Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'

Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he's done throughout his career - the only thing that's notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It's entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn't bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn't even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

And then, compare it to No Man's Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.

I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man's Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.

Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.

Yeah, Star Citizen is the world's most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It'll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a "complete game" state.

Who'd'a thunk?

Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never "release" a finished game, you're not going to be blamed for "bugs" while still collecting money on in-game purchases.

There's a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It's been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.

Like, obviously?

Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.

To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.

So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.

This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.

Why would there be? Seems to work really well this way. Just keep milking the idiots of their money.

I've genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There's just no actual focus on getting the game done.

We have a saying here that translates to something like this: "perfect is the enemy of done". Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.

Damn. I had really hoped my grandchildren would get to play Star Citizen in their lives.

Misguided development at CIG? Why I never!

Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they're still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they're going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1

SCAM

Is anyone really surprised?

I do think they will at least release Squadron 42, but the main game is never coming out.

and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.

sorry I meant durrrr

Dull surprise.

If they finished it they’d have to find a new revenue stream.

Star Citizen sounds right up my alley in terms of game content and play, but I will never touch it due to the business model they've chosen.

Squadron 42 is feature complete and is in optimization and polish phase. 30-40 hour campaign. It looks amazing. This was released this weekend, played live not prerecorded.

https://youtu.be/1H-0x4xk2Xk?si=Q3SmA_skltVVUkiy

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

What's the latest build weight in at?

It's so many gigs, it's not even worth trying every so often. Every time you load it, gigs to download.

Glad I only ever spent the initial $60

The first big disappointment was the end of the funding rewards. Is any of those original rewards even noticable? Oh yay a fish! And a 42 towel to look at!

It's still around?

I remember when Star Citizen first popped up, and it makes me feel old.

It's called Store Citizen for a reason.

I was hoping there to be a conspiracy story behind it but the crux is they don't understand the concept of MVP or made anything before.

In another timeline No Mans sky was called Star Citizen and StarField was cancelled.