Chris Roberts' vacation fund has reached a new milestone. soypoint-2

so-true With your help we can get this up to 1 billion, which will ensure that Chris gets to visit more places and can enjoy more of the local cuisine. Oh, yeah, and it helps the game get finished sooner, of course.

In other news, they finally reworked the game's UI after 12 years of R&D, and it now looks worse than it did before. Progress. soypoint-1

morshupls

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michael-laugh

  • itappearsthat [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    I have actually met a star citizen guy IRL. Deeply embarrassing guy. He works in tech as a product manager and is a new landlord who loves to talk apropos of nothing about how nice he was to his tenants during covid.

  • shitholeislander [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    fundraising idea: establish a front organisation which appears to be a game developer making a wildly unfeasible but tantalising MMO; funnel 90% of donated proceeds to underground anti-imperialist cells across the west instead. based on Star Citizen, the gamers will never realise where their money is actually going

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]
    ·
    1 month ago

    What I hate about this is how cliche the premise is. Why couldn’t they make it into a cowboy bebop-type jazzy dystopian hell instead of an annoying ultra serious MUH MEGACORPORATIONS!! dystopian hell

    • barrbaric [he/him]
      ·
      1 month ago

      There are two key reasons:

      1. Something like Cowboy Bebop would require a lot of effort to make every area unique and characterful, while making things generic will be easier to copy-paste.
      2. Tech bros are libertarians.

      Also IIRC it's supposed to be more "muh spacerome", which is probably worse.

      • moncharleskey@lemmy.zip
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        You mean the popular Japenese anime that aired on Toonami, the same network space that carried Cowboy Bebop?

  • nothx [any]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I know a few rubes that have donated multiple times and won’t shut up about how great the game already is in its current state.

    • space_comrade [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      I've watched a few recent gameplay videos and ngl they made a pretty cool engine. The "game" is basically still in the tech demo phase but it's pretty cool tech, I hope somebody actually makes a game out of it some day.

      Definitely not $700 million worth of tech but oh well.

      • nothx [any]
        ·
        1 month ago

        I don’t think any part of that studio is $700 million worth of tech unless you count all the toys the CEO has been buying himself for 12 years.

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
        ·
        1 month ago

        The kind of game Star Citizen claims to eventually be fundamentally doesn't work. An open world space sim is a concept that sounds cool in your head but if you think about how it would actually play, it's simply not good. Space is impossibly large and 99,99% empty. Even a single planet is way, way, waaaayyyy too big for an open world game, and Chris Roberts hilariously promised 100 star systems at one point.

        Star Citizen, were it to ever come out, would first and foremost be a fast travel simulator. Sitting in loading screens waiting to be teleported to the 0,01% of the ingame world where there are actual things to do and see. Flying through space in your starship would be fun for a few minutes before you press the warp speed button to get to your destination already. Because again, space is empty. There's nothing there. Planets would either be desolate wastelands or contain a single activity hub where 100% of players are at any given moment.

        There is no way to do the scale of space justice. Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA 5 are gigantic games and each take place in a single city. You can run across all of WoW in a couple hours. Star Citizen would, at best, have the same amount of content as those games but spread across 100,000,000x the surface area. Flying your ship around would become very old very quickly.

        • space_comrade [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          Elite Dangerous literally has a whole 1:1 scale galaxy you can explore and it kind of works. Sure it's a pretty niche game and not for everybody but people are having fun with it.

          • fox [comrade/them]
            ·
            1 month ago

            Elite also lets you fly from point to point if you really really want to and it is indeed terribly boring and impossibly long without some sort of FTL

            • keepcarrot [she/her]
              ·
              1 month ago

              Or even FTFTL. I remember travelling for two hours to a star system because it wasn't far enough for fsd (big one) and I ran out of fuel

              • fox [comrade/them]
                ·
                1 month ago

                The running joke of getting players to go to the one space station in the Proxima Centauri system to get a free spaceship. You drop in near Proxima A and need to fly to Proxima B, the other member of the binary system. But it's like a four hour trip with the in-system FTL maxed.

        • alexandra_kollontai [she/her]
          ·
          1 month ago

          I really, really, really, really genuinely love how Outer Wilds solved this problem by just making the solar system 30 km big. Like you can just fly wherever you want. It's so good. By the way, play Outer Wilds.

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
          ·
          1 month ago

          Star Citizen, were it to ever come out, would first and foremost be a fast travel simulator.

          That could be even worse. Once upon a time there was a game called Naval Action, where you spend hours trying to travel because the travel was slow and there was no option of fast travel. Like it could take literally hours of real time.

          • Flyberius [comrade/them]
            ·
            1 month ago

            I enjoyed naval action for a bit. I was really into age of sail at the time though. I'd read some Jack Aubrey and then get my ass whipped by some Dutch bastards

      • Roonerino [comrade/them, doe/deer]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        They didn't make a cool engine though. They just made a pretty Cryengine demo that runs like shit which is scam game easy mode.

        • space_comrade [he/him]
          ·
          1 month ago

          Nah it's a bit more complicated than that. They completely revamped the rendering and netcode to support seamless transitions between space, ground, building, ships etc. What they managed to do with the engine is not easy at all. None of it excuses the blatant grifting tho, just saying some of the devs did pretty cool things there.

          • Roonerino [comrade/them, doe/deer]
            ·
            1 month ago

            Fair enough. I haven't really followed it too closely so I guess there's more technical advancement going on than I've noticed.

          • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            1 month ago

            Until they have a PlanetSide 2 player count I'm not interested

            Also

            netcode to support seamless transitions between... ground, building[s]...

            That's a door

            • space_comrade [he/him]
              ·
              1 month ago

              That's a door

              Have you ever actually done 3D game development? I promise it's not really that simple. Not everything about this game has to be complete shit just because the owner of the company is a grifter, they definitely hired talented people to do the work even if the work is ultimately a scam.

  • TraschcanOfIdeology [they/them, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    You have to respect and be disgusted by a grift this successful. Normally you'd have to scam a dozen or so VCs to get that much money, but doing it to more or less regular people is some next level manipulation.

  • Torenico [he/him]
    ·
    1 month ago

    Back when I craved for a super cool spaceships game where capitalism unfortunately survived and moved into space I played Elite Dangerous, which I got for free and enjoyed every fucking minute of it.

    imagine paying for this garbage game "star citizen". Citizen of my dick and balls.

    • Roonerino [comrade/them, doe/deer]
      ·
      1 month ago

      From what I've seen, even with all the problems it has Elite is still way better at being a game than Star Citizen. Watching people play it just looks so fucking boring and full of time wasting busy work walking back and forth. Elite at least lets you do everything from the cockpit in case you're not the kind of person that gets off on IMMERSION.

      • Torenico [he/him]
        ·
        1 month ago

        I liked it a lot, it is a good game to jump in, fly around for two hours and come back the next day or something. I liked it more since I have my own flying stick, the flying was smooth and fun. My only big issue was the "now what?", after completing a few missions, buying a new ship I didn't really know where to go. I guess I should have looked more into joining the Fuel Rats. Maybe one day.

        • Roonerino [comrade/them, doe/deer]
          ·
          1 month ago

          I mostly stopped playing a bit after the whole engineering thing was added, just such a repetitive grind. Every now and again I'll jump back in though, I did grind enough to get a pretty long jump range on an Asp Explorer so I just go flying around discovering new stars and planets a bit until I get bored again.

  • Yor [she/her]M
    ·
    1 month ago

    $100 million in lees than a year... sadness-abysmal