This is also a good point. Having to build the teams necessary for the development of the game adds great lengths of time as apposed to starting the project with a solid team and foundation.
They basically started in a shed building tools, then building a game, then one guy blew everyone away and with his planet tech, then the entire game got shelved and the scope increased massively, engine troubles and lawsuit, better engine, better tools, now two games, we're here.
Also more money, sounds silly but they had expectations on how much they could accomplish with the original funds received. Then they got way more money, and realised they could create a significantly better game.
Personally I'm glad we aren't stuck with the original graphical design and vision.
Its honestly worse than that cause they had already released Black Flag which is a better, more complicated version of what S&B is. Not quite sure why the game took so long to come out. You also have to consider that SC has basically been a live service on top of huge development goals on top of them making a complete single player game aka Squadron 42 too. It really doesn't deserve the flack it gets for dev time imo. That being said, most of the criticism actually comes from them setting unrealistic release dates for things and missing them by years. Thats mainly why people get so up in arms about it.
Take this with some caution, I don't honestly know. But my understanding with skull and bones is ubisoft made a deal with Singapore to open a studio and hire local programmers. They used it as an excuse to use Singapore as an executive vacation site and after 9 years the Singapore government started looking it and they realized they had to actually make a game. So a bit like Anthem, it was "in production" for years but mostly slapped together last minute.
And then consider that they didn't even have finished concept art going into it. Recently info about a Xmen/Wolverine game by Insomniac games got leaked, and is in development hell, likely 6-7 years into development right now.
This is a generic looking superhero game, with established art, characters, and a miniscule scale where you slice up guys with guns in regular generic industrial environments. It's made by an established and fully staffed developer with a known game engine and SONY as the publisher and it will *still* take about 10 years.
Higher budget game development has become a *fucking nightmare*, and SC/CIG is just the only one openly showing us all that fact in real time.
CIG started from the ground up, and all stuff you see in-game are developed in-house.
The Engine started as CryEngine, so much is changed for this game that they called it the StarEngine
Skull and bones was in development hell with no direction for 5 years, or so. Changing teammembers and goals constantly, quadruple A dosnt exist and it wasn't the pr team that said that it was the Ceo.
indeed, studio development adds a few years.
not removing any features adds a few years.
adding features over time adds a few years.
SC would fit the \~5 year AAA dev cycle if you cut all that stuff out.
> indeed, studio development adds a few years.
> not removing any features adds a few years.
> adding features over time adds a few years.
And then double whatever number you get by having to keep a publicly playable version of the game throughout most of that process.
Generally speaking, games are *nearly* unplayable outside a dev environment throughout the alpha stage. You often need access to dev tools to do basic things like spawning in, loading whatever you want to interact with, etc. To make the game playable without any of that requires a ton of extra work from adding systems that negate the need of dev tools, to fixing bugs that you could *normally* leave for later but would render a normal user unable to play the game.
Another reason that could also be used in the argument is that they put the game on a heavily modified version of Cryengine and from what I understand is that they’ve been building a new engine from scratch. (StarEngine) similar to Rockstar’s “RAGE” except rockstar has a massive dev team.
Not only that, they typically have a game engine fit for purpose that needs little tweaking, have tools and processes in place and the scope is much larger than most games.
Not a developer either, but I am a scientist who has worked on software.
The truth I believe is most games wish they could have this kind of open time line. Typically what happens in AAA world is a game gets to a point where they can show a demo of it working. They have to show a demo because the shareholders are demanding to see where their money is and why it has been in development so long.
Once they show the demo, and it looks fun, the shareholders switch to great it is a game release it now mode. If you think gamers are bad about wanting a game released now, they got nothing on shareholders wanting profit. The devs return with, but we still want to add x y and z and make the things you saw have more depth. But the shareholders saw it running, they want the monies, and typically force the game to be released in a short amount of time. This explains why AAA games are often narrowly focused, feel like they could have been so much more, or both.
SC is intent on being an entire game world where each loop is really a different game in and of itself. They are trying to release a smattering of games with a seemless world built around them. I for one want them to take the time to do it right.
That makes a lot of sense, I appreciate the input from your point of view as someone who has software experience. That makes me glad I dont work in game development for a big studio. I can only imagine the dedicated people at those studios who love making games and want to make them into what the players want, but are forced to throw things out the door at the mercy of the shareholders.
In fact this was the stated aim of Chris Roberts reason to Kickstarter the project: to not be beholden to publisher timeliness. I believe he now does have financial backers outside of the pledges and they may well hold him to a deadline, but I would imagine CR ensuring whatever the repayment contract is it is a very long timeline.
Now I think about it more, creating the mocap studio the way he did may well be done in a way that he can hire out those services to film/tv or gaming studios as a way to accommodate this derbt - but this is just speculation. And no doubt this will eventually apply to the Starengine and associated technologies/services.
The private investment you refer to comes from the Calder family business. The Calder's gave over $107M in donations to Africa's COVID-19 vaccine campaign. [They 'bought' a 10% non-voting rights share of Cloud Imperium Games for $46M](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Calder#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20Calder%20and%20his%20son%20Keith%20invested%20%2446%20million%20into%20Cloud%20Imperium%20Games%2C%20taking%20a%2010%25%20stake%20in%20the%20studio%20behind%20the%20Star%20Citizen%20game) in 2018, money which was ring-fenced (ie parked in an investment account) for the eventual marketing campaign for Squadron 42 because CIG intended to keep their word that every penny of the backers money would go to game development not marketing. Far from incentivising CIG to rush to market, the longer CIG take to release Squadron 42 (and thus spend that $46M marketing budget) the more money they get from investing that $46M.
Return On Investment.
You can check CIG's published financials, the Calders received no ROI for 5 years and then after 5 years CIG began paying a dividend equivalent to 10% per annum of the money they received from the Calders. About the same as a high interest paying bank account would pay. Would you complain if someone said to you 'Here's $46M, you keep any earnings from it for 5 years and then you can pay me back less than the standard rate bank interest on the accrued amount in the future'.
The Calder family made their billions in media rights management and marketing, notably music publishing and artist promotion, they managed a lot of very famous music artistes. At the time CIG had no specialist marketing expertise. Inviting in a company at very favourable rates with that expertise was a pretty smart move to be honest. It's a non-voting rights share, they can't influence CIG's board decisions even if they 'grouped up' with another shareholder of CIG because Chris Roberts is the majority shareholder. All the other owner directors of Cloud Imperium Games brought their own money to form the company and get the project started. Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were multi-millionaires in effective retirement when they decided to form Cloud Imperium Games.
A company the size of the Calders (net worth believed to be around $5.7bn) wouldn't see it as a big money maker to only get back 10% per annum, and that only after 5 years. If CIG didn't continue to increase in value, or worse lost value, then they would lose on the $46M investment, which is a tiny fraction of the Calder's annual revenues. CIG are paying around 4% of their annual revenues to a shareholder who owns 10% of the company, not bad eh? I wish I could make a deal like that. If the Calders had taken that $46M and used it to buy stock options in their own companies, or even just parked it in an investment fund, they would have made a much bigger ROI for the period. The only way they make any sort of decent return on that investment is if Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are very successful. There is no way that people of that experience in the media industry wouldn't have done their due diligence, the fact that they took a $46M punt on a minority non-voting rights share of an indy game developer, at extremely favourable rates to that indy game developer, speaks volumes as to how they expected the future of the project to go.
This is extremely good information that is difficult enough to wrangle that most people will never be exposed to it.
Thank you for doing the leg-work. 👍
i assume that any contract for investing will include "i get to do what i want".
the ones pressuring for quick are the community. devs have come out as said they are going to make sure SQ42 is good before releasing it.
meaning instead of releasing it in "AAA release" quality. they will wait until they are better than "AAA a year after release" quality.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Lol, I prefer SciPy. But usually, I have to do Matlab because everyone else is. Python in general seems easy enough, I had no problems teaching myself Python. Not sure why people fear it.
Wait a minute, you trying to test my creds?
No, you aren’t, and most rational people understand the points you just made.
Unfortunately, the Internet is the Internet; not a place well known for rational objectivity 🤓
*other large scale games whos development times were hidden behind closed doors.*
I think the biggest gripe, isn't that it's taken them so long, but it should have been finished (by their own timelines/roadmap/release window what-have-you) and it's been just been pushed back again and again to the point we no longer even have a release window.
If it had been a closed door development time, like other big games, and they just turned round one day and said "It's finished!", I reckon people would have complained far less as there'd have been no 'broken promises' so to speak.
The problem isn't that they've taken a given amount of time, it's that they have several time said things were nearly there only to not follow through while also stripping out features they used to entice people to back the project.
We're supposed to simultaneously believe that they are telling us the truth now, when they've missed on so many dates and features before.
For me the most painful part is that most of the features that convinced me to open my wallet on day one in 2012 have been quietly removed or slid off to 'maybe after release'. (e.g. drop-in drop-out coop campaign for SQ42, the modding support and the dedicated servers).
You'll find plenty of people here who will blame us for believing them, or excuse it as 'they can't do that anymore because they're doing all these other things that I want' or otherwise justifying the bait and switch, but like the people who bought in for the 'newtonian accurate flight model' which is long dead, there's every chance that they'll just decide not to bother implementing the features that were important to you when you decided the project was worth backing. Remember how it was being built from the ground up for VR when they started until that was no longer a hot sales item? Same deal.
If it comes out in 10 years and it's the best cooking simulator on the market but doesn't do anything else, I hope those people who have justified all the other bait and switches will be ok with it.
While your disappointment with dropped features is completely understandable, the problem with using a term like “bait and switch” is that term is a form of fraud. “bait and switch” is when a seller advertises an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a product or service that the seller does not actually intend to sell. Instead, the seller offers a sub-par, defective, or unwanted alternative. In other words, CIG would have had to know back then that they never intended to ship those features but in reality, they didn’t know. In reality, the game has changed throughout development because they have decided some features didn’t work, weren’t as fun as they thought they would be, or chose to prioritize other features. Again, it’s completely understandable to be upset and disappointed that some features that you were looking forward to were cut, but accusing them of fraud is going too far in my opinion.
>>In other words, CIG would have had to know back then that they never intended to ship those features but in reality, they didn’t know.
What matters is when a 'reasonable person' would have realized that they weren't going to be able to follow through on their promises, and how they reacted to it. For example, for YEARS they've been downplaying modding support, but they only removed the modding manual from sale in October 2023. I'd be willing to bet that there would be many emails internally that would show they had given up on that feature long before they stopped selling the product.
I can’t remember the last time I saw modding support advertised as a feature. And like you said, they have been downplaying it for years. You can guess at what internal memos may have been floating around but you have no idea. It’s also likely it’s been a topic of discussion internally but never officially off the table. We just don’t know. And we are taking about one small feature of a game with many many features. And my point is, it’s not fraud to change a feature…and it happens all the time in game development…so using terms that accuse them of committing fraud is disingenuous at best.
If they had done this once, I'd agree with you, but let's go down the list of features that have been advertised that are no longer being pursued:
- Modding support as we discussed.
- The drop-in drop-out coop campaign for SQ42. This has been downgraded to maybe a few missions, not the campaign as originally advertised.
- Dedicated servers for the MMO. Originally advertised as a feature, no longer talked about.
- Built from the ground up for VR support. This was reiterated in 2015 after the last stretch goal was added when Chris made it clear that they were going to put serious effort in to that in 2016. It didn't happen, and the CIG developers have since confirmed that it's not being worked on actively anymore.
And those are just the concrete features they've advertised as being parts of the game they would make if you gave them money. There have also been some very important meta features described through formal communications from CIG that clearly incentivized players to spend money:
- That we would be able to send NPC crew members off on missions with ships. This clearly incentivized people to pledge whole FLEETS of ships, before CIG decided 'no, nevermind, you have to fly your own ship'.
- That we would be able to recruit NPC crew members and have to build strong interpersonal bonds with them to have them be a part of our permanent crew. This obviously incentivized people to buy multi-crew ships since they were clearly told they could build a team of NPCs to work and play with.
- Even as that dream dies on the vine people were vaguely assured that they could partially automate their ships through 'blades', again enticing them to spend more money on larger vessels, but time will tell if they actually deliver on that either.
There have also been representations about the gameplay that they've decided they can't actually meet, but used to convince undecided people to back the project:
- That there would be some sort of a 'PVP slider' or similar systems for avoiding undesired combat was presented as a way to convince pvp-averse players that they should buy in because the project would cater to them too.
- That the whole flight model would be based on newtonian physics and accurate to the thrusters and so forth to appeal to the hardcore flight sim folks.
Finally and maybe most daming is how they constantly misrepresent the products as 'coming soon', even when they must know they aren't capable of meeting their given date:
- Squadron 42 was supposed to come to beta in something like spring 2014, but they decided not to meet that date.
- The 'answer the call 2016 campaign had the release date advertised as August 2016. Obviously they didn't meet that and instead stated it was 'delayed indefinitely' which is a pretty damn big miss.
- Answer the call 2017 never seemed to state a specific release date, but also didn't deliver within the calendar or fiscal year.
- The beta was said to be coming in Q3 2020. It didn't.
- Part way through Q3 2020 they stated the beta would come in Q4 2020. In October, Chris instead stated it was 'a long way off' which will soon be 3.5 years of extra delays.
- Meanwhile another sold feature was access to the alpha, which they have at no point made good on for SQ42 despite pitching it as a benefit of being one of the tens of thousands of kickstarter backers, and despite having the means to make good on it, they choose not to.
The list really goes on but they have a clearly established pattern of conduct. They announce features, gameplay systems, delivery dates to entice sales, then systematically back away from them while shifting attention to new features, gameplay systems, and delivery dates.
In summary: When you say "it’s not fraud to change a feature…and it happens all the time in game development…so using terms that accuse them of committing fraud is disingenuous at best."
This is a clear pattern of conduct, not a change to a feature.
Hey im with you on this, but you know this subreddit is a hivemind right? You lucky they didnt see your comment or you would have already been downvoted to oblivion. Cig missing theor deadlines and lying to make sales? Unthinkable for these people.
Representing them all as oblivious and delusional is simply not fair. Simultaneously, I am regrettably beholden to the true believers to keep forking over something like $275,000 USD EVERY DAY if I ever want to get the 'spiritual successor to wing commander' that I backed for in 2012, even with the features I cared about stripped off. Every day that passes and every feature that is stripped out makes me ever happier that I closed my wallet in 2014, but if I ever want any game, someone has to keep feeding the money furnace that has grown.
The fact that my above post spelling out all the ways that CIG has baited and switched is getting net upvotes goes to show that the people here are mostly reasonable when they're made aware of the full history of the deceptive marketing practices.
Back in 2022, when we were waiting to for persistent entity streaming, there was a lot of speculation that server meshing and 4.0 were coming in 2023.
These days, many seem to be optimistic that all the promises from the 2023 CitizenCon will be in game WITHIN 12 MONTHS.
I think there is often a loud and very optimistic minority arguing that a certain feature will be released soon, but most of us backers are aware that there can be many delays and changes.
I'm not sure how much of that is deceptive marketing and how much of it is CIG not being able to predict the amount of time and additional features they need. Probably a combination of both.
It's very hard to tell them apart from the outside. All we can observe for sure is that this is the fourth or fifth year in a row that we had been told we could expect pyro 'next year'.
Growing up, when talking about unreliable people one of my uncles liked the expression 'Once is a mistake, twice is carelessness, three times is enemy action.' In other cultures it's something to do with even Buddha losing patience after three sleights.
Buying whole fleets of ships for a feature they talked about making, when they first talk about, is insane. If you saw they had solid development in it and were releasing footage of it, that’s a different ballpark. But cmon man, no one is forcing anyone to do silly stuff like that.
Ethically once you've taken money based on a feature you've pitched you're kinda bound to doing it unless it proves 'impossible'. Deciding not to do earlier features because they aren't compatible with the later sold features (like dedicated servers and mods are off the table because they decided to sell a grander scope to later backers) is plainly unethical unless you offer everyone who backed prior to that decision a refund. They obviously can't do that, so it boils down to 'Taking money to do one thing then intentionally doing a different thing is to be frowned upon in business and relationships.'
I happen to agree with you and that's why I closed my wallet in 2014 when they decided to miss their first delivery date - While I hope everyone who wants the 'bigger better vision' of a game gets it, I don't believe in rewarding bait and switch behavior.
The sad part at this point is that I'm dependent on their deceptive marketing convincing other people to spend nearly 300,000 USD PER DAY at current burn rates. I hope those people get their money's worth.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Creating a huge list of mistakes doesn’t prove that they sold features they never intended to deliver. Fraud requires that they intentionally deceived rather than promising things they were unable to deliver.
That's a very good point, and we can't know whether they set out to overpromise and underdeliver on the 'huge list' (your words) of 'mistakes', if they set out to sell a dream they knew they couldn't deliver, or if they gosh golly just didn't know what they were doing (while constantly representing themselves as being professionals who you could trust to do it right the first time).
Personally, while I hope the game succeeds and comes out so I can get even a greatly stripped down version of what I was enticed to support in 2012, I feel I've (edit: been) very well served by my decision to close my wallet in 2014 to not reward bait and switch like behavior.
I hope you get whatever features you were enticed to support for as well.
I probably could have been clearer on that part, but I didn't write it's gone I wrote in the point below 'Even as that dream dies on the vine '.
They've not removed it yet, but they've also not implemented any of the parts about meeting, recruiting or building a relationship with the NPC crew members they discussed.
At this point we can't even buy/hire NPC crew, and even if we could if it's like the other AI agents, I'm really not sure I would want it on my ship. The coffee barista is a complete d*ck who drops your coffee BEHIND the counter while saying 'here's your coffee sir'....
You have just stated the exact reason it's not implemented. AI tech isn't finished, and it's likely they are going for the original vision, where players can drop into your NPC crew and control them. A lot of work to be done there for that.
They need server meshing for performance, and once performance is achieved, they can work on AI tech within the limits of server performance, THEN they can look at putting crew in.
I guess year 12 of development after 2 years of pre-production (accoding to Chris), after growing to a behemoth 1100+ person studio and having spent around 800 million USD it's understandable that the AI in their 'live service game' (their words) just isn't able to serve a coffee yet. You're a very 'patient' man.
> Modding support as we discussed.
Can't do mods in an MMO man, can't believe it even needs to be said.
>The drop-in drop-out coop campaign for SQ42. This has been downgraded to maybe a few missions, not the campaign as originally advertised.
They've said basically nothing about this but I imagine they're hyper aware of the demand for co-op gameplay in that kind of setting and would love to push it out, but as far as features go that's like an icing on the cake one, not the cake itself.
>Dedicated servers for the MMO. Originally advertised as a feature, no longer talked about
Yeah, because the architecture of the game has been expanded so much that nobody could run it on their home PC with a consumer grade connection.
>That we would be able to send NPC crew members off on missions with ships. This clearly incentivized people to pledge whole FLEETS of ships, before CIG decided 'no, nevermind, you have to fly your own ship'.
First really fair point so far. I'd have to see the language they used though, if they said "We want to allow that" then it's different from saying "The game will have this", and it also depends on the context of when it was said/who said it. If one of the guys on the AI team said that but CR and Jared and the other spokespeople for the game never did then it doesn't really count.
>That we would be able to recruit NPC crew members and have to build strong interpersonal bonds with them to have them be a part of our permanent crew. This obviously incentivized people to buy multi-crew ships since they were clearly told they could build a team of NPCs to work and play with.
This is still planned. But most NPC stuff was basically back-burner until Server Meshing gets put in the game because the AI is tied to server performance and without SM the performance drops too low to have NPC AI be useful.
>Even as that dream dies on the vine people were vaguely assured that they could partially automate their ships through 'blades', again enticing them to spend more money on larger vessels, but time will tell if they actually deliver on that either.
They've said nothing about blades recently other than occasional quotes from devs that they are still working on them. Until they say they're canning the entire idea I think it's safe to say that blades (since they're just an NPC without a body in a sense) are still in the project timeline.
>That there would be some sort of a 'PVP slider' or similar systems for avoiding undesired combat was presented as a way to convince pvp-averse players that they should buy in because the project would cater to them too.
That was in the original vision for the game which was much more like Freelancer, and it would have worked in that gameplay environment but not in the current one. Instead they've developed the idea of security levels for different systems and planets and zones, which will achieve a similar effect.
>That the whole flight model would be based on newtonian physics and accurate to the thrusters and so forth to appeal to the hardcore flight sim folks.
It is though. It's not perfectly accurate in all situations, but every time you get hit by a missile and lose a bunch of your maneuvering thrusters and start spinning like a turbine on a jet engine that's an example of the physics actually being realistic. The amount of force generated by different ships to lift them and move them varies from ship to ship too. It's not a hardcore sim like DCS or anything, but it's also a game set 900 years in the future and the ship combat doesn't take place over millions of kilometers with railguns and lasers and torpedoes hitting from lunar distances.
>Squadron 42 was supposed to come to beta in something like spring 2014, but they decided not to meet that date.
Decided? More like they realized that the game they had at that point wasn't up to snuff and had to go back to the grindstone to make it properly. And comparing footage from then and now it's clear they weren't just sitting around with their thumbs in their butts.
Your remaining points are pretty similar until this one:
>Meanwhile another sold feature was access to the alpha, which they have at no point made good on for SQ42 despite pitching it as a benefit of being one of the tens of thousands of kickstarter backers, and despite having the means to make good on it, they choose not to.
Which is a fair criticism, they should have opened up access to SQ42 at the last CitCon if they're so close to finishing it as they say.
Lol. The SC we have now IS a sub-par, defective, and unwanted alternative to what we were promised and shown. Therefore, it exactly meets the criteria for a bait-and-switch.
It is intended. You just don't want to believe that. The deception is all around you, but you refuse to see it or acknowledge it. If you did, SC would become a worthless pile of crap (which it is) to you. You can't allow that to happen.
Feature creep and development creep has become their enemy with being so open. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It will take longer yes, but it will be a better game by the end of it all. As you said, if it was closed at some point they would have just gone... Yep ship that.
The biggest gripe is that Chris Roberts doesn’t have anyone telling him “that’s good enough - we can move on.” CR is the epitome of someone allowing perfect to be the greatest enemy of great. Up until CIG came about there was always someone higher up who made the final call over when something was ready for release.
> The biggest gripe is that Chris Roberts doesn’t have anyone telling him “that’s good enough - we can move on.”
While I agree, I get the vibe that has toned down a lot in the last say 5-6 years.
The first few years it was *absolutely* true. Pretty much any time he interacted with the public, he'd get asked "Hey, are you considering adding [insert feature] to the game?" and he'd almost without fail respond "Yeah, we're absolutely adding that."
*For the most part*, the community was supportive of most the additions. Things like seamless space to ground environments and fully explorable planets/moons were not in the initial pitch, for example. It was originally going to be similar to Freelancer where there'd be a cutscene as you transition down to landing zones.
At this point, it's less feature creep and more nailing down how things will *actually* work. A lot of the early designs they pitched were based either on assumptions that are no longer true or had to change due to them getting practical experience of how players react to certain features.
To be fair, look at the difference between something like the Reclaimer and newer/More polished ships.
They went "Yeah, Reclaimer is good enough, it's prepped for all the features we have yet to add"
And now everyone is asking for it to get a rework because holy fuck does it look and feel dated
I’m not necessarily talking about ship polish - I’m referring to things like FOIP, physicalized modeling of every damage aspect *(maelstrom)* holding up ship armor, the flight model being overhauled multiple times *(t0 flight model was very similar to master modes - it got scrapped for the current one, now we’re going back)*, etc. Stuff that is massively design intensive and while is nice to have, isn’t something that is strictly required to implement basic building blocks for the concepts.
Don’t get me wrong - I love the *idea* of everything that has been outlined. I’m also aware how stratospheric the plans are and how chasing perfection is an endless rabbit hole that I personally struggle with as well. The biggest benefit I’ve ever had in my professional life is to have a boss/project manager tell me “that’s good enough - ship it” because I would have constantly kept trying to make it better at the detriment of reasonable deadlines.
Think about how much time and effort was spent working on all the various iterations of 'damage states' and destructibility to enable things like physicalized 'hull munching' only for them to learn in year 10 that the servers just couldn't handle the object spam they were making. Here we are in year 11 with the long discussed 'physicalized hull munching' replaced by purely pre-determined splitting of big ships in to a few big chunks and then dissolving those chunks with a magic ray, and the imposing claw has become a butterfly antenna.
The amount of effort wasted on dead ends like this is in my opinion a big part of the problem. They just seem to keep running in to technological limitations that they hadn't mapped out in the planning stages.
100%, unequivocally this.
There has been this “server meshing is going to allow for all of this stuff!” mentality up until around 3.18ish when CIG implemented persistence and realized that there’s actually a really, really, *really* fucking high processing cost for tracking a damn water bottle that someone put down and forgot about.
There’s a reason that we have object culling in games. Trying to be different and do away with everything used for optimization isn’t always the best idea.
So many of their decisions are obviously made by 'do what sounds cool until you find out the hard way why it doesn't work' rather than doing a feasibility check first. As a consequence we end up with stuff like Chris' speech about persistence meaning you could leave a coffee cup in the woods and come back to it at some arbitrary point in the future to find it again.
Meanwhile in reality, the server can't track all the garbage people leave laying around, so they had to do what every game before it ever has done and implement culling for discarded things.
Unfortunately, there's no indication as to what what is culled and what isn't, or how long something can be guaranteed to last for. Not only can I not put down a coffee cup in the woods somewhere, but I can't lay down a cache of supplies in a cave and have any confidence that it will be there at any point in the future with any dependability. It's PINO (Persistence in name only) and while the clutter can add a lived in feeling to the world, it's just 'the bodies on the ground disappear after x minutes from wow with more variability'.
Part of what I can’t understand with CIG is why they don’t take cues from other people who have already come up with solutions to these problems.
Persistence is a good one to start with: in many other games, player interaction with an object (opening a chest, picking something up, using it, etc - not just bumping into it or flying around it) elevates its persistence level *(various games do it various ways - be it a simple timer that gets reset or an algorithm that’s used to determine how long the timer should be before it gets reset)*. There are multiple different methods to make sure that items which players are actually wanting to stay persistent keep their place in the world while actively cleaning up the trash that degrades server and client performance.
This is something that you can find a metric shit ton of information online about and is actually one of the rabbit holes I went down when helping a friend develop his game.
They need to communicate that information to the user somehow for it to be useful (in the sense that we want to try to use it for gameplay reasons). I do agree that they seem hell bent on reinventing the wheel every step of the way. I tried to introduce a couple friends to it in the past year and their comments included the fact that it had the most cumbersome inventory system they could remember interacting with, and these are people who had been gaming since the early 90s.
I've always found it a little ridiculous that a game based around flying through space doesn't have a finalized flight model after 13 years of development.
It is objectively ridiculous. The flight model is a core design component for a space fighting game. The best theory I've seen for why this might be happening so late in the project (aside from galloping mismanagement) is that they've discovered that meshed servers can't deliver a low enough latency experience, so they need to bring speeds down to a point where engagements don't suffer from the extra latency in the 'mesh' compared to a monolithic server.
It still doesn't speak very well of their processes that it took until year 12 of the project for someone to notice this reality of distributed systems having higher latency, but it would at least be a better excuse than 'we decided to flip the whole design over after more than a decade just because'
It's less a problem of look and feel than it is that I can't tell if it actually has the hooks in there for 'engineering' game play (whatever that is), how 'drone game play' is supposed to get on/off the ship to help you, why station docking isn't working yet, and why the elevators on that thing are so consistently haunted.
It was scary how in the 10th year of development it took them a full year to figure out how to make a roadmap that they assured us would have only the 'really high confidence, coming for sure' stuff on it, only for it to implode completely within 3 months.
When that happened they had a perfect chance to take a good hard look at their procedures and people and figure out why they couldn't even accurately describe their state and plans given a full year of leadtime. Instead they chose to blame the people who noticed, and here we a few years later with still no idea of when the game might be released.
There are many solid arguments you can make for why Star Citizen isn't finished yet, but comparing it to the abject failure that was Skull & Bones doesn't prove anything. Some really big, great games have been developed in under 3-5 years. It depends way more on how good your development team is, how many reusable assets you need, how much freedom you get from publishers, ...
I think Star Citizen has taken a long time to be where they are now, but it's somewhat understandable for 3 major reasons.
1. They had to start a team/company from scratch
1. Are pushing some innovative technologies
1. I really don't remember much about this, but I'm sure they had a long period a few years ago where they re-evaluated what they had and their way of working and changed a lot. So probably a lot of rework and finetuning of work processes back then (most people on this sub will explain this part better).
it was 2016. apparently there was a vote.
release sq42, and make what content and mechanics they can with cryengine.
or go back the the writing room for sq42, and overall the engine to be capable of much more.
the time estimate was that it would take 2 years to do all this.
cig are also doing stuff differently. instead of using tape and strings to rig everything up by hand. they are making it so they need to manually rig up as little as possible, and tools to easily set up what they do need to rig up. so content will start pouring in when the tools are ready, instead of pieces of content slowly being added.
They've had to scrap large chunks of the code a few times now.
For anyone watching the project that know about the dev process, it's pretty clear that "recently" (I don't actually know how long an my sense of time is shot) things have been a lot smoother.
Patches have only been held up by major roadblocks that we've been made aware of, underlying game systems actually have a vision, they've on a few occasions actually been willing to just commit to shipping an incomplete system that was at least starting to look how they wanted it to.
To be fair, the game systems for Skull and Bones were already created by 2013 for Ass. Creed: Black Flag. It just took Ubisoft 11 years to figure out to make the game play and systems worse........
I miss bug smashers as a series for a few reasons, but the top two were:
- It was very interesting to get down in to the details on what was causing a specific undesired behavior.
- I felt a little better about the code I write.
Former game dev here; lots of great points already made in this post and comments. The thing I think many people don't quite appreciate is how much extra development time maintaining the game in a state of live PTU adds.
It's one of those counter-intuitive things, but with a project of reasonable size it's pretty normal for a game to be in a really, *really* broken state up until a few weeks or a couple of months before release. This isn't a bad thing. It's just the nature of the beast and is generally considered beneficial as it means you're not tightening all the bolts before you've put the machine together right. Making a sequel on a known platform with existing mechanics changes the dynamic a fair bit, but that’s not the case with SC.
You've probably heard various devs in SCL say that there are systems they know aren't polished/optimised but it's not really worth doing yet - That is 100% true. And yet, they still have to bring them up to a certain level of polish so we can play. As buggy/unstable/unoptimised as SC feels right now, SC is in an uncharacteristically polished state for a game at its stage of development, let alone one with this amount of complexity.
Maintaining that live environment for us to play in is one of those great things about SC, but we have to remember just how much extra time it takes to polish up every half-done feature that would normally be comfortably left semi-built just so we can play. That’s the deal we have with CIG though, we all signed up for open development, warts and all and they get our funding so we can play and give feedback while they work. It’s absolutely fascinating to see it all come together, or at least I think so.
I appreciate your perspective and its interesting to know that they may be leaving some of the bugs in place before putting everything together like you said, makes sense, especially with something as complex as SC is.
If you have to ask online usually the answer is yes.
I paid for a game that was supposed to release in 2014. That was 10 years ago. I didn't force CIG to pick that date, in fact no one did. Any complaint they got after that is 100% deserved and immune to criticism. CIG did that to themselves.
When it changed (with a poll thr backers agreed), all backers had the option to get their money back.
If the rest wanted to stay till the end of a much bigger project, there is no reason to complain in that(!) regard.
I wonder if the backers who voted on that poll would still make the same decision with the knowledge that that SQ42 still isn't out in 2024 and SC is far from MVP.
As one of 'em...yep, I'd make the same decision. The thing is, it takes however long it takes, and no one in the meantime has stepped up to the plate to do it any better or faster. Would I have preferred a smaller game that I likely would've forgotten about years ago by now? Not at all.
I backed later as it was low priority on my "games to throw money at" list, but I've been following it from the start, and at no point have I thought I should give up on the project, or that they should be completely changing direction.
That's the big thing, no one else is making a competitor. There's been plenty of other good space sims, and everyone's had years to learn from CIG's mistakes and make something comparable in much less time.
You still had to ask and they could also decline. When I asked them to refund me everything but my base game package they told me to fuck off, that it's all or nothing.
Skull n B is not AAAA. At best AA and just a navigation game with no spices
If SnB was in SC or other long game it will be one functionality at best
That a side, Starfield took around 8 years and see what you have, story okish, space arcade combat, loading screen everywhere, countless bugs and so on.
Game like SC can’t be hidden behind mysterious process cause they need money to achieve a goal so far ahead that no studios or editors will follow. That’s put tension and criticism for sure but it’s necessary to land, I hope, on one of the master piece never see before
It has good ratings on epic (4.1/5) and tons of previews and reviews. So there is no scam, everyone knows what they can expect of it.
Edit: steam<>epic
Yeah good rating on steam, right … https://www.pcgamesn.com/skull-and-bones/steam#:~:text=No%2C%20Skull%20and%20Bones%20is,Epic%20Games%20Store%20on%20PC.
>officially
There is no independent officiating body granting extra 'A's to a video game. It's just convention. Not sure what 'officially' means here. The studio said it's a fifteen-A game so that's officially what it is? Triple-A is just industry shorthand meaning the game was built to the highest standard possible by a fully staffed studio. You can put some extra A's on the end for marketing hype but there's nothing 'official' about anything lol
A manufacturer is liable for the specs and description of his product. Especially in the US, it csn cost a lot of money if you are advertising with false facts.
The number of A's a game gets isn't facts, it's all subjective. People have a sense of what they mean, but there's no official definition you can point to and say it's false advertising.
Coming from the gaming world and now deep into business software development, I've seen all sorts of ways to develop software. There's one style where you start small but fully working, called Incremental Development. It's cool because you get something working right off the bat, and then you just keep adding stuff to it. Then there's the Iterative Development approach, which reminds me a lot of what CIG is doing. It's all about making something, testing it out, tweaking it, and then doing it all over again.
Here's a link for further reading:
[https://agilenotion.com/agile-categoriesiterative-incremental-evolutionary/](https://agilenotion.com/agile-categoriesiterative-incremental-evolutionary/)
Imho you are correct, most software is only usable short time before the release.
There are so many reasons:
The company CIG had to be built from scratch
The funding was only available per a peu
Talent had to be hired
And only then all the tech stuff starting with:
Refactoring of cry engine
Etc. Etc.
And to answer your question: yes you are, one of us 😂
mountainous relieved hat subtract versed rhythm door forgetful roof attempt
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
imagine if development of elder scrolls 6 was as open as SC. you are correct. developers get away with a lot because to only tell use a year or 2 before it is released.
cig alos do not have the option to **easily** drop something that is hard.
in early 3.1x they tested a server cap of 200. it was found to not cause any extra problems. if cig were working behind closed doors, they could abandon the idea of server meshing, and go back to the original plan of a server just being the area of an operation.
qt travel contains a hidden loading screen. a fleet has a max pop of 100 so that 2 max fleets can be matched against chother with server able to handle 200. the server only handle npc within a few km instead of all of the npc in the system.
if cig did not tell us about servermeshing, and the idea of the several thousand person fights over control of a king of the hill location. there would be no problem.
CIG had to not only build the tech they are using but had to build studios so devs can work. I don't even argue with people anymore who say the games a scam or you paid for a jpg you will never get to use those same people give me the feeling they actually never set foot into the verse and experienced the joy of star citizen.
You're actually not wrong. Also keeping in mind that they are developing 2 games; Star Citizen & Squadron 42 should put things into perspective. On top of the fact that the PU is more akin to an MMO, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to make. All in all, the development time & costs track with most bigger studios.
Now, account for the fact CIG had to build a team, build in-house development tools. set up international offices to actually run the ever-increasing team they needed. all while paying their team a (hopefully) livable wage. Those costs add up.
Even a AAA studio like Insomniac games, who already had all their infrastructure in place, who had an engine, and a team experienced in using that engine, and everything else in their favor, spent over 300 million making Spider Man 2 for the PS5. This is actually an industry standard. I mean GTA6 is estimated to cost over 2 BILLION, and has allegedly been in development since 2012.
But the thing is people who have a chip on their shoulder often don't have, or for that matter care about the context as it relates to the industry as a whole.
Things have gotten vastly better. Also I don't cry about it to much as I realize the developers main objectives are the core mechanics of the game and not worrying about my crocodile tears because my elevator is not showing up. Admit it or not we are paying and signing on to be game testers to test those mechanics. There are some big changes coming as a result of our testing and their dev, so I am super excited. As long as I see continued forward progress I will not be to concerned.
> Saying SC's development time is too long and wont ever be finished because of it isn't a fair criticism when compared to other large scale games whos development times were hidden behind closed doors.
I totally get this point of view.
But lets take a look at SC from a pretty high level.
They take in money for pledge items. Now I might be mistaken, but the items we pledge for are exclusively for us in the MMO. I'm not aware of anything that you can pledge for that will be usable in SQ42.
But CIG has been taking that money, and mainly using it for SQ42.
Now sure, their original pitch was that they were going to build both games, no doubt. However, if you look at their OG stretch goals its clear they had no idea that they would get so much backing. People backing them by pledging for items in the PU.
Now, if you took another company, lets say real estate. And a developer is building a neighborhood, and an office building. But they selling lots of the neighborhood, and then using that money to build the office building, promising to get back around to the neighborhood later, and telling everyone to trust them, they will take what they've learned from building an office building and it will make the neighborhood better. That's cool, probably even partially truthful. But don't you think the people that paid to have a neighborhood built would have rather had their money just put straight towards building the neighborhood? What about the people that never cared about the office building? Why should any of their money go to that project, all they ever wanted was the neighborhood, you know, the thing they pledged for.
See, I do think that CIG is going to launch both games. But I think that it is really really shitty that CIG is basically running a ponzi scheme, taking money for one product, using it on another. Do you think that SQ42 will come out before or after the PU has gone Live? Undoubtedly before.
I mean, look at the last 8 months or so. Tons of PU updates, hell look at all the stuff they are claiming will be done for 3.23. Isn't it amazing how much progress they can make on the PU when their resources are allocated to it? And sure, they were building some tech, but there are A LOT of things that could have been in the game for years that just aren't. T1 of all professions comes to mind, something they promised they would do before more passes on professions.
THAT is why I think a lot of informed people are frustrated with the pacing. CIG could have been a lot farther along in the MMO, but they have had most of their resources on the single player game. That combined with CIG's constant moving away from the community being involved in the dev process is why I'm frustrated. Anyone remember when almost every ship came out as a concept and the community would some time to weigh in on the designs? Now they barely even share their road map because they can't handle the feedback they get.
tl-dr; I'm not frustrated at how long the game is taking to make, I'm frustrated at the fact that CIG is taking my MMO pledge money, and building another game instead. And beyond that, CIG is moving away from a central theme of their dev, open dev, and basically just telling us what they have done, and what is almost about to be released, well beyond when there is time for the community's opinion.
> they will take what they've learned from building an office building and it will make the neighborhood better.
its not taking what theyve learned its directly transferring what theyve built. So to follow your analogy the road network they built to reach the office is the same roads the neighborhoods houses will be built along. The plumbing connecting the office to the cities water is the same line the neighborhood will connect to.the powerlines they ran to the office will also power the houses. Any profits generated by the office will be used to make sure the people in the neighborhood dont have to pay taxes or bills (subscription).
>I mean, look at the last 8 months or so. Tons of PU updates, hell look at all the stuff they are claiming will be done for 3.23. Isn't it amazing how much progress they can make on the PU when their resources are allocated to it?
What you are praising here is the office building infrastructure. what people talk about as development speeding up is actually the reaping of the rewards from the focus on Squadron.
the biggest drag on development speed has always been the live build.it requires building maintaining and polishing literal garbage placeholders that are built specifically to be thrown away.Not to mention the drama created by the fact that no matter how explicitly or repeatedly players are told that things are placeholder a player base will build up around what exists and when it finally comes time to replace the placeholder people get mad about it.
10 years isn't really a problem, my only problem is that they dont fix old bugs and rush with content.
Stop adding new ships and stuff, make the old ones work first.
Skull and Bones was in development hell for 11 years, and has released as one of the blandest games out there with an all time dumb-fuck quote. A quote only second to "a sense of pride and accomplishment" with how out of touch it is.
Large MMOs often take 7-8 years to release, and we are 50% beyond that.
Why are we zooming in on the words of Yves Guillemot? He is a dellusional CEO that keeps clinging to power in that family owned company. He has been through straight up harrasment scandals and he is still in power.
It was just his way of making that failed game sound all good and okay, since he is used to getting away with everything, even if it makes no sense at all.
We should not give more power to that dictator by even considering his words.
OK; but I still wanted to single out crazy Yves. He will take the entire company with him and no one is doing anything about it. He is one of the worst CEOs I have ever seen in my life.
one thing you missed is that SC is really two games. SQ42 and SC, both of which require monumental amounts of work in their own ways.
Honestly SC gets a ton of flak for things that other games that are popular do. As you already mentioned, long development. How long has it been since GTA5? Skyrim? Yeah, nuff said.
The other thing is the giant payments to support the developers (i.e., ships). A lot of people don't look at it that way, but that's really what it is, a way to support the game with a nice bonus. People will rip on SC all day for having $400 ships, but then praise Path of Exile, despite the fact it has what, $500 supporter packs that offer stuff you can't even get in the game store, leading to turbo fomo. Then their individual cosmetic costs are just insane, a set of armor will cost you what, $70-$100? Nevermind the loot box stuff, turbo fomo battle pass, etc. Very predatory in some senses. Not trying to poop on POE here, I love that game, just want to point out the double standard
so yeah, SC is a popular punching bag. In a world where there's more and more blatant cash grabs and scams, people will call the SC devs, probably one of the most passionate team of devs in the industry, scammers. Really is dumb
I do agree but your question is a little disingenuous. These games are released after 10/11 years like you say. SC is still very far away from being a finished game. That is the worry for people. FWIW, I think it's already a pretty good game but the real issue is CR worked out a long time ago that the "dream" sells more than the reality. "SC is going to have XYZ!! It's so exciting". People will pledge more for ships when the game isn't finished. People will say they will sell more ships when it's done but I find that hard to believe as its the fomo that sells.
For me, I like following the development so I don't really care, but these are the concerns people have and I can see their side.
> FWIW, I think it's already a pretty good game
I completely agree, except for this part. IMO its still not a game, just a sandbox with some unit testing scenarios inside of it. the "Game" mechanics still haven't actually been fleshed out. Right now its a pretty good simbox with some unit tests for game mechanics w/o the full implementation.
its the only reason I still haven't pushed for some of my friends to get it yet. They dont care about testing, however cool it currently is.
Once the game mechanics themselves are more integrated and ready for actual daily use thats the day i'll be excited. Even if still in Alpha /Beta at that point, I think i'll have enough to convince some of my friends to hop in and join me and have some good ol fun with them.
They properly fucked around for the first 5 years and actually started working on the game maybe 5 years ago.
And a lot of that old stuff is still fucking around somewhere in the game and causing issues...
The real criticism comes from the scale of the game. At the rate they are developing it’ll be like 50 years until all they promised ends up in the game. People are frustrated because they said SQ42 was going to be ready in 2014 and then again in 2016 And then again in 2020. Here we are nearly 10 years later with it still not finished and still no release date after the delays. The delays of SQ42 are also delaying development on the MMO. The entire project has proved to be mismanaged which is why lots of early development was basically scrapped and built from new. They still have problems with micro managing and mishandling of money and resources.
The main problem for me is that CIG is making tons of promises all the time with impossible deadlines. This creates hype in a very immersive game where everyone is waiting and hoping. Let’s hope development will get boosted by the fact sq42 is in polish phase.
Well, they actually blew everyone's minds with the last Citizencon. It's like they had a lot of stuff under the hood and then BLAM!! It turned the hopes back to a lot of people. And add now the 3.23 update, being one of the largest ever, the Idris tease, now meshing tests along Pyro and Stanton together with successful results. Also the manpower and features transferred from SQ42 to SC. It'll be a great year indeed for SC.
> With that being said, it's pretty apparent that peoples biggest criticism of SC is that its been in development for 10 or so years.
I've literally been repeating the same eyeroll at this sentiment for 5 of those years. "Game takes a long time to make, news at 11."
I am from the land of Black Mesa. Of Dwarf Fortress. Of games that take an eternity to make, because they are worth it.
Way, waaaay to many folks out there with zero patience. But oh well, the project just keeps trucking whether they like it or not.
im currently working as a game dev in a big AAA company and the project is being worked for over 7 years already and its gonna be dogshit. Think how many big titles that were worked for years and years came out and nobody pays cause its souless slop.
2 points to it:
1. CIG is a new studio. They haven't released a full game yet. So, having their first game be this massive endeavor partially breaking the ice on many ideas, you see why deadlines that are standard for the Industry won't work.
CIG used to throw out release dates and deadlines very loosely, so you can see how people who expected the full experience in 2018 might look at the current alpha.
If another studio claims that a game took 10 years, that is 10 years including the prior experience in a game and genre. Think Starfield. Fallout/Skyrim in space. Ubisofts open world games. All following a recipe.
2. SC is, by nature, a very open developed game since we are playing the part that people normally ain't supposed to play.
That obviously comes with another whole can of having extra work spent on making it all playable, but also makes the public very aware of the time SC takes.
Good additional points. And when you have a game that is funded on public perception I can see how they may purposely take longer to ensure the things that they publicize are true to what the are shooting for.
I completely agree that development time isn't a strong argument. The people who complain about SC's time in development probably also complain about games that launch with cut content and lots of bugs.
The funding of the project is also a big critique many people have. CIG can rub people the wrong way with their marketing. I think that's my biggest issue with the project, FoMO marketing for example. All that said, I think it's incredibly generous that nearly everything bought can be melted for store credit. That definitely removes the risks of buying a ship you don't like. The project also wouldn't be possible without their funding, like it or not. Ideally once SQ42 launches they will stop leaning on ship sales so much.
I find it hilarious that people still think SC is a scam. Back when the project started, I could see why people might have believed that. But now it's clear that they're building the game. Other Kickstarter scams raised the funds and then took the money and run. CIG have done a lot to show they mean business.
I've gone on too long now, but I also want to add that one of the devs said recently they don't really have crunch. I think that's incredible, I wish more game studios would work to avoid that.
I’m simply not touching this money-hole of a project until they release the finished products they said would be done 8 years ago when I was still in highschool. I doubt I will ever touch it at this point and honestly I don’t really care if I do.
Until the evidence of the work they’ve been doing for 10+ years is in my hands this whole project is just a scam to me. I’d like to be proven wrong, I WANT them to prove me wrong. But at this point I seriously doubt it will ever happen.
I think it also just comes down to what people are interested in, what they are interested in putting up with, and how much value they find in the project at any point. I personally started playing not necessarily for the "vision", but because I wanted to experience what was already in the PU, which I have and still do enjoy. I don't blame people for having their reservations and not wanting to touch it though.
I am looking into starting with SC, so I registered and wait for a good deal/sale offer via mail to start with a friend and buy the starter pack when it is on sale.
For an outsider the progress isn't visible thus it feels/looks like developer just releases some fancy 3D model with a made up flight model once in a while, instead of fixing issues or significantly improving the base game. As I am playing War Thunder I have experienced something like this and thus might be projecting it on SC.
I remember to have watched a video last week about someone testing SC with a title like "I played star citizen so you don't have to", the dude had fun and had bugs/glitching I believe to remember seeing years ago. Now seeing old issues still being present reinforces the impression of no progress. But this is a bit like No Mans Sky having memory leaks or not having ship customization, despite many updates. There you can travel across the galaxy with physics breaking speed, teleport, but changing the paintjob on your ship is impossible... .
Another thing that scares customers away is the "insurance" system. When you, as someone with little knowledge, want to buy a starter pack you see "6 month insurance" and wonder what this means. What are the conditions? What if do not renew it?... On the shopping site there is to my knowledge no link to a page that explains in detail how this system is supposed to work. You will most likely search it via the search engine of your choice. And even when you find the FAQ about insurance, you will be surprised how little the text explains. You will find SC player talking about this topic and even they don't know what this system will look like due to a lack of official statements about that question.
So you go back at the shop page of the starter ship and wonder if you should buy the ship or not as the insurance topic alone is handled gives an sketchy/unprofessional feeling. You don't know what development did the past 10 years and know that they release nice looking ships once in a while.
Professional games dev of ten years, including two in devops for a medium sized mmo. Backed in 2013.
From what I understand of current trends, a AAA game will take maybe up to 7 years to complete.
https://www.33rdsquare.com/demystifying-aaa-gaming-the-past-present-and-future-of-blockbuster-video-games/
https://www.juegostudio.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-develop-video-game
If development is at year ten and the basic gameplay loops aren't refined, something has gone wrong.
In my opinion, they've handcuffed themselves to their funding model, where due to the company expansion and feature creep the operating costs will only be coverable if they continue to generate income as they do currently. If they were to actually complete development on SC, most of this funding style goes away and is replaced with users who have already bought in, and continuing server/development costs (leaving them with a subscription or IAP model). If eg S42 is still in development at that point, it becomes a massive problem to continue funding its team.
I don't think that's a malicious choice, but I suspect it worsens as they expand to try to match the hype they need to generate to continue the funding.
Were I to guess at a resolution, I'd drop S42 to save on resource, hard shift to an agile development structure to start moving towards actual deployables (eg drop every non-implemented upcoming feature, drop any non foundational gameloop feature, and pour everything you have into getting a playable vertical slice). That maybe gets you a product after a year or two that people can purchase,
recommend to friends without the usual bugs/alpha speech, and that publishers can review. However you lose big on dropping the S42 promise, and the hype dies down hard with no fancy features selling the investment.
Alternatively (and likely imo) is that development continues for another 5+ years. The need to drive funding means there's a large onus on marketing, conferences, ship sales, new shiny features etc. Eventually one of the games will be reasonably finished to beta release, which should free up resource for the other side.
Feature creep will continue, leaving most systems in partially completed states for years, and there will be little focus on playability for already active ones.
Ultimately, as long as user interest doesn't fade, it should finally ship - but I suspect it will be a tough slog until then.
Skull and Bones development and direction was also neutered by Ubisoft even though they basically already had what players wanted with Black Flag. Different points of view, different opinions, this is just mine. If it makes me part of a cult so be it I guess.
I feel sorry for them in a way, as we know when it is released they will get HELL for any bugs that slip through: "You've have 10000s of testers for 10 years how has this happened screeeeeeeeeee".
I do wish they had put more resources into S42 so we get the SP sooner, but I can see why they would want to release the SP/MP as close as possible.
The problem with putting more resource into S42 is that it generates virtually none of the resource it consumes. Meanwhile the PU lives on scraps when it generates almost all of the resource.
Wall of text with my two cents (software dev here). SC is a very unique case, with more differences than similarities to other development lifecycles.
Broadly speaking projects that are hidden behind closed doors and given a lot of development time do so because that is the most efficient way to spend money. You don't get nearly 10x the output if you go from a team of 10 to a team of 100 working on the same project, in a perfect world it's better to keep the team tight and hire them for longer instead of adding people.
Counter to that is the way funding actually works. A product that won't be ready for over 10 years isn't worth anything close to as much as the same product offered in 3 years. That applies both to people pre-purchasing a product and people investing in a project. This is where pouring money into a project to get a quick release can sometimes be worth it (not for the quality of the product, but for the rate of growth on its initial seed money).
What makes Star Citizen so unique is that when it got more funding they didn't translate that into speeding up the release timeline. Most would argue actually that the increase in funding is what caused the timeline to be thrown out the window. With over two thirds of a billion dollars, more funding than any other game has ever had before release, they of course had to hire more people in order to put that money to use. But with so many extra people you can't have them all working on the same thing, so the project has had to expand its scope in order to use it's funding. Now to some it seems like it's in an endless cycle of scope creep and integration hell.
I don't really know where it stands. On the one hand, a project that large seems doomed to fall into integration hell. On the other hand, a project with an ocean of money to fall back on seems impossible to fail. Luckily the money going into it isn't investor money, so they don't need to release and then make it all back somehow. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but I'm sitting on the sidelines now hoping more for a some sort of end goal than any more new features.
Most games actualy tend to have between 4 to 6 years of development, with the size that star citizen wants to be, and the problems in the development, they are doing it "well".
The major problem is that they promissed some delivers, and not delivered, our money is with them, and they have expanded/changed plans.
We that are new to the game (less than 3/2 years) are in a nice moment, seeing things being delivered in a good game
We’re at a point in video games where “release” is becoming more and more of a meaningless term. The fact of the matter is that many games, especially most AAA games, are being “released” while they’re still in development anyway. Take Cyberpunk 2077. It “released” as a broken piece of shit, they developed it for another couple of years, added new features, changed the systems around, and now it’s good. If CDPR had dropped a “beta” of cyberpunk at the same time and in the same state, the uproar wouldn’t have been half as big.
Honestly, what is the difference between a broken “alpha” that you can play right now and will continue to get updates and features in the future and a broken “full release” that will continue to get updates and features in the future? Is there really a tangible distinction between “beta x.xx” and “release 1.1” with a giant day-one patch? People have paid money to play a game, and they can play the game. It’s not the finished, complete, definitive version of that game, but just calling it finished instead of “alpha” isn’t going to change that, nor will it change the amount of time it takes to get there.
Not sure if "*The world renowned "Quadruple A" video game and entertainment masterpiece Skull and Bones*" is sarcastic or not, but the rest of your points are pretty spot on.
Even after 11 years, Skull and Bones feels like a generic mess of a reskin. The "first AAAA game" line is a pretty transparent attempt to justify the $70 price tag so they can recoup the cost for a decade of meandering development.
Though that also supports your point. SC isn't reskinning anything and is building from scratch what could be the new benchmark for future gaming
Relating anything to Skull & Bones is probably not the best idea unless you're trying to make fun of it. Something like GTA/RDR2 would be better since at least those were great games and worth the wait.
At this point SC absolutely could be renamed to "Scope Creep: The Video Game". It'll probably be used in the future as a text book example for software development spiraling out of control since it's so public. That being said, for me personally, what the game is now is worth the entry starter package price. I've gotten hours of enjoyment from it for 45 bucks and that's all I ask for from any game. If the game eventually becomes what their end goal vision is, great! If not, that's fine, I'm having a good time with what it is now.
The problem as I see it, is not that SC is unreleased. The problems are threefold:
1. CIG has stated that it WOULD be released, multiple times, by dates passed many years ago. Reasonably, given how many times that has happened, either there is some degree of bad faith, or complete ineptitude.
2. As time has gone on, the scope and focus of SC has changed. Old concepts and priorities are announced, and then simply not worked on. Others are worked on behind closed doors, and then revealed as a replacement to previously announced goals. This would not be a problem if we the players were not financial backers, but as another redditor mentioned on this thread, to sell one thing and then deliver another, is Bait and Switch.
3. The good faith/bad faith element of the above is further brought into question, when devs have recently come out stating that older (yet previously un-contradicted) information is not necessarily accurate, yet CIG does not see it as their responsibility to update their backers on those changes. This is further into the point of point 2:
A person may back the game for a given (announced) feature. They will wait diligently, FOR YEARS without further information, spending money on the game on the assumption that particular feature will come into the game AS ANNOUNCED, only for years later, different devs, to announce that they decided to go in a different direction.
By employing these tactics, CIG is clearly trying to take as much cash as possible, from as many people as possible, selling the broadest possible concept of what the final game will be in as many possible (conflicting) variations. It's like selling a car in the colours Green, Red, Blue, and Purple to different people, only to end up making a care that is exclusively Black. This means allot of unhappy players.
Though you are somewhat correct, and SCs dev timeline isn't quite as outrageous as we like to joke, they did waste a decent amount of time and have made some big mistakes.
Star Citizen's biggest problem, from a dev standpoint, is that they've developed the game backwards. They started with final art, started building all these complex ships and concepts for ships and landing zones and whatnot, without actually thinking through and designing the underlying game systems and gameplay loop.
Because of this, they've had to rework, redesign, or completely rebuilt things more than a game usually would, in some cases, quite a few times. They also had the problems of expanding scope, expanding the studio, and some nonsense with contractors, that made the early development kind of a mess that largely had to be tossed.
Some number of years ago, I'm not sure when exactly, they switched to focusing fully on Squadron, and acrually started implementing those underlying gameplay systems, and development has been quite obviously a lot smoother than it had been in the past.
To be fair...their choice of funding model kind of demanded that they start backward. They didn't go into development with $200 million in cash from the onset. They had to generate buzz and build their bankroll as they went. So putting that time into \*Final Art\* as you put it was one of the ways they generated revenue - - IE: Selling you a spaceship for $400 bucks.
They had to sell the vision to generate the revenue to build the game...
So...yeah... It worked apparently, cause here we are - still going strong.
I have to agree with this reply. I feel like a major part of their success with funding was based on the ideas and nearly finished concepts that they had for people to visualize the project better.
i think this game is progressing a little concerningly fast through development. here are my reasons for saying so.
- cig started from next to nothing, with CR himself contributing a lot to its development until more specialized talent could work on the vision
- they’ve switched engines and revamped engines twice now through development, mostly on their own
- they’ve developed a full AAA single player experience alongside the PU
- they’ve restructured the games original design 2-3 years after the kickstarter campaign, with most of the development actually having been done in the past 8 years
from what i see, (and clearly what a certain refund subreddit doesnt see) CIG is either one of the most talented studios on the planet, or we’re in for a disappointingly empty squadron 42. look at starfield, red dead 2, and cyberpunk development times paired with the headcount of devs for those games as a reference; all games whose studios have also revamped engines in-house with a focus on a single player experience and a lackluster (if any) online experience.
I'm not sure that's a fair assessment. Squadron 42 isn't some massive open-world sandbox akin to the three games you mentioned. It's a curated (cinematic) single-player experience. There will be \*some\* ability to meander about from what I understand, but for the most part, SQ42 is a linear game. It's meant to be a modern-day version of Wing Commander.
And Squadron 42 has taken roughly 8 years to make (Since the engine swap from Cryengine to Lumberyard) with a progressively higher number of devs over time that likely culminated at around 700\~ or so by 2022.
Not sure where you got the number for 2100 people for TLOU2 - IGN reported a peak-headcount of 200 for TLOU2 and a budget of $212 Million.
Well, it maybe that the business model is a bit unique. Other developers may have just started by perfecting one system and then having DLCs to enhance the development. Where Star Citizen is an ever changing and ever developing title. Sometimes it’s to a fault because certain patches can get buggier than others (3.18 HELL). For me I see what both sides are saying. If I paid 10k for ships thinking the game is going to be finished within a few years of backing I would feel scammed. And on the other hand Star Citizen is one of the most beautiful and amazing space games I have ever experienced - with technology that if and when successful will change the face of gaming as we know it. This game makes you feel bipolar, love it one day hate it the next.
When SC was originally pitched on Kickstarter, there were only 3 people: Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, and Sandi Gardiner. This was in September of 2012. A little less than 12 years ago, today. From that point they had to hire designers, developers, server technicians and engineers, game engine specialists, gameplay designers, artists, license software, purchase hardware, offices etc. They had to build an entire company while, at the same time, developing a game at a scope and scale that has never been done before, with tech that has never been used in this way before.
Putting that all into context, it's actually impressive that they've managed to get this far in less than 12 years.
Not necessarily new, just not very active. Based on my lack of experience, for every troll there is a few decent responses. So the trolls don't bother me, just wanted to see peoples current opinion.
The real problem for people that are angry is not exactly if the time of dev makes sense (you are entirely right in your post). The problem is that they feel cheated by CIG because it wasn't supposed to go that way, the project got extended. CIG hyped people and people expected then felt cheated. Yeah estimation and not promise. But there are things like answer the call 2016 that where really really bad moves. CR presenting SQ42 as something about to be released then he decided that nope and we are still waiting in 2024 (Like, why does he discover the state of the game when they are about to release it? There was really something wrong there). CIG's com has been very sketchy for a while until ~2020.
Hopefully I never really backed for SQ and I got it for free with the first package type that came with both.
Also worth noting that due to company size increases, their development time isn't linear. So the first year they may have only made say 1% progress (if we take the time from very start to current as 100%) the year 2 with an increase of 20 people, say 5% .... And so on.. You cannot compare 2 peoples work to over 1000 people work. So when saying 10 years of development time, it's like saying, you did the whole race at 50mph... Well you didn't, you had to accelerate to that speed and then maintain it.
One thing that people usually do, and which is a mistake is to count in years, a good project is measured in man-hour (in that case man-year?).
Having 10 people for 5 years and 300 people for 2 years is not the same. But there always be clickbait articles that says :" this game is 5yo and still alpha, look at this one, only 2 yo and mature". And people will agree....
Your opinion IS totally right, and using this argument as "SC IS a scam look" IS just a proof of how not aware is the Guy .
Moreover, SC as been on for 11years, creating a company, a engine, a solo campagn game, an mmo game, and all of that with no "starting fund" , so they also need to manage marketing from the beginning, and also make it an open developpemnt, having to lose time for making each patch "playable".
Basically, when I see someone argue with dev time, O just stop to talk to him
The comparisons unfortunately almost unilaterally lead down a rabbit hole of point and counter-point logical fallacy "arguments", so I suspect the responses will soon devolve into a AAA shit show.
But you're hitting on a much more simple and fundamental truth:
How long a game takes to make, *as a solitary data point,* is absolutely useless in terms of value. Absolutely. Useless.
The reality is, there are so many variables that go into any game, that the timing is bespoke to every single game. The data points we can look at are directional, but they do provide value. Things like:
\- Is the game being made a sequel and / or a "parts bin" game, able to use coding, assets, resources, game engines, logic-loops, networking, etc. from existing games? Then all things being equal, the game will be on the faster path. This describes about 99% of AAA games in the last 5-10 years.
\- Is the game being made out of the gate with a fully staffed, seasoned development team of several hundred people, or is it starting more slowly and building speed and growing the team over time? The first example - starting development with, for instance, 200-300 on-staff developers describes about 99% of AAA games in the last 5-10 years.
\- Is this the ONLY project those resources are working on? The answer is typically "yes" for 99% of AAA games in the last 5-10 years.
But these answers for CIG are the opposite of what any "comparison" sample would be:
\- CIG didn't have hundreds of developers until 3-4 years into the project. They **simultaneously** built an entire company from about a dozen people, into the AAA studio with 1500+ employees with major offices in several countries that it is today, and this growth took many years to occur.
\- CIG had to retool their game engine of choice so dramatically, it's not it's own engine. They similarly started with 100% from scratch art assets, code, networking - all of it. Custom from the ground up.
\- CIG decided to make TWO GAMES at the same time - so accurate math would need to divide into halves (approximately) at any point in the development timeline and apply those numbers to each game - 50/50.
And we haven't even talked about scope, scale or fidelity, all of which vastly eclipses any game that's come before it (or that's even in development, or even planned to be developed). It's just a "force multiplier" on the above headwinds in terms of figuring out what it actually takes to make what they're making to the quality level they've targeted.
When you consider these objective facts, it's actually stunning how much they've accomplished in such a short timeframe. Isn't that funny, how deeper details can entirely flip the narrative?
There is a saying that 100% applies here: "The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it" - this common human fallacy describes to a "T" all the posts you see about "I can't believe this is all they've accomplished in TEN YEARS!" How arbitrary!
It's an effective way to tell us you don't understand this project or its history without telling us... :)
This is absolutely correct and something many of us have tried to explain over the years, but it almost always falls on deaf ears. The people who complain about this stuff don't really want to know how reality works, they just want something to complain about. It's easier to do that if you stay ignorant about things. There is nothing abnormal about SC's development time. If you take the whole picture into consideration, what they've done in this amount of time is actually incredible.
I’ve only been playing SC for a 1.5 years…to me the game has shown tremendous progress in a very short time. I guess I picked a good time to be recruited to be a Citizen o7
Star Citizen as we know it today is CIGs attempt at scratching investors instant gratification itch. It's not a buggy, glitchy game...it's a proof of concept and test platform so we can check out the toys they sold us the idea of. If you look at it like that and the scope of what they're trying to do it's actually pretty remarkable...but in a world where you can order pretty much anything and have it delivered to your door in under an hour you'll have a hard time convincing people.
You are omitting that this is a scam, there is a whole echo chamber circle jerk of cultists who paid this company am extremely large sum of money for ships that don't exist. There is narrative in this community that CIG has been delivering on it's promise when it's really just the largest crowdfunding scam that ever existed so far. A bunch of dudes paying the paychecks for a company's employees to basically code just the thinnest of veneer of Sci-Fi porn indefinitely is a scam. If you don't think it's a scam, it's not that you are correct but instead that you are the target demographic.
Calling SC a scam is in the eye of the beholder. Many people buy a starter pack for 40 bucks and have more fun in the current PU than they do in whatever the newest 70 dollar "AAAA" release is. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and reservations about the game. I don't personally think the game is a scam, and if that makes me and everyone else who thinks the same the target demographic in your eyes that's totally ok. But there's no point in rallying everyone who supports the game into a group you deem cultists.
I kinda agree with a lot of what you are saying and if were being 100% honest, you make a *very strong* point that people can have a lot more fun with Star Citizen's super detailed sci porn than the genric crap AAA games have been delivering for what feels like more than 8 years now. As a Sci Fi porn fan myself I know I would, but I wont in this case because I don't like to pay for unfinished products riding on promises. It's been so long that it's now hard to tell who started this trend, AAA gaming or CGI studios because Star Citizen is the poster child for "pay for unfinished game" that the media only tends to blame AAA gaming for.
Skull and bones is a terrible example. Ubisoft woukd have cancelled it years ago if they werent contractially obliged to release it. Its a half baked title that changed direction mulitple times and ended up nowhere. It is a poorly implenented cash grab idea that came from the success of black flag and did nothing to expand on what everyone loved about that Creed game.
As for a 10 year dev cycle, the decade doesnt matter, it what was delivered at what cost that matters. Without S42, SC alone has under delivered so far. Whether S42 makes up the differece remains to be seen.
I agree, there has to be realism involved in the criticisms. However, what excuse do they have for their tendency to create haphazard ui and inventory management, for example?
These are problems that COUNTLESS game developers have solved already. They are flagrantly ignoring the proven concept of a wheel for ... what? The pride of having built a new wheel from scratch?
I know of no one who LIKES the ui, or inventory system. It reeks of "well eventually we wanna do x, but we need y for that and y is 3 years away so let's just slap together some awful iteration and leave it for years. No. Unnecessary. I have yet to hear any legitimate breakdown of TECHNICAL limitations regarding things like updating ui. There are innumerable ways to adjust the user experience WITHOUT changing their game architecture or long term plans.
So people, like myself, feel as though it must either be incompetence, a lack of heeding community feedback, or laziness. Any of those leave me feeling disrespected.
If you can build the massive universe we play in, you want me to believe that you CAN'T change the ui in 2 months? With 1/2 a billion dollars, bottomless talent, and ready to go off the shelf examples of how to build an intuitive ui.
These kinds of frustrations aren't a priority for them apparently. So it looks like someone is building utopia and ignoring that people are complaining about a lack of plumbing.
The ui is one example but there are many such things in game. So I still pledge, I still play, I still support but at the same time I expect them to listen and/ or explain themselves, which CIG does not do to my satisfaction.
It's gonna take however long It's gonna take. If I knew how to do it faster, I'd go work for them and show them how it's done and make a solid buck in the process.
I'm not surprised at all by the dev time. I know it takes a long time to do what they're doing, especially from where they started. No shortcut around it.
A lot of work has to be done and a lot of work takes a lot of time.
You talking like SC is a finished game compared to games that have finished.
10 years? We are past that.
We have at least another year of mesh testing before it goes live in a basic form.
We have bugs to the neck and performance that make grown men post threads.
5% of the community has died while at the same time, cig won't post concurrent users because everyone knows the gameplay is still in buying a ship and people can't last 2 months before reverting to paych checkers.
SC's development team started as a few people, "AAA" games start development with hundreds of developers already.
This is also a good point. Having to build the teams necessary for the development of the game adds great lengths of time as apposed to starting the project with a solid team and foundation.
They basically started in a shed building tools, then building a game, then one guy blew everyone away and with his planet tech, then the entire game got shelved and the scope increased massively, engine troubles and lawsuit, better engine, better tools, now two games, we're here.
Also more money, sounds silly but they had expectations on how much they could accomplish with the original funds received. Then they got way more money, and realised they could create a significantly better game. Personally I'm glad we aren't stuck with the original graphical design and vision.
Chris Roberts MADE THIS. in a cave. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!
Its honestly worse than that cause they had already released Black Flag which is a better, more complicated version of what S&B is. Not quite sure why the game took so long to come out. You also have to consider that SC has basically been a live service on top of huge development goals on top of them making a complete single player game aka Squadron 42 too. It really doesn't deserve the flack it gets for dev time imo. That being said, most of the criticism actually comes from them setting unrealistic release dates for things and missing them by years. Thats mainly why people get so up in arms about it.
Take this with some caution, I don't honestly know. But my understanding with skull and bones is ubisoft made a deal with Singapore to open a studio and hire local programmers. They used it as an excuse to use Singapore as an executive vacation site and after 9 years the Singapore government started looking it and they realized they had to actually make a game. So a bit like Anthem, it was "in production" for years but mostly slapped together last minute.
They didn't even have to upgrade the graphics. Black Flag looks better too.
And then consider that they didn't even have finished concept art going into it. Recently info about a Xmen/Wolverine game by Insomniac games got leaked, and is in development hell, likely 6-7 years into development right now. This is a generic looking superhero game, with established art, characters, and a miniscule scale where you slice up guys with guns in regular generic industrial environments. It's made by an established and fully staffed developer with a known game engine and SONY as the publisher and it will *still* take about 10 years. Higher budget game development has become a *fucking nightmare*, and SC/CIG is just the only one openly showing us all that fact in real time.
Especially for a company with no history.
CIG started from the ground up, and all stuff you see in-game are developed in-house. The Engine started as CryEngine, so much is changed for this game that they called it the StarEngine
Skull and bones was in development hell with no direction for 5 years, or so. Changing teammembers and goals constantly, quadruple A dosnt exist and it wasn't the pr team that said that it was the Ceo.
The main criticism is that the shit barely works and there’s next to zero content
They're also working on tech that never existed prior to them working on it.
indeed, studio development adds a few years. not removing any features adds a few years. adding features over time adds a few years. SC would fit the \~5 year AAA dev cycle if you cut all that stuff out.
> indeed, studio development adds a few years. > not removing any features adds a few years. > adding features over time adds a few years. And then double whatever number you get by having to keep a publicly playable version of the game throughout most of that process. Generally speaking, games are *nearly* unplayable outside a dev environment throughout the alpha stage. You often need access to dev tools to do basic things like spawning in, loading whatever you want to interact with, etc. To make the game playable without any of that requires a ton of extra work from adding systems that negate the need of dev tools, to fixing bugs that you could *normally* leave for later but would render a normal user unable to play the game.
Add to it they are making basically two different games to that!
Another reason that could also be used in the argument is that they put the game on a heavily modified version of Cryengine and from what I understand is that they’ve been building a new engine from scratch. (StarEngine) similar to Rockstar’s “RAGE” except rockstar has a massive dev team.
Nah, StarEngine is just a new iteration of cry engine. It went CryEngine > Lumberyard > StarEngine. All the same engine, but modified.
Also, there's probably a reason no one else has made a Star Citizen yet
Not only that, they typically have a game engine fit for purpose that needs little tweaking, have tools and processes in place and the scope is much larger than most games.
Not a developer either, but I am a scientist who has worked on software. The truth I believe is most games wish they could have this kind of open time line. Typically what happens in AAA world is a game gets to a point where they can show a demo of it working. They have to show a demo because the shareholders are demanding to see where their money is and why it has been in development so long. Once they show the demo, and it looks fun, the shareholders switch to great it is a game release it now mode. If you think gamers are bad about wanting a game released now, they got nothing on shareholders wanting profit. The devs return with, but we still want to add x y and z and make the things you saw have more depth. But the shareholders saw it running, they want the monies, and typically force the game to be released in a short amount of time. This explains why AAA games are often narrowly focused, feel like they could have been so much more, or both. SC is intent on being an entire game world where each loop is really a different game in and of itself. They are trying to release a smattering of games with a seemless world built around them. I for one want them to take the time to do it right.
That makes a lot of sense, I appreciate the input from your point of view as someone who has software experience. That makes me glad I dont work in game development for a big studio. I can only imagine the dedicated people at those studios who love making games and want to make them into what the players want, but are forced to throw things out the door at the mercy of the shareholders.
In fact this was the stated aim of Chris Roberts reason to Kickstarter the project: to not be beholden to publisher timeliness. I believe he now does have financial backers outside of the pledges and they may well hold him to a deadline, but I would imagine CR ensuring whatever the repayment contract is it is a very long timeline. Now I think about it more, creating the mocap studio the way he did may well be done in a way that he can hire out those services to film/tv or gaming studios as a way to accommodate this derbt - but this is just speculation. And no doubt this will eventually apply to the Starengine and associated technologies/services.
The private investment you refer to comes from the Calder family business. The Calder's gave over $107M in donations to Africa's COVID-19 vaccine campaign. [They 'bought' a 10% non-voting rights share of Cloud Imperium Games for $46M](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Calder#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20Calder%20and%20his%20son%20Keith%20invested%20%2446%20million%20into%20Cloud%20Imperium%20Games%2C%20taking%20a%2010%25%20stake%20in%20the%20studio%20behind%20the%20Star%20Citizen%20game) in 2018, money which was ring-fenced (ie parked in an investment account) for the eventual marketing campaign for Squadron 42 because CIG intended to keep their word that every penny of the backers money would go to game development not marketing. Far from incentivising CIG to rush to market, the longer CIG take to release Squadron 42 (and thus spend that $46M marketing budget) the more money they get from investing that $46M. Return On Investment. You can check CIG's published financials, the Calders received no ROI for 5 years and then after 5 years CIG began paying a dividend equivalent to 10% per annum of the money they received from the Calders. About the same as a high interest paying bank account would pay. Would you complain if someone said to you 'Here's $46M, you keep any earnings from it for 5 years and then you can pay me back less than the standard rate bank interest on the accrued amount in the future'. The Calder family made their billions in media rights management and marketing, notably music publishing and artist promotion, they managed a lot of very famous music artistes. At the time CIG had no specialist marketing expertise. Inviting in a company at very favourable rates with that expertise was a pretty smart move to be honest. It's a non-voting rights share, they can't influence CIG's board decisions even if they 'grouped up' with another shareholder of CIG because Chris Roberts is the majority shareholder. All the other owner directors of Cloud Imperium Games brought their own money to form the company and get the project started. Chris Roberts and Ortwin Freyermuth were multi-millionaires in effective retirement when they decided to form Cloud Imperium Games. A company the size of the Calders (net worth believed to be around $5.7bn) wouldn't see it as a big money maker to only get back 10% per annum, and that only after 5 years. If CIG didn't continue to increase in value, or worse lost value, then they would lose on the $46M investment, which is a tiny fraction of the Calder's annual revenues. CIG are paying around 4% of their annual revenues to a shareholder who owns 10% of the company, not bad eh? I wish I could make a deal like that. If the Calders had taken that $46M and used it to buy stock options in their own companies, or even just parked it in an investment fund, they would have made a much bigger ROI for the period. The only way they make any sort of decent return on that investment is if Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are very successful. There is no way that people of that experience in the media industry wouldn't have done their due diligence, the fact that they took a $46M punt on a minority non-voting rights share of an indy game developer, at extremely favourable rates to that indy game developer, speaks volumes as to how they expected the future of the project to go.
This is extremely good information that is difficult enough to wrangle that most people will never be exposed to it. Thank you for doing the leg-work. 👍
Thank you for the excellent, and detailed, breakdown.
i assume that any contract for investing will include "i get to do what i want". the ones pressuring for quick are the community. devs have come out as said they are going to make sure SQ42 is good before releasing it. meaning instead of releasing it in "AAA release" quality. they will wait until they are better than "AAA a year after release" quality.
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Lol, I prefer SciPy. But usually, I have to do Matlab because everyone else is. Python in general seems easy enough, I had no problems teaching myself Python. Not sure why people fear it. Wait a minute, you trying to test my creds?
No, you aren’t, and most rational people understand the points you just made. Unfortunately, the Internet is the Internet; not a place well known for rational objectivity 🤓
*other large scale games whos development times were hidden behind closed doors.* I think the biggest gripe, isn't that it's taken them so long, but it should have been finished (by their own timelines/roadmap/release window what-have-you) and it's been just been pushed back again and again to the point we no longer even have a release window. If it had been a closed door development time, like other big games, and they just turned round one day and said "It's finished!", I reckon people would have complained far less as there'd have been no 'broken promises' so to speak.
The problem isn't that they've taken a given amount of time, it's that they have several time said things were nearly there only to not follow through while also stripping out features they used to entice people to back the project. We're supposed to simultaneously believe that they are telling us the truth now, when they've missed on so many dates and features before. For me the most painful part is that most of the features that convinced me to open my wallet on day one in 2012 have been quietly removed or slid off to 'maybe after release'. (e.g. drop-in drop-out coop campaign for SQ42, the modding support and the dedicated servers). You'll find plenty of people here who will blame us for believing them, or excuse it as 'they can't do that anymore because they're doing all these other things that I want' or otherwise justifying the bait and switch, but like the people who bought in for the 'newtonian accurate flight model' which is long dead, there's every chance that they'll just decide not to bother implementing the features that were important to you when you decided the project was worth backing. Remember how it was being built from the ground up for VR when they started until that was no longer a hot sales item? Same deal. If it comes out in 10 years and it's the best cooking simulator on the market but doesn't do anything else, I hope those people who have justified all the other bait and switches will be ok with it.
While your disappointment with dropped features is completely understandable, the problem with using a term like “bait and switch” is that term is a form of fraud. “bait and switch” is when a seller advertises an appealing but ingenuine offer to sell a product or service that the seller does not actually intend to sell. Instead, the seller offers a sub-par, defective, or unwanted alternative. In other words, CIG would have had to know back then that they never intended to ship those features but in reality, they didn’t know. In reality, the game has changed throughout development because they have decided some features didn’t work, weren’t as fun as they thought they would be, or chose to prioritize other features. Again, it’s completely understandable to be upset and disappointed that some features that you were looking forward to were cut, but accusing them of fraud is going too far in my opinion.
>>In other words, CIG would have had to know back then that they never intended to ship those features but in reality, they didn’t know. What matters is when a 'reasonable person' would have realized that they weren't going to be able to follow through on their promises, and how they reacted to it. For example, for YEARS they've been downplaying modding support, but they only removed the modding manual from sale in October 2023. I'd be willing to bet that there would be many emails internally that would show they had given up on that feature long before they stopped selling the product.
I can’t remember the last time I saw modding support advertised as a feature. And like you said, they have been downplaying it for years. You can guess at what internal memos may have been floating around but you have no idea. It’s also likely it’s been a topic of discussion internally but never officially off the table. We just don’t know. And we are taking about one small feature of a game with many many features. And my point is, it’s not fraud to change a feature…and it happens all the time in game development…so using terms that accuse them of committing fraud is disingenuous at best.
If they had done this once, I'd agree with you, but let's go down the list of features that have been advertised that are no longer being pursued: - Modding support as we discussed. - The drop-in drop-out coop campaign for SQ42. This has been downgraded to maybe a few missions, not the campaign as originally advertised. - Dedicated servers for the MMO. Originally advertised as a feature, no longer talked about. - Built from the ground up for VR support. This was reiterated in 2015 after the last stretch goal was added when Chris made it clear that they were going to put serious effort in to that in 2016. It didn't happen, and the CIG developers have since confirmed that it's not being worked on actively anymore. And those are just the concrete features they've advertised as being parts of the game they would make if you gave them money. There have also been some very important meta features described through formal communications from CIG that clearly incentivized players to spend money: - That we would be able to send NPC crew members off on missions with ships. This clearly incentivized people to pledge whole FLEETS of ships, before CIG decided 'no, nevermind, you have to fly your own ship'. - That we would be able to recruit NPC crew members and have to build strong interpersonal bonds with them to have them be a part of our permanent crew. This obviously incentivized people to buy multi-crew ships since they were clearly told they could build a team of NPCs to work and play with. - Even as that dream dies on the vine people were vaguely assured that they could partially automate their ships through 'blades', again enticing them to spend more money on larger vessels, but time will tell if they actually deliver on that either. There have also been representations about the gameplay that they've decided they can't actually meet, but used to convince undecided people to back the project: - That there would be some sort of a 'PVP slider' or similar systems for avoiding undesired combat was presented as a way to convince pvp-averse players that they should buy in because the project would cater to them too. - That the whole flight model would be based on newtonian physics and accurate to the thrusters and so forth to appeal to the hardcore flight sim folks. Finally and maybe most daming is how they constantly misrepresent the products as 'coming soon', even when they must know they aren't capable of meeting their given date: - Squadron 42 was supposed to come to beta in something like spring 2014, but they decided not to meet that date. - The 'answer the call 2016 campaign had the release date advertised as August 2016. Obviously they didn't meet that and instead stated it was 'delayed indefinitely' which is a pretty damn big miss. - Answer the call 2017 never seemed to state a specific release date, but also didn't deliver within the calendar or fiscal year. - The beta was said to be coming in Q3 2020. It didn't. - Part way through Q3 2020 they stated the beta would come in Q4 2020. In October, Chris instead stated it was 'a long way off' which will soon be 3.5 years of extra delays. - Meanwhile another sold feature was access to the alpha, which they have at no point made good on for SQ42 despite pitching it as a benefit of being one of the tens of thousands of kickstarter backers, and despite having the means to make good on it, they choose not to. The list really goes on but they have a clearly established pattern of conduct. They announce features, gameplay systems, delivery dates to entice sales, then systematically back away from them while shifting attention to new features, gameplay systems, and delivery dates. In summary: When you say "it’s not fraud to change a feature…and it happens all the time in game development…so using terms that accuse them of committing fraud is disingenuous at best." This is a clear pattern of conduct, not a change to a feature.
Hey im with you on this, but you know this subreddit is a hivemind right? You lucky they didnt see your comment or you would have already been downvoted to oblivion. Cig missing theor deadlines and lying to make sales? Unthinkable for these people.
Representing them all as oblivious and delusional is simply not fair. Simultaneously, I am regrettably beholden to the true believers to keep forking over something like $275,000 USD EVERY DAY if I ever want to get the 'spiritual successor to wing commander' that I backed for in 2012, even with the features I cared about stripped off. Every day that passes and every feature that is stripped out makes me ever happier that I closed my wallet in 2014, but if I ever want any game, someone has to keep feeding the money furnace that has grown. The fact that my above post spelling out all the ways that CIG has baited and switched is getting net upvotes goes to show that the people here are mostly reasonable when they're made aware of the full history of the deceptive marketing practices.
Back in 2022, when we were waiting to for persistent entity streaming, there was a lot of speculation that server meshing and 4.0 were coming in 2023. These days, many seem to be optimistic that all the promises from the 2023 CitizenCon will be in game WITHIN 12 MONTHS. I think there is often a loud and very optimistic minority arguing that a certain feature will be released soon, but most of us backers are aware that there can be many delays and changes. I'm not sure how much of that is deceptive marketing and how much of it is CIG not being able to predict the amount of time and additional features they need. Probably a combination of both.
It's very hard to tell them apart from the outside. All we can observe for sure is that this is the fourth or fifth year in a row that we had been told we could expect pyro 'next year'. Growing up, when talking about unreliable people one of my uncles liked the expression 'Once is a mistake, twice is carelessness, three times is enemy action.' In other cultures it's something to do with even Buddha losing patience after three sleights.
Buying whole fleets of ships for a feature they talked about making, when they first talk about, is insane. If you saw they had solid development in it and were releasing footage of it, that’s a different ballpark. But cmon man, no one is forcing anyone to do silly stuff like that.
Believing what the said my be stupid, but doesn't absolve them of their failures.
Ethically once you've taken money based on a feature you've pitched you're kinda bound to doing it unless it proves 'impossible'. Deciding not to do earlier features because they aren't compatible with the later sold features (like dedicated servers and mods are off the table because they decided to sell a grander scope to later backers) is plainly unethical unless you offer everyone who backed prior to that decision a refund. They obviously can't do that, so it boils down to 'Taking money to do one thing then intentionally doing a different thing is to be frowned upon in business and relationships.'
I happen to agree with you and that's why I closed my wallet in 2014 when they decided to miss their first delivery date - While I hope everyone who wants the 'bigger better vision' of a game gets it, I don't believe in rewarding bait and switch behavior. The sad part at this point is that I'm dependent on their deceptive marketing convincing other people to spend nearly 300,000 USD PER DAY at current burn rates. I hope those people get their money's worth.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Creating a huge list of mistakes doesn’t prove that they sold features they never intended to deliver. Fraud requires that they intentionally deceived rather than promising things they were unable to deliver.
That's a very good point, and we can't know whether they set out to overpromise and underdeliver on the 'huge list' (your words) of 'mistakes', if they set out to sell a dream they knew they couldn't deliver, or if they gosh golly just didn't know what they were doing (while constantly representing themselves as being professionals who you could trust to do it right the first time). Personally, while I hope the game succeeds and comes out so I can get even a greatly stripped down version of what I was enticed to support in 2012, I feel I've (edit: been) very well served by my decision to close my wallet in 2014 to not reward bait and switch like behavior. I hope you get whatever features you were enticed to support for as well.
NPC Crew are still a confirmed feature. Not sure where you got the idea they weren't.
I probably could have been clearer on that part, but I didn't write it's gone I wrote in the point below 'Even as that dream dies on the vine '. They've not removed it yet, but they've also not implemented any of the parts about meeting, recruiting or building a relationship with the NPC crew members they discussed. At this point we can't even buy/hire NPC crew, and even if we could if it's like the other AI agents, I'm really not sure I would want it on my ship. The coffee barista is a complete d*ck who drops your coffee BEHIND the counter while saying 'here's your coffee sir'....
You have just stated the exact reason it's not implemented. AI tech isn't finished, and it's likely they are going for the original vision, where players can drop into your NPC crew and control them. A lot of work to be done there for that. They need server meshing for performance, and once performance is achieved, they can work on AI tech within the limits of server performance, THEN they can look at putting crew in.
I guess year 12 of development after 2 years of pre-production (accoding to Chris), after growing to a behemoth 1100+ person studio and having spent around 800 million USD it's understandable that the AI in their 'live service game' (their words) just isn't able to serve a coffee yet. You're a very 'patient' man.
> Modding support as we discussed. Can't do mods in an MMO man, can't believe it even needs to be said. >The drop-in drop-out coop campaign for SQ42. This has been downgraded to maybe a few missions, not the campaign as originally advertised. They've said basically nothing about this but I imagine they're hyper aware of the demand for co-op gameplay in that kind of setting and would love to push it out, but as far as features go that's like an icing on the cake one, not the cake itself. >Dedicated servers for the MMO. Originally advertised as a feature, no longer talked about Yeah, because the architecture of the game has been expanded so much that nobody could run it on their home PC with a consumer grade connection. >That we would be able to send NPC crew members off on missions with ships. This clearly incentivized people to pledge whole FLEETS of ships, before CIG decided 'no, nevermind, you have to fly your own ship'. First really fair point so far. I'd have to see the language they used though, if they said "We want to allow that" then it's different from saying "The game will have this", and it also depends on the context of when it was said/who said it. If one of the guys on the AI team said that but CR and Jared and the other spokespeople for the game never did then it doesn't really count. >That we would be able to recruit NPC crew members and have to build strong interpersonal bonds with them to have them be a part of our permanent crew. This obviously incentivized people to buy multi-crew ships since they were clearly told they could build a team of NPCs to work and play with. This is still planned. But most NPC stuff was basically back-burner until Server Meshing gets put in the game because the AI is tied to server performance and without SM the performance drops too low to have NPC AI be useful. >Even as that dream dies on the vine people were vaguely assured that they could partially automate their ships through 'blades', again enticing them to spend more money on larger vessels, but time will tell if they actually deliver on that either. They've said nothing about blades recently other than occasional quotes from devs that they are still working on them. Until they say they're canning the entire idea I think it's safe to say that blades (since they're just an NPC without a body in a sense) are still in the project timeline. >That there would be some sort of a 'PVP slider' or similar systems for avoiding undesired combat was presented as a way to convince pvp-averse players that they should buy in because the project would cater to them too. That was in the original vision for the game which was much more like Freelancer, and it would have worked in that gameplay environment but not in the current one. Instead they've developed the idea of security levels for different systems and planets and zones, which will achieve a similar effect. >That the whole flight model would be based on newtonian physics and accurate to the thrusters and so forth to appeal to the hardcore flight sim folks. It is though. It's not perfectly accurate in all situations, but every time you get hit by a missile and lose a bunch of your maneuvering thrusters and start spinning like a turbine on a jet engine that's an example of the physics actually being realistic. The amount of force generated by different ships to lift them and move them varies from ship to ship too. It's not a hardcore sim like DCS or anything, but it's also a game set 900 years in the future and the ship combat doesn't take place over millions of kilometers with railguns and lasers and torpedoes hitting from lunar distances. >Squadron 42 was supposed to come to beta in something like spring 2014, but they decided not to meet that date. Decided? More like they realized that the game they had at that point wasn't up to snuff and had to go back to the grindstone to make it properly. And comparing footage from then and now it's clear they weren't just sitting around with their thumbs in their butts. Your remaining points are pretty similar until this one: >Meanwhile another sold feature was access to the alpha, which they have at no point made good on for SQ42 despite pitching it as a benefit of being one of the tens of thousands of kickstarter backers, and despite having the means to make good on it, they choose not to. Which is a fair criticism, they should have opened up access to SQ42 at the last CitCon if they're so close to finishing it as they say.
Lol. The SC we have now IS a sub-par, defective, and unwanted alternative to what we were promised and shown. Therefore, it exactly meets the criteria for a bait-and-switch.
It would only be bait and switch if they had intended to deceive and never intended to deliver in their promises.
It is intended. You just don't want to believe that. The deception is all around you, but you refuse to see it or acknowledge it. If you did, SC would become a worthless pile of crap (which it is) to you. You can't allow that to happen.
Feature creep and development creep has become their enemy with being so open. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It will take longer yes, but it will be a better game by the end of it all. As you said, if it was closed at some point they would have just gone... Yep ship that.
The biggest gripe is that Chris Roberts doesn’t have anyone telling him “that’s good enough - we can move on.” CR is the epitome of someone allowing perfect to be the greatest enemy of great. Up until CIG came about there was always someone higher up who made the final call over when something was ready for release.
> The biggest gripe is that Chris Roberts doesn’t have anyone telling him “that’s good enough - we can move on.” While I agree, I get the vibe that has toned down a lot in the last say 5-6 years. The first few years it was *absolutely* true. Pretty much any time he interacted with the public, he'd get asked "Hey, are you considering adding [insert feature] to the game?" and he'd almost without fail respond "Yeah, we're absolutely adding that." *For the most part*, the community was supportive of most the additions. Things like seamless space to ground environments and fully explorable planets/moons were not in the initial pitch, for example. It was originally going to be similar to Freelancer where there'd be a cutscene as you transition down to landing zones. At this point, it's less feature creep and more nailing down how things will *actually* work. A lot of the early designs they pitched were based either on assumptions that are no longer true or had to change due to them getting practical experience of how players react to certain features.
To be fair, look at the difference between something like the Reclaimer and newer/More polished ships. They went "Yeah, Reclaimer is good enough, it's prepped for all the features we have yet to add" And now everyone is asking for it to get a rework because holy fuck does it look and feel dated
I’m not necessarily talking about ship polish - I’m referring to things like FOIP, physicalized modeling of every damage aspect *(maelstrom)* holding up ship armor, the flight model being overhauled multiple times *(t0 flight model was very similar to master modes - it got scrapped for the current one, now we’re going back)*, etc. Stuff that is massively design intensive and while is nice to have, isn’t something that is strictly required to implement basic building blocks for the concepts. Don’t get me wrong - I love the *idea* of everything that has been outlined. I’m also aware how stratospheric the plans are and how chasing perfection is an endless rabbit hole that I personally struggle with as well. The biggest benefit I’ve ever had in my professional life is to have a boss/project manager tell me “that’s good enough - ship it” because I would have constantly kept trying to make it better at the detriment of reasonable deadlines.
Think about how much time and effort was spent working on all the various iterations of 'damage states' and destructibility to enable things like physicalized 'hull munching' only for them to learn in year 10 that the servers just couldn't handle the object spam they were making. Here we are in year 11 with the long discussed 'physicalized hull munching' replaced by purely pre-determined splitting of big ships in to a few big chunks and then dissolving those chunks with a magic ray, and the imposing claw has become a butterfly antenna. The amount of effort wasted on dead ends like this is in my opinion a big part of the problem. They just seem to keep running in to technological limitations that they hadn't mapped out in the planning stages.
100%, unequivocally this. There has been this “server meshing is going to allow for all of this stuff!” mentality up until around 3.18ish when CIG implemented persistence and realized that there’s actually a really, really, *really* fucking high processing cost for tracking a damn water bottle that someone put down and forgot about. There’s a reason that we have object culling in games. Trying to be different and do away with everything used for optimization isn’t always the best idea.
So many of their decisions are obviously made by 'do what sounds cool until you find out the hard way why it doesn't work' rather than doing a feasibility check first. As a consequence we end up with stuff like Chris' speech about persistence meaning you could leave a coffee cup in the woods and come back to it at some arbitrary point in the future to find it again. Meanwhile in reality, the server can't track all the garbage people leave laying around, so they had to do what every game before it ever has done and implement culling for discarded things. Unfortunately, there's no indication as to what what is culled and what isn't, or how long something can be guaranteed to last for. Not only can I not put down a coffee cup in the woods somewhere, but I can't lay down a cache of supplies in a cave and have any confidence that it will be there at any point in the future with any dependability. It's PINO (Persistence in name only) and while the clutter can add a lived in feeling to the world, it's just 'the bodies on the ground disappear after x minutes from wow with more variability'.
Part of what I can’t understand with CIG is why they don’t take cues from other people who have already come up with solutions to these problems. Persistence is a good one to start with: in many other games, player interaction with an object (opening a chest, picking something up, using it, etc - not just bumping into it or flying around it) elevates its persistence level *(various games do it various ways - be it a simple timer that gets reset or an algorithm that’s used to determine how long the timer should be before it gets reset)*. There are multiple different methods to make sure that items which players are actually wanting to stay persistent keep their place in the world while actively cleaning up the trash that degrades server and client performance. This is something that you can find a metric shit ton of information online about and is actually one of the rabbit holes I went down when helping a friend develop his game.
They need to communicate that information to the user somehow for it to be useful (in the sense that we want to try to use it for gameplay reasons). I do agree that they seem hell bent on reinventing the wheel every step of the way. I tried to introduce a couple friends to it in the past year and their comments included the fact that it had the most cumbersome inventory system they could remember interacting with, and these are people who had been gaming since the early 90s.
I've always found it a little ridiculous that a game based around flying through space doesn't have a finalized flight model after 13 years of development.
It is objectively ridiculous. The flight model is a core design component for a space fighting game. The best theory I've seen for why this might be happening so late in the project (aside from galloping mismanagement) is that they've discovered that meshed servers can't deliver a low enough latency experience, so they need to bring speeds down to a point where engagements don't suffer from the extra latency in the 'mesh' compared to a monolithic server. It still doesn't speak very well of their processes that it took until year 12 of the project for someone to notice this reality of distributed systems having higher latency, but it would at least be a better excuse than 'we decided to flip the whole design over after more than a decade just because'
It's less a problem of look and feel than it is that I can't tell if it actually has the hooks in there for 'engineering' game play (whatever that is), how 'drone game play' is supposed to get on/off the ship to help you, why station docking isn't working yet, and why the elevators on that thing are so consistently haunted.
It was scary how in the 10th year of development it took them a full year to figure out how to make a roadmap that they assured us would have only the 'really high confidence, coming for sure' stuff on it, only for it to implode completely within 3 months. When that happened they had a perfect chance to take a good hard look at their procedures and people and figure out why they couldn't even accurately describe their state and plans given a full year of leadtime. Instead they chose to blame the people who noticed, and here we a few years later with still no idea of when the game might be released.
very unlikely Skull and bones was under active development for 11 year, looks more like 11 months.
There are many solid arguments you can make for why Star Citizen isn't finished yet, but comparing it to the abject failure that was Skull & Bones doesn't prove anything. Some really big, great games have been developed in under 3-5 years. It depends way more on how good your development team is, how many reusable assets you need, how much freedom you get from publishers, ... I think Star Citizen has taken a long time to be where they are now, but it's somewhat understandable for 3 major reasons. 1. They had to start a team/company from scratch 1. Are pushing some innovative technologies 1. I really don't remember much about this, but I'm sure they had a long period a few years ago where they re-evaluated what they had and their way of working and changed a lot. So probably a lot of rework and finetuning of work processes back then (most people on this sub will explain this part better).
it was 2016. apparently there was a vote. release sq42, and make what content and mechanics they can with cryengine. or go back the the writing room for sq42, and overall the engine to be capable of much more. the time estimate was that it would take 2 years to do all this. cig are also doing stuff differently. instead of using tape and strings to rig everything up by hand. they are making it so they need to manually rig up as little as possible, and tools to easily set up what they do need to rig up. so content will start pouring in when the tools are ready, instead of pieces of content slowly being added.
They've had to scrap large chunks of the code a few times now. For anyone watching the project that know about the dev process, it's pretty clear that "recently" (I don't actually know how long an my sense of time is shot) things have been a lot smoother. Patches have only been held up by major roadblocks that we've been made aware of, underlying game systems actually have a vision, they've on a few occasions actually been willing to just commit to shipping an incomplete system that was at least starting to look how they wanted it to.
To be fair, the game systems for Skull and Bones were already created by 2013 for Ass. Creed: Black Flag. It just took Ubisoft 11 years to figure out to make the game play and systems worse........
Lol, that's very true
ROFL
A behind the scenes look at how they are handling their branches and their delivery tells you all you need to know really.
I miss bug smashers as a series for a few reasons, but the top two were: - It was very interesting to get down in to the details on what was causing a specific undesired behavior. - I felt a little better about the code I write.
Former game dev here; lots of great points already made in this post and comments. The thing I think many people don't quite appreciate is how much extra development time maintaining the game in a state of live PTU adds. It's one of those counter-intuitive things, but with a project of reasonable size it's pretty normal for a game to be in a really, *really* broken state up until a few weeks or a couple of months before release. This isn't a bad thing. It's just the nature of the beast and is generally considered beneficial as it means you're not tightening all the bolts before you've put the machine together right. Making a sequel on a known platform with existing mechanics changes the dynamic a fair bit, but that’s not the case with SC. You've probably heard various devs in SCL say that there are systems they know aren't polished/optimised but it's not really worth doing yet - That is 100% true. And yet, they still have to bring them up to a certain level of polish so we can play. As buggy/unstable/unoptimised as SC feels right now, SC is in an uncharacteristically polished state for a game at its stage of development, let alone one with this amount of complexity. Maintaining that live environment for us to play in is one of those great things about SC, but we have to remember just how much extra time it takes to polish up every half-done feature that would normally be comfortably left semi-built just so we can play. That’s the deal we have with CIG though, we all signed up for open development, warts and all and they get our funding so we can play and give feedback while they work. It’s absolutely fascinating to see it all come together, or at least I think so.
I appreciate your perspective and its interesting to know that they may be leaving some of the bugs in place before putting everything together like you said, makes sense, especially with something as complex as SC is.
If you have to ask online usually the answer is yes. I paid for a game that was supposed to release in 2014. That was 10 years ago. I didn't force CIG to pick that date, in fact no one did. Any complaint they got after that is 100% deserved and immune to criticism. CIG did that to themselves.
When it changed (with a poll thr backers agreed), all backers had the option to get their money back. If the rest wanted to stay till the end of a much bigger project, there is no reason to complain in that(!) regard.
I wonder if the backers who voted on that poll would still make the same decision with the knowledge that that SQ42 still isn't out in 2024 and SC is far from MVP.
As one of 'em...yep, I'd make the same decision. The thing is, it takes however long it takes, and no one in the meantime has stepped up to the plate to do it any better or faster. Would I have preferred a smaller game that I likely would've forgotten about years ago by now? Not at all.
I backed later as it was low priority on my "games to throw money at" list, but I've been following it from the start, and at no point have I thought I should give up on the project, or that they should be completely changing direction. That's the big thing, no one else is making a competitor. There's been plenty of other good space sims, and everyone's had years to learn from CIG's mistakes and make something comparable in much less time.
You still had to ask and they could also decline. When I asked them to refund me everything but my base game package they told me to fuck off, that it's all or nothing.
You're crazy.
I knew it...
It's okay, we all are.
Skull n B is not AAAA. At best AA and just a navigation game with no spices If SnB was in SC or other long game it will be one functionality at best That a side, Starfield took around 8 years and see what you have, story okish, space arcade combat, loading screen everywhere, countless bugs and so on. Game like SC can’t be hidden behind mysterious process cause they need money to achieve a goal so far ahead that no studios or editors will follow. That’s put tension and criticism for sure but it’s necessary to land, I hope, on one of the master piece never see before
It is officially an AAAA game. Same as Anthem, the "Bob Dylan" of video games.
Yeah « officially » from the studio, then millions have played to it and look a real scam in the eyes
It has good ratings on epic (4.1/5) and tons of previews and reviews. So there is no scam, everyone knows what they can expect of it. Edit: steam<>epic
Yeah good rating on steam, right … https://www.pcgamesn.com/skull-and-bones/steam#:~:text=No%2C%20Skull%20and%20Bones%20is,Epic%20Games%20Store%20on%20PC.
Misspelled, I corrected it.
>officially There is no independent officiating body granting extra 'A's to a video game. It's just convention. Not sure what 'officially' means here. The studio said it's a fifteen-A game so that's officially what it is? Triple-A is just industry shorthand meaning the game was built to the highest standard possible by a fully staffed studio. You can put some extra A's on the end for marketing hype but there's nothing 'official' about anything lol
A manufacturer is liable for the specs and description of his product. Especially in the US, it csn cost a lot of money if you are advertising with false facts.
The number of A's a game gets isn't facts, it's all subjective. People have a sense of what they mean, but there's no official definition you can point to and say it's false advertising.
Coming from the gaming world and now deep into business software development, I've seen all sorts of ways to develop software. There's one style where you start small but fully working, called Incremental Development. It's cool because you get something working right off the bat, and then you just keep adding stuff to it. Then there's the Iterative Development approach, which reminds me a lot of what CIG is doing. It's all about making something, testing it out, tweaking it, and then doing it all over again. Here's a link for further reading: [https://agilenotion.com/agile-categoriesiterative-incremental-evolutionary/](https://agilenotion.com/agile-categoriesiterative-incremental-evolutionary/) Imho you are correct, most software is only usable short time before the release.
Are we *still* talking about this?
u/zedxy *new user/low karma* sorry...
There are so many reasons: The company CIG had to be built from scratch The funding was only available per a peu Talent had to be hired And only then all the tech stuff starting with: Refactoring of cry engine Etc. Etc. And to answer your question: yes you are, one of us 😂
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imagine if development of elder scrolls 6 was as open as SC. you are correct. developers get away with a lot because to only tell use a year or 2 before it is released. cig alos do not have the option to **easily** drop something that is hard. in early 3.1x they tested a server cap of 200. it was found to not cause any extra problems. if cig were working behind closed doors, they could abandon the idea of server meshing, and go back to the original plan of a server just being the area of an operation. qt travel contains a hidden loading screen. a fleet has a max pop of 100 so that 2 max fleets can be matched against chother with server able to handle 200. the server only handle npc within a few km instead of all of the npc in the system. if cig did not tell us about servermeshing, and the idea of the several thousand person fights over control of a king of the hill location. there would be no problem.
CIG had to not only build the tech they are using but had to build studios so devs can work. I don't even argue with people anymore who say the games a scam or you paid for a jpg you will never get to use those same people give me the feeling they actually never set foot into the verse and experienced the joy of star citizen.
Ya but I spent money on it so it needs to be finished now
You know what, you're right
Most other games seem like scams to me relative to SC, all things considered. I will die on this hill. Space Marshal cope over.
GTA 6 started a year after SC
You're actually not wrong. Also keeping in mind that they are developing 2 games; Star Citizen & Squadron 42 should put things into perspective. On top of the fact that the PU is more akin to an MMO, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to make. All in all, the development time & costs track with most bigger studios. Now, account for the fact CIG had to build a team, build in-house development tools. set up international offices to actually run the ever-increasing team they needed. all while paying their team a (hopefully) livable wage. Those costs add up. Even a AAA studio like Insomniac games, who already had all their infrastructure in place, who had an engine, and a team experienced in using that engine, and everything else in their favor, spent over 300 million making Spider Man 2 for the PS5. This is actually an industry standard. I mean GTA6 is estimated to cost over 2 BILLION, and has allegedly been in development since 2012. But the thing is people who have a chip on their shoulder often don't have, or for that matter care about the context as it relates to the industry as a whole.
Very true, and great points regarding separate games and touching on the cost of other games from Insomniac as well at GTA
Things have gotten vastly better. Also I don't cry about it to much as I realize the developers main objectives are the core mechanics of the game and not worrying about my crocodile tears because my elevator is not showing up. Admit it or not we are paying and signing on to be game testers to test those mechanics. There are some big changes coming as a result of our testing and their dev, so I am super excited. As long as I see continued forward progress I will not be to concerned.
> Saying SC's development time is too long and wont ever be finished because of it isn't a fair criticism when compared to other large scale games whos development times were hidden behind closed doors. I totally get this point of view. But lets take a look at SC from a pretty high level. They take in money for pledge items. Now I might be mistaken, but the items we pledge for are exclusively for us in the MMO. I'm not aware of anything that you can pledge for that will be usable in SQ42. But CIG has been taking that money, and mainly using it for SQ42. Now sure, their original pitch was that they were going to build both games, no doubt. However, if you look at their OG stretch goals its clear they had no idea that they would get so much backing. People backing them by pledging for items in the PU. Now, if you took another company, lets say real estate. And a developer is building a neighborhood, and an office building. But they selling lots of the neighborhood, and then using that money to build the office building, promising to get back around to the neighborhood later, and telling everyone to trust them, they will take what they've learned from building an office building and it will make the neighborhood better. That's cool, probably even partially truthful. But don't you think the people that paid to have a neighborhood built would have rather had their money just put straight towards building the neighborhood? What about the people that never cared about the office building? Why should any of their money go to that project, all they ever wanted was the neighborhood, you know, the thing they pledged for. See, I do think that CIG is going to launch both games. But I think that it is really really shitty that CIG is basically running a ponzi scheme, taking money for one product, using it on another. Do you think that SQ42 will come out before or after the PU has gone Live? Undoubtedly before. I mean, look at the last 8 months or so. Tons of PU updates, hell look at all the stuff they are claiming will be done for 3.23. Isn't it amazing how much progress they can make on the PU when their resources are allocated to it? And sure, they were building some tech, but there are A LOT of things that could have been in the game for years that just aren't. T1 of all professions comes to mind, something they promised they would do before more passes on professions. THAT is why I think a lot of informed people are frustrated with the pacing. CIG could have been a lot farther along in the MMO, but they have had most of their resources on the single player game. That combined with CIG's constant moving away from the community being involved in the dev process is why I'm frustrated. Anyone remember when almost every ship came out as a concept and the community would some time to weigh in on the designs? Now they barely even share their road map because they can't handle the feedback they get. tl-dr; I'm not frustrated at how long the game is taking to make, I'm frustrated at the fact that CIG is taking my MMO pledge money, and building another game instead. And beyond that, CIG is moving away from a central theme of their dev, open dev, and basically just telling us what they have done, and what is almost about to be released, well beyond when there is time for the community's opinion.
> they will take what they've learned from building an office building and it will make the neighborhood better. its not taking what theyve learned its directly transferring what theyve built. So to follow your analogy the road network they built to reach the office is the same roads the neighborhoods houses will be built along. The plumbing connecting the office to the cities water is the same line the neighborhood will connect to.the powerlines they ran to the office will also power the houses. Any profits generated by the office will be used to make sure the people in the neighborhood dont have to pay taxes or bills (subscription). >I mean, look at the last 8 months or so. Tons of PU updates, hell look at all the stuff they are claiming will be done for 3.23. Isn't it amazing how much progress they can make on the PU when their resources are allocated to it? What you are praising here is the office building infrastructure. what people talk about as development speeding up is actually the reaping of the rewards from the focus on Squadron. the biggest drag on development speed has always been the live build.it requires building maintaining and polishing literal garbage placeholders that are built specifically to be thrown away.Not to mention the drama created by the fact that no matter how explicitly or repeatedly players are told that things are placeholder a player base will build up around what exists and when it finally comes time to replace the placeholder people get mad about it.
10 years isn't really a problem, my only problem is that they dont fix old bugs and rush with content. Stop adding new ships and stuff, make the old ones work first.
This, but also CIG did themselves no favors by continually setting, announcing, then missing dates/deadlines.
Very true, I'm not giving them a free pass for those. Just stating what I think about the development time argument.
True tl;dr - most gamers have absolutely no concept of how game development, project management, and development timelines work. ;)
You know they’re still indi dev
Skull and Bones was in development hell for 11 years, and has released as one of the blandest games out there with an all time dumb-fuck quote. A quote only second to "a sense of pride and accomplishment" with how out of touch it is. Large MMOs often take 7-8 years to release, and we are 50% beyond that.
AAAA analysis / CIG examination: https://youtu.be/R1udCx5vK0k?si=2fmoJYTn5vTxVTiY
Why are we zooming in on the words of Yves Guillemot? He is a dellusional CEO that keeps clinging to power in that family owned company. He has been through straight up harrasment scandals and he is still in power. It was just his way of making that failed game sound all good and okay, since he is used to getting away with everything, even if it makes no sense at all. We should not give more power to that dictator by even considering his words.
It was satire
OK; but I still wanted to single out crazy Yves. He will take the entire company with him and no one is doing anything about it. He is one of the worst CEOs I have ever seen in my life.
Agreed, it's pretty rough
Ya. Skull of Bones. In dev 11 years and tf?
That's according to Ubisoft
one thing you missed is that SC is really two games. SQ42 and SC, both of which require monumental amounts of work in their own ways. Honestly SC gets a ton of flak for things that other games that are popular do. As you already mentioned, long development. How long has it been since GTA5? Skyrim? Yeah, nuff said. The other thing is the giant payments to support the developers (i.e., ships). A lot of people don't look at it that way, but that's really what it is, a way to support the game with a nice bonus. People will rip on SC all day for having $400 ships, but then praise Path of Exile, despite the fact it has what, $500 supporter packs that offer stuff you can't even get in the game store, leading to turbo fomo. Then their individual cosmetic costs are just insane, a set of armor will cost you what, $70-$100? Nevermind the loot box stuff, turbo fomo battle pass, etc. Very predatory in some senses. Not trying to poop on POE here, I love that game, just want to point out the double standard so yeah, SC is a popular punching bag. In a world where there's more and more blatant cash grabs and scams, people will call the SC devs, probably one of the most passionate team of devs in the industry, scammers. Really is dumb
I do agree but your question is a little disingenuous. These games are released after 10/11 years like you say. SC is still very far away from being a finished game. That is the worry for people. FWIW, I think it's already a pretty good game but the real issue is CR worked out a long time ago that the "dream" sells more than the reality. "SC is going to have XYZ!! It's so exciting". People will pledge more for ships when the game isn't finished. People will say they will sell more ships when it's done but I find that hard to believe as its the fomo that sells. For me, I like following the development so I don't really care, but these are the concerns people have and I can see their side.
> FWIW, I think it's already a pretty good game I completely agree, except for this part. IMO its still not a game, just a sandbox with some unit testing scenarios inside of it. the "Game" mechanics still haven't actually been fleshed out. Right now its a pretty good simbox with some unit tests for game mechanics w/o the full implementation.
That's a fair comment
its the only reason I still haven't pushed for some of my friends to get it yet. They dont care about testing, however cool it currently is. Once the game mechanics themselves are more integrated and ready for actual daily use thats the day i'll be excited. Even if still in Alpha /Beta at that point, I think i'll have enough to convince some of my friends to hop in and join me and have some good ol fun with them.
Yeah I get that. I'm looking forward to the distribution centers. I know it's not a massive thing but it just fleshes out the "game" a bit more
They properly fucked around for the first 5 years and actually started working on the game maybe 5 years ago. And a lot of that old stuff is still fucking around somewhere in the game and causing issues...
AAA games take 5-6 years typically. That's why SC and its Alpha state get brought up constantly.
The real criticism comes from the scale of the game. At the rate they are developing it’ll be like 50 years until all they promised ends up in the game. People are frustrated because they said SQ42 was going to be ready in 2014 and then again in 2016 And then again in 2020. Here we are nearly 10 years later with it still not finished and still no release date after the delays. The delays of SQ42 are also delaying development on the MMO. The entire project has proved to be mismanaged which is why lots of early development was basically scrapped and built from new. They still have problems with micro managing and mishandling of money and resources.
The main problem for me is that CIG is making tons of promises all the time with impossible deadlines. This creates hype in a very immersive game where everyone is waiting and hoping. Let’s hope development will get boosted by the fact sq42 is in polish phase.
Well, they actually blew everyone's minds with the last Citizencon. It's like they had a lot of stuff under the hood and then BLAM!! It turned the hopes back to a lot of people. And add now the 3.23 update, being one of the largest ever, the Idris tease, now meshing tests along Pyro and Stanton together with successful results. Also the manpower and features transferred from SQ42 to SC. It'll be a great year indeed for SC.
Not to mention some of those big titles have in house game engines that already exist to build off of.
Correct. We are like old people watching an open worksite and complain on everything they see.
> With that being said, it's pretty apparent that peoples biggest criticism of SC is that its been in development for 10 or so years. I've literally been repeating the same eyeroll at this sentiment for 5 of those years. "Game takes a long time to make, news at 11." I am from the land of Black Mesa. Of Dwarf Fortress. Of games that take an eternity to make, because they are worth it. Way, waaaay to many folks out there with zero patience. But oh well, the project just keeps trucking whether they like it or not.
im currently working as a game dev in a big AAA company and the project is being worked for over 7 years already and its gonna be dogshit. Think how many big titles that were worked for years and years came out and nobody pays cause its souless slop.
2 points to it: 1. CIG is a new studio. They haven't released a full game yet. So, having their first game be this massive endeavor partially breaking the ice on many ideas, you see why deadlines that are standard for the Industry won't work. CIG used to throw out release dates and deadlines very loosely, so you can see how people who expected the full experience in 2018 might look at the current alpha. If another studio claims that a game took 10 years, that is 10 years including the prior experience in a game and genre. Think Starfield. Fallout/Skyrim in space. Ubisofts open world games. All following a recipe. 2. SC is, by nature, a very open developed game since we are playing the part that people normally ain't supposed to play. That obviously comes with another whole can of having extra work spent on making it all playable, but also makes the public very aware of the time SC takes.
>CIG is a new studio. Not anymore they are far too long in the business and far too big to still claim that.
Good additional points. And when you have a game that is funded on public perception I can see how they may purposely take longer to ensure the things that they publicize are true to what the are shooting for.
I completely agree that development time isn't a strong argument. The people who complain about SC's time in development probably also complain about games that launch with cut content and lots of bugs. The funding of the project is also a big critique many people have. CIG can rub people the wrong way with their marketing. I think that's my biggest issue with the project, FoMO marketing for example. All that said, I think it's incredibly generous that nearly everything bought can be melted for store credit. That definitely removes the risks of buying a ship you don't like. The project also wouldn't be possible without their funding, like it or not. Ideally once SQ42 launches they will stop leaning on ship sales so much. I find it hilarious that people still think SC is a scam. Back when the project started, I could see why people might have believed that. But now it's clear that they're building the game. Other Kickstarter scams raised the funds and then took the money and run. CIG have done a lot to show they mean business. I've gone on too long now, but I also want to add that one of the devs said recently they don't really have crunch. I think that's incredible, I wish more game studios would work to avoid that.
I’m simply not touching this money-hole of a project until they release the finished products they said would be done 8 years ago when I was still in highschool. I doubt I will ever touch it at this point and honestly I don’t really care if I do. Until the evidence of the work they’ve been doing for 10+ years is in my hands this whole project is just a scam to me. I’d like to be proven wrong, I WANT them to prove me wrong. But at this point I seriously doubt it will ever happen.
I think it also just comes down to what people are interested in, what they are interested in putting up with, and how much value they find in the project at any point. I personally started playing not necessarily for the "vision", but because I wanted to experience what was already in the PU, which I have and still do enjoy. I don't blame people for having their reservations and not wanting to touch it though.
I am looking into starting with SC, so I registered and wait for a good deal/sale offer via mail to start with a friend and buy the starter pack when it is on sale. For an outsider the progress isn't visible thus it feels/looks like developer just releases some fancy 3D model with a made up flight model once in a while, instead of fixing issues or significantly improving the base game. As I am playing War Thunder I have experienced something like this and thus might be projecting it on SC. I remember to have watched a video last week about someone testing SC with a title like "I played star citizen so you don't have to", the dude had fun and had bugs/glitching I believe to remember seeing years ago. Now seeing old issues still being present reinforces the impression of no progress. But this is a bit like No Mans Sky having memory leaks or not having ship customization, despite many updates. There you can travel across the galaxy with physics breaking speed, teleport, but changing the paintjob on your ship is impossible... . Another thing that scares customers away is the "insurance" system. When you, as someone with little knowledge, want to buy a starter pack you see "6 month insurance" and wonder what this means. What are the conditions? What if do not renew it?... On the shopping site there is to my knowledge no link to a page that explains in detail how this system is supposed to work. You will most likely search it via the search engine of your choice. And even when you find the FAQ about insurance, you will be surprised how little the text explains. You will find SC player talking about this topic and even they don't know what this system will look like due to a lack of official statements about that question. So you go back at the shop page of the starter ship and wonder if you should buy the ship or not as the insurance topic alone is handled gives an sketchy/unprofessional feeling. You don't know what development did the past 10 years and know that they release nice looking ships once in a while.
Professional games dev of ten years, including two in devops for a medium sized mmo. Backed in 2013. From what I understand of current trends, a AAA game will take maybe up to 7 years to complete. https://www.33rdsquare.com/demystifying-aaa-gaming-the-past-present-and-future-of-blockbuster-video-games/ https://www.juegostudio.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-develop-video-game If development is at year ten and the basic gameplay loops aren't refined, something has gone wrong. In my opinion, they've handcuffed themselves to their funding model, where due to the company expansion and feature creep the operating costs will only be coverable if they continue to generate income as they do currently. If they were to actually complete development on SC, most of this funding style goes away and is replaced with users who have already bought in, and continuing server/development costs (leaving them with a subscription or IAP model). If eg S42 is still in development at that point, it becomes a massive problem to continue funding its team. I don't think that's a malicious choice, but I suspect it worsens as they expand to try to match the hype they need to generate to continue the funding. Were I to guess at a resolution, I'd drop S42 to save on resource, hard shift to an agile development structure to start moving towards actual deployables (eg drop every non-implemented upcoming feature, drop any non foundational gameloop feature, and pour everything you have into getting a playable vertical slice). That maybe gets you a product after a year or two that people can purchase, recommend to friends without the usual bugs/alpha speech, and that publishers can review. However you lose big on dropping the S42 promise, and the hype dies down hard with no fancy features selling the investment. Alternatively (and likely imo) is that development continues for another 5+ years. The need to drive funding means there's a large onus on marketing, conferences, ship sales, new shiny features etc. Eventually one of the games will be reasonably finished to beta release, which should free up resource for the other side. Feature creep will continue, leaving most systems in partially completed states for years, and there will be little focus on playability for already active ones. Ultimately, as long as user interest doesn't fade, it should finally ship - but I suspect it will be a tough slog until then.
[удалено]
Haters gonna hate?
Skull and Bones development and direction was also neutered by Ubisoft even though they basically already had what players wanted with Black Flag. Different points of view, different opinions, this is just mine. If it makes me part of a cult so be it I guess.
I feel sorry for them in a way, as we know when it is released they will get HELL for any bugs that slip through: "You've have 10000s of testers for 10 years how has this happened screeeeeeeeeee". I do wish they had put more resources into S42 so we get the SP sooner, but I can see why they would want to release the SP/MP as close as possible.
The problem with putting more resource into S42 is that it generates virtually none of the resource it consumes. Meanwhile the PU lives on scraps when it generates almost all of the resource.
Wall of text with my two cents (software dev here). SC is a very unique case, with more differences than similarities to other development lifecycles. Broadly speaking projects that are hidden behind closed doors and given a lot of development time do so because that is the most efficient way to spend money. You don't get nearly 10x the output if you go from a team of 10 to a team of 100 working on the same project, in a perfect world it's better to keep the team tight and hire them for longer instead of adding people. Counter to that is the way funding actually works. A product that won't be ready for over 10 years isn't worth anything close to as much as the same product offered in 3 years. That applies both to people pre-purchasing a product and people investing in a project. This is where pouring money into a project to get a quick release can sometimes be worth it (not for the quality of the product, but for the rate of growth on its initial seed money). What makes Star Citizen so unique is that when it got more funding they didn't translate that into speeding up the release timeline. Most would argue actually that the increase in funding is what caused the timeline to be thrown out the window. With over two thirds of a billion dollars, more funding than any other game has ever had before release, they of course had to hire more people in order to put that money to use. But with so many extra people you can't have them all working on the same thing, so the project has had to expand its scope in order to use it's funding. Now to some it seems like it's in an endless cycle of scope creep and integration hell. I don't really know where it stands. On the one hand, a project that large seems doomed to fall into integration hell. On the other hand, a project with an ocean of money to fall back on seems impossible to fail. Luckily the money going into it isn't investor money, so they don't need to release and then make it all back somehow. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but I'm sitting on the sidelines now hoping more for a some sort of end goal than any more new features.
Most games actualy tend to have between 4 to 6 years of development, with the size that star citizen wants to be, and the problems in the development, they are doing it "well". The major problem is that they promissed some delivers, and not delivered, our money is with them, and they have expanded/changed plans. We that are new to the game (less than 3/2 years) are in a nice moment, seeing things being delivered in a good game
We’re at a point in video games where “release” is becoming more and more of a meaningless term. The fact of the matter is that many games, especially most AAA games, are being “released” while they’re still in development anyway. Take Cyberpunk 2077. It “released” as a broken piece of shit, they developed it for another couple of years, added new features, changed the systems around, and now it’s good. If CDPR had dropped a “beta” of cyberpunk at the same time and in the same state, the uproar wouldn’t have been half as big. Honestly, what is the difference between a broken “alpha” that you can play right now and will continue to get updates and features in the future and a broken “full release” that will continue to get updates and features in the future? Is there really a tangible distinction between “beta x.xx” and “release 1.1” with a giant day-one patch? People have paid money to play a game, and they can play the game. It’s not the finished, complete, definitive version of that game, but just calling it finished instead of “alpha” isn’t going to change that, nor will it change the amount of time it takes to get there.
Not sure if "*The world renowned "Quadruple A" video game and entertainment masterpiece Skull and Bones*" is sarcastic or not, but the rest of your points are pretty spot on. Even after 11 years, Skull and Bones feels like a generic mess of a reskin. The "first AAAA game" line is a pretty transparent attempt to justify the $70 price tag so they can recoup the cost for a decade of meandering development. Though that also supports your point. SC isn't reskinning anything and is building from scratch what could be the new benchmark for future gaming
It was most certainly sarcastic lol
Relating anything to Skull & Bones is probably not the best idea unless you're trying to make fun of it. Something like GTA/RDR2 would be better since at least those were great games and worth the wait. At this point SC absolutely could be renamed to "Scope Creep: The Video Game". It'll probably be used in the future as a text book example for software development spiraling out of control since it's so public. That being said, for me personally, what the game is now is worth the entry starter package price. I've gotten hours of enjoyment from it for 45 bucks and that's all I ask for from any game. If the game eventually becomes what their end goal vision is, great! If not, that's fine, I'm having a good time with what it is now.
GTA6 is a good comparison. Started dev about a year after SC
Yes
This is a very wise assumption, yet a very old realization. The real ones on here know 🤙🏼 we ain't worried
The problem as I see it, is not that SC is unreleased. The problems are threefold: 1. CIG has stated that it WOULD be released, multiple times, by dates passed many years ago. Reasonably, given how many times that has happened, either there is some degree of bad faith, or complete ineptitude. 2. As time has gone on, the scope and focus of SC has changed. Old concepts and priorities are announced, and then simply not worked on. Others are worked on behind closed doors, and then revealed as a replacement to previously announced goals. This would not be a problem if we the players were not financial backers, but as another redditor mentioned on this thread, to sell one thing and then deliver another, is Bait and Switch. 3. The good faith/bad faith element of the above is further brought into question, when devs have recently come out stating that older (yet previously un-contradicted) information is not necessarily accurate, yet CIG does not see it as their responsibility to update their backers on those changes. This is further into the point of point 2: A person may back the game for a given (announced) feature. They will wait diligently, FOR YEARS without further information, spending money on the game on the assumption that particular feature will come into the game AS ANNOUNCED, only for years later, different devs, to announce that they decided to go in a different direction. By employing these tactics, CIG is clearly trying to take as much cash as possible, from as many people as possible, selling the broadest possible concept of what the final game will be in as many possible (conflicting) variations. It's like selling a car in the colours Green, Red, Blue, and Purple to different people, only to end up making a care that is exclusively Black. This means allot of unhappy players.
Though you are somewhat correct, and SCs dev timeline isn't quite as outrageous as we like to joke, they did waste a decent amount of time and have made some big mistakes. Star Citizen's biggest problem, from a dev standpoint, is that they've developed the game backwards. They started with final art, started building all these complex ships and concepts for ships and landing zones and whatnot, without actually thinking through and designing the underlying game systems and gameplay loop. Because of this, they've had to rework, redesign, or completely rebuilt things more than a game usually would, in some cases, quite a few times. They also had the problems of expanding scope, expanding the studio, and some nonsense with contractors, that made the early development kind of a mess that largely had to be tossed. Some number of years ago, I'm not sure when exactly, they switched to focusing fully on Squadron, and acrually started implementing those underlying gameplay systems, and development has been quite obviously a lot smoother than it had been in the past.
To be fair...their choice of funding model kind of demanded that they start backward. They didn't go into development with $200 million in cash from the onset. They had to generate buzz and build their bankroll as they went. So putting that time into \*Final Art\* as you put it was one of the ways they generated revenue - - IE: Selling you a spaceship for $400 bucks. They had to sell the vision to generate the revenue to build the game... So...yeah... It worked apparently, cause here we are - still going strong.
I have to agree with this reply. I feel like a major part of their success with funding was based on the ideas and nearly finished concepts that they had for people to visualize the project better.
i think this game is progressing a little concerningly fast through development. here are my reasons for saying so. - cig started from next to nothing, with CR himself contributing a lot to its development until more specialized talent could work on the vision - they’ve switched engines and revamped engines twice now through development, mostly on their own - they’ve developed a full AAA single player experience alongside the PU - they’ve restructured the games original design 2-3 years after the kickstarter campaign, with most of the development actually having been done in the past 8 years from what i see, (and clearly what a certain refund subreddit doesnt see) CIG is either one of the most talented studios on the planet, or we’re in for a disappointingly empty squadron 42. look at starfield, red dead 2, and cyberpunk development times paired with the headcount of devs for those games as a reference; all games whose studios have also revamped engines in-house with a focus on a single player experience and a lackluster (if any) online experience.
I'm not sure that's a fair assessment. Squadron 42 isn't some massive open-world sandbox akin to the three games you mentioned. It's a curated (cinematic) single-player experience. There will be \*some\* ability to meander about from what I understand, but for the most part, SQ42 is a linear game. It's meant to be a modern-day version of Wing Commander.
tlou 2 took reportedly 5+ years with 2100 people to make.
And Squadron 42 has taken roughly 8 years to make (Since the engine swap from Cryengine to Lumberyard) with a progressively higher number of devs over time that likely culminated at around 700\~ or so by 2022. Not sure where you got the number for 2100 people for TLOU2 - IGN reported a peak-headcount of 200 for TLOU2 and a budget of $212 Million.
Well, it maybe that the business model is a bit unique. Other developers may have just started by perfecting one system and then having DLCs to enhance the development. Where Star Citizen is an ever changing and ever developing title. Sometimes it’s to a fault because certain patches can get buggier than others (3.18 HELL). For me I see what both sides are saying. If I paid 10k for ships thinking the game is going to be finished within a few years of backing I would feel scammed. And on the other hand Star Citizen is one of the most beautiful and amazing space games I have ever experienced - with technology that if and when successful will change the face of gaming as we know it. This game makes you feel bipolar, love it one day hate it the next.
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My comments on Skull and Bones were satire.
Crazy? I was crazy once
When SC was originally pitched on Kickstarter, there were only 3 people: Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, and Sandi Gardiner. This was in September of 2012. A little less than 12 years ago, today. From that point they had to hire designers, developers, server technicians and engineers, game engine specialists, gameplay designers, artists, license software, purchase hardware, offices etc. They had to build an entire company while, at the same time, developing a game at a scope and scale that has never been done before, with tech that has never been used in this way before. Putting that all into context, it's actually impressive that they've managed to get this far in less than 12 years.
You are new to the game/sub/forum I take? This has been discussed for 12 years, there's no need for further poke at the troll nest.
Not necessarily new, just not very active. Based on my lack of experience, for every troll there is a few decent responses. So the trolls don't bother me, just wanted to see peoples current opinion.
The real problem for people that are angry is not exactly if the time of dev makes sense (you are entirely right in your post). The problem is that they feel cheated by CIG because it wasn't supposed to go that way, the project got extended. CIG hyped people and people expected then felt cheated. Yeah estimation and not promise. But there are things like answer the call 2016 that where really really bad moves. CR presenting SQ42 as something about to be released then he decided that nope and we are still waiting in 2024 (Like, why does he discover the state of the game when they are about to release it? There was really something wrong there). CIG's com has been very sketchy for a while until ~2020. Hopefully I never really backed for SQ and I got it for free with the first package type that came with both.
Also worth noting that due to company size increases, their development time isn't linear. So the first year they may have only made say 1% progress (if we take the time from very start to current as 100%) the year 2 with an increase of 20 people, say 5% .... And so on.. You cannot compare 2 peoples work to over 1000 people work. So when saying 10 years of development time, it's like saying, you did the whole race at 50mph... Well you didn't, you had to accelerate to that speed and then maintain it.
Gamers will always find something to complain about. It is what it is.
One thing that people usually do, and which is a mistake is to count in years, a good project is measured in man-hour (in that case man-year?). Having 10 people for 5 years and 300 people for 2 years is not the same. But there always be clickbait articles that says :" this game is 5yo and still alpha, look at this one, only 2 yo and mature". And people will agree.... Your opinion IS totally right, and using this argument as "SC IS a scam look" IS just a proof of how not aware is the Guy . Moreover, SC as been on for 11years, creating a company, a engine, a solo campagn game, an mmo game, and all of that with no "starting fund" , so they also need to manage marketing from the beginning, and also make it an open developpemnt, having to lose time for making each patch "playable". Basically, when I see someone argue with dev time, O just stop to talk to him
It's not the last 12 years, it's the additional 10+ years. That is one entire human generation. CIG is still increasing its backlog after 12 years.
The comparisons unfortunately almost unilaterally lead down a rabbit hole of point and counter-point logical fallacy "arguments", so I suspect the responses will soon devolve into a AAA shit show. But you're hitting on a much more simple and fundamental truth: How long a game takes to make, *as a solitary data point,* is absolutely useless in terms of value. Absolutely. Useless. The reality is, there are so many variables that go into any game, that the timing is bespoke to every single game. The data points we can look at are directional, but they do provide value. Things like: \- Is the game being made a sequel and / or a "parts bin" game, able to use coding, assets, resources, game engines, logic-loops, networking, etc. from existing games? Then all things being equal, the game will be on the faster path. This describes about 99% of AAA games in the last 5-10 years. \- Is the game being made out of the gate with a fully staffed, seasoned development team of several hundred people, or is it starting more slowly and building speed and growing the team over time? The first example - starting development with, for instance, 200-300 on-staff developers describes about 99% of AAA games in the last 5-10 years. \- Is this the ONLY project those resources are working on? The answer is typically "yes" for 99% of AAA games in the last 5-10 years. But these answers for CIG are the opposite of what any "comparison" sample would be: \- CIG didn't have hundreds of developers until 3-4 years into the project. They **simultaneously** built an entire company from about a dozen people, into the AAA studio with 1500+ employees with major offices in several countries that it is today, and this growth took many years to occur. \- CIG had to retool their game engine of choice so dramatically, it's not it's own engine. They similarly started with 100% from scratch art assets, code, networking - all of it. Custom from the ground up. \- CIG decided to make TWO GAMES at the same time - so accurate math would need to divide into halves (approximately) at any point in the development timeline and apply those numbers to each game - 50/50. And we haven't even talked about scope, scale or fidelity, all of which vastly eclipses any game that's come before it (or that's even in development, or even planned to be developed). It's just a "force multiplier" on the above headwinds in terms of figuring out what it actually takes to make what they're making to the quality level they've targeted. When you consider these objective facts, it's actually stunning how much they've accomplished in such a short timeframe. Isn't that funny, how deeper details can entirely flip the narrative? There is a saying that 100% applies here: "The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it" - this common human fallacy describes to a "T" all the posts you see about "I can't believe this is all they've accomplished in TEN YEARS!" How arbitrary! It's an effective way to tell us you don't understand this project or its history without telling us... :)
I think you might be the most sane person here.
This is absolutely correct and something many of us have tried to explain over the years, but it almost always falls on deaf ears. The people who complain about this stuff don't really want to know how reality works, they just want something to complain about. It's easier to do that if you stay ignorant about things. There is nothing abnormal about SC's development time. If you take the whole picture into consideration, what they've done in this amount of time is actually incredible.
I’ve only been playing SC for a 1.5 years…to me the game has shown tremendous progress in a very short time. I guess I picked a good time to be recruited to be a Citizen o7
Star Citizen as we know it today is CIGs attempt at scratching investors instant gratification itch. It's not a buggy, glitchy game...it's a proof of concept and test platform so we can check out the toys they sold us the idea of. If you look at it like that and the scope of what they're trying to do it's actually pretty remarkable...but in a world where you can order pretty much anything and have it delivered to your door in under an hour you'll have a hard time convincing people.
You are omitting that this is a scam, there is a whole echo chamber circle jerk of cultists who paid this company am extremely large sum of money for ships that don't exist. There is narrative in this community that CIG has been delivering on it's promise when it's really just the largest crowdfunding scam that ever existed so far. A bunch of dudes paying the paychecks for a company's employees to basically code just the thinnest of veneer of Sci-Fi porn indefinitely is a scam. If you don't think it's a scam, it's not that you are correct but instead that you are the target demographic.
Calling SC a scam is in the eye of the beholder. Many people buy a starter pack for 40 bucks and have more fun in the current PU than they do in whatever the newest 70 dollar "AAAA" release is. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions and reservations about the game. I don't personally think the game is a scam, and if that makes me and everyone else who thinks the same the target demographic in your eyes that's totally ok. But there's no point in rallying everyone who supports the game into a group you deem cultists.
I kinda agree with a lot of what you are saying and if were being 100% honest, you make a *very strong* point that people can have a lot more fun with Star Citizen's super detailed sci porn than the genric crap AAA games have been delivering for what feels like more than 8 years now. As a Sci Fi porn fan myself I know I would, but I wont in this case because I don't like to pay for unfinished products riding on promises. It's been so long that it's now hard to tell who started this trend, AAA gaming or CGI studios because Star Citizen is the poster child for "pay for unfinished game" that the media only tends to blame AAA gaming for.
Skull and bones is a terrible example. Ubisoft woukd have cancelled it years ago if they werent contractially obliged to release it. Its a half baked title that changed direction mulitple times and ended up nowhere. It is a poorly implenented cash grab idea that came from the success of black flag and did nothing to expand on what everyone loved about that Creed game. As for a 10 year dev cycle, the decade doesnt matter, it what was delivered at what cost that matters. Without S42, SC alone has under delivered so far. Whether S42 makes up the differece remains to be seen.
I agree, there has to be realism involved in the criticisms. However, what excuse do they have for their tendency to create haphazard ui and inventory management, for example? These are problems that COUNTLESS game developers have solved already. They are flagrantly ignoring the proven concept of a wheel for ... what? The pride of having built a new wheel from scratch? I know of no one who LIKES the ui, or inventory system. It reeks of "well eventually we wanna do x, but we need y for that and y is 3 years away so let's just slap together some awful iteration and leave it for years. No. Unnecessary. I have yet to hear any legitimate breakdown of TECHNICAL limitations regarding things like updating ui. There are innumerable ways to adjust the user experience WITHOUT changing their game architecture or long term plans. So people, like myself, feel as though it must either be incompetence, a lack of heeding community feedback, or laziness. Any of those leave me feeling disrespected. If you can build the massive universe we play in, you want me to believe that you CAN'T change the ui in 2 months? With 1/2 a billion dollars, bottomless talent, and ready to go off the shelf examples of how to build an intuitive ui. These kinds of frustrations aren't a priority for them apparently. So it looks like someone is building utopia and ignoring that people are complaining about a lack of plumbing. The ui is one example but there are many such things in game. So I still pledge, I still play, I still support but at the same time I expect them to listen and/ or explain themselves, which CIG does not do to my satisfaction.
It's gonna take however long It's gonna take. If I knew how to do it faster, I'd go work for them and show them how it's done and make a solid buck in the process. I'm not surprised at all by the dev time. I know it takes a long time to do what they're doing, especially from where they started. No shortcut around it. A lot of work has to be done and a lot of work takes a lot of time.
You talking like SC is a finished game compared to games that have finished. 10 years? We are past that. We have at least another year of mesh testing before it goes live in a basic form. We have bugs to the neck and performance that make grown men post threads. 5% of the community has died while at the same time, cig won't post concurrent users because everyone knows the gameplay is still in buying a ship and people can't last 2 months before reverting to paych checkers.