Star Citizen: Death of a Space Thread?

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Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

DancingShade posted:

Doesn't flopping require a thing to be released in 2017? Something doesn't add up.

Maybe it's all part of their master plan to ensure that Star Citizen will be the most award-winning game of all time. Every year that goes by with more hype/money poured into this and with even less to show for it, they'll win another "Biggest Flop" or "Most Disappointing Game" award! CIG will have to buy a new Restoration Hardware shelf to hold all of them!

# ¿ Dec 19, 2016 00:50

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 11:44

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

peter gabriel posted:

Cloud computing is pretty easy to understand, it's Dropbox or sometimes Google Drive

If you tell your coders to just do it and they tell you it can't be done and start trying to confuse you with their knowledge or experience, you just have to whip them harder. Eventually they'll learn that your vision will always win. Or the next coders you hire will learn that. Or the ones after that.

(Pro tip: they work faster if you yell "MESH! MESH!" while your grabby hands are swooping that whip around!)

Anyway, congratulations to CIG for finally taking their game engine ~~out behind the woodshed~~ over to Lumberyard or whatever. I'm sure everything will work great now. :rolleyes:

# ¿ Dec 26, 2016 21:39

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Hobold posted:

Weren't goons collectively in for over $300k before poo poo starting going stupid? The fact that there is only collectively $55k still in, speaks volumes about how little faith remains in this project.

Yeah, could the guy who "talks to someone" at CIG who apparently obsesses over how many goons still haven't gotten their money back from Star Citizen do a little digging? Maybe start by asking how many people are in that organization. And it'd be fascinating to know how much has been refunded to get that number down to $55k, and especially interesting to know how it compares percentage-wise to the amount refunded to everyone else.

(And since I suspect that anyone at CIG who cares enough to skim their database to see how people on SA still have sunk into this project has probably tracked orther organizations affiliated with whoever else is on CIG's "enemies list," maybe share the data for them, too. It'd be funny to see if any other group of rats has jumped off that sinking ship faster.)

# ¿ Dec 28, 2016 03:48

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Astroniomix posted:

I like how almost every time someone posts a timestamped video it's 2-3 or at one point even 6 hours in.

How can these people bear to do this for so long when they so clearly find it unfun?

I don't understand it, either. Are they getting money for this (officially or under the table), or are they just sinking hours and hours into what amounts to an unpaid job in the hope that some day -- clearly not today, but some day in the future -- everyone will want to watch Star Citizen being played and will automatically gravitate towards the streamers who've been around the longest?

Because honestly, neither of those options makes any goddamn sense.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 00:58

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

SelenicMartian posted:

"We plan the scope of the development based on what arrives monthly by the people to support."
What the gently caress?

Google Translate is a harsh mistress.

I imagine he wanted to convey that they ask for money every month and people give it to them, which means that they can keep expanding the scope of the game (or at least claim that the new money flowing in is going to make the game better in some way).

Given their history so far, though, it really comes off as "We ask for money every month and people give it to us, and as long as that keeps working, we can keep doing what we've been doing. But if that constant monthly income stops for some reason, we're going to have to come up with a scaled-back plan for the project to finish it with whatever money we've got left."

# ¿ Jan 16, 2017 00:02

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

TheAgent posted:

guess its the last holdouts of actual devs who had previous management experience on titles

now you gonna have dudes straight outta college running an entire department of dozens of people, working 60+ hours a week for $40k/yr

lol

This is good for Star Citizen!

The problem with experienced game developers is that when you yell REALLY HARD them to do something, they feel entitled to tell you their pointless opinions. Generally dumb things like "That's not how netcode works" or "The engine absolutely cannot support that" or "That's a bad use of our limited time and budget." They might also have ideas of their own, which is like letting the parking attendant suggest menu items to the celebrity chef. And worst of all, experienced game developers can potentially get jobs elsewhere.

But if you get all of your game developers straight out of college, all of those problems go away. They can't claim to know for sure what's impossible and they don't have any other job offers, so when you yell at them to do it, they'll just say "YES SIR" and scurry back to their desk to put a layer of code over everything or mesh some servers or whatever it is people like that do when you can't spare the time to hover over their shoulder and yell at them about your vision or make suggestions based on things you vaguely remember from the '90s or present them with challenges that you're pretty sure have only never been solved because nobody's been yelled at hard enough to solve them yet.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 03:33

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Quavers posted:

https://ptu.cloudimperiumgames.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/star-citizen-alpha-2-6-1

Welcome to 2.6.1!

The jerk levels of ships should now better scale with boost.

The toilet can now be accessed.

I suppose they know their customer base pretty well at this point.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2017 21:51

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

aleksendr posted:

Police Quest & King Quest for me. Do vic-20 count as PC ? If so then Omega Race.

drat, I feel old. If we're counting any computer as a PC, then the first game I ever played on a PC was Adventure, on my aunt's KayPro II portable computer. (CP/M operating system, all-metal case, 9" green monochrome CRT, 64K of RAM, and two 5.25" disk drives!) She also had Ladder, a sort of Donkey Kong clone using text symbols (think Rogue or Nethack, but it's Donkey Kong). I learned how to type "xyzzy" before I learned how to ride a bike.

A few years later I was in elementary school and my family got an IBM PC with Microsoft Flight Simulator (thrill to the CGA graphics! Chicago is a grey plain populated only by an excitingly chunky Hancock Building and a wireframe Sears Tower! New York Harbor features a 2D Statue of Liberty!) and Zork I (the store's display copy, just the manual and the disk, no other packaging). From then on, my brother and I nearly monopolized that thing with any Infocom game we could get our hands on, plus Ultima III and IV, Starflight, Pinball Construction Set, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold, and I can't even remember what else because now I guess my beard reaches down to my knees and I am withered and grey, a stooped elder mumbling half-remembered stories from long before written memory. So beware, nostalgia hunters: one day you shall be as I am now, and your own stories shall bore the living poo poo out of everyone around you.

(I'm just kidding, I actually like hearing about good games in this thread...it helps break up the monotony of reading about Star Citizen.)

# ¿ Mar 4, 2017 04:38

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

AlmightyPants posted:

Hey spacenerds, No Man's Sky is on sale and they just added space trucks and a hoverbike or something and I'm kinda thinking of getting it. $32.57 on greenmangaming right now. I was gonna wait for it to drop below $30 but they've been really slow on discounting it. Thoughts?

Keep waiting. Even the reviews after this patch have generally been underwhelmed by it.

There must be all kinds of games you'd like that you could buy for less than $30, so maybe go one with one of those first, and wait 'til NMS shows up in a bundle or dips below $10 (maybe $20 if you dig the "it's like a zen garden" vibe the most positive reviews have assigned to it).

# ¿ Mar 14, 2017 09:30

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

DapperDon posted:

Jesus Tapdancing Christ! This video describes the Shitizens to a "T". I mean, I have heard some really great descriptions. Hell, I have come up with a few of my own. But this? This is scary how much it describes them.

I disagree. That guy has real marbles and a real structure to roll them down, and he plays with it every day. He's not sitting around saying, "I wish someone would invent some awesome fast marbles and build a thing I could roll them on," and nobody's trying to get him to pay them for a picture of a fast-looking marble and a promise that some day there will be a track worth racing them on. He's also not going around trying to tell other people that they should buy pictures of fast-looking marbles and join him in looking forward to the track that is definitely being developed (it's just hit a few blockers along the way!). Nor is he weirdly angry because the fast-looking marble pictures and imaginary track made of dreams was criticized by some argumentative guy who got famous by selling some bad marbles and clunky tracks to roll them on.

He's obsessed with something so anodyne and pointless that it's impossible to really understand, but at least it's something that exists and he doesn't seem to need anyone else to share his obsession in order to be happy. That's no Shitizen.

# ¿ Mar 23, 2017 01:42

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

DapperDon posted:

Here is a genuine question to those that know this far better than I. Was Chris Roberts that goddamned good back then?

According to the people who were at the meeting (Richard Garriott among them, for whatever that's worth), the pitch he gave at Origin for Wing Commander was outstanding. Like, jaw-dropping, exciting, take-our-money outstanding.

Apparently he's still good at that, at least for selected audiences. Game design and project management, on the other hand...not so much.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2017 07:22

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Wise Learned Man posted:

It's so full of poo poo. They should have just changed it to "Now I have your money, so gently caress all of that. You'll eat poo poo and like it." At least that would be somewhat reflective of reality.

To be fair, "I have your money, so gently caress all of that, you'll eat poo poo and like it" does fit the pledge to "treat you with the same respect we would give a publisher" (Microsoft could attest to that one) and "treat you with the respect you deserve rather than spending your money on public relations." Give 'em credit for a rare display of honesty, I guess?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2017 04:55

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Wise Learned Man posted:

It's really a perfect analogue for SC.

Using an engine that is grossly unsuitable for the game you want to make

Major issues with motion-capture and animations, necessitating multiple changes of tech and resulting in a poor end product

Murky, ever-changing vision for the game and its basic design tenets

Struggling to collaborate among geographically-remote studios across multiple timezones

Expecting that procedural generation will save you time and effort, only to learn that you have to go in and handcraft everything to make it not suck

Failing to produce a vertical slice

Spending years on a gameplay loop without determining if it is actually fun

Promising 100 landable planets, then having to slash that promise down to just a few

Unusually high degree of staff turnover, particularly among management

Perpetually failing to plan a realistic scope for the project

Significant shortcomings in scheduling and properly budgeting time for various tasks

Lengthy, soul-crushing crunch

Having to redo work that had previously been completed and approved

Interdepartmental infighting and lack of strong direction from leads

Scrambling to put something together at the last minute without regard for future usability

Critical lack of time and focus on polish and bugfixing

It's almost like every disastrous software development project has a few common sources of failure.

Yeah.

On the other hand, it does mean that CIG really is more open about what's going on during development than other studios: we know all of these problems are happening there right now, long before they're even close to having an actual game to show for it, while we had to wait until the autopsy to find out how ME: Andromeda turned out so bad.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2017 00:23

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

The Titanic posted:

This is bad for Star Citizen, but it won't stop Chris Roberts because honestly I don't think he would be able to handle an actual professional coming in with a mindset of getting a job done.

CR is basically able to live in a fantasy land right now, where his talent pool of programming assets are probably equal to his level of skill. This lets him lord over them, while likely keeping them in line through fear and job security. CR is a man whom, countless times and has even gone in record to admit it himself, doesn't see his own short falls.

Instead of surround himself with people who can fill in his gaps for skill and knowledge, his vanity won't allow it. No artist can get through his watchful eye, and no program can be written that he didn't dream up.

I still remember back when he revealed his secret to being a great manager: tell the programmer to go solve the problem, and when they tell you it can't be done and give you reasons why it can't be done, yell at them to just go solve it already, because they're only saying no out of ego and spite.

I can't imagine any professional would put up with that kind of bullshit for longer than it takes to make a phone call and line up another job somewhere, anywhere else.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 05:44

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

hot balls man no homo posted:

As soon as the cash reserves run dry and the paychecks bounce, everything goes into lockdown mode. Chris Robberts' Magnum Dope-us will be locked away on a hard drive to never see the light of day.

I still think that's going to be at the very end of a long, slow death: if they're very lucky, they'll manage to get a MVP of Squadron 42 out the door while the money's still coming in, some kind of "part 1" with the promise that the rest of it will be out when it's ready. Then they'll make sad noises about how it's not selling as well as they had hoped, and how they're working around the clock to get it patched into something more presentable. Some crash bugs will get fixed. Sales won't pick up. Future chapters will never arrive.

Meanwhile, they'll keep up the pretense that they're working on Star Citizen and are making progress with it, even while they're purging "non-essential" studios and employees to keep their burn rate below whatever they're still able to squeeze out of their whales. They'll still be making big promises about what big features are just around the corner, but not as often; maybe it'll eventually just be Chris and a small "core team" left, spending most of their time rearranging the deck chairs, commissioning concept art/ship assets from the cheapest offshore developers-from-hire they can find so they'll still have something to sell to their few remaining backers, and trying to package up whatever they've managed to put together in case any developer too rich and too dumb to know better might be interested in buying them out. I doubt that even a MVP version will ever get within two weeks of release; it'll still be a couple of janky, ill-conceived, and entirely separate modules up until the day that they shut down for good.

Epilogue: some number of years after CIG is dead and gone, Squadron 42: Part 1 will end up in a "studio-killer" bundle alongside Duke Nukem Forever and, I dunno, some indie kickstarter boondoggles or one-hit wonders, and we'll get to read funny reviews from people who missed all the drama when it was happening. They'll say things like "You can see what they were trying to do" and "This bit is so bad that it flips all the way around and becomes fun and charming" and "Whoever designed this definitely never tried to play it." Old whales will step forward and speak wistfully about how Derek Smart and an army of internet trolls killed the game before it could get good, and if they're asked how much money they gave Chris Roberts, they'll either ignore the question or just pretend they only bought a starter package, no big deal, it was fun while it lasted.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2017 01:36

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

big nipples big life posted:

I have a hard time seeing croberts forking over 30% to valve but yeah steam sales, steam doodads and a super low price point could move more. The main point is that they have already sold the game to the vast majority of their market and all they have right now is debt.

But Steam offers....refunds. :eek:

(also, since Valve is reconfiguring their trading card system so that cards only become available after a game has met some kind of player-base threshold, and S42's initial release may not in fact be actually playable, who knows if cards would even be a thing for it.)

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 07:23

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Sappo569 posted:

I'm the code on the monitor instead of any actual gameplay

'Mr. Roberts sir this ... this is the blocker i talked about'

EVERYONE OUT ! except you camera man , I want the world to see how a real leader addresses his failed subordinates

We already know Chris Roberts doesn't send everyone else out of the room before berating a subordinate; or at least we can assume that he wouldn't send anyone out of the room, based on the reports that he regularly tears into employees on conference calls in front of the rest of the team.

When you're an expert manager and visionary developer, you know that the best way to lead is through fear. Fear will keep the little coders in line. Fear will make them ask fewer impertinent questions. Fear will make them spend less time telling you why the game isn't working and more time listening to you when you yell at them to MAKE it work.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2017 23:52

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

spacetoaster posted:

100% honesty here. I would pay $29.99 if he wrote a tell-all book once this is all over.

I'd rather a tell-all was written by someone more credible (i.e., much better-informed and much less impressed with Chris Roberts), but yeah, I really want an authoritative, insider post-mortem on what the gently caress happened when it's over. That's going to be a fascinating story. And probably a source of cautionary tales (and entire chapters in textbooks on computer science, project management, and business ethics!) for years to come.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 06:45

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

EggsAisle posted:

Swap out "cautionary" for "inspirational" and you've got yourself the classic Citizen pitch. In the end, I wonder if we're not just as trapped in orbit as they are. Though at least the goons are a little more self-aware.

Yeah, especially now.

It's certainly true that everyone can see what CIG has actually produced after years of work and millions of dollars:
- an incomplete alpha split into different modules,
- a lot of expensive jpgs of ships,
- a long list of core features that they "hope" will be added "soon," and
- a lot of promises made over the past year that critical technical and game design problems are this close to being solved (echoing similar promises made the year before).

You'd have to be made of stone to not have some kind of reaction to seeing all of that: no matter how much you might want to be able to remain entirely impartial and say "I guess we'll see what happens," your brain's already plotted the trajectory and made its best guess about where Star Citizen is going to end up. And that's even before you get into the personalities running the show over at CIG, and what your immediate reaction to them might be. Even if you don't want to choose a side, you probably already did.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2017 09:33

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Regrettable posted:

Lol, is that Griffin McElroy?

Yeah, it's from the end of one of Polygon's E3 review videos, where he was making fun of how the pirates in Sea of Thieves eat bananas. (The video has sound, which really enhances the experience. Plus you get to watch him deal with the aftermath of biting into it like that for the next 40 seconds.)

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 01:25

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

tooterfish posted:

I think it's because he's talked down the competition so much over the years, to do anything "worse" than them would upset the whales.

I feel like the remaining whales are beyond being upset by something like that. They're not even going to really compare the two: they already made their choice, and now all they have to do is keep repeating the same list of marketing catchphrases over and over to keep themselves happy. There's simply no space between "The alpha already has more to do than most AAA games!" and "Elite is a mile wide and an inch deep!" and all of the other bullshit they parrot for any creeping doubts they might or might not have to ever be said out loud.

Whatever half-broken nonsense CIG eventually puts in front of them will get simultaneously excused for being Just An Alpha ("no other company lets us see a product this early in development!") and praised for being more promising and ambitious and successful than anything any other company has ever done ("it's groundbreaking technology!" "no game has ever done anything like this before!" "things are progressing so quickly!"). Give it a few days, maybe less, and they'll have a consistent phrasing for how fuckin' wonderful and amazing the new patch is and how fantastic the future Star Citizen is going to be. None of it will bear much (or any) resemblance to what someone playing the game would see, but that won't matter, either.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2017 20:37

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

peter gabriel posted:

Please DO NOT talk about things from or before 2016 thank you

Is this the new form e-mail sent to people requesting refunds?

# ¿ Jul 24, 2017 21:41

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Tokamak posted:

March to Three Zero: Burn Down

"Burn Down" sounds like the second-to-last thing on CIG's ELE to-do list, just before "Collect Insurance."

# ¿ Aug 4, 2017 04:56

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

AlmightyPants posted:

Does star citizen have any of that? Every video I've seen shows a broken mess where nothing works.

I watched Beet Wagon streaming Star Citizen, and the only thing I saw that always worked was the animation that plays when you respawn in your wank pod. So, uh, there's that. If you really like getting a good view of a smooth, spandex-encased space crotch scrunching its way down to the edge of a filthy bunk before your character stands up, Star Citizen's going to be able to reliably deliver that experience at least 95% of the time, over and over and over again.

Literally everything else I saw while he was playing bugged out at some point or another. Clipping errors through walls and floors, plummeting straight out of the world, buttons that could only be pressed from one very specific angle several feet away, guns that were supposed to be there suddenly not being there, entering a ship successfully and suddenly standing outside it anyway, only the barest hint of collision detection, and a genuinely terrible framerate throughout. It's horrifying to watch, especially when you realize that this is what all the Star Citizen zealots are talking about when they say they've already "had more fun with Star Citizen than they've had with any AAA game" and that it currently has "hundreds and hundreds of hours of things to do." Because holy loving poo poo, there is nothing there. It's a few sparse locations, with more bugs than features. It looked so comprehensively and fundamentally hosed on every level that it's almost impossible to believe that there's anyone who can even imagine that there are major improvements on the way Real Soon Now. Maybe if every major release has been ten times better than the one before it? But if that were the case, good lord, how bad was the version before this one? Could anything be THAT bad?

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 05:14

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

jBrereton posted:

I have never seen Chris Roberts playing star citizen and being happy with it.

How often has anyone seen him play it at all? I've only seen the two clips that get posted in this thread where he tries to play and fails, and the one where he's pretending to play something (I don't even know if it's supposed to be Star Citizen!) in VR. Everything else I've seen has been him talking about what they hope to do with the game, or describing what's happening on the screen while other people "play" it.

I mean, now I'm curious: in all the hours and hours of video chronicling the development of the game, is there anything that suggests he's invested in any part of the project beyond its visuals (cinematics, trailers, art, screenshots, etc.)? I know he trots out lots of examples of how immersive and high-fidelity and persistent it will feel to fly around in your ship and use its toilet and crash on moons and get missions from NPCs, but has he ever talked about game design in terms of what's fun to do, or how to balance different mechanics, or anything like that?

# ¿ Aug 8, 2017 23:53

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

trucutru posted:

It's better because it involves an in-game camera so that director Chris Roberts can have more control over exactly what to show to make the game as immersive as possible.

Oh my god, you're right. That's probably the answer: now every "hologram" in the game will let him direct a little movie, picking his camera angles and arranging a virtual set and probably even getting to go back and shoot some more mocap, since this groundbreaking new process ( :rolleyes:

) is something that he'll insist needs to be shown off as much as possible. Finally, an excuse to do all the cutscenes he wants to do, plus he gets a whole new set of things he can micromanage while he's avoiding addressing any game design or programming issues.

I dunno, maybe this is his solution to that problem they talked about way back when they "finished" shooting all their mocap for Squadron 42 and realized they never discussed how they were going to be able to make the NPCs react semi-appropriately to the player bumping into them, or jumping up and down on a table, or running off around a corner instead of listening to an entire monologue. Now they can just put it all in "holograms" and stick it directly in front of the player's face no matter which direction they turn.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2017 11:22

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

MarcusSA posted:

I would be absolutely shocked if news were to come out that Chris is sick delaying the project.

Shocked I tell you.

Yeah, same here.

But it would be much more entertaining if they admitted that Chris being sick wouldn't delay anything at all. We all suspect it anyway, the only shocking thing would be hearing it from them.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2017 00:57

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Aurra posted:

It's so beautiful, and hysterically funny, too.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2017 03:58

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Xaerael posted:

What is it with guys that have crazy dense facial hair that looks painted on being total loving creeps.

It's easier for sketch artists to draw, and even easier to get rid of when the cops start showing that sketch to the public?

# ¿ Aug 19, 2017 22:18

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

SomethingJones posted:

Hello everyone

Gamescom 2017 Interview
GameStarDE & Christopher Robins
PART ONE

....jesus loving christ. This is amazing.

I'm not confused, am I? He really did just give an interview where he said outright that Squadron 42 isn't ready because:

- They haven't got all the mocap they shot for it in yet (because it doesn't have enough "fluidity," which I'm guessing means hundreds and hundreds of hours of exhaustive manual correction still left to do for some poor fuckers over there)
- They haven't got AI (at "a level" "that you don't normally have") for it yet
- They haven't gone beyond "blocking out" the basics of the missions for it; nothing playable has been done yet
- They haven't finished all the assets they'll need for it, either

...and this is the easy game, the one he actually gives a poo poo about. End of 2017, millions and millions of dollars spent, and he literally has some hard drives stuffed with mocap footage and some ideas to show for it. Unbelievable.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2017 07:59

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

HycoCam posted:

Watching the pro-streamers walk around with nothing do except look at wrecks made me realize how close CR is to having a game.

All CR needs to do is hide a bunch of notes for the player to find around the various wrecks talking about the sacrifices Sandi has made in her lifestyle to be the best VP ever. Rename Star Citizen to Gone Space or Gone Citizen and boom--game of the year!

Notes? Never in a million years.

You must have meant video. Glorious, audition-worthy video clips.

Her Citizen -- Answer the Call 2018

# ¿ Aug 25, 2017 18:35

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Colostomy Bag posted:

Good summary, but also don't forget Chambers basically looking like life has been pounded out of him and asking if he can leave now 5 or 6 times.

Also, that there's no computer-controlled opposition anywhere in the game; three players go from one empty place to another empty place, pick up an (empty) box, and then have a mock fight with some other players in order to tick off the boxes on Chris's cinematic "vision." They literally showed no game, just a big empty virtual space where you can do some play-acting.

Chris pointed out twice that there's a crater on the little moon that would fit the entire game map of Skyrim, but there's a little cave in Skyrim that has more actual gameplay features than all of Star Citizen.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2017 00:54

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Boxturret posted:

I love how that mock mission failed at literally every single point.

The mission was super simple, all it included was: get quest from npc, jump to planet, retrieve item, fight off enemies, board friendly ship and leave planet with item, fight more enemies, win. Yet the npc was only visible to one of the players, the jump crashed the game, the item was invisible to the guy carrying it, the shot missed the enemy which then teleport ed and exploded, the ramp killed the rover and the quest item, then the bad guy ship self destructed to make it look like they won.

I don't think you can even include "fight off enemies" as part of the mission -- they literally had other players sitting in a basement waiting to show up, blow up a ship, pretend to shoot at the rover, and then gently caress off. The actual mission was just "get quest, jump to planet, retrieve item, leave planet." Which is actually a really difficult mission, given how buggy quantum travel is and how often the game crashes, but come the gently caress on.

Everything else they showed was a community theater production of Chris Roberts' "Hollywood Star Citizen Sizzle Reel Dreams", complete with lovely dialogue I'm sure he wrote himself, and hamhanded stage directions like "follow the rover when it drives in circles around a rock and wait for the railgun shot before blowing up your ship." It was a bunch of people theorycrafting about what a mission could be, if only the game could actually support one.

Trilobite fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Aug 26, 2017

# ¿ Aug 26, 2017 22:28

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Boxturret posted:

Oh I was interpreting the pilot, pirates, and rescue people as being stand ins for their amazing ai....

I interpreted it the same way, and it just made me wonder how badly hosed their progress on AI is if they can't even try to put anything between the player and the box. A stationary turret. A guy with a crowbar who just runs at you. A loving banana peel. Anything at all.

If the "opposing quest" narrative reddit's concocted is actually what CIG was trying to do with that, the whole thing just gets worse. "LFG to try and stop me and my buddy from picking up a box -- anyone? please? we promise to land really far away from the site so you can have time to set up, you promise to not start shooting until we've confirmed that at least one of us can see the box and interact with it."

# ¿ Aug 26, 2017 23:26

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

This is the most telling part for me. I can see a big ill-defined MMO going of the rails and getting stuck in development hell, but a singleplayer space shooty game with a story campaign is orders of magnitude less complex to make. After all this time it should be rock solid and ready to show off even if they are still polishing and adding content. I was actually expecting it at Gamescom but nope, nothing.

I looked up the fantastic transcript SomethingJones did of Chris's interview about this during Gamescom: Go read it, it will blow your mind.

Basically, S42's currently a dead project walking because Chris shot an insane amount of mocap and all of it just goes jittery and hosed-up when they try to put it into the game, and because they can't figure out how to do enemy AI, and because all they've done so far is plan out what the various missions will be but haven't gotten around to actually making any of them playable yet. 2017, $155m+ and counting. A professional game studio at work. :toot:

# ¿ Aug 27, 2017 04:52

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Klyith posted:

The MVP will be an ambush, not an announcement. They want to get there while they have money left in the bank. That way they can loudly insist that the game is still in active development. Don't worry, we're not going anywhere! But they will also cut back on expenses and make it last as long as possible, draw the whole thing in years-long wet fart of disappointment. Meanwhile continue to pay themselves a handsome but not exorbitant wage to take as much of that cake as possible.

Or anyways, that's what I'd do if I was them. Also, I don't even know if they can get to the plausible MVP. At this pace.

I've gone from not knowing if they could plausibly get to a MVP to being utterly convinced that there's just no way they can get there for Star Citizen. Not a chance in hell.

Squadron 42 is still possible, maybe, if only because the two biggest things working against them there are how goddamn much mocap they're buried under and the lack of functional AI. If anyone at CIG can get Chris to listen when the money starts running out, they might be able to convince him to cut those cinematic "flourishes" and to slap together a quick-and-dirty set of stupidly straightforward missions where even lovely AI could manage to avoid trying to endlessly walk through solid objects three times out of five. Plus, they've said so little about what's going to be in Squadron 42 that it's easy to make a case that almost any Wing Commander-esque game-shaped product is exactly what backers paid for. At this point, it hardly seems likely that Squadron 42 would be a good game, but it's not completely beyond the realm of possibilities. It could even sell some retail copies, given a low enough price point and decent (or at least hilarious) reviews.

But the same's not true for Star Citizen, because in addition to having its own mocap and AI woes and a troubling absence of any kind of overall game design, it also has to be massively multiplayer, and everything they've apparently been spending development time on so far is just making the network overhead worse and worse. They seem to be hoping that their netcode team (is it still only three people?) is going to suddenly have a EUREKA moment and come up with a magical solution that enables an engine that can't handle 12 players simultaneously to suddenly handle over a hundred, defying the basic laws of physics through cloud-meshing or mesh-clouding or Item 14.0 or some other bullshit. It's like borrowing a million dollars and trusting that on the day that debt needs to be paid, you can cover it by sitting down at a roulette table and putting $1 on the chance that the ball will ricochet off the wheel, hit a chandelier, and land in someone's drink halfway across the casino floor. They could cut a lot of what they've promised and even find ways to fake most of the rest, but I just don't see how a Star Citizen with no more than a dozen players per server could be the MVP that'll give them enough cover to slink away semi-gracefully: it'll be a howling bloodbath.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2017 07:17

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

Mirificus posted:

Wait, so within the span of a few sentences this chucklehead goes from arguing that nothing anyone has seen in Star Citizen is final, everything is likely to change more than a few times, and probably change significantly...to arguing that everything CIG has showed about what's coming next for Star Citizen has been delivered as described, without fail.

Is this some kind of Necker cube phenomenon that only devoted backers can experience? Do they get mental whiplash from processing "Everything is subject to change, they do it all the time!" and "They've always given us exactly what they showed us!" simultaneously, or do they have some kind of vestigial hindbrain to handle one of those concepts while their brainstem chews on the other?

# ¿ Aug 28, 2017 06:15

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

tuo posted:

Citizencon will be Squadron 42, for sure. When beeing asked about Sq42, CRobberts always said "no, not at Gamescom, no", so I am 100% sure Citizencon will be Sq42. It would make sense, because it would shift attention away from the half-year-overdue 3.0, and maybe they can even sell some Sq42-stuff. Plus they can ride at the back of the upcoming Star Wars VIII hype surrounding Hamil.

I can't even imagine what they could show for Squadron 42 at Citizencon; that interview Chris gave during Gamescom really made it sound like they didn't have anything working for it. The mocap's all hosed and is taking them even longer than anyone thought it would to correct, there's no AI, and they've only blocked out what they want the missions to be so far with none of them actually implemented yet. I mean, maybe he was coming down off something and feeling really depressed, but considering that his default position is to say everything's going great and there's nothing to worry about and it'll all be done "soon," he really did go out of his way to let the interviewer know that they shouldn't expect to be seeing Squadron 42 for quite some time.

So at Citizencon, the only thing they could show would have to be a cinematic trailer full of the absolute purest bullshit -- maybe take one scene from his massive script and rush to hammer the animations into shape, slap some background music in, play Hollywood director with it using some camera moves and set dressing cribbed from whatever he saw most recently, and pretend it's "a glimpse" of what they've got ready for ~~2018~~ ~~2019~~ "very soon." Which, yeah, that'd totally be in character for Chris to do (the man loves to imagine he's still able to work in the movie industry!), but for gently caress's sake, why even bother when they can keep not showing anything for at least another year and know for a fact that the backers aren't going to give a poo poo?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 10:22

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

tuo posted:

yes...and? You think that won't work, given the experience of the past?

Backer are dying to see polished poo poo that works, irregardless of how it was perceived from CIG. They need stuff to reassure that everything is fine, and they will get it. After Gamescom, CIG will play it as safe as it gets.

I don't disagree that CIG's going to want to play it safe and soothe their troubled backers' growing fears, but I lean more in the direction of CIG recognizing that most of their backers don't give even a microscopic poo poo about Squadron 42 and are perfectly happy with the "Chris doesn't want the story spoiled!" explanation for why it's been locked in an attic room and no one in the family has said its name for the past few years. Playing it safe for them I think means leaning into Star Citizen some more since that's what the backers actually want, though I'm also not sure what in god's name they've got to show for that, either.

Citizencon's in, what, late October? Maybe they'll finally have 3.0 ready to ~~dump on~~ release to the backers by then. Or maybe they'll gin up some kind of presentation suggesting that 3.1 or 3.2 will have basic features everybody's been desperately waiting to see, like computer-controlled enemies on missions and working doors. Maybe a fake-rear end movie trailer for the next big (empty) moon they'll add, or some landing zone somewhere. But I think they're going to keep pretending that S42 isn't getting mentioned for Artistic Reasons, rather than remind backers that there's a second project whose lack of visible progress is something they should be worried about.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 14:22

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 11:44

Trilobite: Aug 15, 2001

NoNotTheMindProbe posted:

Why did they name the largest ship after a Nazi tank? Konigstiger = Kingtiger which is the German term for Bengal Tiger.

The carrier in the first Wing Commander game was "a Bengal-class Strike Carrier" named the Tiger's Claw, and they were hitting that nostalgia button as hard as they could for fundraising purposes.

Also, I want to say for the record that I looked that up on wikipedia just now because I was sure it had to be a reference to something he'd done before but couldn't for the life of me remember any ship names from Wing Commander.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 23:34

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > Star Citizen: Death of a Space Thread?

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