Star Citizen & Squadron 42

Post Reply New Topic

As far as I know, we don‘t have an official Thread regarding my favourite game yet. I guess it‘s about time

Star Citizen is a mmo rpg game and space simulation currently in alpha stage (3.1.4) Financially it‘s funded solely on crowdfunding.

Here you can discuss everything related to Star Citizen and Squadron 42
From news regarding the developement, concept sales, evocati releases, videos and so on

i love the concept of both games. sadly, the developers have been rather ill-treated and until the single player portion actually comes out and works, i wont be signing up to play, just yet.

besides, im gonna need a hell of an upgrade to my rig if i wanna play that beast of a game.

Not a game I'd ever touch, and I say that as a PC gamer that definitely enjoys space-themed games. That is one *nasty* developer/publisher. Wouldnt trust them with... anything. Anything at all.

How come?

This is a developer with even deeper greed, and even shadier practices, than EA.

It's a kickstarted game, right? That's fine. In a kickstarter, you ask up front for the money necessary to complete the project. They not only reached their goal, but went WAY past it. The kickstarter did VERY well.

That was years ago. Since then, MOST of what Star Citizen is, is not a game... it's a way to give the devs even more money. Ever notice the EXTREME focus on ships you can buy? Even worse, ever notice the utterly ridiculous prices on them? Ridiculous prices on what are, I remind you, ships in a video game, and one that isnt even remotely close to being finished yet. EA and Activision are the absolute greediest of the big companies, and even those guys wouldnt even CONSIDER trying those money-grubbing tactics. Have you SEEN the prices on those ships, and how many there are?

And here's the thing: The usual arguement from fans is "well they need that money to support development" and I can tell you right now: No, they dont. This isnt how development works. They hit their kickstarter goal so hard that they completely shattered it... they got what they wanted and then some. They had all the support they needed. So that means that one out of three things is happening:

1. They mismanaged the money so badly that they ran out, and got increasingly desperate

2. They COMPLETELY missed the mark on their initial estimate of how much they needed. In fact, they missed it so badly that it says they barely even UNDERSTAND what is needed to create this product.

3. They didnt run out, and it wasnt about missing the mark... they simply wanted more, and saw a way to goad players into giving them lots more

There is no fourth option here. Those are the only three possibilities for the cost and sheer number of those ships.

It's been YEARS, and Star Citizen the game remains a glorified tech demo at best (and apparently, one that doesnt run very well). Seriously. They've.... had.... YEARS to do this. Yet they've managed so little progress that it reminds me of Duke Nukem Forever. This just isnt how development is meant to work, even on kickstarted projects (it isnt how it's supposed to work on ANY project).

And all of this while muuuuuuuuch smaller devs are already doing similarly expansive games. Look up a game called Empyrion, for instance. Another space game with massive scale, but a different gameplay style (much more focus on being on the planets themselves, and also a focus on building). It's huuuuuuge. I've been following the development of that one for a long time... they update FREQUENTLY (like, every couple of weeks) and updates are typically bloody massive. There's no microtransactions, no need to pay them a bloody thing beyond the initial purchase (which is only $20 normally.... just 20!), yet there's a super-long feature list. The game's one problem is it has a mean learning curve (seriously, it's one complicated game), but that's okay by me... any truly expansive game usually has a learning curve from hell. It's a game with endless possibilities and no need to constantly pay ridiculous sums to get those possibilities. There are various other similar examples out there, too.... this is hardly the only one (just the one I'm most familiar with). Plenty of excellent space games to be found, some expansive like that, some much more focused or even combined with other genres.

Yet SC is the one that continues to flounder and ask for more and more money to support a project that absolutely has not been proven, yet HAS ground nearly to a halt in terms of true progress. They're supposed to be professionals, too... they should be pulling this off faster, better, and more efficiently than any indie dev could, but they arent.


I mean, honestly. The whole situation is ridiculous. If you actually show SC's store pages to anyone that ISNT already obsessed with the game, they tend to just laugh at it. I remember explaining the whole thing to a few friends... they utterly refused to believe me at first. They were sure a game developer not only wouldnt get away with that, but that they'd never even TRY it. When they saw SC and it's store were real, they were utterly baffled. They then wondered why ANYONE would trust or buy from that developer. And that's the *usual* reaction, not an uncommon one. Actual developers that I know found the whole thing to be just disgusting, when asked for their opinion on it. One in particular called it "Scam Citizen", and.... yeah, I have a hard time going against that one. Because it genuinely might be true, we cant be sure.

So... yeah, that. Honestly I could go on for awhile longer (because the list of problems is MUCH longer than what I've brought up), but... yeah.

As long as gamers keep doing braindead things like pre-ordering, and buying ridiculous DLCs, these sort of practices will continue. But none of them are doing it in as nasty a way as the SC devs. Again, even EA and Activision wouldnt dream of doing this. And when even the devil himself wont copy you... you know you've gone too far.


And yeah, I know I didnt mention Squadron 42 too much in here... there's a whole other section to this messed up story, and that's a bit much for me to want to type about here. One way or another, I think I've made my point.

Alpha 3.2 is available to all backers

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... -Available

It's definitely a game I'm interested in, but I'll wait until it's done. Whether that happens or not seems to be up in the air. I understand the scepticism towards the game's development, but in reality it's not unusual for such a large scale game to have a development time this long. On the other hand, the developers haven't shown much reason for people to have faith in their ability to deliver, with poor communication and a long history of missed deadlines. Their funding model seems obscene and predatory, and I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of all this a lot of people are going to wish they'd invested their considerable sums of money in something more worthwhile than make believe ships.

My gut feeling is that there's a lot of people working on it as a labour of love, who grossly underestimated the funding required to make it and now face the prospect of having overpromised and underdelivered.

Comparing it to games like Empyrion seems a bit disingenous as they are very different games other than them both being set in space, with a very different scope and scale of ambition.

Actually, the scope is mostly the same.

A zillion different planets, a zillion different things to do, tons and tons of content, full multiplayer, exploration... the only true difference is that you're allowed to build your own ships as well instead of just paying the devs utterly ridiculous amounts of money for something that should be MAYBE $3 max. Well, the other difference is that Empyrion's devs have CONSTANTLY communicated, and made constant forward progress instead of randomly backtracking (which, based on what I've observed, the backtracking in Star Citizen seems deliberate... what better way to keep the money flowing than to "delay" the project's release for increasingly nonsensical reasons? To any other dev team, the reasons they often quote are seriously ridiculous).

I also remember when, in games, you bought the bloody game, and as a result, GOT the bloody game. You worked to unlock stuff. You DID NOT pay the devs 50 freaking dollars for each individual unlockable..... or way more than that. Even if it was an MMO or a game very focused on multiplayer.

"Predatory" doesnt even begin to describe it, which is why I dont think it's a matter of them just "overestimating". And if it IS a matter of just screwing up... then these are people that have no place in the industry, as they have no bloody clue what they're doing, because that's a screwup of colossal proportions that has rarely been matched (only example I can think of is Duke Nukem Forever). I mean, a long development time is one thing, but this game's problems go waaaaayyyyyyyyy beyond just that.

As it is, alot of people are already wishing that they'd not invested anything in it. The outrage over it has hit a boiling point. Been seeing it ALOT recently, even in alot of places that arent whatsoever related to it.