Star Citizen will likely never be finished, precisely because the person in charge, Chris Roberts, is notorious in the game industry for being the human embodiment of scope creep.
Even the earliest games he directed or produced as far back as Strike Commander in 1993 suffered from delays. "His" most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer, was also delayed by nearly 2 years from its original release date, only reaching completion because he was fired from the job and only kept on as a consultant while the game was finished without his "direction."
I'm not a backer of Star Citizen, but I see Roberts as a "pure visionary," someone who is capable of generating large and interesting ideas, but lacks the ability to execute. If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy. As soon as a feature is halfway done, he's already come up with several more that are suddenly the Most Important Thing.
This is why the game is taking over decade to complete and will likely never be finished. Squadron 42 isn't even the core Star Citizen product - it's technically a "companion game" and even this is only just now finishing the campaign 10 (!!) years after it was first announced.
Something Roberts doesn't seem to understand is that the longer a game goes, the higher the expectations, with virtually no upper limit. Considering the quality of games that have come out in recent years, there is no world where Star Citizen or Squadron 42 are strictly a disappointment to everyone other than the sunk-cost-fallacy "investors" still huffing the copium of their 4-5 figure backing fees.
It's almost interesting, but largely exhausting to read people's critique of this project with virtually no knowledge of relevant details.
None of the things you're loosely describing make sense without comparative context. When you provide that context, the differences tell a very different story.
> If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy
Finding people with negative views of their former employer isn't interesting. There's also hundreds of people who are quite happy working for the company and/or Chris Roberts (their forum/social media posts are not difficult to find either).
There is a fairly specific failure mode for the game at this point, and I haven't seen it described in this thread.
>> "most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer"
The first Wing Commander had almost 300k sales and ports for just about everything, 8 sequels, a TV show, and a movie years before Freelancer shipped, and then it got another game. It seems like a better candidate for his most famous work.
Chris Roberts had a peculiar Hollywood moment with the 1999 “Wing Commander” movie that he directed.
Hollywood producers won’t let you keep endlessly polishing a turd on their dime, so the movie went to theaters with Kilrathi puppets that look like constipated hairless rodents locked in green gas bubbles. It’s a marvel of terrible science fiction.
but was that "Duke Nukem Forever", or just a mediocre game that got the infamous title slapped on for profit? I don't remember much about the game other than it killing the Duke Nukem Brand.
I recognize a lot of faces in that trailer. The game stars Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Andy Serkis, Gillian Anderson (Scully!), Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, and some more familiar faces [1]
So that's where all my money's gone since 2012!
Star Citizen actually launching a finished product certainly wasn't on my 2020's bingo card.
the server meshing demo is technically impressive, very curious how they did that
so in the example, they had 3 location authority server and 1 replication layer,
so each location server can represent a physical location on 3d world, say its own solar system, and moving out from location A to location B moves you to a different server, and that was possible cause your position matrix was store in the replication layer and each server has a copy of replication layer.
now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations
In the demo they simulate everything in every servers, which is a huge waste of cpu, not sure how it's going to work in the game. There are a lof ot corner cases / problems not solved with their tech.
> now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations
Probably just as other distributed systems implement replication: you have a leader to broadcast instruction and other followers applied the instruction to their local copy of the state.
However, there'll always be delay/stale data between the leader and followers. So, to improve performance, you can allow the followers to perform speculative decision based on their own calculation, but these local decisions will be overwritten / rollback by instructions received from the leader.
I believe them now. The underlying difference in Star Citizen is they have extremely permissive shareholder obligations, and essentially no deadline.
That virtually uncaps scope creep, and because they've had a fairly open development process it's plain to see the time for not delivering a product past by a while ago.
The thing they can fail to do at this point is scale the player connections. If they manage to scale to thousands of players I'll be impressed.
As for Squadron 42, their track record is good in terms of sheer honesty (really not the same thing as as a prediction). A single player game being "feature complete" is pretty straight forward.
Also what they announced is not even the core game! I stopped caring about what games he has until it is installable and playable (full game). Last game I bought of his was probably early 2000s. It was disappointing. He has got this privateer itch he has been trying to scratch since the mid 90s. This is the 5th version of the game. This one taking the longest. Meanwhile dozens of other companies have shipped complete versions 2-3 times already. I would say to get the current gen feel of what privateer would be I would say play starfield. If all you want is trading and that sort of thing one of the X series.
The game does a lot of plane-like physics instead of space-like physics as far as flying goes. Some of it is explained away by the ship "simulating" things for you, like drag. In practice it's just more fun/intuitive that way. Humans have a hard time with real space physics. Not that dogfighting would ever be a thing in space anyway.
> Not that dogfighting would ever be a thing in space anyway
I doubt that. Even in space, small vessels for last hop movement of personnel and cargo between points would probably still be necessary, and as long as those exist and there's the possibility of being intercepted in close quarters there'll be the need of single flyer attack/defense ships.
Nobody expects dogfighting in the middle of a multi month acceleration/deceleration trajectory, but once you've parked your capital ship in orbit, there would be ways to get close and ambush it where maneuverability and pin point accuracy of a fighter jet would be useful. It's science fiction anyway.
Every 4-6 months I reinstall Star Citizen in the hope it’s not a buggy low FPS mess. On paper this is my ideal game but I’ve yet to enjoy it. I have zero hype for S42. Well, almost zero…
And since when does bug fixing and optimization come before the end of feature development?
There's nothing shocking or strange about this company's software development procedure. Just a load of people who are very emotional about a project and don't understand what's going on.
The delay is simply an issue of perverse incentives.
Marketing + slow release + hype = unofficial subscription model, funding increases indefinetely. Adding new crazy scope creep instead of releasing earlier was always beneficial.
The worst part is that if you were in a dedicated flight sim, set up your sticks, and enjoy.
In SC, you gotta set up your sticks, you gotta then use mouse + keyboard to get to your ship. Then you can enjoy. But then like 50+% of the game is outside the cockpit, so now you're having to fiddle with trying to find a comfortable place to put that damn keyboard/mouse.
This game presents its own unique physical challenges, not to mention a need for like a GTX3070 at a minimum to get decent framerate (just 60 without every cool looking thing turned off)
I was disabled and slated for major surgeries when I backed at under 10,000 total backers. Have a physical card something near 7500.
I am still disabled and slated for major surgeries. Never know if I’ll be able to comfortably play the game.
A friend of mine started medschool at the same time and is now nearly fully through medschool. He’s also a backer under 10,000.
He doesn’t know if he’s never going to have any time to play, or if he’s going to fully drop out of life (likely) and only be a doctor and play Star Citizen with all of his free time in life. Bit of a neurotic asocial fellow.
Anyways, I have a post history across social medias to show that I’ve never doubted this game would fully come to fruition. Around 2016 or so I concluded I might change my mind if they had nothing meaningful to show after 15 years.
The hate surrounding so many things about this company/game has always been exceptionally amusing to me. There are people in the subreddit/YouTube that have quite literally been complaining on an at-least weekly basis since like. 2014 (I say this as I post shadowbanned on HN)
They really devote a significant portion of their lives solely to being extremely butthurt about the company, Chris Roberts, and his wife. The disgruntled ex-employees that come out of the woodwork every now & then are wild too.
They’re still not completely out of the pits yet, but I think people are going to be surprised when this ends up being a completely jawdropping(decade defining?) game.
I also think I’ll probably still be disabled, even if I have surgery soon, recovery is very, very long.
Life is strange.
Couldn't agree more. People seem to want to see this project fail for some reason. They're all going to be in for a kick to the gut when it finally releases, because CIG is one of the few game studios actually pushing the boundaries of what's possible in gaming. o7
Even the earliest games he directed or produced as far back as Strike Commander in 1993 suffered from delays. "His" most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer, was also delayed by nearly 2 years from its original release date, only reaching completion because he was fired from the job and only kept on as a consultant while the game was finished without his "direction."
I'm not a backer of Star Citizen, but I see Roberts as a "pure visionary," someone who is capable of generating large and interesting ideas, but lacks the ability to execute. If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy. As soon as a feature is halfway done, he's already come up with several more that are suddenly the Most Important Thing.
This is why the game is taking over decade to complete and will likely never be finished. Squadron 42 isn't even the core Star Citizen product - it's technically a "companion game" and even this is only just now finishing the campaign 10 (!!) years after it was first announced.
Something Roberts doesn't seem to understand is that the longer a game goes, the higher the expectations, with virtually no upper limit. Considering the quality of games that have come out in recent years, there is no world where Star Citizen or Squadron 42 are strictly a disappointment to everyone other than the sunk-cost-fallacy "investors" still huffing the copium of their 4-5 figure backing fees.