Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

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Variise

N00b
497
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Both Denaut and I have brought it up before. I can't speak for Denaut but my comparison was about the marketing. I think this game will suffer the same fall that NMS did once it is released. CIG has made so many promises I just can't see him being able to keep.

This is why nobody should take anything you say seriously.

When facts don't line up with your beliefs you create your own reality. I suppose that's one way to live a blissfully ignorant life.
 

Skanda

I'm Amod too!
6,662
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This is why nobody should take anything you say seriously.

When facts don't line up with your beliefs you create your own reality. I suppose that's one way to live a blissfully ignorant life.

You realize that entire post was subjective right? I used words like "think" and "I can't see". You are now trying to take an opinion post and conflate it to me "making things up". I'm not the one trying to make excuses for how much I have spent on this game in a vain attempt to make myself look less biased.
 

wilkxus

<Bronze Donator>
519
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This community purposefully embraces trolls. At some points there were 2-3 full pages of this shit in this thread all without me ever entering the thread. You don't need me to have a bunch of bored trolls create days long circle jerks about a topic they know nothing about. Seems endemic in other threads too.
Hmmm, the sentiments in most of the replies to you appear to be very KIND and HELPFULL. If they do not appear kind, informative and helpfull to you, I sincerely and kindly would like to ask you to please reconsider your perspective.

These nice people talking to you.... speaking kindly, addressing your points, investing real time to give you the benefit of the doubt and share their relevant professional experience, sharing their honest perspective.... they are your FRIENDS/colleagues in this forum! Please consider being a little kinder to them.

The "white coats" of their professional manner are a dead giveaway. Once the raging anger in your head subsides please consider their words in the spirit of professional courtesy in which they are offered. They are the reason people come here to read the forums so be kind to them please. Just because they do not agree with you and hold differing opinions does NOT make them Trolls.

The others (those NOT speaking kind words) are simply some of the OTHER very kind souls that are BAITING threads with TROLL bait.... if you are NOT a troll pelase do NOT sniff, inspect or goodness forbid, consume the troll bait!

It is NOT good to eat Troll bait. Resist the urge!

Please be kind to the Troll baiters, simply by ignoring them. They perform a dirty but very necessary task. They merely test and put out bait for Trolls in the gaming sections, the raison d'etre of this place. The Troll baiters are a VERY necessary part of any forum as the keep the place CLEAN and NICE. From time to time there is some stink (when bait is put out) but after that the signal to noise ratio (usefull vs useless information) goes up! Troll baiting and clearing keeps things clean and nice enough to keep the nice men and women with a (mostly) professional manner, coming back to lurk and share their insights on games and state of the industry.

-----------------------
Now if you ALREADY consumed the Troll bait...... all hope is not lost! The following steps have been found to be helpfull to normal regular folk (non trolls)

[1] Go take a nice long break and nap, perhaps even as much as a day or two (if you consumed a lot of bait)

[2] re-read Skanda's, Denaut, Ridas, a_skeleton_03, Mr Creed, Ianis etc. posts.
You might be pleasantly surprised! They have nice points to make. You do too. BOTH you and other people might have differing opinions, that is ok!

[3] Consider their posts, against your voluminous posting here.... and contemplate:
Perhaps Skanda Denaul et all do perhaps have at least a PARTIAL point you might recognize and benefit from?

[4] If you are still angry or even feel like RESPONDING in ANY way.... you still have Troll bait in your system!
Its ok! Do not panic!
Go back to [1].... and repeat.

[5] Next time PLEASE respect the members and Ignore the Troll Baiters =)


I Sincerely hope that helps. I REALLY like reading about games and gaming and lurking here as do many others. Have a nice evening/afternoon/morning/night and I hope to see you share more of your information and enthusiasm in this game later =)

Take care.
 
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Is this game going to have combat that is just pew pew pew lazer fights with some shield management? Or is there gonna be more than that? And what about huge 'capitol ships', can you send out mini fighters from them like some kind of RTS?
 

Brikker

Trump's Staff
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4,833
I don't think the people making this game can even definitively say what will be in it when it releases in 2-5 years.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
<Gold Donor>
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Most developers don't do R&D because it's expensive and often leads nowhere. EA had to hold back Bioware's DA:I from release because R&D on 4 legged animations/rigging didn't work despite that being the only change to the Frostbite engine and despite spending countless months on it. Ubisoft just announced they will finally do R&D for a year to develop features for AC. They may very well fail to do anything but at least they are trying.

The problem in the industry is that those things are unusual, the exceptions. Not the norm. They simply don't need to innovate because the consoles can't handle the ever increasing requirements of pushing gaming forward.

So R&D is something unique. CIG is doing so much R&D they can't even be compared to the next closest studio. That brings with it a metric ton of uncertainty and complexity. I recognized this immediately and called BS on their release dates. I still think 2017 for SQ42 is very optimistic simply because SQ42 and the SC: PU uses the same assets/features and they will want to include advances they make in both builds. This will likely push development on SQ42 into 2018. It all depends on how long it takes them to get SC feature complete and that means move from Alpha to Beta. No fucking way that's happening in 2017. Not unless they do the same thing other studios do which is call an Alpha build Beta and a Beta build Gold.

As far as scraping everything that's not true. Art assets are mostly retained and they have been building modular kits for constructing buildings for about 2 years now. None of that changed. The ship flight model didn't change, I told you I was wrong about that. That's a balance pass. Most of the tech they built is still there in the engine. Very few of them were scrapped.

The most obvious things that have changed are the original plans for planetary landings. That did require them to figure out how to place the modules they build for landing zones onto the planets but they didn't scrap any of them. Another big change is damage states for ships. They used to spend 1-3 months building a ship and 1-3 months on animation and damage states. That entire system was scrapped once a powerful R&D tool automated the entire process using different techniques which also saves them memory. I don't know the technical terms for it but it has to do with blending shaders I think. They still break up ships but it works differently now. I think it takes them about 1 month to do what used to take them 4-6 months. This also required that they go back and re-do every single ship. Another reason for re-doing them is to lower the memory they take up typically reducing their memory size to 1/10 of what it was before.

Finally you have characters which have gone through a complete revamp I think twice now. They are also on the 8th skeleton if I recall correctly.

So Procedural Planets, Ships and Characters were the chief issues during development resulting in a re-do. A lot of the requirements for features in the game also required the CryEngine to be re-written. The UI is perhaps the only other major feature going through a complete revamp.

Ground assets that were unique were never re-done. Rooms however were scrapped and replaced with the modular kits they built but again that's going back at least a year and that's not being re-done again.
Dead ends in software development aren't necessarily R&D. Sometimes it's just stupid ideas or poor execution.
 
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etchazz

Trakanon Raider
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You don't even realize you are conflating details even after I explained two different situations. That's why you think I'm contradicting myself.

1. IIRC CryTek (Sean + 2 guys in their spare time for free) created the animation/assets to pitch Chris to get him to buy CryEngine which he did for IIRC $1 million. This was held together by silly string and sticky tape.
2. Chris reused this along with some additional PR with help from Sandi and Ben to launch Kickstarter and their own website. During this first year Chris worked with Dave to write the over arching story which goes into the Design Document.

They did not build a Vertical Slice (functional slice of the game). At best it was a visual Prototype (non-functional) of what might be.

I'm not the one saying they were wasting their time. You are. That's not a fact it's an opinion. Fact is Chris used that prototype in his pitch. That's all. Stop conflating.

As for the rest you are describing a specific process that is endemic in the game industry. Creating soulless games that have no new features, no story or if they have a story it's shallow enough to fit on a few dozen pages and the player can complete it in a few hours. That is the current state of the game industry. Hardly something to cheerlead and the fact that others here seem to rally around this dead end concept is hugely hypocritical.

Why are you declaring to me how you and others called it that the game won't launch on time or that it's late as if I was standing against that argument. This doesn't suddenly give your other opinions credibility since I said the earliest the game might launch is 2017/2018 back in 2015 when ScamCitizen was still an active meme.

The only problem I have with the rest of your opinion is the comparison to No Man's Sky.

No Man's Sky has/had a developer who outright lied about the existence dozens of gameplay features that don't exist in the game.
SC has has an open development process with a staggering amount of detail available on most features. You know what's in the current build and you know what's immediately coming in the next build and you have at least an idea of the direction they are heading in the future.

No Man's Sky did not allow people to test the game prior to release so you literally had to take the developer at their word. With so few information available No Man's Sky had virtually no scrutiny put on it by anyone.
SC's PU is playable today. You aren't wrong that it's very light on content but that's by nature of the development process which is front loading technical solutions and building the game later.
SC's SQ42 however is not playable and apart from a few PR videos and the asset leaks from last year nobody knows anything about it. CIG claims they are virtually content complete or will be by CitizenCon or soon after. At that point they are waiting on some required gameplay features and final testing/polish.

Take any other game and you can't judge it because the Publisher won't release information on the game so you can't sit there and play armchair CEO from your cubicle.

Look what happened when EA released their last couple of videos on the new Mass Effect game. People lost their fucking shit because animations, art etc were NOT final and that game is coming out early next year. Despite Bioware stating this before the video barely functional idiots can't help but judge the game as a final product.

That is not to say you are wrong about the direction they took with their Designs. A good example is unified scales. This actually came up in that investigative article. Not sure if you read it. They didn't finalize all scales for everything in the Design Document or if they did it changed. Characters, doors, world objects are all done and have been for a couple of years but scaling was off on ship weapons because they kept going through major revisions. They fucked up with contractors repeatedly and didn't learn lessons wasting god knows how many millions in the process. Now that's a waste and that's ultimately Chris' fault.

However reading commentary from other developers they go through this same process and have huge waste internally all the time. Million dollars on a single AAA character or hero object for a game is not unusual and apparently neither is scraping it but that's just what I read. That's not something you would run into working on a LEGO game.

And that's my criticism of your criticism. This isn't fucking LEGO Batman or a supposed AAA Copy/Paste game. Trying to compare it to that in the industry is just dumb.

That's a ton of bullshit you just spewed there. You can rip on the industry all you want, but you know what most people in the industry manage to do? RELEASE A FUCKING GAME!
 
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I don't think the people making this game can even definitively say what will be in it when it releases in 2-5 years.
I bet after spending all that time and money, the end result will just be the same as Wing Commander from the 18th century. But there will be mining and crafting for retard modern gamers.
 

Variise

N00b
497
17
Wilkxus that's all well and good and every single person you mentioned does varying degrees post either valid arguments or opinions which is fine.

The problem with people like Skanda, a_skeleton_03 and some others is they also troll. If that is not their intent I'm at my wits end with them yet again since they keep repeating either false things I already provided a direct answer to that they themselves could easily look up or they just read part of a sentence and ignore context so they can create strawman arguments over and over and over. They just don't want to or don't care to learn and some of them clearly have no interest in having an intelligent debate. Typically people try to step back and view each others points of view. I have repeatedly done this just less so when I do get upset with them.

I even tried to offer and olive branch twice now since I sincerely believed we were just talking over each other which can happen when people are passionate about a subject.

No. Silence and trolling is what I got in response each time.

So I"m sorry but I have tried it your way twice and failed. They made that impossible. I suppose my friend was right about you people after all.
 

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
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The problem with people like Skanda, a_skeleton_03 and some others is they also troll
I do not and never have trolled in the gaming section of the forums. There is zero point.

I told you when we first started here that I am glad you came. I am dead serious about that. We do for sure need opposing opinions. We don't agree that doesn't mean you shouldn't be posting what your opinion is.

I am still going to argue on how wrong you are until I am blue in the face. Like I said if this project is ever finished I will be thrilled for you and for the rest of us to have a game to play hopefully.

I do not see it going that way though. We do have lots of experience on this forum with game development.
 

wilkxus

<Bronze Donator>
519
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They just don't want to or don't care to learn and some of them clearly have no interest in having an intelligent debate. Typically people try to step back and view each others points of view. I have repeatedly done this just less so when I do get upset with them.

I even tried to offer and olive branch twice now since I sincerely believed we were just talking over each other which can happen when people are passionate about a subject.

No. Silence and trolling is what I got in response each time.

So I"m sorry but I have tried it your way twice and failed. They made that impossible. I suppose my friend was right about you people after all.
You seem to be at step 5 IMHO..... but I and (some) others welcome your views regardless (Trolly type posters too, they live off this kinda shit, especially your "my friend was right about you people after all" kinda stuff.... ROLF....)
Sometimes it takes going through multiple cycles of the procedure I outlined before your skin is thick enough to be able to bear things here.

Do..... not.... eat the Troll bait....
Do not.... FEEEED the Trolls with dumb sh*t like that unless you plan on being treated like Troll food.

It can be amusing.... but most often just disturbing and sad. (psst....really, please avoid the Troll bait :)

Some people will ignore you and your (in your view at least) valid points.
Everyone is right to a degree (including you, me and others)
Everyone is wrong to a degree (including you, me and others)
Just because you are right.... in some things, does not make someone else wrong in theirs. Trolls will be Trolls.
Nobody wins, or looses.... except the trolls.... they eat all the shit and keep the place clean.... cleaner than would be otherwise at least.

Remember....many people come here ESPECIALLY to see Trolls feeding....(schrunch skrunch skrunch..... yum yum yum...)

Nobody here gives much of a shit about olive branches, yours or mine lol.... This is not THAT kind of forum lmao. There are plenty of carebear managed forums around.... mostly barren wastelands as far as actual meaningfull content, but they are huggy feely nice! This place you might get told to shove your olive branch up your ...... (by some) or just ignored (by others). Here things are a little more raw and underfined. Requires some..... maturity to wade into because the internet is a ROUGH place. Trolls ARE the moderation here.

Anyhow, perhaps after a longer break.... certain things will make a little more sense ;-)

To close the door, and move things on (your) topic..... silghtly.

Star Citizen Online will live on.... and add a *few* more features cycled in and scrapped or redevelopped before being released. They must be having a BLAST playing with all that donated cash....sigh, too many rich first world suckers around with too much cash. A sick development in the industry :-(

It really is shockingly amusing though with such a huge budget, and so many years in development how loosey goosey they are about actually moving the game out the door.

Funnier still that at this rate Brad and Pantheon MIGHT beat them to the actual release date! No disrespect to Brad intended, he had his management Titanic with Vanguard, and now he is floating something a little more manageable (with close to ZERO experimental stuff probably).
 

Grim1

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Like I said if this project is ever finished I will be thrilled for you and for the rest of us to have a game to play hopefully.

I do not see it going that way though. We do have lots of experience on this forum with game development.

They will release something eventually, otherwise they will be in lawsuit hell for the rest of their lives. But it doesn't have to be a very good game or even complete to satisfy the courts.

Even though the optics look bad, I still give Chris the benefit of the doubt because of his past endeavors. Didn't invest in this though. I feel for the people with thousands invested who desperately need to believe all is well.
 

etchazz

Trakanon Raider
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I can't even fathom the level of stupidity to have 5 or more offices around the globe each working on different parts of the game and thinking that that would work. You then get exactly what's happening: finger pointing as each office blames the other office for something not working or not being done on time. You then take certain guys from one office and shuffle them off to another office to get that office up to par, only to have the office those guys just left from fall behind. No one knows which office is the main office, or whom exactly is in charge. It's like a Chinese fire drill.
 

Tmac

Adventurer
<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
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Wilkxus that's all well and good and every single person you mentioned does varying degrees post either valid arguments or opinions which is fine.

The problem with people like Skanda, a_skeleton_03 and some others is they also troll. If that is not their intent I'm at my wits end with them...

That's bc you're doing it wrong. lolz
 

Tmac

Adventurer
<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
9,976
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I can't even fathom the level of stupidity to have 5 or more offices around the globe each working on different parts of the game and thinking that that would work. You then get exactly what's happening: finger pointing as each office blames the other office for something not working or not being done on time. You then take certain guys from one office and shuffle them off to another office to get that office up to par, only to have the office those guys just left from fall behind. No one knows which office is the main office, or whom exactly is in charge. It's like a Chinese fire drill.

Sounds like corporate culture to me!
 

overbyte

Golden Knight of the Realm
122
5
The game has a lot of promises to keep and delusions of grandeur, so it's easy to be skeptical. Stil, there seems to be a lot of good forward movement in the past few months and with citizencon this weekend we might get to see a bit more of it. If they can get 3.0 out to the public by years end and start getting caught up on their back log of ships that would go a long ways toward rekindling a bit of faith.