Star Citizen – Year Four

[dsmart]

It happens sometimes in TweetDeck that when you click to block someone, if it’s scrolling, you end up blocking the wrong person. I ONLY ever block people who are rude to me or who make personal attacks. If you look in my feed right now, there is a lot of open debates with various people and nobody is blocked. The same respectful debates we have here in the blog discussions.

Also sometimes my media person (who has access to my social media accounts) may block someone if they are not familiar with them or if they think they’re being rude or trolling (only I get to troll in my feed).

So tell me your Twitter handle and I’ll look into it and unblock if everything looks OK. If you don’t want to provide your Twitter handle in public, just email me directly to dsmart at live dot com

[dsmart]

Here is what I’ve been predicting all month long ahead of this:

Nov 2nd: https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/661306828568023040

Nov 5th: https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/662384623880642560

Nov 17th: https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/666661407144955905

[MDrake SC]

Another anniversary sale comes. Not only is the 2.0 limited to just 1,000 people for now, they have to make a 7 day sale event for at least 26 ships…

A lot of those ships for sale are still pure JPEGs. At least 10 have oldish models, and 5 are flyable. People who are addicted to this yearly sale event, and still keep buying stuff, kinda disgust me.

And hurray for a $350 repair ship? Such pretty artwork showing off the repair gameplay design-dreamcrap. Materials, reconstruction, stripping, patching… All of this dreamcrap. Would it be better to just call it feature creep?

Just more promises to go into the ditch with more “soon.” But wait, that means that JPEGS are not alone in enlightening people to give away money. All of these “complex” gameplay design “documents” are the secondary sales tool. Sure, the JPEGs need ships, but the ships “sometimes” need a document to convince folks that they are worth $350, or whatever price. And maybe a video for transparency-other-people-are-working.

Enlightened with documents. Cleansed in transparency. Blessed by JPEGs.

[Zyll Goliath]

Well that CIRCUS from the last night proved that CIG avoid to show to the public actual Game-Play in the 2.0 as they didn’t change current Flight Mechanics at all,even worst seems that they implemented Interactive mode to ALL controller options,yeah joystick now has Interactive Mode so that You can Move your Crosshair the same way as with the Mouse.So that’s should be an improvement that CIG was promising for so long to the backers?Now seem that the game is even more aim-centered,as CR always wanted it to be a fucking First person shooter in space yeah that’s right remember him what he said about the Freelancer controls if you don’t let me remind you by quoting him CR:”The final mouse controls, while good, weren’t the ones that I saw in my head I imagined the game being like a FPS, but in space and having the same level of shooting precision”-Well I guess he finally nailed his wishes from the past I just can’t get it Why CIG even bother to implemented the complex damage system if people are going to play this crap like almost as any FPS game out there?
And yeah seems that the forces of the White Knights pushing the buttons and trying to stop desperately anyone that mention “gizmondo money laundry connection” on others forums which for me clearly indicates that something is really fishy in there…….

[dsmart]

Yeah, it’s precisely what most of us expected. Just another money grab. You’d think that they would have done a demo of all the stuff Chris mentioned was going to be in 2.0. Thing is, he didn’t say when it was all going to be in there. Just that it was going to be. And given all the crashes from those who got it, it is understandable why didn’t show anything live.

And two of my contacts got the invite and so far, neither one of them has seen even 5% of what Chris said was going to be in 2.0.

[SJ Parkinson]

I’ve been following the Star Citizen debate for almost a year now. I’m not a backer, I missed the KS and never signed up after. When I went to the CIG web site to do so, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I saw the amounts of money that were being collected (after wildly exceeding their Kickstarter expectations).

Yet, I was tempted to buy into SC after reading the glowing press and universal user enthusiasm. I hadn’t seen a single negative press column until WIRED posted one entitled, “Fans Have Dropped $77M on This Guy’s Buggy, Half-Built Game.” That was enough for me to hold off. My attitude was “deeds, not words” and all I saw was pretty commercials, videos and graphics. WIRED was wrong, the game wasn’t even half done. If they’d produced something tangible, I would have bought into it, but they never did.

I saw it as a, ‘We can do this project through KS for $500K, we collected $2.1M and now we have $60.2M, but still need more’ situation. Meanwhile, Chris Roberts is saying he could do the game with the money already collected, but didn’t stop the fund raising. Huh? Elite: Dangerous (Frontier Developments), in the meantime, asked for £1.2M on KS, got £1.5M, released a finished game a year ago and will be releasing their V2.0 version in time for this Christmas without additional fund raising.

I’d heard of ‘Derek Smart’ referenced in several hate filled forums on a few discussion sites. I’m a former game designer/producer myself and always try to make up my own mind so I looked him up. Instead of the horrific bile spitting monster I’d been told about, I found someone asking the same reasonable questions I was. His subsequent treatment (as described in blog posts here) for being inquisitive was way over the top and another indicator that something was wrong.

I’m convinced Star Citizen is going to crash horribly. The TOS changes resetting refund conditions and minimizing CIG obligations tells any intelligent person there is trouble afoot. I can’t stop thinking that Chris Roberts and John Romero have a lot in common at this point.

Now, if I’m wrong and Star Citizen comes out, I’ll happily change the above opinion and offer a sincere apology to all involved. However, Derek you’ve been asking the right questions to date and I applaud you for that. Keep it up. The need for transparency, stated delivery dates and financial responsibility in projects of this scale is a necessity. There are over a million investors in Star Citizen today and having reliable information about the state of the project is valuable.

Keep asking those questions and thank you.

Have a great weekend.

[dsmart]

@SJ Thanks for stopping by. I have also stated, just as you did, that if I am proven to be wrong about this, and Chris does ship the game that he pitched and promised, that not only would I apologize, but I would also retire (I am semi-retired) from game development – completely.

A LOT of people don’t really understand the nuances of what’s at stake here. They just see some angry, jealous (insert choice adjective of the day) raising the alarm, asking people to look closely, ask the tough questions etc. But instead, they just want to attack, attack, attack. YET they wonder why such extremism in the Star Citizen community, has now completely and utterly tainted it.

The 2.0 they released yesterday is more than enough evidence that they have a LONG way to go with this project IF they ever get to finish it. And if they do, it’s easily another 2-3 years, plus another $75m+ to get there.

UPDATE: I have added an update to my latest blog. It’s at the bottom.

[dsmart]

I wrote a short missive about the 2.0 jittering issue today; along with an exchange between Chris and an engineer 🙂 You can see the full Twitter exchange in these tweets.

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