The irony is Star Citizen would have probably worked if only people had not given Roberts so much money to fuel his ego and feature-creep.
As promised, a small basic single player campaign (no celebs, voiceovers, fancy Call of Duty AAA cinematic crap) and a smallish Freelancer type universe, it would have been great.
They should have just released a pure space sim like Elite first and then added in stuff like first person, new planets, new worlds, etc.
That's what I thought this game was going to be. Basically an MMO Freelancer. That would have been so awesome. As soon as they started talking about the FPS portion, I was no longer interested Luckily I never bought it monetarily.
Don't get me wrong, I've always had this dream game in mind that I would die for.
3 factions
two military and one chaotic
Each would have 4 classes
line officers (Navigators, pilots, gunners)
Fighter/Bomber Pilots
Troopers (infantry)
Engineers
When you start the game, you start at a lowely rank and can progress to a high command rank where if your a trooper, you become a general, if your a line officer you can rise to ship captancy and then to commanding fleets
If your a pilot, you can become a squadron commander, a wing commander or a theatre commander
If your an engineer, you can rise to ship designer.
you crew massive ships and fight against the other factions. You can battle for your empire, or if your chaotic, profit as a pirate chief or smuggler or worse.
You can fight ship to ship, launch fighters, send boarding parties. Or bombard and invade planets.
If you're a admiral or general, you become more strategic minded and your gaming experience really changes as you pass orders to your fleet, or your army or your fighters.
But technically I can never see a game like this made, plus you'd need millions of players to have it function properly.
On top of that the jerk players would join the game and then go out and assassinate other players to steal their roles, so you'd basically have a bunch of Klingon running around trying to seize command
The game company would act as central command the three factions, sending them out on strategic missions. Maybe you're sides central command is evil and you don't see it until you rise high enough to get the real commands about exterminating enemy civilians.
Maybe your with the pirates and you see that they're merciless butchers. So you defect to another side.
I think that this is the type of game that Chris Roberts really wanted, but he might not be able to deliver it.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
As a rule of thumb, games that make scale and community major selling points from day one are not that great and rarely succeed. Scale is great if a game is great, but if the game is just mediocre, it really doesn't matter what the scale is, because almost no-one is going to care enough to go through it all.
Roberts Space Industries is proud to offer a summer free flight trial of Star Citizen! During this week long free fly you will get a chance try out the game and fly fighter ships like the Mustang Beta, the Sabre and the F7C Hornet!
Create an account, then enter this promo code to gain access to play the game:
Things keep getting weird with this game. Even though they raised massive amounts of money they still applied for a large multi-million dollar loan using pretty much all of their assets as collateral. Their Alpha 3.0 release has been pushed off as well. there are also a lot of rumors that a lot of the coders have left the company and been replaced with Interns.
Another source flat-out believed that Star Citizen could not be made. “Not what they've promised, absolutely not. If it happened then I would believe in God.” They added: “the biggest obstacle to finishing, if you were going to take out money and time, is the scope. They could make a smaller game. They could make a really nice dogfighting shooter in space and it would probably do really well. That's the general attitude of most people in the industry.”
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
I've thought about trying to get a refund for my ship pledges, but I just don't have the energy to jump through all the hoops needed to actually get CIG to refund my money. Instead I've used this as my learning lesson, being the first game I Kickstarted. Only back games that have realistic and achievable goals, and only ever back at the minimum amount required to get the game
Just from a personal perspective I really wanted this game to be everything they said it was. I'm a huge fan of Chris Roberts and Wing Commander, I have to say that even all this time its one of the best game franchises ever made. It combined everything that you would want, an epic space adventure, a compelling enemy, a game that was hugely fun to play and a amazing story line.
(I dare anyone to look at the fall of Tolwyn and not have strong feelings about it). It spawned its on galaxy that included multiple games and some really fantastic novels.
When I first heard about Star Citizen, I was so hopeful, it had all the elements that I wanted. The ability to be the Captain of a Star ship, or even serve as a crewman on a star ship, a non linear open universe where one minute you could be in a dog fight, the next trading or mining, and the next boarding an enemy ship. Even the demo's were amazing.
When they went to kick starter I began to get suspicious because frankly they started to treat the game like a car dealer ship. Instead of selling the merits of the game they were selling ships. when I read about people buying ships for hundreds and thousands of dollars, I started to back away.
then they started to do those stretch goals and added feature promise after promise and I came to realize that while Roberts might not be actively running a con, he was running one. there was no way that this game could ever be completed and sewed together, everything because a sell job to raise money.
I mean honestly if you can't build a video game for $133 million dollars, and now your running to the bank and handing over assets for a loan that include the game rights there's a major problem.
Maybe at some point Roberts has to throw in the towel and just put out a game because the longer this goes the less likely that we'll see something ever close to his vision.
I've never trusted putting money into something like this where its "Give us money and we'll make a product", that's why I've never donated to a kick starter game campaign, because to raise more money you have to promise the impossible.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
I've never trusted putting money into something like this where its "Give us money and we'll make a product", that's why I've never donated to a kick starter game campaign, because to raise more money you have to promise the impossible.
Games I've Kickstarted:
Shadowrun Returns
Shadowrun Dragonfall
Shadowrun Hong Kong
Torment: Tides of Numenera
Moebius: Empire Rising
Wasteland 2
Banner Saga
Plus BattleTech which seems to be coming along just fine.
That's also pretty much a list of my favourite games from recent years. Well except for Moebius, which sucked, but that hit/miss ratio is still likely better than with games I've bought other ways. Additionally, most of those games wouldn't exist without crowdfunding, so I'm personally quite happy with Kickstarter.
Of course you have to be careful what you put your money into, but that's just how games are. You can just as easily waste 60 bucks on a bug-riddled AAA game with 4 hours of mediocre gameplay.
I've only Kickstarted 3, Amplitude, Yooka-Laylee, and Bloodstained. Amplitude and Yooka-Laylee weren't amazing, but at least they released decent complete products. Bloodstained is still coming along and is looking pretty good.
Just from a personal perspective I really wanted this game to be everything they said it was. I'm a huge fan of Chris Roberts and Wing Commander, I have to say that even all this time its one of the best game franchises ever made. It combined everything that you would want, an epic space adventure, a compelling enemy, a game that was hugely fun to play and a amazing story line.
(I dare anyone to look at the fall of Tolwyn and not have strong feelings about it). It spawned its on galaxy that included multiple games and some really fantastic novels.
When I first heard about Star Citizen, I was so hopeful, it had all the elements that I wanted. The ability to be the Captain of a Star ship, or even serve as a crewman on a star ship, a non linear open universe where one minute you could be in a dog fight, the next trading or mining, and the next boarding an enemy ship. Even the demo's were amazing.
When they went to kick starter I began to get suspicious because frankly they started to treat the game like a car dealer ship. Instead of selling the merits of the game they were selling ships. when I read about people buying ships for hundreds and thousands of dollars, I started to back away.
then they started to do those stretch goals and added feature promise after promise and I came to realize that while Roberts might not be actively running a con, he was running one. there was no way that this game could ever be completed and sewed together, everything because a sell job to raise money.
I mean honestly if you can't build a video game for $133 million dollars, and now your running to the bank and handing over assets for a loan that include the game rights there's a major problem.
Maybe at some point Roberts has to throw in the towel and just put out a game because the longer this goes the less likely that we'll see something ever close to his vision.
I've never trusted putting money into something like this where its "Give us money and we'll make a product", that's why I've never donated to a kick starter game campaign, because to raise more money you have to promise the impossible.
The least they could do is put out a great single-player Squadron 42 in episodes. I can't believe it's been 5 years since I funded this game. I was super stoked to be an early adopter as I even got the call-sign Wing_Commander. That's okay though, maybe I'll get to play this when I'm old and living in virtual reality.
The least they could do is put out a great single-player Squadron 42 in episodes. I can't believe it's been 5 years since I funded this game. I was super stoked to be an early adopter as I even got the call-sign Wing_Commander. That's okay though, maybe I'll get to play this when I'm old and living in virtual reality.
That probably would have been a smart move, they could have followed the Wing Commander Prophesy special ops model, where you could download chapters.
At this point I'm starting to agree with a lot of the industry people who are talking about this. No matter what happens now, the game is going to be a bust because they can't deliver on what they've promised, and they promised a lot so that they could create the stretch goals.
I mean what happens to the guy that invested and bought a thousand dollar ship, and he finally gets to fully play the game and its a let down (which it pretty much will be).
I was reading one article where they took a tour of the facility and most of the work was on ships and advertisement trailers instead of game play. And then they made a big show of filming the voice over work that was being done.
I had a lot of hope for this game because it was everything I would want in a game, a pure immersive experience where you can be a pilot a gunner, a pirate a solider. you can seamlessly go from your ship to a planets surface to boarding and taking another ship. Its similar to what Derek Smart tried to and failed to do with Battlecruiser.
I'm paranoid about kickstarter campaigns now. There are some amazing horror stories of what happens when you give your money with the expectation of something. One of the scams that's happened and I wish I could remember the game. Was that they made a bunch of promises, and raised money and released this buggy mess of a game and when the backers all squealed they released the source code of the game and basically said its your game now mod up.
Maybe things will change now that they've basically used the rights to the game as collateral. But at some point Roberts is simply going to have to come out and say this is where we're at, we can't deliver what we promised, what happens next?
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
In the years of development time for this game, I have gone from a relatively young person with the free time to actually want to experience a massively multiplayer universe and live the space-explorer/pirate life that I've always wanted...
To an adult who has too many real-life rpg problems to have time to live in an immersive Star Citizen universe. All I want is a great single-player story and be in Wing Commander I-IV again.
Star Citizen's first Squadron 42 trailer is what sold it for me and that's what I really want now...not to spend time in a chair at home being an intergalactic fuel truck driver.
Now that I think about it, why did I spend a few hundred dollars on virtual Starfarer (space fuel tanker) when in reality, we're going to have self-driving fuel tankers on the highway in only a few short years? I guess at the time, it sounded like a good money maker so I could actually buy the things I wanted inside the actual game.
The Following 2 Users Say Thank You to Hack&Lube For This Useful Post:
See the next addon is that you should be able to do is midspace refueling for other players for money, whether its real or imagined. That would encourage more boarding and robberies instead of just blowing you out of the sky.
Plus I'd want to be able to make you walk the plank and sniff vacuum.
Yeah, like a lot of you I was looking more forward to a modern version of Wing Commander, with some sort of online version of Privateer sounding interesting too. If they'd stuck with the original game we could've been playing it a long time ago (I know you can play pieces now but I have no interest in being an Alpha tester, time is too limited to waste on unfinished games). The scope just got way out of hand on this.