One of the nice things about Star Citizen at this point is that things have pretty much calcified into their existing properties. Nobody here is magically going to be impressed and decide that, indeed, Star Citizen is good and will impress the world. Similarly nobody on the other side is going to see that and magically go "wow, they didn't show any gameplay" and decide to get a refund. People will see what they want to see, especially given how good Chris is at providing just enough rope for people to hang themselves on their own dreams. What I saw was a lot of really impressive work for a game that nobody actually paid for. I see planets that would look fantastic as flyovers during a cutscene, art assets that would be really great in localized encounters, and plenty of generic (but still nice) content. If CIG had maintained the original concept of instances linked by cutscenes, or if it was for a single player Squadron 42, then I'd be pretty impressed. But since the content they revealed has minimal impact on the expected gameplay, they steadfastly failed to show any kind of multiplayer interaction (or any real gameplay to speak of), and since Star Citizen is supposed to be a MMO and not a single player game there isn't much to be excited about.
What I saw was basically yet another indication of the things that actually matter to Chris Roberts; grandeur, scale, and derivative content. Look at how many times he talked about things that sound impressive like all those NPCs, the size of various buildings, provided a reference to a superior work of fiction like Blade Runner or Star Wars. Look at how little he talked about gameplay loops, or introduced mechanics that players have been waiting years for, or addressed core issues like networking, performance, or the flight model. Look at how a game that was meant to be a space simulation barely even touched space; indeed the only relevant discussion regarding actual space travel was how Chris apparently thinks that waiting eight minutes to travel between planets is somehow good game design. Look at how he thinks that showing hundreds of "procedurally generated" city blocks will somehow enhance the player experience, or how having millions of square kilometers of empty territory will lead to a better experience than what you can already get with Elite.
Star Citizen is not a scam, it's an ego trip. It's hundreds of people working on something, and doing what looks to be some good work doing it, to stoke the narcissism of a failed developer who is more interested in maintaining the appearances of producing a AAA title than actually delivering it. What we saw today was absolutely an indication that they are burning millions and using up a lot of personnel, and they are delivering on things. The problem is that what they're delivering has no bearing on what people are paying for.
All I saw was a tech demo similar to all the crap we devs do on our own just to setup to see what I really can/cannot do in our games. Stuff gamers may never get to see. Some of it makes into the game, some don't. And you move on with what works.
Example. just last week I was doing an update for UCCE 3.0x (based on a
known issue about the solar array) and came across code that I prototyped using a spreadsheet to see if I could actually use the Earth's tilt to calculate solar energy collection based on the ship's solar arrays in relation to that. A fucking spreadsheet. I could simply have faked it, but I think I was already slowly losing my mind (this was back in early nineties btw) at the time, so any rational thought eluded me. Anyway, it wasn't until months later that I actually decided to try out my pipe dream because the issue of players actually running out of nuclear reactor fuel and getting stranded in deep space, started to be an issue - many games lost as a result. I had implemented an emergency tow function to combat that btw. So I implemented it anyway. And it just worked. Simply because I had tested is months before, but never actually wrote the code to do it because I didn't think it was actually going to be needed. Then it was.
https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/922962688027910144
For any backer to have viewed this as anything but another tech demo of dreams, is the sort of reason why they keep giving CIG money. No, it makes no sense, but that's how life works. I believe they're just happy it wasn't an embarrassing repeat of GC2017 and they're just happy CIG brought enough lube for the shafting this time.
There will never - ever - be a game showing any of that shit. Right now - as I type this - they can't even get 3.0 in ANY decent working condition. And that's already almost a year overdue. And they have significant performance issues - even for a massively scaled down version of what they promised. But yeah, even seeing the 15-20 fps of a single player in local LAN, they're totally going to put
that into a real-time game, let alone a fucking MMO for a game that can't run more than 8 clients without falling over. And that level didn't even look as efficient as GTA-V which built a whole fucking city, complete with dynamic LOD and very advanced vis - all because they built their own engine. And this yahoos think they're going to do any of that shit in any version of CryEngine.
They can go fuck themselves.
