It’s really simple. They realized they could make more money by never releasing it. That realization has made them more money than the vast majority of game studios. It’s a glorified ship showcase simulator, that’s about it, not really a game. If they set a release date they’d reduce the amount of money they make, why would they do that?
Feels very similar to the trend of ‘why QA our AAA game before release when we can call it GaaS?’
Do you think they could finish the game if they wanted to?
I really don’t think it’s a conscious choice. Just Chris Roberts’ typical perfectionism and nobody there to say “Ok, this is enough, we must ship something”.
Having said that, I used to think Elite Dangerous had the superior model, but they’ve proven me wrong by going to absolute shit with Odyssey (no VR support, no walkable ships) and pretty much dropped all development thereafter.
Nah, this non-release actually gives them a lot of money, and they simply have no incentive to stop anyone who thinks it’s not ready.
Just another $100 million bro. I swear, just another $200 million. Another $300 million and we can finish this!
I was a kickstarter for this way back in the day. I used to not feel bad about the delay until I realised I bought it a few years after high school. More than once I had completely forgotten about this game and that I had paid for it. Which obviously pretty drastically changed my view on it and the devs, especially after learning a bit more about Chris.
That was years ago and before I learned about shit like the store page for ship pledges that’s hidden and only unlocks when you spend ridiculous amount on ship pledges. The $10,000 ship pre orders…
I’ve gone full circle, now I just want the game to succeed so I can never hear about it again.
But dude, Star Citizen ships are the NFTs of tomorrow!
Think of the fat stacks you’re gonna get when the game drops, the plebs cant buy the pre-order ships and you take them to resale!
Please stop Chris. I’ve already taken out another mortgage and the bank won’t stop calling me. The divorce your game brought on was cheaper by several orders of magnitude. Approve refund pls
The buyers remorse game. Just give them a tiny bit more money and then a bit more and another, then the game will release, eventually, maybe, hopefully. Please release the game, we spend so much money on it. Here, take more money, we hope that helps. What, you need more? Okay, next quarter. We can’t stop spending now guys or the money was all wasted.
Sunken cost fallacy: the game.
True, sunken cost is the correct terminology. That’s what I mean.
Uh-huh, and devs are incentivised to keep that fallacy up, because the release would mean that ships bought for in-game currency will not be wiped every something update.
Yes, right - the only ships that currently persist are the ones bought for real money. And the devs have 0 incentive to change that, because players really end up buying the ships for cash (easily $300, $400, $1000 for a ship) instead of leaving such bullshit for good.
Jeez, I’ve spent less than that on cars in real life before.
Wait until you hear of $8000, $21000, and $54000 ship packages.
They are all real.
By the time the game is released, we will actually be Star Citizens travelling through space.
Hopefully citizens of a less capitalist space
Right, I gave them $500 when I was in highschool (don’t judge me) that was like… Jesus it’s almost been 10 years
Is there any content?
I played during a free week (dunno if it’s still going). The game offers this world of awesome prospects. Even in a state where there’s no additional content to the current, it’s already a relaxing game with beautiful scenery. But: OMG the bugs. The tutorial waypoints sometimes don’t appear for minutes. Interaction work at the servers whim. I bugged out one of my starter items (the helmet). I had to buy a new one. The first mission is the one I failed when I was delivering goods and they bugged out, so I couldn’t deliver them anymore and the mission was bricked.
Pirate Software put it best: “what the game wants to be is great, but the only thing I see expanding is the storefront and I’d like it to not be that”
And I would extend that quote to “as long as the storefront expands while the core game doesn’t function, this is not a game but a development service and as long as it’s not a game you shouldn’t buy it or anything related to it”. I wanna play games and not glorified tech demos. Especially when there is more than 10 years of development. We definitely gave them enough leeway.
There is! I play it all the time with my friends and its some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a video game. The other day we hijacked some guy’s space yacht and flew it to deep space, I left the ship with my friend while we brought our huge salvage ship over and scraped off all the metal from the ship, then chewed it up with the mounted claw/grinder. The whole process took 3 people 2 hours and it was so much fun.
It’s not for everyone and may very well never release. But I’ve been waiting for a game like this for years and I can’t get enough of it. The immersion is insane.
What about the guy who’s space yacht you stole. Was he another player or an NPC? If he was another player, will he have to buy a new space yacht for real money?
No not at all, it’ll be available again after a cooldown period of up to like 45 minutes depending on ship size. Meant to simulate insurance buying you a new ship etc etc
Thanks for your reply. Are his insurance premiums going to go up?
It was a player. They can insurance claim it and be back in it before I was even done scrapping it most likely. Or they might have been able to track it down and attack me to get it back, and I wouldn’t have been able to defend myself in the scrapping ship which is basically a big space barge not made for combat, which would have been cool as hell.
Depending on what ship it was the other player will have to wait quite a bit for it to be available again. Anything stored on said shipped was lost to the pirates of course.
Also anything bought with real money can’t really be lost. That would be illegal in so many countries.
Play with friends you say? Another game I’ll never play…
I want to like it but the last time I tried to play the game, it tried to kill my computer. Have they optimized it at all?
Depends a little. It definitely does work on lower end PCs. But if you crank everything to max settings you will struggle on most PCs. When you are CPU limited try the new Vulkan implementation. While it’s not fully implemented it does already use less CPU.
I will try that, thank you.
It depends on when you last played it. A few updates ago they improved performance a ton, but its still rough sometimes, especially if you have 16gb or less RAM.
Oh it was a couple years ago at this point. I’ll give it another shot.
Nah, didn’t get better. And never, I say NEVER, land on Crusader with anything but a supercomputer. You won’t be able to escape :D
Sigh, this is actually what tried to kill my computer. I literally had to hold the power button down to stop whatever SC was doing to it.
so another rust… wow, can’t wait. /s
Imagine so brain dead to be proud of being a griefer and ruin other people’s fun
Lmao are you also mad when players in sea of thieves sink your ship? Or when people in GTA online shoot you? If you don’t like that kind of gameplay don’t play the game
Or when people in GTA online shoot you?
Yea actually, I quit playing because tgose assholes flying around on the motorcycle things kept killing me when I was trying to do the delivery for the one business I was able to afford. Which took like real life hours to restock. So I could never actually get money to do anything cool. Fuck that. There’s nothing fun about that.
Listen, if you don’t want your multi million dollar space yacht stolen, don’t leave it unlocked and unattended at a space station. This was a valuable lesson for someone. (Real talk though, I am not even sure where the owner was, they may have even logged off with their ship sitting outside the station)
Normally I would super support you, but in Star Citizen the owner of the yacht actually loses nothing and can call another one later.
Wars, piracy, and all that behavior is part of the game, and it is encouraged by the developers. They even released a second system with pretty much 0 policing specifically to make some anarchy.
In this case, it’s not ruining other people’s fun, it’s the gist of the game.
Yep. But it is still “Early Access” so it isn’t finished. But like other early access games, it’s a playable game. Think first person Freelancer or a better Elite Dangerous.
a better Elite Dangerous.
Elite Dangerous was released. This is not.
I’ve actually enjoyed my time in SC far more than E:D. One is a buggy mess that is occasionally fun, and the other is a space sim with no gameplay at all and just wants a boring soulless grind.
Not defending SC’s development practices, just shitting on E:D which I put 80 hours into.
It’s more than just “playable”, but it also is not a finished, fully fleshed out game, either. Definitely worth checking out during the occasional free-fly events (though one has just ended, so might be a little while for the next).
Any comparison is meaningless because for every bad thing you say, people will jump at you with the classic ol’ “its still in development”.
The fact is that it’s buggy, crashes all the time and you lose progress, it can’t be played like any actual existing MMO - it’s a demo atm even if you ignore the common resets they do officially on major releases. Until it’s actually released and can be decently reviewed from start to finish it can’t even start to compare to an actual released, playable game.
That’s a little unfair, because enjoyment of something doesn’t necessitate it being experienced from beginning to end in a linear progression. Something like the seasonal(?) content on No Man’s Sky often requiring a save file being restarted and not needed the main story to be completed to finish the new objectives. Or, something like Path of Exile, where each season progresses from a fresh start at level 1, with no progress carried over.
Progress gets rest on those about as frequently, it not more so, than the resets in Star Citizen, except those games are also feature complete with a full story involved.
Maybe something like Ark, then, with the creation of new servers. No real story being progressed through, but a multi-player sandbox environment. Again, though, that’s a feature complete game where all the systems (mostly) work.
I guess where I’m going is that you can certainly look at individual elements of the game and compare those to similar systems in other games. And if expectations are of it being a sandbox you can mess around in and experience some cool systems, it will deliver. But it is not a finished game that has persistent player driven progress. It is not a game with a story path you can follow (though, I don’t think it claims to be once fully released, either). It is buggy at times and suffers server issues as the small changes and interactions build up over time, making an instance unstable and eventually kicking everyone logged in.
“Demo” might be the closest description, but that doesn’t quite capture the experience of playing it. It falls very short of being a full game. It also is something that other games just don’t capture the same feeling of.
Again, I’m not trying to convince anyone to spend any money towards it, but absolutely give the free fly events a chance.
I know I bought Elite Dangerous Horizons on steam for like 80 bucks and played it for a while, and now no matter what I do, I cant get access to the game. I get bungled in third party account sign ins.
Sounds like the genera is cursed. There is promise, but the developers just leech money and obstruct access to the game.
freelancer had its problems but at least it was a shipped product, and didn’t cost nearly a billion dollars and wasn’t funded by players based on hopes and prayers. I’d much rather play 40 freelancers, which could probably be made from scratch back to back in less time and with less money.
People paid money for a game to be made and it’s both being worked on and has playable content, just like other early access games. Why does Star Citizen get the hate for doing the same thing as other games?
same thing? like what? which game did the same thing?
Star Citizen is the Oak Island Money Pit of games.
To be fair, Star Citizen can technically be played. Whatever the hell is in the pit on Oak Island could just as well be an empty fuckin’ box. lol
Here I thought they already announced a release version, but it turns out it was just another layer of grift in their infinite grift sandwich.
It’s because it’s a scam.
EDIT: all the downvotes, yet no explanations. I wonder if it’s because there isn’t any way to prove it isn’t.
Scam Citizen
They do have a pretty fun playable game though. I bought one of the basic packs forever ago, and at this point, I wouldn’t even care if they where to exit scam. I don’t think they will, but I’ve certainly gotten my money’s worth out of it.
I haven’t even read the comments yet and I already know what they look like.
Dear Star Citizen simps/haters:
Nothing about Star Citizen is productive.
Can someone who has played both Star Citizen and Eve Online tell me what the major differences are?
I haven’t played SC, and i haven’t played Eve in a while, but here is some readily available information:
- Eve has been in release state for 20 years.
- Eve has an ancient dedicated player base that probably knows the game better than the devs.
- Most old players place a priority on helping new players and keeping the game healthy.
- You can’t walk around outside your ship.
In Eve, you control your ship in a 3D view more akin to a strategy game. In SC you pilot it from the cockpit like say Elite Dangerous or other space sims.
Thank you! Great explanation <3
Eve Online is much much more strategy (third-person) and diplomacy. You don’t get anywhere without getting involved deeply with other player groups (corporations). It’s more of a business sim than a space sim.
SC is much more pew pew and first-person and teamwork will be much more casual.
Star Citizen is all about first-person perspective. You’re not a “capsuleer” like in Eve, you do exist outside of your ship, you can walk its interiors, you can walk cities, socialize with people on the ground, or capture enemy ships and go ground battles, you go to planetary “hotels” to rest, etc. etc. It’s more like an immersive space sim in a massively multiplayer world - it’s about living in this virtual place. If we would use all those fancy modern buzzwords, “metaverse” would probably be the closest.
Eve operates on a very different layer of abstraction. You don’t even get to directly control your ship - you set general commands for where and how it should move to target, orbit it, etc. (which is something that frustrated many newcomers since this model is pretty much nonexistent in modern space games). The juice of Eve is not personal interaction of character models, which doesn’t exist, but the economy and legacy of such a massive project. When it comes to an economic system, Eve may rival the real world in its complexity. Also, the control of systems adds a strong political layer on top - something that players expand on, creating a long and complicated, player-generated political lore. People there take it very seriously, which makes Eve more of a strategy than the game you immerse yourself in to have a light and nice evening.
Wow, thank you. Very thorough explanation.
I’m asking because I started playing Eve Online a couple of weeks ago, and I wonder why would anyone need another space sim game, because I don’t think anyone can fully grasp Eve. But apparently they are very different in how the game feels, handles, and plays.
I think Eve’s monetisation is a bit less predatory than what Star Citizen offers.
Certainly so. Though, make no mistake - Eve does collect an enormous revenue and has a userbase willing to pay.
Some legendary battles had tens of thousands of dollars in ISK losses.
I fully believe you after being around Jita for the weekend. People give absolute no fucks what sec they are in.
Never will be a release date. Never ever sell a cash cow
I understand that no release date yet is bad but could people follow the development before complaining? Squadron 42, the game’s single player campaign, is FEATURE COMPLETE. This means that once all the features are ported to star citizen, the only thing it will be missing is server stuff (like a living market and server meshing) and in game locations like new star systems (the first of which is scheduled to release this year) and star citizen is feature complete as well. The developers have even announced that they are already planning a 1.0 release and will reveal more info soon, which the article did mention. I hate the fact that you can buy ships as well with real money but to think this game will never release is coming close to hoping the game will fail.
I’ll believe it when I see it
the only thing it will be missing is server stuff
This read a little bit like “once I’m done building this boat, I’ll just be missing the space stuff to fly to Mars”
I hope it’s not taken negatively, I’m just extremely uncertain that they could reuse anything from the offline to online part. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re wrong with the release schedule and so on.
They actually already have! In the most recent patch they updated the flight system to use the one from the single player game and overhauled the ui to be like the single player one (the old system was very outdated and slow)
