Gorf is at at again.
(I can’t believe you’ve had this many replies and nobody said “Nice meltdown.” And nobody pointed out you spelled “defenestrate” incorrectly either. Oh well I won’t break the streak.)
My reply is late so please ignore this if the thread moved on. Seems you made an earnest effort with your defenestration effortpost so I might as well do the same in reply.
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“It's to defenstrate this notion that crowdfunding of this magnitude is bad.”
Well that’s a surprising mission statement at this point. MoMA, defenestrator of erroneous notions about crowdfunding at scale, etc.. I just assumed you stayed for the camaraderie and already made peace with the project malaise. I guess I misread that.
It’s honesty been a while since Erin, Sandi or Archer (!) have really been in the hot seat. Feels like Papy’s been made the heat sink for backer dreams this season in his new role. Poor bastard. Oh and Lando, too — laying it on thicker than ever, convincing no one, and leaving many of us nostalgic for the earnestness of the trueblood fanboy Lesnick.
Nobody here thinks Sandi does the Marketing nor have they for ages — she shows up for ATV, occasionally twitters, pursues the next cutting room floor gig with that indomitable drive of hers, drives away Marketing subordinates quarterly, and hits a stage twice a year to tearfully giggle before a crowd as if each new appearance was her accepting a lifetime achievement award for humanitarian work rather than being a big awkward reminder she’s still making fat bank for reading scripts about marginal progress underway for a game she cares not a whit about.
As for Erin and Chris, they both seem to be shrinking and retreating. Chris has pivoted back to Squadron oversight again so that should pretty much kill its hope of release in the next couple of years. Erin was supposed to be a confidence builder for the backers but at this point his machine gun stammer and worrying health signs just seem to heighten anxieties. He may be better off letting the Dukes of High Chill, Papy and Chambers, do the talking. Neither look like they’re about to grab their chest and start gasping — which is optically a more helpful look.
I don’t know how it looks from where you stand but it sure feels to me like 2017 was the year that the expansionist vision of Star Citizen surrendered to contraction and resignation, even though neither CIG nor backers are openly speaking of it. Capitulation is felt and seen everywhere even though old habits die hard and routines run habitually. It’s depressingly thin gruel for comedy sometimes but we do what we can.
CONSIDER THE LIVESTREAMERS
You can really see it on the regular fan livestreams.
Redacted, Relay, the Captain’s Table, the Space Bro Show.
Nobody is playing the release they spent a year and a half hyped to max about. It’s widely agreed that 3.01 is unplayable. If it’s not the framerates, it’s the interdictions. If not the interdictions, the broken missions. So everybody’s jamming on Tarkov, Fortnite, Monster Hunter or something, anything else but Star Citizen during their daily streams and when they get together for their weekly discussions with other streamers, they theorycraft about 3.2, 4.0, “what I will do when (x) is in the game”, or they grouse politely about CIG’s gaffes of the last week. The old routines run out of duty, habit, compulsion — even though they rely on an assumption nobody really seems to believe anymore:
“The game will one day be fixed, fun and make possible all of these theorycrafted possibilities for gameplay I’ve been clinging to for years and do so better than all games that came before it.” (Just listen to
Erris on this week’s Relay craptalking about Bethesda’s supposedly terrible lockpicking mechanics and you’ll see him employ this when theorycrafting CIG’s better [but as yet totally undefined] way of implementing hacking in the game...)
The routines die hard, but even the longtime loyalists are exhausted, losing faith, watching the last dimly glowing embers of what was once white hot hope slowly crumble off as ash. Even if stability and performance weren’t such a brutal tax, the meager loops and frustratingly implemented play mechanics in the game are a drag
as designed — a fact that guys like Luke Pressley at Foundry openly admit. There’s a huge burden to fix not just what is broken to make what isn’t broken Fun. In year 6.
Erris’s desperate pleading that “We need Chris, too” because “Chris gives me faith” a couple of weeks ago was a miserable damn sight; a dreamoholic with cirrhosis of the brain begging for a shot of the hair of the dog that bit him. Chris’s confidence helps Erris run the magic routine. But Chris is retreating, closing up, slipping away and he might as well, he may be symbolic source of hope for the dreamer collective but he’s the practical source of the project malaise just as
Lucas was for the prequels.Batgirl watched CIG revoke her backstage VIP pass right after they maximized the chance to squeeze it for a little extra CitizenCon 2017 hype — cold-blooded, considering how loyal she’s been and for how long. Now she’s venturing into
constructive criticism.Dan Gheesling said his pained goodbyes after explaining 3.0 didn’t have enough to keep either him or his viewers engaged.
BadNewsBaron wrote an essay of defense of Star Citizen on Medium.com a little while back, but he too has moved on quietly to new games.
Twerk probably didn’t realize the irony last week when he openly bemoaned that the bigger ships made for terrible FPS levels and it really needed fixing —
he was only just now seeing problems that Heretic Beer4theBeerGod had written extensive warnings about three years ago. Good thing CIG drove out such voices and left the community a safe space for asskissers and theorycrafters — they’ll have only each other to feed on as they get exactly what they asked for all along, Chris Roberts’s unalloyed vision of the Best Damn Space Sim Ever.
The malaise is everywhere — the sense that things have gone horribly wrong is widely felt though not widely acknowledged. It’s the subtext of nearly all discussions about the game between fans and streamers and even from CIG themselves yet never the text save for places like here, or Frontier forums, Derek’s blogs, the refunds subreddit, MassivelyOP or other little heretical outposts here and there. (There’s another very interesting one but I’ll write about that later.)
If the thread feels like a broken record, MoMA well, it’s in part because malaise has been the story here for years.
CIG really seems to be shrinking before our eyes and putting greater distance between leadership and the public than in the dumb ol’ days. Most of the energy and enthusiasm these days has shifted to arguing about the Crytek lawsuit because at least that has a wide range of possible outcomes and will make winners and losers of those playing prediction games. That game has no designer, it’s been improvised on the fly by critics and fans serving their time-honored roles on a new battlefield, yet even
that game is a better game than Chris has managed to put out after $180 Million and six years of effort. Seems like that says quite a lot, little of it good.
I still enjoy your participation in the thread, MoMA. How you spend your money is your business and if you want to use big $0.25 words in effort posts I’m hardly one to throw stones. You do you, even if you like to rock the :smuggo: maybe more than you should and the :gary: not enough.
