Is it a scam or not? I know it's never gonna happen but a small part of me wants it to be real so badly
It's basically just development hell, which given that it's a crowdfunded game means it has the same effect as a scam: paying for a game you'll never get.
Just go play Elite Dangerous. The new expansion is very cool, hopefully they actually fix it so it's playable with a consistent, decent framerate on anything less than a threadripper with 64 gigs of ram and a pair of RTX 3090s.
I love ED, did a Beagle Point run and everything. But it's dead boring without a VR setup to intensify the experience and the flight model is not great by comparison.
That's fair. I highly recommend head and eye tracking, as it adds a lot of that experience back without needing the bulky headgear that I hate having to pull out of the closet.
Plus ED was given for free in Epic Games not long ago... I have to try it out sometime. I heard the Fuel Rats are pretty based
CIG objectively has very good artists and software engineers who have created and accomplished some really impressive things (including a lot of bullshit like "ok guys time to refactor cryengine to use bigger floats so we can have coordinates on an accurate astronomic scale that maintain millimeter precision, instead of just keeping things in local coordinate bubbles like literally every other game that's looked at this problem in history" which they shouldn't have been asked to do in the first place, but successfully did).
The downside is that the executive leadership has an impossible, ever-shifting vision for it which means a lot of that work is wasted when they decide on a whim that they want to go in a different direction, and through all of this they've been incredibly vague about actual gameplay mechanics instead of pure simulationist stuff, and I'm not sure if they've even managed to solve the problem of NPCs just t-posing on chairs instead of doing anything yet. I haven't downloaded and played the alpha for four or five years now, and I understand that they've added a lot but definitely not as much as they should have in that time frame.
It is kind of interesting to watch development hell play out in real time and in full view of the public, though. Usually this sort of thing happens behind closed doors for a decade before the funding dries up and they scrap it or shove out a half-finished wreck following last minute revisions to scale it back, but here they've managed to capture the imaginations of enough well-off middle aged PMC types to secure a constant flow of funding.
It'll be interesting when Squadron 42 finally drops, and I assume sooner or later they'll hit a persistent beta stage with SC where it's not feature complete (or only has placeholder prototypes for a lot of things) but they promise they won't wipe player's progress anymore; two years later they'll go back on that promise as they move into a refactored second persistent beta; the game never actually launches, it just goes through an endless cycle of betas and incremental revisions and additions.
Yeah the art pipeline that came out of it is pretty neat. I think it was only seen in Alien: Isolation before, and wasn't used in that nearly to the extent in star citizen.
There's tons of ways to create environments and props for a game. So it's hard to explain without already knowing some of the most common ways for contrast. It was a pretty good shortcut for artists to create a more detailed environment without as much time spent, or took the same amount of time but was used more efficiently to produce more. It also looks great.
I always feel bad for all the artists who work on crappy projects. They legit do good work and this case helped push the art side of games into a new technique yet their work will likely just end up being put on ice when/if this never gets release.
Npcs still t-pose, though mostly just before a server crash. Sever meshing will supposedly fix it any year now.
They've finally completed the first system, 3 years behind schedule.
That said, there just isn't any other game that is quite as good at space combat. Which is annoying.
Npcs still t-pose, though mostly just before a server crash.
I hope I some day program a game with glitches that iconic.
Other games' falling through the map issues are but a shadow on the platonic cave compared to Morrowind, which itself is a pale imitation of Daggerfall, that pile of bugs somehow bolted together into a game.
I'm still smiling about this comment a day later, but I never did think of a clever response.
That said, there just isn’t any other game that is quite as good at space combat. Which is annoying.
Yeah, I bought in back when there was just Arena Commander because my friends at the time were very enthusiastic about SC and even in that rough, limited state it felt good to fly in, despite the interface being kind of shit. I got Elite: Dangerous for free on Epic and played a lot of that, but the combat there is just bad so I spent most of time my time mining, which was actually enjoyable. I definitely missed SC's flight model in E:D even years after having last played SC.
Yeah, big time scam I wish I could get my money back form. Mostly figured I would be safe because the single player bit had a release date and I foolishly thought they would stick to it. It's been like 6 years and I think they just finally stopped pretending like it was going to happen.
They're still making it, and honestly their processes are a lot better now. But CR needs to step away amd stop people redoing things over.
The game as it currently exists is entirely for the few people who somehow think there's still some grand plan that will come to fruition some day. Those people's interaction with the game isn't PLAYING it, really, it's IMAGINING what might be there in the future!
A while back, they put out an update. It was dust clouds. A few colorful dust clouds, out there in space, to take pretty pictures with. No mechanical changes to the game. And yet the Star Citizen youtube community went around puttng out 30 minute videos guessing where this magicial dust cloud technology might go in the future! Maybe you can harvest it! what if it did something to your sensors! what if thiis, what if that?! And that's what Star Citizen is. A game that exists in the imagination of people who will not simply look at what's in front of them.
Its functionally a scam but not a wilful one, the devs are developing a lot of novel technology to make the game function. I hope it happens but I'm not holding my breath.
Mismanaged, wild scope, constantly changing direction, constantly expanding the scope.
Its in development hell due to mismanagement and will probably never see a full release, but it isn't a scam.
It also has the best space combat model around at the moment unfortunately, ED and Squadrons don't quite compare. Planets are great. Space trucking when it works is great.
It just all only works 40 percent of the time, and there's still only one system.
Much better alternative games out there, I recommend the X series personally if you like management/strategy. X4 is good and X3 is a classic with a slightly worse learning curve. And if you don't want that there is Elite Dangerous. You could even make an argument that No Man Sky is also a good alternative.
Star Citizen was a product of the rush for "realism", most of the promise was AAA graphics in a space game which was rare up to that point. But now the world moved on AAA graphics are everywhere now, we are about to see Unreal Engine 5 release push that further. Heck even Unity can look great in certain ways(nature rendering, large scale RTS stuff).
Disregard the development hell and scams, the premise was that Star Citizen would be THE definitive AAA realistic graphics reference and well that is a failure now. That shitty Amazon engine is a huge burden too.
Maybe if they moved everything to UE5 and set a 3 year release date(2025) no matter what the game would be salvageable but that wont happen.
Ahhh the hours put into X3 bring back fond memories. Setting up a space trucking empire delivering solar cells. Good times.
