Mr. Smart, I just want to take a few minutes to add and say "Thank You" as well. I started playing games when the Atari 2600 was new and been hooked ever since. I played the original Wing Commander Series and loved them. When Chris Roberts released Freelancer...I loved it.
So when the idea for Star Citizen was first thrown around, I was hooked. However, being a skeptical person, I refrained from backing the original call to crowdfund. Knowing Chris Roberts track record for over-promising and not delivering, I waited.
Fast forward to the summer of 2016. I had just built my first computer (I know, a little late to the game, but I was on consoles previously and my brother got me hooked again), and I was looking around the internet. What did I stumble across? Star Citizen, still around and they actually had some ships you could fly. So, against my better judgement, I said "what the hell" and purchased a starter pack. I played the Alpha 3.0 for a bit, saw the promise and potential and bought into the hope of getting to play this wonderful open universe.
End of 2016 into 2017, and a few hundred $$ later, and I said to hell with this buggy mess. It's going nowhere. I got scammed by CIG. I'll move on, so I did.
Fast forward to now, May of 2020. I'm home, teleworking (and thankful to have a job) and upgrading my computer a little here and there. Star Citizen popped back into my brain. I reinstalled it, fired it up and played a bit. Really enjoyed it..except for the broken things, that quite honestly should have been fixed by now. Inventory management? Ship parts not working? Clicking on an action and waiting 2 seconds to see an animation kick in. FPS still clunky and not fluid. Ship combat still turning into circle strafing. Simple "box run" missions bugging out and not letting you even complete them or start them. Not being able to navigate the star map to plot courses. A UI that is clunky at best. And one star system to play around in (that only took 9 years, so far to get into. Where's the other 99?). Some of the purchases finally pushed me over the limit, and I hit Concierge ( I had no idea what that was until I hit it. Didn't even know it was a thing). It opened up new chat and forum areas. Holy crap there was a hidden area I wasn't aware of?
Throughout this past month, I've dealt with the crashes, disconnects and general game bugs. I've excused it, looked past it, and thought "someday". The thing I can't get past, is the cult mentality that pervades this SC community. No one can say ANYTHING about CIG in chat or their forums that might be "critical" or asking a question about why some of the things are still broken years later without getting dogpiled on by the community to silence them. It's disgusting. And that's what is making me step back again and re-evaluate my time and money with this project. Hell, I'm tired of seeing CIG constantly "rework" items that were already "finished". Retooling tools to rework items that have already been completed. Or hearing "we don't have the tools to do that". The expectation that most of have is the same with anything when we put our hard earned money into it. I don't care what space you work in, if you are an experienced person or company in a particular field and make commitments for feature sets for crowdfunding and commit to them in a timeline, then the expectation is you do it. In any other field, when those things don't happen, people start asking questions. And eventually they get fed up and want their money back. I've heard comparisons in chat and the forums to the amount of money that has been spent and time so far in development to some AAA titles. GTAV and Red Dead Redemption 2 are the ones that consistently come up. The part that fails to come up, is that both of those games are primarily single player games with maybe a tenth of the features that Star Citizen promised and a small multiplayer portion bolted on. Not the 100 fully fleshed star systems MMO that was promised to be out in 2014...
I'm not a game developer, but I do have experience in managing projects and programs. And I can tell you there are some red flags that are flying with this "Project". I'm at the point now, that I don't think it will ever be finished. I still love the idea of it, and I "hope" I'll get to play in that universe before I'm dead. And now that outside people and companies are investing money in this, we can probably expect to see in the near future either this game getting canned or it getting "Released" as is with one star system and partially finished one. I don't have any faith about SQ42 ever seeing the light of day...
Chris Roberts past is proving true again. And I actually had someone in chat say "that a persons past actions is not an indicator of what they will do in the future"....What. The. Fuck?
So, thank you for keeping it real. Thank you for being a voice reason. Keep doing what you're doing. It's appreciated.
