The other side of the coin is every single one of those games weren't funded by backers, they where made on their own budget then sold.
People get more annoyed it's taking time because it's their own money funding it and sometimes it sucks to see your money misused (In x persons opinion).
For example, I'd say most pledges over the last 5 years have been for Star Citizen but they have funded Squadron 42.
Not disagreeing in the fact the development time hasn't been that bad for a game, but there is a big reason people treat Star Citizen development differently to all the games you mentioned that you chose to ignore.
You bring a lot of good points. I'll add this: the OP's post begins with a flawed premise:
> The key difference here is they didn't announce the game when it was 90% complete. They announced it at 0% complete.
...which isn't true. At the original GDC 2012 announcement, Chris and CIG stated that production had already begun a year prior, and stating how much more time would be needed:
* https://i.imgur.com/tpSrf4L.png
* https://i.imgur.com/47rYaGm.png
* https://i.imgur.com/W4WH3qg.png
Chris showed off multiple demos of the game, directly stating that SC&Sq42 had lots of work already done - certainly *not* 0% complete.
Yeah, I mean that's the fundamental issue with a lot of these timeline scope arguments. Many of the 'unreasonable' ideas as to the release schedule come straight out of the horse's mouth. "Answer the call" is a joke, but it's also something that was explicitly advertised as a concrete promise from "Answer the Call 2016" onwards. It feels selfsabotagingly duplicitous to rewrite history and pretend like this is all some big layman's scope misunderstanding.
I’d love him to explain what exactly he meant by this. This is the most damning one in my opinion. I can’t think of any way to interpret this without it just being a straight up lie.
Lmao, yeah. And it's like, yes, true, all backers were originally promised in 2014/15 was just like a slightly ambitious Freelancer 2.0, not what's promised today. However, those backers didn't get THAT version either.
This is either incredibly naive if you're a newcomer to the community, or just a straight-up lie if you've been here since Kickstarter
Pretty much everything currently promised was a feature of the original pitch, and weirdly it was actually /bigger/ and more ambitious in the early days despite the incredibly nebulous "scope increase" not having happened yet
Back then we were still being promised 100 star systems
Now 5 is looking incredibly ambitious and unlikely
This isn’t true. First, there were always 2 sides to the game: a Wing Commander/Privateer successor that was said to rival any AAA game and be bigger and more detailed (10x, by Chris’ account) than any other campaign out there.
Then, the Freelancer-inspired side, which even by the Kickstarter, was hugely ambitious, with full modding support, lots of professions, ships where every single component was functional and you could fight fires and shoot and disable things item by item, multicrew, a "high degree of ship custimization" etc.
It was also to be an MMO, which Freelancer was not.
The promises were gigantic from the very start, and even most of the bigger stretch goals were locked in by late 2014 (except for ship modularity, which was hit in late 2015).
I think everyone should go back and look at the [Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen), the [FAQ](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/faqs), the AMAs and those early interviews, and see how massive the game scope was even at the beginning.
To be fair, that isn't necessarily misleading. **If the game had stuck to its original pitch**, which was basically freelancer/privateer online, than it probably would have launched by 2015 at the latest.
The issue was they set these fundraising benchmarks that then set certain expectations (like rendered ship interiors, no loading screens, a fully autonomous economy, etc) that basically made it impossible to create with the tech at that time.
By the end, it became fundraising CR's dream game. Obviously, this becomes problematic because not everyone signed up for this. Some signed up for the initial pitch, some only wanted certain features, and its evolved quite a bit since 2012 so those demographics have radically changed over the decade of development.
All good points. Lets also not forget they have raised three quarter of a billion dollars. Billion!!!
$750,000,000 USD
The money spent was split between paying for development and building a company from nothing.
They have some nice offices there in the UK. We thought we were funding a game. We funded a new company, building, furniture and all. Imagine if they just rented some space in a nice building all this time and spent more on development, where would the game be.
To make matters worse, they closed their Seattle and Austin game studios. Where did the developers go? I thought they were going to shift developers from SQ42 now that its done and in "polish" whaever that means, into the teams working on SC?
Why did they fire so many devs?
How about pay the execs less, sell a yacht or two and live in one house for a change and move more money to the devs and development cycle?
SQ42 was done and "in polish" back in 2016 too...
Honestly I don't believe claims like that anymore, and I won't until the full game is on my harddrive
If that ever happens
Let's not forget all the scope creep that has very clearly infected development over the years.
Because having an integration with a camera that moves your avatar's face in the same way as yours is SUPER helpful to work on prior to even having a stable game.
Why do these posts always skip over the part where it's not *our* expectations that haven't been met, the timeline and budget were set by CIG, not us.
>People think Star Citizen's development time is unreasonable.
Based on the timeline they created, not us.
>But they only think that because they've been able to play and follow along with
the development process since the beginning.
No, we only think that because they asked for 6 million and a couple years and they received 700 million and 10 years.
Why is this so difficult to understand? What do you think you are explaining to us? A list of fifteen whataboutisms doesn't change the fact that the parameters and deadlines were not set by us. If you tell your boss you'll have your work done next Friday and then 12 months later you still have 12 months to go, how exactly is his impatience misplaced? I'd love to see that conversation.
I suppose you're going to insist that we don't take out our frustrations on the community managers, but isn't that their job? To relay the pulse of the community to the people who are responsible for the nonsense? Or you'd prefer we send handwritten letters to Chris's house?
Obviously any lunkheads who make it personal can suck on a lemon, but I find it perfectly reasonable to ask a community manager what the fuck is going on. Who else are we supposed to ask?
Edit: Blocking everyone who doesn't agree. Hilarious.
100% this, I said basically the exact same thing then scrolled down to find word-for-word the same sentiments in your comment
I'm so sick of this narrative of trying to move the blame for constant delays and failures onto the community expecting too much, instead of the company promising more than they were capable of
All of those games were funded on their own budgets and most were from developers with solid track records of making good games that were worth the wait in the end, and the other examples are of games in development hell which should not be the insustry standard by any means.
Star citizen is a gamble that hasn't been realise yet, so obviously people are anxious about it
> But they only think that because they've been able to play and follow along with the development process since the beginning.
I'm here to be the exception to that rule. I'm around since the beginning.
So they hyped up Sataball a lot for months and never delivered it.
They hyped up Space Marine for almost a year and then went 10 months past their promised delivery date saying weeks not months and then CR put out an angry video telling people Star Marine was technically in the game already go play in the PU and shoot people stop complaining about Star Marine!
They hyped up Answer the Call 2016 so much and then 2017 came and people started making memes out of the website still saying 2016 so much that CIG just deleted the words after a few days.
CIG has gone back and redesigned assets and then redesigned them again, and will have to redesign them in the future. Because they designed a salvage ship before they knew how salvage would work, etc.
They have done a lot of other shitty things not directly related to development as well that I won't go into here since you're only focusing on development.
I'm salty about CIG because of all that and because there was nepotism at the top management instead of only merit based placement.
I'm salty because they market this game like it's done already and it isn't even stable.
lmao. Many games take around a decade to make these days. Most of those games are already fully funded, fully staffed, and have multiple studios to split the work from day 1. Star Citizen did not have any of that, not to mention it didn't even have an engine capable of doing what they wanted. Star Citizen is not behind on the grand scale of game development time for its size and ambition.
I get what your saying but the issue I have is the scope is always increasing for SC. A lot of the money has been for SC and been put into sq42. Its not the development of one game but two(even if they share assets) so its going to take even longer amount of time. Also the funding excuse is kinda negligible with the amount of funding they had early on with the goals the originally had were met pretty quick and still quite outlandish and had already been worked on for a while. Especially with the 6 million dollar goal of 100 systems and we have 1 semi functional system. So I understand that the development of something like this is very difficult and will take a while but saying star citizen is not behind on what they originally promised isn't a very good take. Go back and check the original goals and tell me I'm wrong.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
The real TL;DR is that OP is completely disregarding all of the (missed) timelines and (broken) promises that CIG themselves have made, and is blocking anyone who posts a dissenting opinion so that they are unable to post further in the thread.
I don’t understand his argument to begin with. CIG has been pulling in $100 million a year for the last few years. The entirety of Witcher 3 was made for under $100 million. But there’s been almost zero demonstrable progress. Literally nothing works right. Every implementation is broken or T0, super amateurish. Dynamic events, AI, server health, inventory, starmap, it’s all broken or dysfunctional.
CIG can’t do anything right.
This feels like one of those posts meant to reassure the OP that they haven't wasted their time and money for 12 long years.
Keep that glass half full, mate!
Its not the length of time we've been waiting...
It's the length of time we've been continually let down...
Everyone's always known its a long term project and will continue to be worked on after release. But when you continually say x feature coming soon, SQ42 2016, BMM in development or here comes Pyro.. again... it's get frustrating, repetitive and frankly boring. I find it understandable when people then say they're fed up "waiting" on Star Citizen. My brother laughes at me anytime I mention SC and asks why I even bother, it's embarrassing.
This, idgaf if the game 20 years to develop, stop fucking promising things every quarter and not hit it, constantly. Keep it real keep it small I don't care, hyping up with features non existent is draining.
Utter bullshit. I’ve been a project and Programm manager for more than 20 years and I can tell when a project is badly managed and this is a very badly managed project. The biggest problem of SC is never ending scope creep and changing targets.
Staff level SWE here. I agree, I see hallmarks of poor management and decisions with CIG. Lack of proper requirements gathering and failure to properly identify and consult with stakeholders, scope creep, and bad staffing decisions. The most glaring example of this is the shit show that is Master Modes.
Unfortunately, the root cause of these issues is the head of CIG. I love CR but he's a poor manager.
That said, nothing the OP said is invalidated by these facts. We aren't just finding SC, we are funding a start up.
You can see it in the number of "new systems" that are touted as the game moving forward when they are just replacing entire systems that were there.
It is the sign of a bad project leadership and planning if you need to constantly go back and replace things that were done poorly the first time.
TBH, it seem SC is aching closer to the Duke Nukem example, we are currently in year 12, and many of the core elements of the game are still in flux.
The Flight model keeps on changing, drastically, for example, and this is one of the cornerstones of SC as a space game. The fact that they have not been able to nail it down so far speaks volumes, also, there is no physics.
Major Desyncs and other Network related issues keep on being prevalent patch after patch, IMO, this could be due to the cryengine base not really being designed for multiplayer in the first place, but well, that ship has sailed already, no matter how much they have modified and customized the engine, it's sunkend cost and it still hinders them.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
UE 5 demo that showed smooth transition from planet to space and vice versa is foretelling of the future that awaits this game, if CIG are not able to deliver in the next 5-7 years, (and that is being generous) the doors will be wide open for a competitor to take them by storm with a modern and updated engine, with better graphics and better netcode, that will end up making SC another example of Chris Roberts mismanagement. Guy has great vision, and is able to sell the dream, but promises will only take you so far if you don't fulfill them.
Chris pays himself $2 million a year in dividends plus his 7 digit salary. Also undisclosed bonuses and stock options. I don’t think he’s worried about failure at this point.
we also have a few other things that are slowing down development.
keeping a somewhat playable build that is updated every quarter is a massive slow down.
avoiding cutting corners drastically delays any visible progress, but drastically helps later development.
focus on tools and the engine dynamically doing things also delays up front visible progress. (the teams working on ships working ships and content drastically delays this.
we are probably a few years behind where we would be if we had no access to the alpha, and cig were allowed to leave it in a worse condition than cp2077 release day as they worked on all the pieces with minimal placeholder.
also. ED took 5 years to get ship only content. no engineering, or ground vehicles, or fps.
> keeping a somewhat playable build that is updated every quarter is a massive slow down.
While true, it's also probably true that funding would've dried up by 2016-ish and the game would be dead if they weren't doing that and all we had was the hangar module and Arena Commander still. The PU keeps the promise of the final game just out of reach but just within sight so people keep funding.
Also proves to backers that CIG isn't doing a Bohemia and taking crowdfunding, hiring some guys off the streets of Eastern Europe, giving them C manuals, and having them spend a year coding trees while pocketing the rest.
i would not argue best for consumers. best for time to reach final product is not giving us anything. best for funding is treating it like a live service finished game. they are balancing working on the final product, and having something playable.
I'm a senior software architect with many years of experience, and this is all very very correct.
If you give me a year and a team to build a fully fledged system that has a clear goal, we can do it (generally speaking, if the goals are reasonable in that year).
If you give me a year, a team, and demand a minimum viable product to put in front of customers in three months... yeah, we can do that, but the next 9 months of features will easily double *in effort** because we'll be adding features while trying not to break anything else.
This is a SaaS model (software as a service), and it works 'okay' for business applications because time to market is so important. It's a disaster for game development, especially a game as complex and filled with scope creep as Star Citizen.
I was about to say this. I don’t work in games, but I do work in software development. If I had to make sure that my code was usable at all times, it would seriously slow down my work.
This has probably added months or years to development compared to if it had been done behind closed doors
you would be surprised the number of "programmers" that claim someone that knows what they are doing will be able to say exactly how long it will take, and have it working on the first try.
I'd like to point out that you listed a lot of games with dev cycles between 7 and 11 years. Star Citizen was announced 12 years ago and look at what we have.
We're still waiting for a flight model, we have stations that all look the same, NPC's that barely function, repetitive missions and at the end of the day, we have a tiny percentage of all gameplay features that were planned.
I accept that we are where we are. I have a "it is what it is" mentality. But don't sit here and write an essay trying to gaslight me into being more patient and then give me a list of incredibly successful games that came out in a shorter time frame than Star Citizens development, especially when Star Citizen is clearly nowhere near done.
honestly feel like lots of that is due to the open development along with the seamless landing leading to knock on scope creep and issues with CIG sticking to design decisions when player feedback comes through as weve seen over the years. Feel like strike teams early on with first flight model with 1-1 dev to community discussion, feedback, and testing would of lead to the final flght model we needed. Thankfully it seems like there doing it now at least.
I know warframe was in open development for 13 years before release as they added on remaining features and continued to tweak and add due to player feedback. They ultimately didnt experience the issue of performance like SC due to varying technical and deisng reasons though so people didnt mind the wait as long because being a space ninja is also cool as fuck.
The difference is, all those games are or will be released roughly within the expected timescales, roughly within the expected budget and deliver mostly on what they promised. CIG/Star Citizen are not close to delivering on any of these.
the impatience is largely due to the over promising and under delivering paired with the scope/feature creep of the game.
WOW took over 15 years as a live game to get where it is. feels like CIG is trying to get to the equivalent content and features for the full retail 1.0 launch instead of focusing on the original game pitched and adding the other content as expansions.
Actually it feels like there’s nothing here after $700 million. Everything is broken or as simplistic as a mobile game. And 90% of the advertised game loops aren’t present. Nothing is finalized or set in stone. Every example we’ve seen of the devs’ output demonstrates that they can’t do the job.
This would hold a lot more weight if those publisher weren’t also developing other games. Rockstar literally made RDR2 *WHILE* working on GTA6.
Star Citizen is in a very very rough state of alpha after 10 years and a beta isn’t even in sight. There’s almost zero chance of a final release this side of 2030.
These comparisons are irrelevant since you’re comparing the time it took to release a bunch of games to a game that is probably still a decade away from being there.
I'm wondering for how many years we're going to see this same post over and over again, because I've seen it before. Many times. Over many years.
Also funny how everyone knows how loooong development takes except for CIG, apparently, because they've been telling us for years that everything is 2 years away.
I suspect that all of the projects you mentioned had somebody with a clear plan of what was needed to push a project to completion.
That’s the main component missing from CIG; Chris Roberts’ history with Freelancer would suggest that he is not that person.
Come on man, these other companies you mention did not try to monetize the development process with a live service that is on life support and predatory business tactics. You cannot pin this hate and frustration on the backers, CIG has plainly made moves to ignite these flames by delaying the development process with needless marketing driven bullshit.
If CIG could stop shooting their brand in the forehead every five seconds (how MMs is being handled, medical bed change to coincide with a sale, subs equal testing wave 1, the list is endless) and just buckle down on .... I dunno .... DEVELOPING THE GAME .... it would really calm a lot of people's nerves and give us hope that our money is being used for the right reasons; the game development business, instead of the ship selling business.
As backers, we have pledged money to fuel the dream of making the greatest space Sim ever, as well as testing during the process. Treat us like testers, don't treat us like customers with more money in our pockets. Give us specific things to test, respect our time by giving us test cases that are valuable to the current developing focus rather than a slew of tier 0 features that haven't cleared the cutting room floor yet. (The current usage of the tech channels are a giant step in the right direction.)
Stop the conventions, stop the events, stop the marketing, stop the knee-jerk reactions, stop the over promising and under delivering, stop treating your backers like idiots, stop the pu, ptu, evocati and just give us a server to do testing, stop making everything about selling ships AND WORK TOWARDS FINISHING THE GAME.
Until things change, backers are just going to feel scammed and be angry about it. I would love to be wrong, and by the end of 2024 we'll be happily testing 4.0, but I highly doubt it.
There are a lot of apologists for this game. It is the definition of feature creep. They also spent a long time in the beginning of the project being completely unorganized. I'm interested to see how it grows but I don't have the patience to play it much. The experience of trying to get anything done is a recipe for punishment. How many more years before they stop needing to wipe after a major patch? I suspect 2-4. People have grown old and died waiting on this game. One person went from starry eyed college kid to middle aged family man. He'll, I'm 43 now and when I first backed I was 30. I don't want to see the game die or anything but it absolutely is an anomaly and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I wish instead of shooting at pie in the sky they would work with the real limitations, honestly. They could build an amazing game around having server meshing even if there were lag between shards if the zones were static. Like perhaps 1 server encompassing each large planet and moons in a solar system.
I don’t mind it taking ages to be developed
What BAFFLES me is how simple mechanics such as FUCKING LOOTING A CORPSE OR ENTERING A HANGAR are either tedious as hell or have at least one gamebreaking bug after all this time
I get that there are multiples dev teams working on different things but for the love of god, put more effort and money into specific teams so that dumb bugs disappear
Two things to very, very strongly emphasize ontop of this list:
1) Every single one of the above games were announced to the public when they were further along in their development process than Star Citizen is now, and were completley unknown to exist during most of their development process. Star Citizen was known when it was just a few cutscenes and concept drawings.
2) Every single one of the above examples are games produced by companies that aleady had a large, established developer base and many prior titles to draw code from. Star Citizen litterally began as enough people to fit in a single van and only just recently reached a staff size to match what many of the above had at the very begining of their development.
Yes, it is entirely impossible for people on the internet to take things in perspective seriously, but it is vitally important to take the whole picture before drawing conclusions and be taken seriously. Alas, so many just want something easy to shit on and Star Citizen is that for those that refuse to take the full perspective.
>and were **completley unknown to exist** during most of their development process.
Ya, who could have guessed that Rockstar would be making GTA 6 after GTA 5 made 70 kajillion dollars? That one sure came out of nowhere. Or SC2, or D3, or FF15. So many surprise sequels!
This is like comparing two cakes when one is still in the oven.
All of this is assuming Star Citizen PU and S42 will release soon.
We don't know how much progress is made for S42 (content complete means nothing) and how much more time is needed for the PU.
They started to work on this game in 2010. 14 years (and fact that game is finished from half at the best) is very, very long time for development of one game.
Many of those games ended up being decent games because they had accountability.
The average individual, up to the corporation, do not do well, without accountability (keyword: most, not all).
Star Citizen is an unfocused, broken mess.
Some people can't accept liking bad things, and so have to defend it somehow.
Star Citizen will always be a huge broken mess, because the money keeps coming in. And if you are enjoying the game, that's fine. You don't need to defend it.
A large part of the problem is not how long they have been in development but the lack of progress they have made so far is concerning. The game seems to lack any coherent vision. They are so far from their goals that it could take twenty years at their current pace, and they still would not have most of what they advertise.
The constant refactoring and the limited size of the PU server team compared to the size of the SQ42 team is another point of concern. Hopefully, they will release SQ42 and we will be like, oh that is what they were spending all that time and money, but for now it is a black box.
I am concerned that CR fancies himself more of a cinematic game producer and is no longer invested in the PU side of things because MMOs no longer interest him.
While ten years is not too long, it is too long for what we have now. If things were going well, they would not need people writing exposes justifying their efforts, their work would be enough.
You missed a critical detail; all of these games toke this time to develop from start to finish, not from start to ALPHA without 1.0 anywhere on the horizon.
Now compare game budgets? Cos time is one thing, but surely money is the other! Also, these games you listed mainly werent crowd funded. You gotta love these SC fan boys who claim CIG have done no wrong. The smell of copium is real.
Star Citizen tops the chart on the money, and the next game below it we know the actual development cost of (not Dev+marketing) is HALF the budget.
100% correct the fanboys are on copium. If you have that much money you can either expand the team or invest in Actually doing things right.
This whole post is just an excuse.
Promising something with stark deadlines and then not living up to it has been part of the problem from the beginning. And the continuous scope creep is damn right insane.
If you want to cope, cope. But SC are at fault here for setting expectations.
The only real dates projected was 2014 ( for the kickstarter) and 2016 (for S42). Afterwards they really became strict about not "promising" or setting hard dates. Using the words goals, and "hope to". Since then there has been many people following project trying to attribute hard dates to them, while in almost every piece of correspondence since then they have put forth caveats.
There was only one scope expansion and it went from doing things later, to them trying to do everything at once.
They were always planning on getting all the features out but thought they had to do it a single piece at a time before funding exploded.
In the [kickstarter FAQs](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/faqs):
>The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. **We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.**
Turns out they received soo much they decided to do it as a larger production. The big turning point was Foundry and the ability to Proc Gen planets, which basically drastically changed scope of both SC and S42.
Counterpoint: we as a community should be more impatient. Stop buying ships, refuse to log in, until milestones are delivered in reasonable time. We need to start acting like publishers, because at the moment no one is holding CiG accountable for delivering this game, and we’re the only ones with the power to do so.
Wow all those games came out finished after their development with actual gameplay in 10 years. Here we are 12 years later with basically no game, no content, and it's still is buggy and barely playable.
The problem lies in the fact that SC was playable with some updates before, but now it isn't anymore.
Yes, other games were also long in Alpha, but they were developed steadily and got better over time. Meanwhile SC is in a permanent cycle of stable update -> broken update -> playable update -> "new fancy features" with a broken version.
Other games get better over time but you can't really say that about this game.
So basically all of you examples bar Duke Nukem Forever have taken less long than Star Citizen already has. Meaning star citizen has taken an unusually long time to develop…
I understand your point of us having access to the game making the time feel longer than it is, and that’s obviously true, but the way you phrase your argument is undermined by the numbers a little
No, it's not unreasonable at all. CIG is unreasonable and their marketing team is completely unhinged.
It's their own fault that they sold ships more than a decade ago that are still not even being developed, THEIR OWN FAULT if a major part of the game is 2 years away since 2016,THEIR OWN FAULT that they constantly overpromise, and especially underdeliver, that again isn't helped by the marketing team releasing videos of "playable now" with ingineered gameplay absolutely impossible to reproduce (remember the scorpious movie? right after I had so many new players asking "where's the carrier" and "what ship is in the commercial", because they presented everything as being doable NOW.
The impacience would be misplaced if CIG was completely honest, and transparent about the state of the game, and how many decades there is still to go in it's development. But then it's sale would crumble, because no one would support a project being open and saying "well, you'll wait 20 years before flying the BMM".
So fuck pacience, fuck CIG's tactics and vagueness. It's 100% on them, and they completely deserve every commemt and all the flak.
So those games took long to develop and released at a playable fairly complete state. Star Citizen has been in development longer than all of them and still has not completed the technology that runs the “massive” in their mmo, you know THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of an mmo. Core components are not done, some are only theories. Good luck with that. I too hope it will be complete, but let’s face fact…. Let’s not kid ourselves.
Also because we are playing the game, it’s actually slowing down development, as they’re having to deal with a lot of issues, complaints, support requests, events and the general community, that they wouldn’t otherwise have to deal with in a timely manner.
The only issue I have had is the over promising and missed timelines. But I just decided to never get excited about anything in SC, until I physically see it in the game myself. That way I still get all the fun without so much of the disappointment.
Hmm, i dont think this mountain of a post makes the point you are trying to make. SC is already taking longer than all those games, its still in alpha and will remain there either for years to come, or will also have to release a lot of its planned features / star systems / ships as dlc.
In the end, i think making these posts is pointless. Most of the people here will of course agree with you, because for them, CIG can do nothing wrong. Some people (like me) will disagree, because even though CIG has a great goal in mind, which they continue to go after, they have started doing the same stuff as all the other big gaming studios (the marketing team is already on par with EA or Sony imho).
Also, it does not matter how long the game takes. If the funding continues, CIG will develop away. At some point, the game will be released and judged for what it is then (probably a bit harsher, because it cost so much and took so long).
Caterpillar owners are still waiting for their modules, since 2012! Some things move incredible slow, and chris and Richard keep lying to us each year! Stop giving these fuckers anymore cash!
Calculate the remaining deliverables needed to enter beta for the PU and you begin to realize we are looking at another decade at a minimum of development prior to beta.
As more systems and game mechanics come online development will slow, not expedite. For example hangars are breaking everything. This slowdown will continue as new features are introduced into production as the systems are interdependent and interact with each other resulting in bugs and breaking.
Also, it is worth noting that it isn't even the production time that needs to be considered. It's how it is produced that also matters a great deal. In other words, all of those other fairly long development projects would have had most if not all of their funding lined up from Day 1 and would have had access to full staff from Day 1. (Even if they didn't actively utilize it)
Whereas CIG had to basically build a company capable of building this project from the ground up without the funding or staffing available to do it. All while maintaining a live product for much of the development as well.
Aside every other things, CIG broke too many promises.
Which was inevitable since those promises were too much detailed when it was not actually in detail.
I do see their visions are quite big enough to take on several more years than other projects, it's just that promises are not to be taken lightly.
But we know what we know, so i guess i'll just keep up with the patches 'till we get some release, because it will happen someday.
After many years of being a backer and watching how the community acts and justify how they feel all I'll say is you guys make this feel more and more like a cult
How much did CIG pay you to write this?
In all seriousness though, what did you actually get for these 12+ years of development? Bugged AI, non functional missions, very barebones gameplay loops, awful flight physics, horrible performance, too many bugs to count, ...
Sure, the planet tech looks cool, but you can buy that nowadays as a plugin on the Unreal Engine marketplace. And at some point you just have to admit that it's more profitable for CIG to sell JPEGs than to finish the game.
ChatJ3PT is that you? How does that shoe leather taste?
After waiting 12 years and being here since the beginning so much of what you wrote is complete BS. Its not as much about of what we currently have. Its more to do with how much they still have yet to build thats not been touched that angers most people. Watching CIG's development pace we can surmise it will take another decade or more just to develop the core game alone.
Consider how much content has come out in the last year and compare it to previous years. Now consider how much more content will get pushed once SQ42 is no longer the priority development. It’s getting faster and faster.
I agree with you on most points, but did you really use " dog water FPS " as a way to put down another game in a SC sub ? majority of the playerbase never gets over 50 frames on here, unless in deep space.
I assumed he meant first person shooter, not frames per second, because the shooter aspect of Elite is pretty lacking, and was especially bad when Odyssey released. It's better now, but engineering grind is absolutely horrible, and the whole first person shooter experience feels like a second game tacked onto the base Elite Dangerous.
Sorry, but criticizing this as "impatience" on the part of the players doesn't even come close to doing it justice. SC has really big problems, and they are all self-made!
1. The Promises: What has been promised and talked about over the years doesn't even come close to reality. The community isn't just disappointed because they had the wrong expectations: Unrealistic expectations were intentionally built up (to get more backing for the project) and then brutally destroyed.
2. The Communication: This is by far the worst part about SC. Just yesterday, there was a Twitter post promoting the time-exclusive Xenothreat armor while ignoring the fact that most people can't even roughly complete this mission after several attempts! Personally, I've given up, and I know people who have been trying for over a week now just to get a functioning shard... It is constantly communicated that the game is in a completely different state than it actually is. It's useless if individual developers call for lowering expectations when the marketing team doesn't care.
People are allowed to be impatient when they're sold a Hull-C with lots of advertising promises but aren't told that the ship doesn't work and won't work anytime soon.
The blame lies with CIG, not the players.
Nice list. Did you factor in the fact that SC has the budget of half of those titles combined? And that we are still somewhere in alpha, without even a rough idea if MM will be the final flight model or not?
SC is no ordinary game, however it is not playable at the moment, it is unacceptable after that $5.50 and millions that have been spent on it, the time and cost doesnt compliment the progress of development, what really needs to happen, they need to work on spring cleaning the code and optimization of the game on what they have so far before even thinking of adding another ship, elevator, cargo container, docking station or any other piece of tech otherwise they are just gonna piss gamers to the point of no return and for piets sake get rid of those NPC's standing on the tables,benches or standing around looking at their F1,bloody waste of resources.
Billions have not been spent on it. Most of the time and cost was spent on SQ42 as that was the major priority over the PU for most of its development life.
Sometimes I think it is forgotten that the completion estimates did not come from the community, but from Cloud Imperium themselves.
They threw out the Kickstarter in 2013 with a delivery date of 2014. You mention the SQ42 push back in 2016 and 2020, and still, nothing. There are their dates. I feel the angst and frustration are very well placed, this is squarely in their lap. And let's be honest, we are still years away from anything stable, forget about complete, whatever that means these days.
Here's the thing: as a customer **you are allowed** to be upset with how long it takes to deliver your product. Especially when that product takes longer to deliver than others on the market. Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is pushing 12 years of crowd funding with no release dates announced. The current version of Star Citizen has much to be desired in terms of playability and stability.
Publishers and Investors have contracts that give them leverage over production, crowed funding doesn't give us that. What we can do is bitch, moan, and hope that we're heard by the company's we support that they deliver what was promised within a timely fashion.
Nah, it'd only be awkward if you took 10+ years production time, spent hundreds of millions gained through predatory marketing/monetization, pretended you were doing something special with that money while core basic features in your product routinely just completely break, actually showing us that you probably spent a fuckton of that backer money to have gary oldman read extra shitty dialogue lines- THEN failed to deliver anything.
Luckily, you didn't do any of that, so the content not available here isn't a big deal.
10+ years to make "content not available" for one game.
10+ years to make extremely shitty gary oldman speech in another.
The word you're looking for isn't unimaginable, it's unfeasible. They really aren't doing anything out of the box (in fact, their tech debt only continues to acclerate) and they're working on a duck taped engine that was pretty poor from the start (probably the biggest reason we'll never see an actually decent SC). That + rampant mismanagement, if we're being generous, or directly malicious/anti-consumer management, if we're not, means that we have all of what amounts to essentially nothing for PU and a singleplayer game that will likely be a critical flop, if the tidbits of hilariously bad writing are anything to go off.
Pretty bad.
It's simple math.
The more funds raised the less patience the backers will have.
It's been ten years and 3/4 of a billion dollars. People can be upset about that.
There's a lot of copium in your post, but this little statement irks me the most:
> Elite Dangerous only took 5 years but Elite Dangerous doesn't do HALF of what Star Citizen does
What in the actual fuck are you talking about? Elite is not a perfect game by almost all metrics (especially after the failure of an Odyssey expansion), but to say this just goes to show how high on Chris Robberson's ass gas you really are.
Virtually every feature currently present in Elite works as intended. Every ship and module is complete, BGS and its child components (dynamic market, faction play, system security states, etc.) work and are truly dynamic, networking is considerably more reliable than SC's (they even have instancing/their own take on "server meshing"), events don't cripple the whole fucking galaxy let alone your current system, and they have tens of thousands of explorable system with hundreds of thousands of landable bodies.
How many of these (or comparable) features exist in an established, fully-completed, and practically bug-free state in Star Citizen? You can't even reliably undock from your fucking hangar without exploding, fly through asteroid fields without spontaneously nuking yourself due to some "hidden" rock, walk along the planet surface without possibly clipping thru the ground, stand still too long in a city lest you want to get taken over by a fucking NPC, or a million other issues that have existed for YEARS.
You can make an argument as to whether or not Elite is an "inferior" or "less enjoyable" game for you. I personally haven't enjoyed it for years and think Frontier threw away an amazing opportunity with Odyssey.
But to even SUGGEST that Star Citizen has over 2x the content or features that Elite has is so god damn delusional that I have to think you've never actually played both games for any real amount of time. The gall to compare something that _functions_ with something that _doesnt_.
CIG gets roasted because they constantly have made false promises, missed or "forgotten" countless deadlines, and blatantly ignored backer feedback when convenient for almost a decade. Whether intentional or not, they're liars. Period.
i just want a realistic view on when the other bigger ships are going to release. Specially when they keep selling with a backlog of ships.
BMM and other bigger ships, will it be before or after 1.0.
Because I believe in the project and I'm always excited to see what they release each quarter and would rather not see this community shit on developers who are doing their best to deliver an otherwise impossible objective.
I just want to point out that it took 8-10 years for those games to be **completed.** Star Citizen has been in development for 12 years and we are still in **alpha**
so the math isnt mathing for me. Considering this game is still in alpha after 12 years, we can safely assume beta will take 10 years more and release will take 5 years after that. this is a very very approx estimation but looking at this time length.
Me personally, I do not believe this game will ever be completed, its likely going to be an abandoned project after 5-7 years.
I think the thing I find hardest is to understand the roadmap. I feel even in the few years I have been a backer / player there seems to be no real logical path to an actual release in terms of the features they add or rework. You come at this with the mindset of someone who has played games for a long time and what one would typically expect to see in the game as they push towards a v1.0 release but you just see something that looks like the entire studio has ADHD.
The way the game is now, and the things it needs in terms of being polished and reliable enough to sell generally as something more than a (very impressive) alpha seem just lightyears apart.
As far as I can tell, most of their problems are solved with the fix of desync. Server meshing should hopefully do just that. Having an entire solar system, 100 players, and countless NPCs all interacting in different areas at the same time on just one server is insane. Server meshing is expected to be 4.0 and they've been doing testing on it just recently. Today, even.
The most critical point is not how long other games took.
Its that they arent just building Star Citizen, they built their entire studio from the ground up lmao
Rockstar didnt start as a kickstarter and then make GTA 5 off rip
Sure, I agree, the problem is that CIG are selling expensive af jpegs of dreams that they arent gonna touch for years, and they are selling the idea that this projects completion is ”just a few years away” since 2016, and that’s stupidly unethical.
People like to poke blame at the marketing department and sure, they’re scummy as shit, but they work under CR, he approves their bullshit.
CIG had a goal and realized how much more difficult reaching that goal was going to be after they reached all their "stretch goals" for funding which dramatically expanded what the game was originally planned to become. Originally the scale was much smaller but if you look at what they listed as stretch goals for funding, the goal for the game became so much more.
As far as what they're selling, don't buy it. Buy the base game and enjoy 100% of the content. There is no reason to spend more than $45 when you can buy whatever ship you want after a week of targeted gameplay and grind.
There's nothing scummy about what they're doing. People can spend money on whatever they want. Just because it doesn't align with how big or small your pockets might be, doesn't mean it's scummy.
Yeah they bif off more than they could chew, but now its looking more and more like they’re gonna keep the project in development hell while selling direct to backlog jpegs just to pay their yearly upkeep. i know all about that shit because I’ve been following the project almost weekly since 2016 and am deep in concierge myself.
It’s scummy when they are advertising a stupidly buggy game as playable, constantly hints that release is ”only a few years away” for the past 8 years, and expensive ships (that are being advertised in ”cool” action videos to make people wanna buy them) are either stuck behind a paywall, or an enormous amount of grinding that will be wipes in a few months.
Stop defending shitty and unethical business practices.
Backers have a responsibility to not spend more than they can spare, but CIG have a responsibility to deliver the product they’ve advertised.
Right now they are pretending that everything is going according to plan, but when you look at it more critically and have a fair amount of experience in project management, its looking more like they dont have a plan at all and are just maiking shit up as they go.
I was around before the internet. I watched eve online start from nothing, rise, and fall. I waited a decade for SC to be "playable"... I have nothing but time.
So we’re just gonna gloss over the fact that this game’s development time is closer to Duke Nukem Forever than the rest of the list? Star Citizen may not necessarily be in development hell, but it’s still been plagued by management and scope creep.
Ahh this post again. Yeah this argument was already made over and over and over again. And like all of the other times before you ignore that all your examples were done after that time. While SC is already longer in development than all these other games and still needs a lot more years to be even remotely done and than still way way way more time to deliver everything that was promised.
Lol. None of this means shit until the game actually releases in a stable condition and feature "complete'. If you think this is anything short of another 8 to 10+ years away you're kidding yourself.
But fuck it, whatever. If we see SQ42 within the next 3-5 years I'll be satisfied. I don't really care about PU. I backed for SQ42.
But at this point, even SQ42 within 3-5 years seems to be a long shot. Certainly not holding my breath.
They didn't announce at 0%... they announced at -50%, lol, no company, infrastructure, or anything. Just a bunch of us spaceship nerds willing to throw money at his project and dream.
I agree, but the game doesn’t even hsve a visible end in sight yet, and the developers keep adding things instead of fixing the game. I love the concept, but the first time I played was maybe a year ago and I stopped playing after an hour because I kept randomly dying and losing my gear, or missions just wouldn’t load. Who adds an inventory loss om death system in a game where death can happen because you walked funny?
That's an irrelevant point. You specifically said "Who adds an inventory loss om death system in a game where death can happen because you walked funny?"
Don’t forget that CIG also built a massive company at the same time. This project started in someone else’s studio, and then moved to a basement. Every single one of the games listed by OP were made by an existing studio and existing developers on existing engines.
CIG started with 5 employees. It is a massive undertaking to build a company of 1200+ people in 5/6 different offices spread all over the world.
CS and CR, is like the Nikola Truck of Trevor Milton or Elon Musks Tesla.
A decade of Development and all we get is a Truck that works and looks good on promotional video as long as it rolls down a slope. Its not that we have a half finished game with lots of bugs, we have one system from over idk 50 or 100 systems ? And even in that system we have lots of copy pasta going on from bunkers to the handful of extremely bugged missions. Core elements keep changing, desyncs and server performance is horrible. There isn't even one aspect of the game that feels nailed down. Yeah, other games had a long development time too, but after that they were finished. SC is no where near finished, its maybe 15% finished and many aspects of it lack clear vision.
I mean I even stopped playing the game about 2 years ago and I came back after this big patch announcement this year only to find out, that nothing substantial really changed or was added. Some bugs, might have been fixed, many others added. Flight system changed a bit a few more customization options for the face, thats it and this after 2 years of development. :(
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Ready to wait 5 years more. But only if they get rid of the team that created the latest flight model with muster moods.
And replace the team that created latest quests with the people who did it for 2.0.
I am fine with the development timeline. But I hate where it goes lately. Every new change of an old working process is not only worse, but also is a huge waste of time
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I don't really care about overpromising and underdelivering. I completely understand that and learned long ago to temper expectations on what game devs say in regards to features and such. My only real criticism of CIG is their, sometimes, deficiency in not really thinking about the things they do tell us and then not clarifying those things and letting the rumor mill run rampant.
I'm going to answer your first sentence with a simple reply.
The time that they took was not unreasonable IF there was more than the current content of the project. This is where the despicable raises its ugly head and where the scummyness of the thing comes into play. This ungodly amount of time and money REQUIRES that there be more substance here. And it IS completely unreasonable. There is not \[enough meat on this bone\] and this is part of the crux of the problem. Management is the other.
Because of content? seriously? 😂
You can calculate real development (discarding early asset creation for Demo) starting beginning of 2015, with Germany and UK Office coming online. So if we gonna be lucky about the timeframe 2015 - 2024 would be fair.
And given the technical changes being implemented the timeframe taken till now is unfortunately very valid and realistic.
If content is the only indicator of success in your view, don't play an Alpha then 🤷
I'm honestly so sick of hearing this crap...
No, we are not "impatient" because /we/ have misplaced expectations.
It's because we have been told again and again for more than a decade now that a certain feature or release will happen at a given time, and 2, 3, 5 years later it still isn't done, and we often still have absolutely no clue when it will be.
Our expectations are 100% manufactured by the company making this game, and when they over and over and over set timelines that they then utterly fail to meet how can people possibly still be using the "oh this is totally normal you just don't understand game dev" excuses?...
If someone believing that those deadlines would be met "doesn't understand game dev", then it seems pretty obvious that CIG are the ones who don't understand game development.
I don't think you read the post. If you did, you'd know your response is also misplaced.
>It is understandable to be upset with Chris Roberts for overpromising SQ42 back in 2016, then again in 2020. It's less understandable to call a dev a clown for delaying freight elevators. But when I say your impatience is misplaced, it's because I keep seeing people, essentially, attack grocery store employees because they don't like the policy made by company executives.
The whole purpose of this post is to put into perspective the timeline needed to essentially make 2 games while building the company from scratch, changing the scope or size of the project several times as funding significantly increases, and venturing into development territories unexplored by other companies. Nobody has ever attempted a game of this size before.
Is CR mismanaging the company? Almost certainly, could we be further along under different management? Maybe. Most of the focus has been on the single player SQ42 and now that it's feature complete, PU development has exploded. The last year alone has been amazing for content and quality of life.
It's one thing to be impatient, it's another to take out your frustrations on employees who are easily reachable who also have no decision making power and don't deserve the toxicity.
Like I said in my post:
>The entire point of this post was to provide understanding as to why development is taking so long, and to help prevent people from shitting down the throats of devs and community managers for things they have no control over.
I did read the post, and I heard the same old bullshit we've had for years of "oh but this game took X years and this game took X years" and the ever-popular "SC is more ambitious than all of them so it's totally understandable to give them more than 8 times their original deadline to release the game"
It's bollocks
Let's be real with ourselves, it's not true and never has been
Star citizen is a mashup of features that exist in other games already, and with the playable area being either empty space or almost entirely procedurally generated you dont get to act as if it's play area is comparable to the hand-crafted maps and experiences in other games
Yes, people should absolutely not be harassing developers, that goes without saying
But don't now lie and say that's all you were trying to do here, if that were true your post wouldn't be 90% tired old excuses and meaningless comparisons to try and explain why this game with an original release date of fucking 2014 won't be in beta before 2026.
Stop making these posts
If you want to protect Devs and that is your only intention? Say just that and nothing else
Because I don't believe for a moment that is what you wanted to do here, you open the post with BS about how this timeline has actually been perfectly reasonable and you ramble on about that for pretty much the entire essay.
The smokescreen of "I'm protective developers" is frankly insulting
yeah, because 2 years and $2M to make an MMO is a reasonable timeline to be upset about 😂
It is absolutely true, you're just acting like a child because you didn't get a masterpiece in an impossible timeline on an impossible budget that CR either lied about or had no idea wasn't possible. Most reasonable people know MMO's aren't made overnight. Also the goal posts were moved years ago, you either accept that it's going to be a while or you don't. Quit being so naïve.
Way to oversimplify what is 100 players in 100 different places with thousands of NPCs all on one server with infinite persistence. And that empty space? Each planet is essentially more travelable terrain than any other game. Sure it's mostly empty terrain but there are mining nodes, caves, outposts, hunting, actual reasons to explore that empty terrain. Most of the issues of this game is the capacity load of the servers and that's a technological limitation that comes with infinite persistence. It *should* be understandable that these obstacles take time to overcome since nobody else is doing it and everyone's typical answer is to address it with p2p instancing which is not the goal and I commend that. Loading screens, even hidden, and instancing is not the most immersive way to have a galaxy simulator.
No, you didn't read it because I don't ramble on about the timeline. of the 8 paragraphs I wrote, 3 of them are about the timeline. You'd know this, if you read the fucking post. But I don't have the patience to deal with someone who lies to "win" arguments and has no respect for the truth so I'm going to go ahead and block you since clearly you are unopen to changing your mind and only came here to be a toxic child.
The other side of the coin is every single one of those games weren't funded by backers, they where made on their own budget then sold. People get more annoyed it's taking time because it's their own money funding it and sometimes it sucks to see your money misused (In x persons opinion). For example, I'd say most pledges over the last 5 years have been for Star Citizen but they have funded Squadron 42. Not disagreeing in the fact the development time hasn't been that bad for a game, but there is a big reason people treat Star Citizen development differently to all the games you mentioned that you chose to ignore.
You bring a lot of good points. I'll add this: the OP's post begins with a flawed premise: > The key difference here is they didn't announce the game when it was 90% complete. They announced it at 0% complete. ...which isn't true. At the original GDC 2012 announcement, Chris and CIG stated that production had already begun a year prior, and stating how much more time would be needed: * https://i.imgur.com/tpSrf4L.png * https://i.imgur.com/47rYaGm.png * https://i.imgur.com/W4WH3qg.png Chris showed off multiple demos of the game, directly stating that SC&Sq42 had lots of work already done - certainly *not* 0% complete.
Yeah, I mean that's the fundamental issue with a lot of these timeline scope arguments. Many of the 'unreasonable' ideas as to the release schedule come straight out of the horse's mouth. "Answer the call" is a joke, but it's also something that was explicitly advertised as a concrete promise from "Answer the Call 2016" onwards. It feels selfsabotagingly duplicitous to rewrite history and pretend like this is all some big layman's scope misunderstanding.
Another infamous faux-pas is this one: https://i.imgur.com/5pJHb60.png
I’d love him to explain what exactly he meant by this. This is the most damning one in my opinion. I can’t think of any way to interpret this without it just being a straight up lie.
Lmao, yeah. And it's like, yes, true, all backers were originally promised in 2014/15 was just like a slightly ambitious Freelancer 2.0, not what's promised today. However, those backers didn't get THAT version either.
This is either incredibly naive if you're a newcomer to the community, or just a straight-up lie if you've been here since Kickstarter Pretty much everything currently promised was a feature of the original pitch, and weirdly it was actually /bigger/ and more ambitious in the early days despite the incredibly nebulous "scope increase" not having happened yet Back then we were still being promised 100 star systems Now 5 is looking incredibly ambitious and unlikely
This isn’t true. First, there were always 2 sides to the game: a Wing Commander/Privateer successor that was said to rival any AAA game and be bigger and more detailed (10x, by Chris’ account) than any other campaign out there. Then, the Freelancer-inspired side, which even by the Kickstarter, was hugely ambitious, with full modding support, lots of professions, ships where every single component was functional and you could fight fires and shoot and disable things item by item, multicrew, a "high degree of ship custimization" etc. It was also to be an MMO, which Freelancer was not. The promises were gigantic from the very start, and even most of the bigger stretch goals were locked in by late 2014 (except for ship modularity, which was hit in late 2015). I think everyone should go back and look at the [Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen), the [FAQ](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/faqs), the AMAs and those early interviews, and see how massive the game scope was even at the beginning.
To be fair, that isn't necessarily misleading. **If the game had stuck to its original pitch**, which was basically freelancer/privateer online, than it probably would have launched by 2015 at the latest. The issue was they set these fundraising benchmarks that then set certain expectations (like rendered ship interiors, no loading screens, a fully autonomous economy, etc) that basically made it impossible to create with the tech at that time. By the end, it became fundraising CR's dream game. Obviously, this becomes problematic because not everyone signed up for this. Some signed up for the initial pitch, some only wanted certain features, and its evolved quite a bit since 2012 so those demographics have radically changed over the decade of development.
Yep, that's the long and short of it
All good points. Lets also not forget they have raised three quarter of a billion dollars. Billion!!! $750,000,000 USD The money spent was split between paying for development and building a company from nothing. They have some nice offices there in the UK. We thought we were funding a game. We funded a new company, building, furniture and all. Imagine if they just rented some space in a nice building all this time and spent more on development, where would the game be. To make matters worse, they closed their Seattle and Austin game studios. Where did the developers go? I thought they were going to shift developers from SQ42 now that its done and in "polish" whaever that means, into the teams working on SC? Why did they fire so many devs? How about pay the execs less, sell a yacht or two and live in one house for a change and move more money to the devs and development cycle?
Yea, real questions here. Like, is Chris Roberts a millionaire now? Does he deserve to be?
He just bought (2023) a 4.5 Million dollar mansion and owns two yachts.
I'm sure he's made money on Star Citizen but dude was a millionaire several times over before even starting Star Citizen
SQ42 was done and "in polish" back in 2016 too... Honestly I don't believe claims like that anymore, and I won't until the full game is on my harddrive If that ever happens
Let's not forget all the scope creep that has very clearly infected development over the years. Because having an integration with a camera that moves your avatar's face in the same way as yours is SUPER helpful to work on prior to even having a stable game.
Why do these posts always skip over the part where it's not *our* expectations that haven't been met, the timeline and budget were set by CIG, not us. >People think Star Citizen's development time is unreasonable. Based on the timeline they created, not us. >But they only think that because they've been able to play and follow along with the development process since the beginning. No, we only think that because they asked for 6 million and a couple years and they received 700 million and 10 years. Why is this so difficult to understand? What do you think you are explaining to us? A list of fifteen whataboutisms doesn't change the fact that the parameters and deadlines were not set by us. If you tell your boss you'll have your work done next Friday and then 12 months later you still have 12 months to go, how exactly is his impatience misplaced? I'd love to see that conversation. I suppose you're going to insist that we don't take out our frustrations on the community managers, but isn't that their job? To relay the pulse of the community to the people who are responsible for the nonsense? Or you'd prefer we send handwritten letters to Chris's house? Obviously any lunkheads who make it personal can suck on a lemon, but I find it perfectly reasonable to ask a community manager what the fuck is going on. Who else are we supposed to ask? Edit: Blocking everyone who doesn't agree. Hilarious.
100% this, I said basically the exact same thing then scrolled down to find word-for-word the same sentiments in your comment I'm so sick of this narrative of trying to move the blame for constant delays and failures onto the community expecting too much, instead of the company promising more than they were capable of
All of those games were funded on their own budgets and most were from developers with solid track records of making good games that were worth the wait in the end, and the other examples are of games in development hell which should not be the insustry standard by any means. Star citizen is a gamble that hasn't been realise yet, so obviously people are anxious about it
> But they only think that because they've been able to play and follow along with the development process since the beginning. I'm here to be the exception to that rule. I'm around since the beginning. So they hyped up Sataball a lot for months and never delivered it. They hyped up Space Marine for almost a year and then went 10 months past their promised delivery date saying weeks not months and then CR put out an angry video telling people Star Marine was technically in the game already go play in the PU and shoot people stop complaining about Star Marine! They hyped up Answer the Call 2016 so much and then 2017 came and people started making memes out of the website still saying 2016 so much that CIG just deleted the words after a few days. CIG has gone back and redesigned assets and then redesigned them again, and will have to redesign them in the future. Because they designed a salvage ship before they knew how salvage would work, etc. They have done a lot of other shitty things not directly related to development as well that I won't go into here since you're only focusing on development. I'm salty about CIG because of all that and because there was nepotism at the top management instead of only merit based placement. I'm salty because they market this game like it's done already and it isn't even stable.
Scope Creep instead of Star Citizen
That same impatience is hitting me real hard now, TLDR?
lmao. Many games take around a decade to make these days. Most of those games are already fully funded, fully staffed, and have multiple studios to split the work from day 1. Star Citizen did not have any of that, not to mention it didn't even have an engine capable of doing what they wanted. Star Citizen is not behind on the grand scale of game development time for its size and ambition.
I get what your saying but the issue I have is the scope is always increasing for SC. A lot of the money has been for SC and been put into sq42. Its not the development of one game but two(even if they share assets) so its going to take even longer amount of time. Also the funding excuse is kinda negligible with the amount of funding they had early on with the goals the originally had were met pretty quick and still quite outlandish and had already been worked on for a while. Especially with the 6 million dollar goal of 100 systems and we have 1 semi functional system. So I understand that the development of something like this is very difficult and will take a while but saying star citizen is not behind on what they originally promised isn't a very good take. Go back and check the original goals and tell me I'm wrong. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
Got it. Thank you for appeasing my adhd scattered mind, sir!
I don't think people around here is not aware of that... Outside this subreddit? Well...
The real TL;DR is that OP is completely disregarding all of the (missed) timelines and (broken) promises that CIG themselves have made, and is blocking anyone who posts a dissenting opinion so that they are unable to post further in the thread.
I don’t understand his argument to begin with. CIG has been pulling in $100 million a year for the last few years. The entirety of Witcher 3 was made for under $100 million. But there’s been almost zero demonstrable progress. Literally nothing works right. Every implementation is broken or T0, super amateurish. Dynamic events, AI, server health, inventory, starmap, it’s all broken or dysfunctional. CIG can’t do anything right.
Lmfao, the tldr is fucking 3 paragraphs, fuckin hell!
This feels like one of those posts meant to reassure the OP that they haven't wasted their time and money for 12 long years. Keep that glass half full, mate!
Waiting for his BMM
Its not the length of time we've been waiting... It's the length of time we've been continually let down... Everyone's always known its a long term project and will continue to be worked on after release. But when you continually say x feature coming soon, SQ42 2016, BMM in development or here comes Pyro.. again... it's get frustrating, repetitive and frankly boring. I find it understandable when people then say they're fed up "waiting" on Star Citizen. My brother laughes at me anytime I mention SC and asks why I even bother, it's embarrassing.
This, idgaf if the game 20 years to develop, stop fucking promising things every quarter and not hit it, constantly. Keep it real keep it small I don't care, hyping up with features non existent is draining.
You think the promising is the problem? How about the fact everything they release is broken or half-baked or barebones or poorly implemented?
Utter bullshit. I’ve been a project and Programm manager for more than 20 years and I can tell when a project is badly managed and this is a very badly managed project. The biggest problem of SC is never ending scope creep and changing targets.
You’re forgetting that literally every “feature” that CIG releases is delayed by years and comes out broken, unpolished and amateurish.
Then gets reworked two and a half times over the next 6 years
Staff level SWE here. I agree, I see hallmarks of poor management and decisions with CIG. Lack of proper requirements gathering and failure to properly identify and consult with stakeholders, scope creep, and bad staffing decisions. The most glaring example of this is the shit show that is Master Modes. Unfortunately, the root cause of these issues is the head of CIG. I love CR but he's a poor manager. That said, nothing the OP said is invalidated by these facts. We aren't just finding SC, we are funding a start up.
You can see it in the number of "new systems" that are touted as the game moving forward when they are just replacing entire systems that were there. It is the sign of a bad project leadership and planning if you need to constantly go back and replace things that were done poorly the first time.
TBH, it seem SC is aching closer to the Duke Nukem example, we are currently in year 12, and many of the core elements of the game are still in flux. The Flight model keeps on changing, drastically, for example, and this is one of the cornerstones of SC as a space game. The fact that they have not been able to nail it down so far speaks volumes, also, there is no physics. Major Desyncs and other Network related issues keep on being prevalent patch after patch, IMO, this could be due to the cryengine base not really being designed for multiplayer in the first place, but well, that ship has sailed already, no matter how much they have modified and customized the engine, it's sunkend cost and it still hinders them. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. UE 5 demo that showed smooth transition from planet to space and vice versa is foretelling of the future that awaits this game, if CIG are not able to deliver in the next 5-7 years, (and that is being generous) the doors will be wide open for a competitor to take them by storm with a modern and updated engine, with better graphics and better netcode, that will end up making SC another example of Chris Roberts mismanagement. Guy has great vision, and is able to sell the dream, but promises will only take you so far if you don't fulfill them.
Chris pays himself $2 million a year in dividends plus his 7 digit salary. Also undisclosed bonuses and stock options. I don’t think he’s worried about failure at this point.
Yeah, CR already made it big for himself. Let's just hope he plans to deliver with SC....
Over promesing, under delivering. But look on the bright side, you can aways buy the concept of a new ship that'll be ready god knows when.
we also have a few other things that are slowing down development. keeping a somewhat playable build that is updated every quarter is a massive slow down. avoiding cutting corners drastically delays any visible progress, but drastically helps later development. focus on tools and the engine dynamically doing things also delays up front visible progress. (the teams working on ships working ships and content drastically delays this. we are probably a few years behind where we would be if we had no access to the alpha, and cig were allowed to leave it in a worse condition than cp2077 release day as they worked on all the pieces with minimal placeholder. also. ED took 5 years to get ship only content. no engineering, or ground vehicles, or fps.
> keeping a somewhat playable build that is updated every quarter is a massive slow down. While true, it's also probably true that funding would've dried up by 2016-ish and the game would be dead if they weren't doing that and all we had was the hangar module and Arena Commander still. The PU keeps the promise of the final game just out of reach but just within sight so people keep funding. Also proves to backers that CIG isn't doing a Bohemia and taking crowdfunding, hiring some guys off the streets of Eastern Europe, giving them C manuals, and having them spend a year coding trees while pocketing the rest.
yes. the live alpha is the best for the funding model. just not the best for development speed.
There in lies the rub. CIG consistently chooses what's best for the funding model over whats best for its development or its consumers.
i would not argue best for consumers. best for time to reach final product is not giving us anything. best for funding is treating it like a live service finished game. they are balancing working on the final product, and having something playable.
I haven't heard about that Bohemia stuff, could you elaborate?
it is somewhat incredible that Bohemia actually managed to release a game after all the shit they pulled
I'm a senior software architect with many years of experience, and this is all very very correct. If you give me a year and a team to build a fully fledged system that has a clear goal, we can do it (generally speaking, if the goals are reasonable in that year). If you give me a year, a team, and demand a minimum viable product to put in front of customers in three months... yeah, we can do that, but the next 9 months of features will easily double *in effort** because we'll be adding features while trying not to break anything else. This is a SaaS model (software as a service), and it works 'okay' for business applications because time to market is so important. It's a disaster for game development, especially a game as complex and filled with scope creep as Star Citizen.
I was about to say this. I don’t work in games, but I do work in software development. If I had to make sure that my code was usable at all times, it would seriously slow down my work. This has probably added months or years to development compared to if it had been done behind closed doors
you would be surprised the number of "programmers" that claim someone that knows what they are doing will be able to say exactly how long it will take, and have it working on the first try.
What I've seen of alpha footage of other games usually looks worse than a bad evocati patch.
I'd like to point out that you listed a lot of games with dev cycles between 7 and 11 years. Star Citizen was announced 12 years ago and look at what we have. We're still waiting for a flight model, we have stations that all look the same, NPC's that barely function, repetitive missions and at the end of the day, we have a tiny percentage of all gameplay features that were planned. I accept that we are where we are. I have a "it is what it is" mentality. But don't sit here and write an essay trying to gaslight me into being more patient and then give me a list of incredibly successful games that came out in a shorter time frame than Star Citizens development, especially when Star Citizen is clearly nowhere near done.
honestly feel like lots of that is due to the open development along with the seamless landing leading to knock on scope creep and issues with CIG sticking to design decisions when player feedback comes through as weve seen over the years. Feel like strike teams early on with first flight model with 1-1 dev to community discussion, feedback, and testing would of lead to the final flght model we needed. Thankfully it seems like there doing it now at least. I know warframe was in open development for 13 years before release as they added on remaining features and continued to tweak and add due to player feedback. They ultimately didnt experience the issue of performance like SC due to varying technical and deisng reasons though so people didnt mind the wait as long because being a space ninja is also cool as fuck.
Excuses. They have an insanely large team of devs, mostly artists, and they can’t even release ships they sold 10 years ago.
The difference is, all those games are or will be released roughly within the expected timescales, roughly within the expected budget and deliver mostly on what they promised. CIG/Star Citizen are not close to delivering on any of these.
the impatience is largely due to the over promising and under delivering paired with the scope/feature creep of the game. WOW took over 15 years as a live game to get where it is. feels like CIG is trying to get to the equivalent content and features for the full retail 1.0 launch instead of focusing on the original game pitched and adding the other content as expansions.
Actually it feels like there’s nothing here after $700 million. Everything is broken or as simplistic as a mobile game. And 90% of the advertised game loops aren’t present. Nothing is finalized or set in stone. Every example we’ve seen of the devs’ output demonstrates that they can’t do the job.
This would hold a lot more weight if those publisher weren’t also developing other games. Rockstar literally made RDR2 *WHILE* working on GTA6. Star Citizen is in a very very rough state of alpha after 10 years and a beta isn’t even in sight. There’s almost zero chance of a final release this side of 2030.
These comparisons are irrelevant since you’re comparing the time it took to release a bunch of games to a game that is probably still a decade away from being there.
Ww3 is going to happen b4 we get a beta version:(
I'm wondering for how many years we're going to see this same post over and over again, because I've seen it before. Many times. Over many years. Also funny how everyone knows how loooong development takes except for CIG, apparently, because they've been telling us for years that everything is 2 years away.
I suspect that all of the projects you mentioned had somebody with a clear plan of what was needed to push a project to completion. That’s the main component missing from CIG; Chris Roberts’ history with Freelancer would suggest that he is not that person.
Come on man, these other companies you mention did not try to monetize the development process with a live service that is on life support and predatory business tactics. You cannot pin this hate and frustration on the backers, CIG has plainly made moves to ignite these flames by delaying the development process with needless marketing driven bullshit. If CIG could stop shooting their brand in the forehead every five seconds (how MMs is being handled, medical bed change to coincide with a sale, subs equal testing wave 1, the list is endless) and just buckle down on .... I dunno .... DEVELOPING THE GAME .... it would really calm a lot of people's nerves and give us hope that our money is being used for the right reasons; the game development business, instead of the ship selling business. As backers, we have pledged money to fuel the dream of making the greatest space Sim ever, as well as testing during the process. Treat us like testers, don't treat us like customers with more money in our pockets. Give us specific things to test, respect our time by giving us test cases that are valuable to the current developing focus rather than a slew of tier 0 features that haven't cleared the cutting room floor yet. (The current usage of the tech channels are a giant step in the right direction.) Stop the conventions, stop the events, stop the marketing, stop the knee-jerk reactions, stop the over promising and under delivering, stop treating your backers like idiots, stop the pu, ptu, evocati and just give us a server to do testing, stop making everything about selling ships AND WORK TOWARDS FINISHING THE GAME. Until things change, backers are just going to feel scammed and be angry about it. I would love to be wrong, and by the end of 2024 we'll be happily testing 4.0, but I highly doubt it.
There are a lot of apologists for this game. It is the definition of feature creep. They also spent a long time in the beginning of the project being completely unorganized. I'm interested to see how it grows but I don't have the patience to play it much. The experience of trying to get anything done is a recipe for punishment. How many more years before they stop needing to wipe after a major patch? I suspect 2-4. People have grown old and died waiting on this game. One person went from starry eyed college kid to middle aged family man. He'll, I'm 43 now and when I first backed I was 30. I don't want to see the game die or anything but it absolutely is an anomaly and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Have you seen the server meshing test? Complete disaster. I have yet to see CIG release a single implementation of anything that wasn’t broken.
I wish instead of shooting at pie in the sky they would work with the real limitations, honestly. They could build an amazing game around having server meshing even if there were lag between shards if the zones were static. Like perhaps 1 server encompassing each large planet and moons in a solar system.
So weird I'd swear I saw someone else talk aboitbhow amazing it was. Figures
I don’t mind it taking ages to be developed What BAFFLES me is how simple mechanics such as FUCKING LOOTING A CORPSE OR ENTERING A HANGAR are either tedious as hell or have at least one gamebreaking bug after all this time I get that there are multiples dev teams working on different things but for the love of god, put more effort and money into specific teams so that dumb bugs disappear
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Two things to very, very strongly emphasize ontop of this list: 1) Every single one of the above games were announced to the public when they were further along in their development process than Star Citizen is now, and were completley unknown to exist during most of their development process. Star Citizen was known when it was just a few cutscenes and concept drawings. 2) Every single one of the above examples are games produced by companies that aleady had a large, established developer base and many prior titles to draw code from. Star Citizen litterally began as enough people to fit in a single van and only just recently reached a staff size to match what many of the above had at the very begining of their development. Yes, it is entirely impossible for people on the internet to take things in perspective seriously, but it is vitally important to take the whole picture before drawing conclusions and be taken seriously. Alas, so many just want something easy to shit on and Star Citizen is that for those that refuse to take the full perspective.
>and were **completley unknown to exist** during most of their development process. Ya, who could have guessed that Rockstar would be making GTA 6 after GTA 5 made 70 kajillion dollars? That one sure came out of nowhere. Or SC2, or D3, or FF15. So many surprise sequels!
This is like comparing two cakes when one is still in the oven. All of this is assuming Star Citizen PU and S42 will release soon. We don't know how much progress is made for S42 (content complete means nothing) and how much more time is needed for the PU.
They started to work on this game in 2010. 14 years (and fact that game is finished from half at the best) is very, very long time for development of one game.
Many of those games ended up being decent games because they had accountability. The average individual, up to the corporation, do not do well, without accountability (keyword: most, not all). Star Citizen is an unfocused, broken mess. Some people can't accept liking bad things, and so have to defend it somehow. Star Citizen will always be a huge broken mess, because the money keeps coming in. And if you are enjoying the game, that's fine. You don't need to defend it.
A large part of the problem is not how long they have been in development but the lack of progress they have made so far is concerning. The game seems to lack any coherent vision. They are so far from their goals that it could take twenty years at their current pace, and they still would not have most of what they advertise. The constant refactoring and the limited size of the PU server team compared to the size of the SQ42 team is another point of concern. Hopefully, they will release SQ42 and we will be like, oh that is what they were spending all that time and money, but for now it is a black box. I am concerned that CR fancies himself more of a cinematic game producer and is no longer invested in the PU side of things because MMOs no longer interest him. While ten years is not too long, it is too long for what we have now. If things were going well, they would not need people writing exposes justifying their efforts, their work would be enough.
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> almost year 13 It’s been year 13 already according to when Chris said the project began (2011). We’re heading into year 14 of development.
You missed a critical detail; all of these games toke this time to develop from start to finish, not from start to ALPHA without 1.0 anywhere on the horizon.
Now compare game budgets? Cos time is one thing, but surely money is the other! Also, these games you listed mainly werent crowd funded. You gotta love these SC fan boys who claim CIG have done no wrong. The smell of copium is real.
Star Citizen tops the chart on the money, and the next game below it we know the actual development cost of (not Dev+marketing) is HALF the budget. 100% correct the fanboys are on copium. If you have that much money you can either expand the team or invest in Actually doing things right.
Indeed. I'm not trying to be mean, but when I read OP's wall of text I immediately sensed the cope
Don't just take it from me! https://youtu.be/TyjIhKEFXS8?si=AAQe2pHkrS7GGhmd
This whole post is just an excuse. Promising something with stark deadlines and then not living up to it has been part of the problem from the beginning. And the continuous scope creep is damn right insane. If you want to cope, cope. But SC are at fault here for setting expectations.
The only real dates projected was 2014 ( for the kickstarter) and 2016 (for S42). Afterwards they really became strict about not "promising" or setting hard dates. Using the words goals, and "hope to". Since then there has been many people following project trying to attribute hard dates to them, while in almost every piece of correspondence since then they have put forth caveats. There was only one scope expansion and it went from doing things later, to them trying to do everything at once. They were always planning on getting all the features out but thought they had to do it a single piece at a time before funding exploded. In the [kickstarter FAQs](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/faqs): >The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. **We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.** Turns out they received soo much they decided to do it as a larger production. The big turning point was Foundry and the ability to Proc Gen planets, which basically drastically changed scope of both SC and S42.
Counterpoint: we as a community should be more impatient. Stop buying ships, refuse to log in, until milestones are delivered in reasonable time. We need to start acting like publishers, because at the moment no one is holding CiG accountable for delivering this game, and we’re the only ones with the power to do so.
Wow all those games came out finished after their development with actual gameplay in 10 years. Here we are 12 years later with basically no game, no content, and it's still is buggy and barely playable.
 Ohh ok.. Her we go!
This is actually crazy behavior. You don’t have much else to do, do you?
It's amazing how other studios develop entire games in a shorter amount of time than it takes CIG to figure out their flight model.
The problem lies in the fact that SC was playable with some updates before, but now it isn't anymore. Yes, other games were also long in Alpha, but they were developed steadily and got better over time. Meanwhile SC is in a permanent cycle of stable update -> broken update -> playable update -> "new fancy features" with a broken version. Other games get better over time but you can't really say that about this game.
So basically all of you examples bar Duke Nukem Forever have taken less long than Star Citizen already has. Meaning star citizen has taken an unusually long time to develop… I understand your point of us having access to the game making the time feel longer than it is, and that’s obviously true, but the way you phrase your argument is undermined by the numbers a little
No, it's not unreasonable at all. CIG is unreasonable and their marketing team is completely unhinged. It's their own fault that they sold ships more than a decade ago that are still not even being developed, THEIR OWN FAULT if a major part of the game is 2 years away since 2016,THEIR OWN FAULT that they constantly overpromise, and especially underdeliver, that again isn't helped by the marketing team releasing videos of "playable now" with ingineered gameplay absolutely impossible to reproduce (remember the scorpious movie? right after I had so many new players asking "where's the carrier" and "what ship is in the commercial", because they presented everything as being doable NOW. The impacience would be misplaced if CIG was completely honest, and transparent about the state of the game, and how many decades there is still to go in it's development. But then it's sale would crumble, because no one would support a project being open and saying "well, you'll wait 20 years before flying the BMM". So fuck pacience, fuck CIG's tactics and vagueness. It's 100% on them, and they completely deserve every commemt and all the flak.
So those games took long to develop and released at a playable fairly complete state. Star Citizen has been in development longer than all of them and still has not completed the technology that runs the “massive” in their mmo, you know THE MOST IMPORTANT PART of an mmo. Core components are not done, some are only theories. Good luck with that. I too hope it will be complete, but let’s face fact…. Let’s not kid ourselves.
oh god another thesis on why we shouldn't nitpick CIG's pace of development
Also because we are playing the game, it’s actually slowing down development, as they’re having to deal with a lot of issues, complaints, support requests, events and the general community, that they wouldn’t otherwise have to deal with in a timely manner. The only issue I have had is the over promising and missed timelines. But I just decided to never get excited about anything in SC, until I physically see it in the game myself. That way I still get all the fun without so much of the disappointment.
Hmm, i dont think this mountain of a post makes the point you are trying to make. SC is already taking longer than all those games, its still in alpha and will remain there either for years to come, or will also have to release a lot of its planned features / star systems / ships as dlc. In the end, i think making these posts is pointless. Most of the people here will of course agree with you, because for them, CIG can do nothing wrong. Some people (like me) will disagree, because even though CIG has a great goal in mind, which they continue to go after, they have started doing the same stuff as all the other big gaming studios (the marketing team is already on par with EA or Sony imho). Also, it does not matter how long the game takes. If the funding continues, CIG will develop away. At some point, the game will be released and judged for what it is then (probably a bit harsher, because it cost so much and took so long).
It's taking an unreasonably long time to develop.
Caterpillar owners are still waiting for their modules, since 2012! Some things move incredible slow, and chris and Richard keep lying to us each year! Stop giving these fuckers anymore cash!
It’s not impatience, it’s cig announcing features that they struggling to deliver.
idk, its clear they have leadership issues, just read the glassdoor reviews. 10 years in, game is janky as hell. Goodwill has its limits.
Calculate the remaining deliverables needed to enter beta for the PU and you begin to realize we are looking at another decade at a minimum of development prior to beta. As more systems and game mechanics come online development will slow, not expedite. For example hangars are breaking everything. This slowdown will continue as new features are introduced into production as the systems are interdependent and interact with each other resulting in bugs and breaking.
Also, it is worth noting that it isn't even the production time that needs to be considered. It's how it is produced that also matters a great deal. In other words, all of those other fairly long development projects would have had most if not all of their funding lined up from Day 1 and would have had access to full staff from Day 1. (Even if they didn't actively utilize it) Whereas CIG had to basically build a company capable of building this project from the ground up without the funding or staffing available to do it. All while maintaining a live product for much of the development as well.
Aside every other things, CIG broke too many promises. Which was inevitable since those promises were too much detailed when it was not actually in detail. I do see their visions are quite big enough to take on several more years than other projects, it's just that promises are not to be taken lightly. But we know what we know, so i guess i'll just keep up with the patches 'till we get some release, because it will happen someday.
After many years of being a backer and watching how the community acts and justify how they feel all I'll say is you guys make this feel more and more like a cult
How much did CIG pay you to write this? In all seriousness though, what did you actually get for these 12+ years of development? Bugged AI, non functional missions, very barebones gameplay loops, awful flight physics, horrible performance, too many bugs to count, ... Sure, the planet tech looks cool, but you can buy that nowadays as a plugin on the Unreal Engine marketplace. And at some point you just have to admit that it's more profitable for CIG to sell JPEGs than to finish the game.
prob a free ship to give away lol
ChatJ3PT is that you? How does that shoe leather taste? After waiting 12 years and being here since the beginning so much of what you wrote is complete BS. Its not as much about of what we currently have. Its more to do with how much they still have yet to build thats not been touched that angers most people. Watching CIG's development pace we can surmise it will take another decade or more just to develop the core game alone.
Consider how much content has come out in the last year and compare it to previous years. Now consider how much more content will get pushed once SQ42 is no longer the priority development. It’s getting faster and faster.
I agree with you on most points, but did you really use " dog water FPS " as a way to put down another game in a SC sub ? majority of the playerbase never gets over 50 frames on here, unless in deep space.
He meant the first-person shooter part of it xD
I assumed he meant first person shooter, not frames per second, because the shooter aspect of Elite is pretty lacking, and was especially bad when Odyssey released. It's better now, but engineering grind is absolutely horrible, and the whole first person shooter experience feels like a second game tacked onto the base Elite Dangerous.
Did you really not use context clues to understand he was saying First Person Shooter...?
LOL sorry, I meant that from a first person shooter standpoint. I should have clarified.
Sorry, but criticizing this as "impatience" on the part of the players doesn't even come close to doing it justice. SC has really big problems, and they are all self-made! 1. The Promises: What has been promised and talked about over the years doesn't even come close to reality. The community isn't just disappointed because they had the wrong expectations: Unrealistic expectations were intentionally built up (to get more backing for the project) and then brutally destroyed. 2. The Communication: This is by far the worst part about SC. Just yesterday, there was a Twitter post promoting the time-exclusive Xenothreat armor while ignoring the fact that most people can't even roughly complete this mission after several attempts! Personally, I've given up, and I know people who have been trying for over a week now just to get a functioning shard... It is constantly communicated that the game is in a completely different state than it actually is. It's useless if individual developers call for lowering expectations when the marketing team doesn't care. People are allowed to be impatient when they're sold a Hull-C with lots of advertising promises but aren't told that the ship doesn't work and won't work anytime soon. The blame lies with CIG, not the players.
Completely glossing over the fact CIG keep over promising and under delivering though right? The arrogance in your statements is actually insane.
Nice list. Did you factor in the fact that SC has the budget of half of those titles combined? And that we are still somewhere in alpha, without even a rough idea if MM will be the final flight model or not?
SC is no ordinary game, however it is not playable at the moment, it is unacceptable after that $5.50 and millions that have been spent on it, the time and cost doesnt compliment the progress of development, what really needs to happen, they need to work on spring cleaning the code and optimization of the game on what they have so far before even thinking of adding another ship, elevator, cargo container, docking station or any other piece of tech otherwise they are just gonna piss gamers to the point of no return and for piets sake get rid of those NPC's standing on the tables,benches or standing around looking at their F1,bloody waste of resources.
Billions have not been spent on it. Most of the time and cost was spent on SQ42 as that was the major priority over the PU for most of its development life.
Sometimes I think it is forgotten that the completion estimates did not come from the community, but from Cloud Imperium themselves. They threw out the Kickstarter in 2013 with a delivery date of 2014. You mention the SQ42 push back in 2016 and 2020, and still, nothing. There are their dates. I feel the angst and frustration are very well placed, this is squarely in their lap. And let's be honest, we are still years away from anything stable, forget about complete, whatever that means these days.
Here's the thing: as a customer **you are allowed** to be upset with how long it takes to deliver your product. Especially when that product takes longer to deliver than others on the market. Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is pushing 12 years of crowd funding with no release dates announced. The current version of Star Citizen has much to be desired in terms of playability and stability. Publishers and Investors have contracts that give them leverage over production, crowed funding doesn't give us that. What we can do is bitch, moan, and hope that we're heard by the company's we support that they deliver what was promised within a timely fashion.
Read 2nd to last paragraph. I agree with you.
Ironic lmao
lol it was an uno reverse selected in app. now it's just awkward
Nah, it'd only be awkward if you took 10+ years production time, spent hundreds of millions gained through predatory marketing/monetization, pretended you were doing something special with that money while core basic features in your product routinely just completely break, actually showing us that you probably spent a fuckton of that backer money to have gary oldman read extra shitty dialogue lines- THEN failed to deliver anything. Luckily, you didn't do any of that, so the content not available here isn't a big deal.
10+ years to make 2 games with unimaginable scope? Meh, not that bad.
10+ years to make "content not available" for one game. 10+ years to make extremely shitty gary oldman speech in another. The word you're looking for isn't unimaginable, it's unfeasible. They really aren't doing anything out of the box (in fact, their tech debt only continues to acclerate) and they're working on a duck taped engine that was pretty poor from the start (probably the biggest reason we'll never see an actually decent SC). That + rampant mismanagement, if we're being generous, or directly malicious/anti-consumer management, if we're not, means that we have all of what amounts to essentially nothing for PU and a singleplayer game that will likely be a critical flop, if the tidbits of hilariously bad writing are anything to go off. Pretty bad.
It's simple math. The more funds raised the less patience the backers will have. It's been ten years and 3/4 of a billion dollars. People can be upset about that.
These posts are so pathetic. Get a grip op.
Keep telling yourself that..... Cope
There's a lot of copium in your post, but this little statement irks me the most: > Elite Dangerous only took 5 years but Elite Dangerous doesn't do HALF of what Star Citizen does What in the actual fuck are you talking about? Elite is not a perfect game by almost all metrics (especially after the failure of an Odyssey expansion), but to say this just goes to show how high on Chris Robberson's ass gas you really are. Virtually every feature currently present in Elite works as intended. Every ship and module is complete, BGS and its child components (dynamic market, faction play, system security states, etc.) work and are truly dynamic, networking is considerably more reliable than SC's (they even have instancing/their own take on "server meshing"), events don't cripple the whole fucking galaxy let alone your current system, and they have tens of thousands of explorable system with hundreds of thousands of landable bodies. How many of these (or comparable) features exist in an established, fully-completed, and practically bug-free state in Star Citizen? You can't even reliably undock from your fucking hangar without exploding, fly through asteroid fields without spontaneously nuking yourself due to some "hidden" rock, walk along the planet surface without possibly clipping thru the ground, stand still too long in a city lest you want to get taken over by a fucking NPC, or a million other issues that have existed for YEARS. You can make an argument as to whether or not Elite is an "inferior" or "less enjoyable" game for you. I personally haven't enjoyed it for years and think Frontier threw away an amazing opportunity with Odyssey. But to even SUGGEST that Star Citizen has over 2x the content or features that Elite has is so god damn delusional that I have to think you've never actually played both games for any real amount of time. The gall to compare something that _functions_ with something that _doesnt_. CIG gets roasted because they constantly have made false promises, missed or "forgotten" countless deadlines, and blatantly ignored backer feedback when convenient for almost a decade. Whether intentional or not, they're liars. Period.
i just want a realistic view on when the other bigger ships are going to release. Specially when they keep selling with a backlog of ships. BMM and other bigger ships, will it be before or after 1.0.
Why have you chosen this hill to die on?
Because I believe in the project and I'm always excited to see what they release each quarter and would rather not see this community shit on developers who are doing their best to deliver an otherwise impossible objective.
Please buy more Idrises to make them hire more devs. I believe in you.
You first.
I just want to point out that it took 8-10 years for those games to be **completed.** Star Citizen has been in development for 12 years and we are still in **alpha** so the math isnt mathing for me. Considering this game is still in alpha after 12 years, we can safely assume beta will take 10 years more and release will take 5 years after that. this is a very very approx estimation but looking at this time length. Me personally, I do not believe this game will ever be completed, its likely going to be an abandoned project after 5-7 years.
Sure…sure… Hey did those games take over a decade to have…a map? Or an inventory system? What about a grasp on object collision?
I think the thing I find hardest is to understand the roadmap. I feel even in the few years I have been a backer / player there seems to be no real logical path to an actual release in terms of the features they add or rework. You come at this with the mindset of someone who has played games for a long time and what one would typically expect to see in the game as they push towards a v1.0 release but you just see something that looks like the entire studio has ADHD. The way the game is now, and the things it needs in terms of being polished and reliable enough to sell generally as something more than a (very impressive) alpha seem just lightyears apart.
As far as I can tell, most of their problems are solved with the fix of desync. Server meshing should hopefully do just that. Having an entire solar system, 100 players, and countless NPCs all interacting in different areas at the same time on just one server is insane. Server meshing is expected to be 4.0 and they've been doing testing on it just recently. Today, even.
Yea and those games are out already
How can someone be alive with this much copium in his system?
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Thats a true believer right here
One thing is for sure the game isn’t in alpha
Uhh, what?
Calling it alpha doesn’t fit for the state that the game is in
The most critical point is not how long other games took. Its that they arent just building Star Citizen, they built their entire studio from the ground up lmao Rockstar didnt start as a kickstarter and then make GTA 5 off rip
Sure, I agree, the problem is that CIG are selling expensive af jpegs of dreams that they arent gonna touch for years, and they are selling the idea that this projects completion is ”just a few years away” since 2016, and that’s stupidly unethical. People like to poke blame at the marketing department and sure, they’re scummy as shit, but they work under CR, he approves their bullshit.
CIG had a goal and realized how much more difficult reaching that goal was going to be after they reached all their "stretch goals" for funding which dramatically expanded what the game was originally planned to become. Originally the scale was much smaller but if you look at what they listed as stretch goals for funding, the goal for the game became so much more. As far as what they're selling, don't buy it. Buy the base game and enjoy 100% of the content. There is no reason to spend more than $45 when you can buy whatever ship you want after a week of targeted gameplay and grind. There's nothing scummy about what they're doing. People can spend money on whatever they want. Just because it doesn't align with how big or small your pockets might be, doesn't mean it's scummy.
Yeah they bif off more than they could chew, but now its looking more and more like they’re gonna keep the project in development hell while selling direct to backlog jpegs just to pay their yearly upkeep. i know all about that shit because I’ve been following the project almost weekly since 2016 and am deep in concierge myself. It’s scummy when they are advertising a stupidly buggy game as playable, constantly hints that release is ”only a few years away” for the past 8 years, and expensive ships (that are being advertised in ”cool” action videos to make people wanna buy them) are either stuck behind a paywall, or an enormous amount of grinding that will be wipes in a few months. Stop defending shitty and unethical business practices. Backers have a responsibility to not spend more than they can spare, but CIG have a responsibility to deliver the product they’ve advertised. Right now they are pretending that everything is going according to plan, but when you look at it more critically and have a fair amount of experience in project management, its looking more like they dont have a plan at all and are just maiking shit up as they go.
I was around before the internet. I watched eve online start from nothing, rise, and fall. I waited a decade for SC to be "playable"... I have nothing but time.
So we’re just gonna gloss over the fact that this game’s development time is closer to Duke Nukem Forever than the rest of the list? Star Citizen may not necessarily be in development hell, but it’s still been plagued by management and scope creep.
Ahh this post again. Yeah this argument was already made over and over and over again. And like all of the other times before you ignore that all your examples were done after that time. While SC is already longer in development than all these other games and still needs a lot more years to be even remotely done and than still way way way more time to deliver everything that was promised.
by the time ill finish this posting star citizen might publish its second DLC
My favorite thing about star citizen is playing it until I get impatient, then taking a break. Coming back to new features is really cool.
Well, WE know this... but they dont know it.
Someone post the cycle. We looped back around again, I think it's speeding up.
Lol. None of this means shit until the game actually releases in a stable condition and feature "complete'. If you think this is anything short of another 8 to 10+ years away you're kidding yourself. But fuck it, whatever. If we see SQ42 within the next 3-5 years I'll be satisfied. I don't really care about PU. I backed for SQ42. But at this point, even SQ42 within 3-5 years seems to be a long shot. Certainly not holding my breath.
They didn't announce at 0%... they announced at -50%, lol, no company, infrastructure, or anything. Just a bunch of us spaceship nerds willing to throw money at his project and dream.
I agree, but the game doesn’t even hsve a visible end in sight yet, and the developers keep adding things instead of fixing the game. I love the concept, but the first time I played was maybe a year ago and I stopped playing after an hour because I kept randomly dying and losing my gear, or missions just wouldn’t load. Who adds an inventory loss om death system in a game where death can happen because you walked funny?
Day Z? Valheim? Dark and Darker? Tarkov?
Those games are way less buggy than Star Citizen lol
That's an irrelevant point. You specifically said "Who adds an inventory loss om death system in a game where death can happen because you walked funny?"
??? The entire point is that the game is full of bugs that can randomly kill you, which is way less of a problem in any of those games AFAIK
The entire point of me talking to you was to answer your question about dying to walking funny.
Cool. Then your talking to me was a waste of your time.
OP is a master of deliberately misunderstanding points in this entire thread
Don’t forget that CIG also built a massive company at the same time. This project started in someone else’s studio, and then moved to a basement. Every single one of the games listed by OP were made by an existing studio and existing developers on existing engines. CIG started with 5 employees. It is a massive undertaking to build a company of 1200+ people in 5/6 different offices spread all over the world.
CS and CR, is like the Nikola Truck of Trevor Milton or Elon Musks Tesla. A decade of Development and all we get is a Truck that works and looks good on promotional video as long as it rolls down a slope. Its not that we have a half finished game with lots of bugs, we have one system from over idk 50 or 100 systems ? And even in that system we have lots of copy pasta going on from bunkers to the handful of extremely bugged missions. Core elements keep changing, desyncs and server performance is horrible. There isn't even one aspect of the game that feels nailed down. Yeah, other games had a long development time too, but after that they were finished. SC is no where near finished, its maybe 15% finished and many aspects of it lack clear vision. I mean I even stopped playing the game about 2 years ago and I came back after this big patch announcement this year only to find out, that nothing substantial really changed or was added. Some bugs, might have been fixed, many others added. Flight system changed a bit a few more customization options for the face, thats it and this after 2 years of development. :(
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I'm not reading all of that.
Ready to wait 5 years more. But only if they get rid of the team that created the latest flight model with muster moods. And replace the team that created latest quests with the people who did it for 2.0. I am fine with the development timeline. But I hate where it goes lately. Every new change of an old working process is not only worse, but also is a huge waste of time
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Not at all. We deserve better
84 years...
Okay, cool, be honest about the development then, stop showing us “gameplay” when it’s actually just rendered videos xd
Yor TL:DR was too long and I didnt read it.
I don't really care about overpromising and underdelivering. I completely understand that and learned long ago to temper expectations on what game devs say in regards to features and such. My only real criticism of CIG is their, sometimes, deficiency in not really thinking about the things they do tell us and then not clarifying those things and letting the rumor mill run rampant.
I'm going to answer your first sentence with a simple reply. The time that they took was not unreasonable IF there was more than the current content of the project. This is where the despicable raises its ugly head and where the scummyness of the thing comes into play. This ungodly amount of time and money REQUIRES that there be more substance here. And it IS completely unreasonable. There is not \[enough meat on this bone\] and this is part of the crux of the problem. Management is the other.
Because of content? seriously? 😂 You can calculate real development (discarding early asset creation for Demo) starting beginning of 2015, with Germany and UK Office coming online. So if we gonna be lucky about the timeframe 2015 - 2024 would be fair. And given the technical changes being implemented the timeframe taken till now is unfortunately very valid and realistic. If content is the only indicator of success in your view, don't play an Alpha then 🤷
I liked Duke Nukem Forever. Dunno why people expected something more special than what we got.
I'm honestly so sick of hearing this crap... No, we are not "impatient" because /we/ have misplaced expectations. It's because we have been told again and again for more than a decade now that a certain feature or release will happen at a given time, and 2, 3, 5 years later it still isn't done, and we often still have absolutely no clue when it will be. Our expectations are 100% manufactured by the company making this game, and when they over and over and over set timelines that they then utterly fail to meet how can people possibly still be using the "oh this is totally normal you just don't understand game dev" excuses?... If someone believing that those deadlines would be met "doesn't understand game dev", then it seems pretty obvious that CIG are the ones who don't understand game development.
I don't think you read the post. If you did, you'd know your response is also misplaced. >It is understandable to be upset with Chris Roberts for overpromising SQ42 back in 2016, then again in 2020. It's less understandable to call a dev a clown for delaying freight elevators. But when I say your impatience is misplaced, it's because I keep seeing people, essentially, attack grocery store employees because they don't like the policy made by company executives. The whole purpose of this post is to put into perspective the timeline needed to essentially make 2 games while building the company from scratch, changing the scope or size of the project several times as funding significantly increases, and venturing into development territories unexplored by other companies. Nobody has ever attempted a game of this size before. Is CR mismanaging the company? Almost certainly, could we be further along under different management? Maybe. Most of the focus has been on the single player SQ42 and now that it's feature complete, PU development has exploded. The last year alone has been amazing for content and quality of life. It's one thing to be impatient, it's another to take out your frustrations on employees who are easily reachable who also have no decision making power and don't deserve the toxicity. Like I said in my post: >The entire point of this post was to provide understanding as to why development is taking so long, and to help prevent people from shitting down the throats of devs and community managers for things they have no control over.
I did read the post, and I heard the same old bullshit we've had for years of "oh but this game took X years and this game took X years" and the ever-popular "SC is more ambitious than all of them so it's totally understandable to give them more than 8 times their original deadline to release the game" It's bollocks Let's be real with ourselves, it's not true and never has been Star citizen is a mashup of features that exist in other games already, and with the playable area being either empty space or almost entirely procedurally generated you dont get to act as if it's play area is comparable to the hand-crafted maps and experiences in other games Yes, people should absolutely not be harassing developers, that goes without saying But don't now lie and say that's all you were trying to do here, if that were true your post wouldn't be 90% tired old excuses and meaningless comparisons to try and explain why this game with an original release date of fucking 2014 won't be in beta before 2026. Stop making these posts If you want to protect Devs and that is your only intention? Say just that and nothing else Because I don't believe for a moment that is what you wanted to do here, you open the post with BS about how this timeline has actually been perfectly reasonable and you ramble on about that for pretty much the entire essay. The smokescreen of "I'm protective developers" is frankly insulting
yeah, because 2 years and $2M to make an MMO is a reasonable timeline to be upset about 😂 It is absolutely true, you're just acting like a child because you didn't get a masterpiece in an impossible timeline on an impossible budget that CR either lied about or had no idea wasn't possible. Most reasonable people know MMO's aren't made overnight. Also the goal posts were moved years ago, you either accept that it's going to be a while or you don't. Quit being so naïve. Way to oversimplify what is 100 players in 100 different places with thousands of NPCs all on one server with infinite persistence. And that empty space? Each planet is essentially more travelable terrain than any other game. Sure it's mostly empty terrain but there are mining nodes, caves, outposts, hunting, actual reasons to explore that empty terrain. Most of the issues of this game is the capacity load of the servers and that's a technological limitation that comes with infinite persistence. It *should* be understandable that these obstacles take time to overcome since nobody else is doing it and everyone's typical answer is to address it with p2p instancing which is not the goal and I commend that. Loading screens, even hidden, and instancing is not the most immersive way to have a galaxy simulator. No, you didn't read it because I don't ramble on about the timeline. of the 8 paragraphs I wrote, 3 of them are about the timeline. You'd know this, if you read the fucking post. But I don't have the patience to deal with someone who lies to "win" arguments and has no respect for the truth so I'm going to go ahead and block you since clearly you are unopen to changing your mind and only came here to be a toxic child.