So recently
TotalBiscuit made some comments about Star Citizen regarding people comparing it to No Man's Sky.
Jan 26, 2017: In
this broadcast, he said (verbatim):
"The comparisons to No Man's Sky are bullshit. Wanna know why they are bullshit? Because No Man's Sky hid everything before launch; and lied about a bunch of shit; and then came out and ended up being a bunch of shit.
Star Citizen is the most transparent development of anything I have ever seen. There is so much info..I mean one, you can go and play it right now; and you can see the exact state that it's currently in - 'cuz you can just go and play the alpha.
And the amount of information they put out on a weekly basis..they make videos, they stream, the developer blogs are like five fucking pages long a day.
There's no game in history that has been as transparent as with the development and where they're going with it, than Star Citizen has been.
They...you can play it; they show it all the time; they are completely open with their process.
So no, yeah, it might end coming out and being shit; and the people throwing thousands of dollars at it, well I think that's kind of foolish, but you know, it's your money, you do what you want with it.
But I refuse to allow it to be compared to No Man's Sky; it's a, it's a polar opposite situation..of that. It's a stupid comparison. We know exactly what Star Citizen is, right now at this very moment. We do; it's all out there.
Aug 16, 2016: In
this broadcast, he basically makes the same comparisons between No Man's Sky and Star Citizen hype; but this time specifically about the "zealous" Star Citizen fanbase and it's comparison to the NMS one.
July 9th, 2015: In
this broadcast, he said (verbatim):
"I am certainly concerned about No Man's Sky; obviously I'll give it a try, uhm, but it's extremely ambitious, and that's always a reason to doubt it. And then when you throw in the idea of procedural generation, like urrgh. I hear that word; I hear that word a lot, and whenever I hear it, I get a little bit worried because I've seen games that do the all procedural generation thing, and they're generally by no means as good as a game that has a properly designed level. Because the computer can never create a properly designed level anywhere near as well as an actual human being can. And when comes out to planets; I'm like oh well, I mean, er I dunno what's gonna be going on with that. I've definitely got my doubts; certainly. I hope it turns out good; I don't want it to fail.
*laughs*
Star Citizen, imaginary game, yeah. You threw money at a pipe dream. You know, maybe Star Citizen will come out at some point in some form, I'm sure it probably will, but. We will see some game, that has space ships in it. It will probably be...yeah, we turned it into a racing game guys, we took the racing component that's the entire game, just like, we're done. It is, it is super ambitious. It also has a lot of money, but it doesn't matter how much money you can throw at a game, you can still end up failing your goals.
They're [backers] throwing money at a dream; and I, I don't really know if Star Citizen actually turns out to be what they claimed it is, and what they promise it is; then it will be incredible no doubt; but..when? When is that gonna happen?
Meanwhile, over at the
/r/StarCitizen watering hole, a bunch of the "zealous" fanbase, along with the Usual Suspects (aka Shitizens) are trying to use his statements to somehow legitimize the notion that because Star Citizen has "open" development, that means everything is fine, it's coming out etc.
It's all the usual rubbish.
TotalBiscuit has been clear and consistent in his musings and statements regarding Star Citizen. His recent statements are no different. His comment about NMS vs SC, especially in the recent broadcast, are restricted to the notion of people comparing the two games in terms of
knowing what the game is and about; and that because NMS was a disaster, so too will Star Citizen.
He is basically saying that with NMS you didn't
know what you were getting, what state the game was in etc. Until it was released. Then all hell broke loose. But with Star Citizen, there is all this wealth of material, you can read them, go play the alpha right now etc. So you know - beforehand - the state that the game is in, the discussions around it, and from there you can make an informed decision about it.
The key takeaway here is that, NMS hid everything about the development, failed to curb expectations etc. But how is that wrong? The game wasn't crowd-funded, it wasn't early access, and they were under no obligation to release anything about the development of their game, other the hype they were generating. In short, they operated like a standard dev studio or publisher would.
Star Citizen is a
$142m crowd-funded game; not to mention the amount of money from loans and investors which haven't been disclosed. Even if they don't have to explain anything to the bankers and investors, they have an obligation to the backers because that was the premise of the project and the
promise made to backers. It is patently irrelevant if they are "open" (hint: they aren't) or not, in terms of full disclosure because, since day one, they've historically
LIED to backers, used shady tactics to continue fleecing them for funding etc. And after five (six if you're counting) years and all this money, neither of the two games promised for a Nov 2014 delivery, are even near 15% complete.
No Man's Sky promised no such thing; and were under
no obligation to be "open" about their development. However, just like Sean Murray did, Chris Roberts has been talking up and lying about a bunch of features which have now either been cut, or will never - ever - make it into the game.
The Star Citizen devs are only "open" about what they
want to share with backers. And most of the more critical info is either hidden or obfuscated. Go ahead, ask a backer when the much touted 3.0 patch (see
my predictions here - all of which came true) is coming out; or the state of Squadron 42; or the status of the Lumberyard engine switch; or their internal projections (note the
public schedule only goes to 2.6.1) for the release of both games; or why they were busy making R&D tech demos under the guise of building tech for the game engine; or why some
critical info about the game, ends up in game magazines (e.g. in Germany) instead of the community etc. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Star Citizen is as open and transparent as the frosted glass in a Church. In fact, the "game" itself is so transparent, that you can't even see it; because there is no game.ps:
Rant by a former concierge and $10K+ backer.
