Star Citizen – General Discussions
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Well that didn’t take long. Someone has published the supa sekret Star Citizen 2.4 patch notes
They were always building a game. The engine they were using, how they were going about doing it, and the fact that they simply can’t build the game they promised, are what the issue has been about since day one. Over on my Discord channel (invite code), this person said it best.
“Scruffpuff – Yesterday at 10:30 PM
The core of the issue for me (I can’t speak for others, everyone has their own trigger here) is that they are not, in any way, building a game. There is no plan for an actual game here. Not a single gameplay element has been designed at any level. But we do have assets – things like ships, men, clothes, and things like that. Before we even had a working engine, they were building ships. AND – polishing them over and over and over again until the asset was perfect – even though the asset itself did not work properly. Redoing helmets over and over. Motion capture over and over. They took the absolute last steps in making a game, and made them first.
Now they’re hoping to take all this high-fidelity assets and plug them into an engine. Then, at the end, hoping to make a game out of it all.
RSI is keeping everything pretty vague too. People on the forums genuinely believe it will have all these features they want – some of the features they want are mutually exclusive. RSI doesn’t seem to mind this. Which tells me that either they don’t know yet themselves, or worse, they don’t care.
“Let them think what they want, as long as they keep buying.”
I’ve been following this since the beginning and I still have no idea how the game works. Take one facet as an example: exploration. OK, we know from the PTU what a single system looks like. There’s nothing to explore – nothing to find. They say they’ll make 100 systems. OK that’s still really small. WoW is far bigger, yet “exploration” does not exist in that game, because it’s too small. What exactly will “exploring” mean? In Elite there are so many systems you can genuinely check out new ones. In EVE they had an exploration minigame. What does it mean in Star Citizen? Nobody knows. But they certainly all imagine these wild Star Trek fantasies.
Or another one: Mining. Mining (which is not in the game) will give you I assume some kind of ore? (nobody knows) which you can refine? (nobody knows) do you do it onboard or at a refinery (nobody knows) and does that mean you can craft? Craft what? How? Where? Will there be a market? Can you trade? Give away? Are these virtual items or physical ones that fit in your hold? Does anyone know anything at all? Never mind that – sell this new mining ship.
He wants to make a 90’s style Wing Commander game/movie with modern tech, but old outdated methods more than anything else.
So these guys sell a bunch of mining ships whose purpose is completely unknown, and unknowable, at this point. Then, they use that money to make a single-player game in which the ship cannot be used. I don’t even know what to call that.
Basically Star Citizen is a charity for Chris Roberts to create Wing Commander 2017 without having to pay for it, or get a publisher.
That’s it.
He knew nobody cared enough to fund it, so he sold it as something else. He originally intended to deliver the PU, then it was too hard, so he said fuck it, let’s do the part I CAN do.
He’ll worry about the rest later.
I think after this is over we’re going to have to take a good look at how we define “scam”. People who backed a couple years ago are not scammed. People who back today are getting bait-and-switched. So it’s sort-of-a-scam at this point.
I think selling PTU mining ships and using that money to create a single-player game where you can’t use the ship is veering dangerously close to an open scam.
There’s an implicit guarantee that he will go back and finish the PTU, but if that were possible, why did he suddenly shift all hands to SQ42? Why is that one tiny piece of the puzzle so much more important? Why the laser focus?
Remember that all last year it was about selling Star Marine to the media. Pictures, videos, conferences, teasers, gaming articles – Star Marine, the COD-killer, JUST around the corner. Then all of a sudden it’s gone, and now it’s all about SQ42.
Someone said it months ago and I wish I still had the post, explaining that Chris wasn’t around to see game development make all these mistakes and learn from them the first time around, so he’s walking head-first into all the same mistakes, not realizing there’s a reason we moved to other tech.
We don’t know for sure, but as I said, that doesn’t mean we can’t examine the evidence and make an informed prediction.”
Yes – it’s all about making money. Which is precisely what I said they were going to do next. Forget about core game play mechanics; lets do the features which enable us to sell stuff.
Of course pgabz now has a video for that too. And there’s also a new one about failed promises.
This is the Star Citizen project right now.
They keep throwing around this word “persistence” and trying to obfuscate the true meaning and nature.
These “features” in 2.4 are not in the vein of persistence.
- aUEC
- Item Purchases
- Hangar Configurations
- Ship Loadouts
- Character Loadouts
- Crusader Reputation (Criminal and Defender)
- Ship Ammo and Missiles (Crusader only)
These are standard gaming features which are no different from any game that has the capability to save state, progress etc. Heck, any single-player game that you can resume – or even from a manually saved game state – can be described as being persistent if you take this CIG meaning into account. Going by the above, Star Citizen is as persistent as Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, and their ilk.
It’s pure and utter bullshit.
The fact that the game itself is instanced, completely throws most of that “persistent” notion out the window.
Aside from that, this whole 2.4 Evocati nonsense (which I wrote about here) is another example of missteps.
For example, it used to be dev -> PTU -> Public. This process allowed a closed testing of a build before it goes public. Most of us devs do this; but since we’re self-funded, we have valid (e.g. costs) reasons to limit the size of our “focus test group” before making a specific build public. In the case of this crowd-funded game, which has been paid for many times over, they have no plausible reason to restrict backer access. None.
Problem is, due to the fact that they – foolishly – decided to build a twitch based MMO on cloud (Google Compute) instances, coupled with the fact that they are pushing an average of 30GB (!) updates (they’re not patches in the proper sense of the term) per user with each update, means huge bandwidth and cloud instance costs. And when you take into account (run a Wireshark analysis with the game and see for yourself) the size of the packets they are sending back and forth, it’s easy to see just how ridiculous this whole architecture is. Like truly, and utterly horrid. And he has admitted this as recently as last month in one of his 104TC self-own sessions.
So now it’s dev -> Evocati -> PTU -> Public. And the Evocati part is basically just another PTU, but with an NDA (!) attached, and a smaller set of invite-only backers. Seriously, they attached an NDA to a crowd-funded project. A project which only backers who have already paid for the project, have access to anyway.
So those cloud computing/storage costs alone, are the primary reason why they are not going to be able to keep this Star Citizen game running for the long term. Unlike leased and/or colo servers, cloud costs are very high. For a quarter of what they are paying each month, they could have bought or leased servers, and saved a ton of money. Which appears to be what he said back in 2014.
And they could have stuck with the original plan and let backers spin up and host their own game sessions, while CIG only hosts some firs-come/first server official servers, and a master server which allows game sessions to talk to each other, and populate a server browser with available games etc.
So now, without the ability for backers to spin up their own game sessions, this means that once CIG folds – as I’m 100% certain that they will – the game can no longer be run. Which is pretty much the same thing as when publishers pulling backend (master server) support for multiplayer games after a few years.
This should be a major concern for backers; but most aren’t even thinking about this objectively, so they really can’t see all the problems that are coming.
Also, before Chris decided that he was making an MMO after all, despite statements to the contrary, the game was looking like a standard session based game as I described above. Meaning that any player could spin up – and host – a game session and allow others to join via a server browser. Just like most games – which are not MMO games – do. Heck, even Line Of Defense supports both types because a standard MMO style client-server is a bit more difficult and involved, on consoles. But of course, seeing as he had already started selling a “persistent universe”, he pretty much increased the engineering debt and subsequently tanked the Star Citizen (aka PU) project. Simply put, you cannot have the “persistent universe” as described, with instanced client sessions. Like, at all. Heck, right now, they can’t even get more than 12 people in an instance, without the game choking, glitching, crashing etc.
Aside from all this, having paid for this game – in full – and given their ‘open development‘ (that nonsense is already out the window), every backer is entitled to the game; and at all times. Legalities aside, allowing some backers, and not others, to access the game, is a decision made by people who are morally bankrupt. You know, the same people who frequently make promises they can’t keep, write-up a ToS they have no intentions of abiding by – and which they get to abuse without reason, have a habit of lying to backers – incessantly and with impunity. These are the people backers gave over $113 million to build this game.At the end of the day, Star Citizen (PU) as has been described, will never – ever – see the light of day. As I have said before, they’re going to keep putting in crap designed to make money, removing and/or scaling back promised features, while focusing on SQ42 because that’s what Chris (who wants to be a movie director, more than he wants to be a game designer) wants to focus on; and because it’s the only aspect of a “game” that is capable of being delivered as a “finished product”. And once that happens – if it happens – he’s going to bail.
I am going to say it again, this whole project is FUBAR and there is simply no saving it. And the gamers, as well as the engineers who have worked so very hard on it, are going to be the ones burned the most; while Chris, his family, and exec friends at the top of the food chain, would have personally benefited financially from it all. Though the risks were always there, at the end of the day, the backers, private investors, banks – everyone who has ever put money into this shit-show, stands to lose it. All of it.
Reminder: The current ToS v1.2 expires on May 31st. So now we wait and see what they do/say come June 1st. You can read more about that here.
Meet the guy who is silently and routinely humiliating Chris Roberts. Like a boss.
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