Star Citizen

[PsYcNeT]

Not to white knight Chris Roberts too much, but they did say as far back as April 2014 that they were looking at a Q1 2016 Player Universe launch. Now whether you believe the PU alpha can be out in the next 8 months is your own assessment however.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

Not to white knight Chris Roberts too much, but they did say as far back as April 2014 that they were looking at a Q1 2016 Player Universe launch. Now whether you believe the PU alpha can be out in the next 8 months is your own assessment however.

November 2014 was the original date that Roberts said would be the go-live for the Squadron 42 single player component with the PU beta following in Q1 of 2015. Obviously they missed that by a mile, but my point is that if they had stuck to the features they had promised at the end of the initial wave of crowd funding they might have been able to hit those goals, or at least be a lot closer than they are now. But with every new feature that they add in the goalposts get moved back, so when 2016 comes around I fully expect Roberts to be talking about this awesome new feature where you get to raise your own virtual pet in-game and that he expects a PU alpha sometime in 2017

[cDnStealth]

A good comparison is Elite Dangerous. Their kickstarter was a month after Star Citizen's and although it did miss it's target date they've released the game they promised. The only issue that game encountered was the removal of offline play to which they offered refunds.

So two examples of space sims that promised to release their games around the same time. One is a fully released game and one is an 8 vs 8 arena game that struggles to function and isn't even close to being released.

[PsYcNeT]

Kinda apples to more ripe apples, since ED was in development for 3-4 years prior to their Kickstarter.

[Kerplunk]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

Kinda apples to more ripe apples, since ED was in development for 3-4 years prior to their Kickstarter.

Sounds like it was an off and on project until about 2011 (with the other products/engines taking priority), which is about the same time SC came out with it's initial demo concept. While technically "in development" for that time, this is one of the worst ways to develop a proper product. The release time lines should probably be a lot closer than what they are, given the initial feature list.

[Nehkara]

[starseed]

If they need to wait until q4 2017 to release it in order to do it right, then I hope CIG can ignore the impatient fanbase and wait. Doing it right is way more important than appeasing the mob!

[Codes]

Agreed, Starseed.

I've spent a little bit more on this game than I would have liked, so I have no problem waiting for them to take their time to do things properly. Based on their actions to date, I suspect this will be the case. But, then again, the forums can be a soul-crushing experience even for the toughest person.

[PsYcNeT]

Derek Smart Derek Smart Derek Smart

[Hemi-Cuda]

FPS module delays yet again, and when I read stuff like this it makes me doubt if we'll ever see a real full game come out

http://kotaku.com/why-star-citizen-i...ong-1724835913

Still, people who have worked at Star Citizen development studio Cloud Imperium, speaking under condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about their work on Star Citizen, point to Roberts’ ambition and leadership style as one of the main causes of the game’s delays.
As an example, one high-level ex-employee shared the story of the Menu Helmet. At one point, according to that employee, Roberts decided he wanted players to have to find and wear an in-game helmet in order to gain access to the menu in Arena Commander. Some developers tried to shoot down the idea, noting that players would grow frustrated if they couldn’t find something as essential as a menu, but Roberts insisted, so a team of developers spent weeks making it work. Then, according to that source, Roberts tried it, only to realize that it wasn’t actually fun. So they scrapped the whole thing and went back to a regular menu system.

If they had stuck to the original plan, had half the funding done with crowd-sourcing and the other half through investors, then just created the game with what they had, it would have probably been done by now and probably have been a pretty great game. But with a seemingly endless source of money and no investors or publishers to answer to, there's no pressure on Chris Roberts to stick to any sort of timetable so he keeps bouncing around from one cool new feature to the next. He did a great job of reinvigorating the space sim genre with Star Citizen, but if he doesn't get his head out of the clouds and get the damn game finished then he could get passed by all the other space sims in development right now and no one will care when/if he actually gets SC finished

[atb]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

FPS module delays yet again, and when I read stuff like this it makes me doubt if we'll ever see a real full game come out

http://kotaku.com/why-star-citizen-i...ong-1724835913




If they had stuck to the original plan, had half the funding done with crowd-sourcing and the other half through investors, then just created the game with what they had, it would have probably been done by now and probably have been a pretty great game. But with a seemingly endless source of money and no investors or publishers to answer to, there's no pressure on Chris Roberts to stick to any sort of timetable so he keeps bouncing around from one cool new feature to the next. He did a great job of reinvigorating the space sim genre with Star Citizen, but if he doesn't get his head out of the clouds and get the damn game finished then he could get passed by all the other space sims in development right now and no one will care when/if he actually gets SC finished

Yeah, unfortunately he's not making a great case for the future of large budget crowd funded games. It's too bad as this will probably result in a lot of people who contributed to Star Citizen to not contribute to other game projects.

[CaptainCrunch]

I was wondering what was happening with this, it was something that I was looking forward to following and maybe getting, but it just seems to be something that's a wee bit uncontrollable now, and the people that have donated money to it have to be a bit aggravated.

Its funny because you could see Roberts ego grow as he went along the Wing Commander trail until it became a full blown egosplosion with 4 where he tried to show that he was more a movie producer/director then a game maker and while Wing Commander 4 was very good, the emphasis kind of went from the game play to the features and fmv story line.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Its funny because you could see Roberts ego grow as he went along the Wing Commander trail until it became a full blown egosplosion with 4 where he tried to show that he was more a movie producer/director then a game maker and while Wing Commander 4 was very good, the emphasis kind of went from the game play to the features and fmv story line.

I had high hopes for this based on WC1/WC2 but now that I think about it in context of what you've described...this makes perfect sense. The whole explosion of Wing Commander from WC3->4->awful Freddie Prinze Jr. movie and how the Roberts brothers thought they were the next George Lucas' on the cusp of the future of interactive entertainment, etc...

[AcGold]

Hell yeah aim high, why would he aim for mediocrity? If he wants to be a genius innovator that pushes the envelope that's a good thing, it's that exact same ingenuity and ambition that lead to Star Citizen. A big ego is kind of necessary for projects of such astounding magnitude and scope

[starseed]

When I read about the helmet menu thing, I thought about Steve Jobs dropping the iPod prototype into a fish tank.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by AcGold

Hell yeah aim high, why would he aim for mediocrity? If he wants to be a genius innovator that pushes the envelope that's a good thing, it's that exact same ingenuity and ambition that lead to Star Citizen. A big ego is kind of necessary for projects of such astounding magnitude and scope

This is what happened the last time Chris Robert's ego got big:



Written and directed by Chris Roberts, it's a big pile of . I dropped several hundred dollars on Star Citizen because of my childhood nostalgia for Roberts' games but I've also lived through all the ups and downs of the franchise. This is quite clearly the legacy of Wing Commander and I see it either going great (Wing Commander 1&2, Privateer 1, Freelancer), or really bad (Privateer 2, Armada, the Movie). Roberts was great when he focuses on core gameplay, but whenever it went into cinematics or grandiose, it was a really mixed bag.

[Looch City]

Matt Damon!

...wait no that's not Matt Damon.

[Kerplunk]

Interesting article from the escapist, which seems to be causing a bit of a kerfuffle:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...of-the-Company

[AcGold]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

This is what happened the last time Chris Robert's ego got big:



Written and directed by Chris Roberts, it's a big pile of . I dropped several hundred dollars on Star Citizen because of my childhood nostalgia for Roberts' games but I've also lived through all the ups and downs of the franchise. This is quite clearly the legacy of Wing Commander and I see it either going great (Wing Commander 1&2, Privateer 1, Freelancer), or really bad (Privateer 2, Armada, the Movie). Roberts was great when he focuses on core gameplay, but whenever it went into cinematics or grandiose, it was a really mixed bag.

I would suggest his egos always been big, he clusterf's things when there are too many yes men and not enough reason. Same thing with the Star Wars movies and Lucas. When you get a large operation with hundreds of different complicated parts and one guy is leading the entire thing with no room for disagreement things usually go terribly. It's the lack of input from outside opinions that will be his downfall here if it happens.

I bet it comes out and it's not quite the game everyone thought it would be because I agree 100%, he's not focusing on core gameplay. The flying around and shooting stuff part of the game, the main gameplay, hasn't really impressed thus far so it's exactly as you are describing. All flash no substance as of yet.

It might all come together when it goes gold but take a game like Eve: Valkyrie. That game looks like it's basic gameplay elements are done right. Large scale battles with a true sense of speed, really captures the grandiosity of empty space and the sense of isolation you'd feel even in a massive dog fight.

[CaptainCrunch]

I've had a bad feeling about this game for a while. It just seemed to be all about selling ship packages and fund raising.

When I look at the results of the game so far, I have a feeling that it will never be fully completed, and at some point it will be abandoned and kicked out of space dock for game players to complete it on their own.

I would never donate to crowd funding for a movie or a video game, it just seems to be too easy to run a con that doesn't stop because there will always be that core group that will keep spinning money into it.

Even the release of Arena Commander according to most was a buggy mess.

Even reading the article above, which did seem to be a bit of a hit piece, but Roberts didn't do much to allay fears.

The proper thing to do after raising more then 90 million bucks is for Roberts to show some good faith and shut down the crowd sourcing and self fund the rest.