue goes to them. (There is some third party trading but it looks pretty minor.)
At this point, the average wacko NFT-based game probably has a greater chance of success than Star Citizen. Although you'd probably have to use to some advanced mathematics to determine the difference between these two extremely-close-to-zero chances.
I'd say that Star Citizen and video game NFTs are both on par with being all promise and no meaningful delivery (yet) though. I could see both Ubi restricting sales of their "NFTs" and Star Citizen adding resale features later. That's how nebulous both are.
True if you consider only consumer money. But if you consider investors that is not true. There are NFT "games" that have raised a lot. I don't know if they would define themselves as games, but functionally they all look like they are trying to be an MMO or Roblox.
Watching Star Citizen has been a hobby for me like watching a train wreck is painfully slow motion.
It came about at the same time as the revival of a beloved franchise Elite in the form of Elite Dangerous. ED didn't have the budget SC does but it stuck to quite narrow development goals and shipped years ago. It's progressively added updates, patches and expansions since.
No Man's Sky is vaguely in the same vein and had a terrible launch (I highly recommend this video [1]) but, to their credit, Hello Games has plugged away at NMS adding more content and updates to the point where it's an enjoyable experience now and has a loyal fan base.
But SC? By God. It's like a progenitor for NFT scams. Constantly raising even more money by selling limited run ships (for a game that still basically doesn't exist). I'd occasionally see a presentation on some new system under development (eg the prison system) and I always thought "why on Earth are they talking about this before they even have a core game?"
It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything.
I'm honestly surprised so many still drink the Kool-Aid on SC. I really wonder where all the money has gone (and how much is actually gone).
> It's an object lesson that too much money can be a bad thing. It's so easy for an embarrassment of riches to lead to hopeless feature creep and not really delivering anything.
Totally agree. I think they're addicted to keeping people engaged through upcoming features rather than an actual game. Fascinating.
Hearing about the long demise of this game makes me really start to wonder: is there an opportunity here? The concept behind Star Citizen is spectacular--unfortunately, that concept is also all it has going for it at the moment. But there's nothing fundamentally impossible about realizing that concept if it were approached efficiently.
I sense a major opportunity for a motivated, well-managed team of developers to do "Star Citizen, but like actually this time". I imagine a project where an MVP is shipped as a number one priority, and the project is incrementally expanded from there, instead of what's happened with SC and CIG's obsessive perfectionism.
I wonder this same thing every time Star Citizen hits the news again.
What baffles me most about the whole thing is how much value SC fans are placing on the ideas versus the execution of those ideas. It's almost as if people think that other game studios just aren't as creative or haven't thought beyond the scope of what they've delivered in shipped games. Like the only reason Assassin's Creed doesn't allow players to start their own splinter group of assassins to operate within a robust, period-correct world economy and political system is because no one ever thought of it. What gamer hasn't sat down to make a list of features for her dream game and eventually realized what she was describing was just an 'entire universe where everything is possible' sim?
As with most artistic and technological achievements, the greatness comes from actually producing a game that manages to satisfactorily offer some portion of that dream list, not from coming up with the list itself.
I am working on a game that hits some of the main bullet points. Being a duo developer and aiming for a low end hardware demographic, it won't have the high polygon visuals many want, so I wouldn't call it equivalent. Hopefully I can carve out a niche that's enjoyable for a number of people.
I have actually had a fair amount of fun playing Star Citizen. To my knowledge it's the only game you can actually mess about with friends on spaceships where you aren't limited to merely controlling the ship (i.e. Elite Dangerous).
That said, it's clearly well out of proportion to their funding. Some of the feature creep implies such horrible judgement by experienced game designers it would have been hard to predict.
I think I paid $80 in the original kickstarter. I've spent maybe a total of two hours playing the game, but the entertainment I've got out of the development has been well worth the money.
I bought in back in the early days when it was supposed to be a new single player game with optional multiplayer. By now, the whole thing is more like an unplayable buggy mess of a failed MMORPG. And no single player yet.
EDIT: Also it says a lot that my account got deactivated for inactivity while I was waiting for them to release something playable...
I went to jail in 2013, not long after I donated to the Kickstarter. I recently got out - hoping an old game like Star Citizen would still be playable. Found out it wasn't even released yet o_O.
For real? Is that by design? In elite jail is at least just an instantaneous transfer and an financial transaction, which is maybe one reason why the justice in elite doesn't really work.
SC is a textbook example of feature creep. And Chris Roberts has the same problem George Lucas did, a creative with a blank check and nobody to tell him no. If they had stuck to the original feature set as promised in the kickstarter nearly a decade ago then the game would have been released by now. Instead they waste time and resources on overly ambitious features that are mostly unfinished and more and more ships.
Do I think its a scam? Not strictly. I don't think they went in to this with the goal of taking people's money and not delivering. But I do think its horribly mismanaged.
This is exactly what happened on his last big space project (Freelancer) - way over time/budget, too much random micromanaging of meaningless things, etc. Microsoft had to swoop in at the end and save the project, removing him in the process.
And it turned out to be a pretty good game. Which shows he has good ideas, he just needs constraints. Its a really common pitfall in creative industries. You don't see it as much in AAA games I think because devs tend to be more structured. But it happens a lot in indie games and all the damn time in film. There are countless movies which were vanity projects for the directors.
All I want are for the lodging elevators and subway stops to reliably appear, and to not get booted right when I'm at my destination outpost/planet without lodging.
Loading the game takes 10 min at best, and to wait that long only to see the one and only elevator out not rendering (requiring reloading the game) is beyond frustrating. I can deal with lag here and there, but this literally makes the game unplayable.
The first and last time I pre-ordered a game was for MOO3.
I won't ever be fooled again. Besides now that i've gotten older I don't care as much. I can wait.
If Cloud Imperium Games thinks the answer is limiting what parts of their roadmap to share with the public is the answer, they are sadly mistaken. At this point, this is not a unrealistic expectation of their user problem, it is a CIG can't develop a game problem.
The team itself needs to ruthlessly cut features and develop a MVP game concept and execute it. At this point Star Citizen is already the next Duke Nuke'em forever, and it is now well on it's way to creating a class of it's own in the over-hyped gaming vapor-wear category.
Frankly, this type of conflict with and blaming of their own fans is a portent of the beginning of the end.
I like this take. There's a book called "Games people play" by E. Berne that changed how I think about things like this. It talks about how people on a biological level need to interact with others and how they'll unconsciously repeat a script (game) with predictable roles and results to accomplish that. The main insight is that these games don't necessarily need to have a positive outcome - people still get something out of it. So it gets repeated, to the puzzlement of any observers and sometimes even the participants.
I was just going to comment, the real game seems to be the development of the game, (pre)ordering and outfitting your ship and gear, etc. It will no longer be a game, once the game is finished.
“After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.”
For sure. I feel like I've gotten my $25 worth of entertainment just from following all the drama for over a decade. If you have a few hours to kill, Sunk Cost Galaxy is a great rundown of how SC got to where it is today. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...
This is really true for Elite though, join an active squadron and the universe get a _lot_ more interesting! But a lot of the stuff is outside the game then.
"But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community"
The arrogance. Said as if they've delivered what was advertised to anyone except said contingent.
The developers have shown their word counts for nothing, and so the same goes for these statements. They've accepted people's money, which obliges them to provide a reasonable quality return in a reasonable time scale.
You have to understand there’s very few games out that inspire anything in people now days. It’s all very uninspiring, and it’s almost better to put your hopes into an attempt at something better.
Otherwise all that’s left is the drivel, and you better like eating it.
How about a little contrition? Something like 'Yeah, we know we've screwed up our delivery over and over again. And we've never really delivered anything as promised. And our model has been repeatedly shown to be a failure. And we know you told us for years this would be the case if nothing changed, and we ignored you anyway. So we are sorry to ALL of you. Here's how we're going to change everything or here's how we're going to refund you.' Pretending there is one marginal, disgruntled group is a cynical, face-saying decoy designed to ignore the fact that virtually everyone is disgruntled. Pure arrogance.
I paid for this game despite it being in alpha, tried it with friends, it's not fun, and it doesn't really work. Losing progress is infuriating. Thankfully we were able to a get a full refund and back to Rust I go. It's kind of amazing to see what Facepunch is able to do with a 30 person crew considering it now sits as a steam top 5 concurrent users up there with CS:GO and DOTA2.
Is this game actually legit or just a scam as is popularly understood? I saw there is an alpha, but it's tough to separate fact from fiction on this game, would love to hear the perspective of some HNers.
Legit, mostly. I’ve recently purchased the game and it is stunning and rather awe-inspiring, with some solid gameplay loops. But, the bugs are heartbreaking. I’m not prepared to invest 100s of hours learning/playing the game with immersion breaking bugs. So I’ve shelved it for now.
The scam IMO is continuing to work on anything other than fixing the bugs.
As someone who hasn't played this, 5 years ago when I looked at videos, the UI seemed comically bad. Interacting with something brings up some flying UI text that gives in front of you until you disengage or select something. Recent videos show that same UI. Is that UI actually usable? Sometimes the text seems to blend into the background and I'm not sure of the purpose behind the weird flying animations they have
It has embezzled hundreds of millions, yet does not even have a fully playable product after a decade, and seemingly exists only to exploit whales with more money than sense who'll buy new ships. You be the judge.
I dont think its a scam but I think its planned to never finish. It's a well funded job for a bunch of people. I think it is finished and will just receive updates as-is for years.
I remember the hype when the kickstarter ran. Not being a gamer I nonetheless thought how cool it would be to try my hands at this world they promised. I thought that once the kickstarter delivered I would test it out.
Since then I heard nothing for a long time and had more or less forgotten about it. Then I stumbled into a rabbit hole on Instagram as I clicked some scify artwork. The algorithm picked up on that and from there on forward I saw post after post from people promising credit if one joined through their recommendation code.
For me it felt like a pyramid scheme, like people trying to get me hocked on NFTs or Amway or any one of these rip some sucker schemes. At least with Amway one would have physical products albeit massively overpriced.
With Star Citizen one would have some unplayable (at least from my POV) pixels on a screen.
I love sci-fi. Star Citizen has potential. But when I tried to play it half year ago, it was extremely boring. It's like life simulator in space. That is not the reason why I usually play games. I expect story with good point. There is none of that.
it occurred to me many years ago that star citizen is a meta game. the game is watching a game come together. plenty of people get a kick out of all that this encompasses. unfortunately, it wasn't sold this way but maybe out of necessity. furthermore, i'm not even convinced that they anticipated this.
Releasing a playable MVP and adding features would be preferable to a big bang with the kitchen sink. I had already abandoned my investment in this product. "Best is the enemy of good."
For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff.
I don’t think reductionist arguments are terribly useful for real things.
> For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff.
It sounds like you just don't understand the statement. It's not a binary assessment, it's an observation: if you set your bar too high, you simply may never get there and have nothing to show for it, thus by "lowering the bar" you may actually deliver a better product (you know, because it actually got delivered, and not canceled).
That’s my understanding of the statement. The reason I’m irked is that you simply may never get there by not implementing features or fixing bugs (you know, because it got cancelled due to never being useful enough to make it).
Its not binary but by setting the bar too low, you never get their either.
My irk is that the premise is that anything not chosen is too “perfect.” Also annoying is having “minimum viable products” that aren’t actually viable.
I just wish they had some overview on their website of what's already in the game and what you can play. I bought a ship pack back in 2012 (or whenever the initial announcement was).
I'm not too invested in the game but it would be nice if there was an at least somewhat playable version (mostly interested in ship to ship combat - don't care about the FPS parts).
It seems intentional. Possibly in order to continue the collection of money from people thinking they need people to keep investing. As soon as they release an actual game and development can come to an end then they can't profit much its continued dependance on investment money.
Do you have evidence of this? I personally try to give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of their intentions.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
- Hanlon’s razor
Of course, that doesn’t absolve the developers of guilt here. They are at the very least guilty of failing to build a successful game with all the money they’ve raised, and nobody should ever trust them with their money again.
Star Citizen looks like the least playable game I've ever seen. Not one thing looks compelling about it. Does anyone here actually like playing it? Why!? Help me!
I know for a fact that some of these folks are passionate about the ships, how they look, their stats... and they buy a lot of them. It's not just about the game, it's also to show off to your friends your cool new ship
I am a Star Citizen backer, and have been since 2015. I have over $1200 spent in this game (over the course of the last 7 years). My most expensive, and longest held ship, the Orion, is not flyable yet. Yet, I regret absolutely nothing.
Its funny how you guys are saying "Why isnt it released yet", without also acknowledging that every single game that has "released early" has been a massive dumpster fire. Not to even mention that, CIG have literally had to create new tech out of thin air to accomplish their goals. The feats of strength CIG have pulled off are already huge.
They have created an in-game solar system, with full size planets, that you can fly around, walk around, with no loading screens, anywhere. They have created tech that allows artists to procedurally create planets, at will. Their Quantum AI simulation aims to be the largest, and deepest AI simulation in gaming history.
Couple this, with that CIG is really making two games. Star Citizen, and Squadron 42. Granted, we havent seen a whole lot of SQ42, but it is there.
Anyone that claims Star Citizen is a scam is hoping for its destruction and is being disingenuous. CIG is extremely transparent that this is not a finished product, and that you are buying a PLEDGE. They call the people who buy their pledges BACKERS. They literally make you click the box saying you understand that. They also publish a Roadmap and a Release Tracker, which they regularly make good on. However, certain top of line features are pushed so the teams can work on other things, and the hugely invested player base just wants to play the game that they enjoy with new stuff because they know that CIG is creating something special.
Look at the progress, and content added to the Persistent Universe over the years. We went from having just Port Olisar (PO), to PO and surrounding POIs, to PO/POIs to nearby moons that we couldnt land on, to PO/POIs nearby moons that we could land on, and so on. They added mining, missions, trading, hauling, bounty hunting, hacking, fps combat, even illegal drug smuggling. They have added hundreds of ships, ship weapons, and handheld weapons combined. Currently, Star Citizen has a larger weapon variety than Battlefield 2042. They have added 4 entire planetary systems including 4 major new cities, 4 major ports, several moons, all with their own points of interest. All without any loading screens whatsoever.
They even have a fucking convention every year called CitizenCon where they unveil a bunch of stuff they have been working on. In one of the latest ones, they showed off jumping to a whole new system.
Also what about their YouTube channel which has literally thousands of videos showing their progress over the years? Does that count for anything?
But no, its def a scam. Or, and more likely, its a game that a lot of people believe in, like myself. I would rather give $1200 to CIG for a moonshot game, that has the potential to be genre defining, than give it to scumbags like EA, Activision/Blizz, Ubisoft, etc, who release broken cash-games.
If SC is a scam, its the worst run scam in history.
I bought a copy in late 2016. At the time CIG were running their "Answer the Call" campaign. At the previous year's citizen con they'd announced Squadron 42 would be coming out in 2016. When I bought in I figured even if they don't make the 2016 release window how long a wait could it possibly be, given they'd committed to 2016? Well, it's been 6 years and the email updates indicate that they're still working on extremely rudimentary features. They're nowhere near wrapping up something that was apparently a year away from release 6 years ago.
CIG later announced they'd be creating what is effectively a Battlefield clone called Theatres of War. Originally shown off at citizen con 2019, It's now been 2 years later and even that doesn't sound like it's coming any time soon.
CIG go beyond just giving bad estimates, they're persistently found to be outright lying about the state of the game and at the rate of progress they're making we'll probably be dead if it ever releases.
SC might not be an intentional scam, but if it isn't then the people running it are so incompetent that it might as well be.
> If SC is a scam, its the worst run scam in history.
I don't know, it seems like Croberts and his buddies have managed to live pretty comfortably for over a decade by selling spaceship JPEGs and promises.
I've never played Star Citizen, but I've heard from many parties that it's full of frequent, immersion-breaking bugs that aren't fixed in lieu of adding more new features. Is it a scam? Maybe that's too harsh. But it's eight years into unmet promises and scope creep, and that doesn't make me hopeful for the game's future.
Instead of discussing whether Star Citizen is a scam, let's imagine what Star Citizen might have been like if it were a scam. Pretend you're a scammer. You're going to run a Kickstarter scam. You describe a huge video game that has a bunch of features everyone wants. You hope to rake in a few tens of thousands of dollars, but somehow it succeeds beyond your wildest expectations, and now you've got more money than you've ever seen in your life. So, what do you do if you're running a scam? Well, first you start using some of the money to raise even more money. Start offering a bunch of extras, solid gold spaceships shaped like dragons or whatever. Don't worry about game balance. Then use some of the money to develop an actual game demo. Don't worry about bugs, priority #1 is cool pictures that will enable you to raise more money. Keep spending more money on marketing. Keep reaching out for more rounds of investments. Do keep working on tech demos because you're now in the business of raising money. You're not at all opposed to actually making a game, and if you happen to finish making something, that'd be great, since you can sell it for even more money, but you've already achieved all of your goals. As things start to slow down, you announce another game and repeat the whole process.
Now, that's quite likely not what happened, but from the outside, the symptoms look the same. Here's what I imagine is most likely version:
I've got experience making space games. I want to make another space game. I take a guess at how much it might cost to make (say, $23 million and two years), but I'm not actually any good at estimating cost and development time. I'm in way over my head, but I've got a LOT more money than I've ever had to manage before, so at least I can hire a lot of people. The people I pick aren't any better at this than I am, or I'm not listening to their advice. We're two years out from launch. No Man's Sky comes and goes and the reaction to the release is existentially terrifying to me. Gotta keep adding stuff! Oh god we're running out of money somehow, gotta get more money so we can finish this. Hire more people! Oh god our staff is up to 600 and people think we're a scam just because we haven't released a game yet. Put the whole development calendar online, we're working hard here, please please make this work. We're two years out from launch. Oh god how are we out of money again. Raise more money, hire more people! The early graphics look stale now, gotta refresh them. We've been two years out from launch for almost a decade. I'm still confident that the game will be out in two years, but I'm smart enough to recognize that I've been confident about this for six years and that fact fills me with dread.
Star Citizen upsets me. It's in theory the video game I want, but never pre-order something like this. It should have been out in 2014. Here it is 8 years overdue.
Don't care what the budget was or anything. The most AAA of games can be produced in less than that time. It's very obvious it's not coming. So sad.
What makes me still curious about star citizen is why? Money was obviously not the problem. You can't blame software development framework. Waterfall vs agile doesn't matter. The least efficient processes would have delivered now. Even deadly things like micromanagement cannot be the cause because eventually you would deliver. I also suspect it's not a scam, there are employees there.
So what exactly was the failure? What exactly would cause them to never deliver?
>We can't allow for individualism... what you want is people who are positive, can do, and want to work as a team, not always trying to go 'This won't work' or 'It's about me'. - Roberts
>The race isn't finished yet. Wait till the finish line is crossed and then I'll say people can make judgements about whether it was the right way or not. - Roberts
So let's make it clear here. We can make the judgement. It didn't work. Those devs were right.
Chris Roberts most likely pushed out or fired those people who said 'this wont work' and better yet created a toxic work environment where people who were left couldn't speak up and say it wouldn't work. His toxic culture creates incompetence. The blame obvious lay entirely at the feet of Chris Roberts.
Scoping dogs many game developers. It's not solely a ego or leadership thing, indies do it to themselves too.
The problem is that game scope blows up much faster than you expect because it's disproportionately based on how many contradictions appear in the initial design. That is, if you introduce overlapping systems like "can traverse spaceship interior and exterior on foot", "can open and close doors and airlocks", and "other players respond to physics", every way in which one system has been hacked into being (which is most of them, in games) will carry over to hacks in the others, with correspondingly more time spent on assets, testing, bugfixes, etc. Repeat that across an "everything" game and you automatically get an impossible project that could only be achieved with a much more intensive simulation everywhere(which would exceed any plausible computation budget). The design has to put its foot down somewhere and say "we aren't going there" to resolve whatever contradictions it can. For example, replacing fully traversable environments with cutscenes and UI, or replacing lengthy animations with iconography. The games that can justify going really deep into their simulation end up being pretty niche, like Dwarf Fortress.
But actually making the resolution to settle on a more streamlined focus that would cohere well also breaks the hype of "sheer possibility". As long as you keep adding more, more continues to seem possible. Both creators and fans like staying in that zone. Nobody likes cutting their sunk costs, so they will rush to justify keeping stuff that doesn't work in the game until the project is cancelled due to lack of progress.
I think the problem was/is feature creep. I've been following the game since the original pitch, but never bought into it. The original pitch changed incredibly quickly due to how much money they got, and it seemed like that changing scope never really slowed down. Every time I would check in on it, it would seem like they were promising large new features every 6 months, or in some cases what seemed like entire games (their online multiplayer FPS).
The best example I can think of to illustrate feature creep was the face expression tracking. I read they were working on something where your webcam could see your face and map the expressions onto your character in game. The fact that that went so far to be publicly known illustrates some kind of organizational disfunction.
>I think the problem was/is feature creep. I've been following the game since the original pitch, but never bought into it.
I feel that comes into the waterfall vs agile. Even with extreme levels of feature creep, it would have delivered already.
> The original pitch changed incredibly quickly due to how much money they got, and it seemed like that changing scope never really slowed down. Every time I would check in on it, it would seem like they were promising large new features every 6 months, or in some cases what seemed like entire games (their online multiplayer FPS).
When I consider Ludum Dare, people make working basic video games in a weekend. You can tack on features later, improve things here and there. You might have technical debt that needs repairing as you go but being 8 years past the deadline this can't explain it. It's too much time.
If I was alone and started building star citizen back in 2010. I would have delivered something...
>concurrency issues, latency issues, poor database schemas, scaling issues, there's a lot of reasons internet scale things can grind to a halt.
With such a budget, you can solve these problems within 8 years.
I would bet my net worth that you(anonymous HN account 'newacc9') could have solved these problems in 8 years. You might even need to have gone to university and gotten a compsci degree to learn about all these things and still have had over 4 years to solve it.
the game gets shit on a lot but for better or worse they are genuinely trying a lot of things that nobody else tries and is probably ever going to try again. the depth of simulation they have going on is insane, unsurprisingly the resulting dev difficulties are also insane. and likely to make the project fail. but I still want them to try for the sliver of a chance that they can actually pull it off after 20 years.
at the very least I think the idea that star citizen is some kind of intentional scam where they intentionally don't want to get the game done because the can keep their current monetization running is extremely stupid to say the least.
even if chris roberts and the leadership are mustache twirling monocle wearing capitalist masterminds with no interest in actually making a game like this (they are not), they wouldn't be able to systematically control literally hundreds of engineers without anyone noticing what's going on.
Well. Last time i played I finally had my first flight. It’s been possible for a while now to visit different planets, space stations and so on. But I have not tried before now. They have focused a lot on details and realism. When I opened the ramp to my ship and walked in it felt like i was there. I walked through the door to the cockpit and entered the pilot seat. Then I powered up the ship. A voice spoke and informed me the ship was online and a flurry of hud elements gave me a disorienting amount of information about fuel, elevation, ammo, comm channels and so on. After fiddling for a while I figured out how to ask for launch permission and clumsily took off. I barely managed to float up and out of the spaceport hangar I was in. You have supreme control of your ship and can rotate and tilt any which way. After getting used to the controls I used the star map to select a destination and began the quantum jump. It takes several minutes to to this. When I arrived I was on the wrong side of the planet, and so I had to do a second smaller jump to correct this. The view was something else. You really feel like you are floating far above a planet. I then got out of the pilot seat, opened one of ships bay doors and just stood there looking down on the planet below me. After a while I flew down looking for a landing place. I could not find it so I landed on a high rise building and left the ship. I then got stuck and had to kill myself to get sent back to my starting point.
The scale of the planets and the kind of environments they can have is genuinely impressive. It doesn't look like procedural generation like No Man's Sky. The cities and environments can be placed and this allows for actual planetary scale with multiple biomes which has never been done before
Of course this also causes lots of difficulties in dev since it's a ridiculous scale and being multiplayer, there's even more complexity. Plus the performance seems to be terrible sometimes
Ambitious games have so many points of failure. If you made. A perfect living replica of the Star Wars universe but the controls were kind of meh or the pacing of progress was too slow, or the difficulty is off it might still come off as a bad game. Or any universe. But the point being that nailing the complexity of your ambitions is very hard but also just a small piece of it.
The moment Star Citizen releases I know for a fact I will lose all interest, so keep up the current pace CIG!