Agony Aunt posted:

They aren't though. They could weasel their way out of even the kickstarter stuff with a "well, we tried, but we just couldn't make it happen", but don't worry, because here is another concept ship!

Agony Aunt posted:

Its all about the pipelines. Once those pipelines are laid they will be pumping out content. Just you wait and see! I mean, how can you have base building without plumbing?

But yeah, the memory of backers is like goldfish. Once they have done one circuit of the bowl (or one patch) they forget everything that was said prior to it. That is why its only the last patch that lost content, the next one will be fine and full of content.

I have no explanation though why some of them talk in present tense about possible future things. They probably are just playing the game in their heads.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Challenge for you goons.

Let's say the Crobber gets abducted by space aliens who want him to make a bad movie as an example of what not to do. They also have your family members hostage and make you take over running Robert's Space Industries.

How the gently caress do you turn it into something resembling a legit company?

Bootcha posted:

Hey gang.

So here's a question.

Espresso Machine cost about $17,000.

Space Door cost about $40,000.

What single, used-once item would cost $100,000?

You've seen it. You've absolutely loving seen it.

Aussies, you've absolutely loving seen it.

Sabreseven posted:

Why does he remind me of :



It might be the gross "energy" drink I guess. Or, that he's basically sacrificing integrity for money.

Meh.

E: Energy drinks are loving nasty, don't drink them.

Tippis posted:

Couldn't find it so I made my own…

Dapper_Swindler posted:

i have asked this question in the GBS thread and i will ask it here. how the gently caress do these still buy into this game, in the best case situation, roberts and his team are gonna make broken and super unfocused MMO game that you could play on gmod servers. at worst, its a loving scam. it know its sunk cost mixed with sad nerds but wtf.

Fargin Icehole posted:

The reason why this has been covered so long is because this project defies all logic.


There's a couple of "big" names that are no longer with their respective companies that made them and their work famous and started kickstarters for their own projects. You got Keiji Inafune of Mega Man fame (whole different can of worms on that one) with Mighty No.9, Koji Igarashi of Castlevania:Symphony of the Night fame and really any castlevania you can enjoy playing, Yu Suzuki of Shenmue fame, Julian Gollop of XCOM fame, etc, etc, etc.

Chris Roberts has managed to tap into the same energy of nostalgia to get his project funded. The difference between him and the rest of the people i mentioned before (the exception of Keiji Inafune) is that the rest of the gallery had a plan and knew when to stop.

Hannibal Rex posted:

I can't talk about the later Wing Commanders, but 1 was absolutely a killer app for the PC back in 1990. Back then, you had Amigas, Ataris and the C64 as the main gaming home computers. Wing Commander coincided with VGA graphics and sound blasters, and was the major PC game that left the previous home computers in the dust.

As for Freelancer, I only got into it a year or so after it was release, and I completely missed out on the hype, the delays, and the disappointed expectations. I still like it a lot for its completely hand-crafted universe. Maybe that was a side-effect of being intended as some sort of MMO game, but I really like how you can explore a huge game world at your own leisure, discover hidden bases, get more and more access to background history as your faction standing improves, etc. Basically, it has a lot of RPG elements that more recent space games lack, especially those with proc-gen universes.

chaosapiant posted:

My opinion probably won't be very popular, but I kinda feel bad for Chris Roberts. I believe (or want to believe) that he really believes this game will be everything he's ever dreamed of making. He's so far out of touch with reality that no other narrative makes sense to him and he can't fathom a world where he might fail at this. And it's just one shameful update or handful or broken features after another. And he's sold his dream to so many people he can't go back on it now.

These are things I choose to believe because this story makes sense to me. I mean...just look at the dude. He's way too dopy for me to believe he's masterminded the perfect fraudulent scheme where he can siphon millions of dollars, give next to nothing in return, and people in the end will applaud him for it. And I'm sure the people closest to him are just patting him on the back and paying tribute to his ego because now they're loving rich and who cares if an actual game comes out.

He's like ever super villain cliche where the villain genuinely believes he's doing good work and when he's undone and found out by the hero, he can't handle that truth.

queef anxiety posted:

I'm surprised they haven't offered full on space stations or real estate options yet. these idiots are paying a grand for a jpeg how much for a poster sized jpeg?

MedicineHut posted:

I see Yamiks uses FRAPS or similar non SC built in app. Whereas most shitizens use the game built in FPS function. Is it possible that there is a significant difference between those? As in has CIG rigged the game’s?

Agony Aunt posted:

Yeah, never liked FRAPS for that. I tried rivatuner/afterburner and it crashed all the time. Thankfully shadowplay is a thing. I just hate with a passion how you now can't use it without signing in to GeForce experience. I ended up creating a dummy mail account just to redirect all the spam mail from nvidia into.

Flared Basic Bitch posted:

A fun anecdote to contemplate the next time some commando trots out that “they were setting up the new studio for two loving years” bullshit. A boss at my work quit about two months ago to found a tech startup with a partner. It was an idea that they’d been wanting to try and get off the ground for years. In the two months since my boss left they have:

- Secured financing
- Moved into an office space
- Furnished the office, purchased hardware, licensed software, etc.
- Retained legal counsel, and contracted financial and HR specialists
- Started writing their software
- Started hiring

I assume they’re wizards or possibly satanists.

TheDarkFlame posted:

While some games look truly great and that kind of graphical aesthetic sells the game's sense of weight to a degree, I find a lot of my favourite games go with a much less real vibe and use the graphics in a way that fits the gameplay. Great graphics are one thing, but probably the most realistic games I own are a couple of the newer Need For Speed games and for a lot of the game you're just blowing past all those pretty pixels because you've got somewhere far better to be.

Dishonoured's art style is pretty cool and serves the game's victorian steampunk setting and black-magic assassin gameplay. Sure it could look better being a slightly older game, it's certainly not as slick as Prey, but its sense of style is distinct and adds to the mood of its corrupt, polluted landscape of sin, deciet and chaos. I forget if the sequel looked as cartoony and kept the caricaturesque faces, or tried to be more realistic.

The Witness has a very plain, flat art style with lots of bold colours and clean lines, which complements its game design greatly. The whole game is built to be a kind of thoughtful and meditative space (with some small exception), being a slow paced puzzle game with a good amount of depth and variation that allows for exploration through different areas each with different puzzle mechanics to understand.

Hell there are a lot of VR games that manage to sell not just a videogame experience but a real, physical world, with very simplistic graphics. It's all about the experience, the feeling of movements being replicated exactly in the game convincing you that you're in a place that is clearly not real. You find yourself trying to lean against surfaces that don't exist, or even better putting a controller you know exists down on a table when, because you know that you're holding a controller and are in a video game, you know the table doesn't exist.

I've had this experience a couple of times in games like Surgeon Simulator, or I Expect You To Die, or even in Skyrim on PSVR and PSVR's version of Skyrim looks comparatively atrocious but it's still physically convinving enough to catch you from time to time. I'm looking forward to seeing how Star Citizen handles VR in its upcoming release in... *checks notes* uh you know what I'm sure they know what they're doing.

Sabreseven posted:

In the old threads a defender or two sometimes popped in, but as soon as they got asked about anything other than polygon counts or crowdfunding totals they ran for the hills, most of them don't or have never played SC or looked any deeper than the funding tracker total and are therefore ill-prepared to actually debate with anyone here.

Agony Aunt posted:

To be fair:

ED forums: The devs don't play their own game
Fortmite forums: The devs don't play their own game
Paladins forums: The devs don't play their own game

And those are just the ones i'm personally aware of.

AbstractNapper posted:

That sounds a bit unusual and maybe out of context (?). Is there a citation for an intervew of him claiming that?

I mean "play" can mean lots of things. You don't have to play your game from start to finish with every bug fix, and technically you don't have to play other games to be a game developer. You kind of do ought to play-test your own code though, even if it's on some testbed platform or in some debugging mode (so you can directly test the results of your changes without playing the whole game or even complete game sections -- typically, there will be other people to do that).

In any case, it takes a special kind of naivety to go live streaming an alpha version of a game that is years in development and demo a game section/aspect that is supposedly what you've been working on, to a crowd that actually both funds the development and has been play testing your game regularly reporting bugs through the proper channels you've made available to them. You're kind of "screwed" if you stumble on one or more show-stopper bug(s) and even more so if those have been reported since forever.

And, of course, then you have Chris trying to play his own game for what seems to be the first time ever on a live stream, which... I don't know what he thought would happen. At least he got to experience first hand the unfinished state of everything, I guess.

Agony Aunt posted:

A couple of people in the /r/sc thread pulling the "AAA devs just pumping out rubbish" line.

I wonder in what reality these people live? There is always trash being pushed out, always has been, including some trash pushed out by CR in his time, but there are also many great games being actually released every year, both by AAA and indie devs. Meanwhile, CIG, number of delivered games: 0.

Scruffpuff posted:

Nobody knows who or what Chris Roberts is. Do his games have a good style? What about his storytelling? So far nobody really knows because there's not enough to draw on, and none of his work is consistent enough to establish a style from. His poo poo has always been "ideas stolen from sci-fi, then done badly" but none of it is internally consistent.

Saladin Rising posted:

Quite a few of the Star Citizen backers are also older dudes who probably haven't played games since the late 90's/early 2000's. So of course they're impressed with Star Citizen, they'd be impressed with any game that came out after 2010. I say this because in a way, I almost fall into that category. I think I've posted this before, but I was amazed with the graphics on Portal 2 and Borderlands when I played them last year. I was similarly amazed with Breath of the Wild played largely in handheld mode, but that one is a more universally acclaimed game. When the games you're most familiar with are 15 years old, anything vaguely modern looks impressive.


The secret is, fun matters more than graphics. Splatoon is cartoony, unrealistic, and fun as gently caress, as is Mario Odyssey. Breath of the Wild looks slightly more realistic, but still has you climbing giant towers and jumping off them with a handheld paraglider. Civilization 5 looks semi-realistic, but let me tell you about the 1800 year permanent war between the Communist Zulus and the Fascist Babyonians, which ended when the Zulus dropped nukes on 3 Babyonian cities and destroyed 12 Babyonian Giant Death Robots while Zulu X-Com squads captured the burned, radioactive husks of those cities. Oh, and Poland launched a starship to Alpha Centari in 1600's.

Semi-tangential, but I have spent less than $500 on all of the above fun, and $300 of that was buying a Switch. I'm still boggled at how much money Citizens can piss away on absolutely nothing; I only got a Switch and Breath of the Wild when I was super, super sure that buying it was worthwhile for the fun and gameplay I'd get back. Meanwhile Citizens will spend $500 on a JPG when they could have bought 7 or 8 games and played them for hundreds of hours and had way more fun.

Hav posted:

I'll see your 'Gamers' and raise you Alien Abductees.


This is a great example of a 'myth' promulgated by simple repetition without reference to an actual source of truth. It's one of the reason why references are generally important, but it creates accountability around something that could be coming from a pub.

The $46 Million poll (June 12th 2014) was;
"Should we continue to offer stretch goals?"


34713 votes
Yes - 55%
No - 26%
No preference - 20%


> https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13944-Letter-From-The-Chairman-46-Million

You could be charitable and go, no, no, they meant the $19 million poll (September 16th 2013);
"What should we do with the crowdfunding counter after we reach our goal?"


21238 votes
5% - Take the funds raised counter down after $23 million (mission achieved!)
7% - Have the funding counter display the amount towards the current stretch goal / feature, not the total amount once we reach $23M.
88% - Keep it up through development and continue to offer stretch goal rewards in addition to extra features and development milestones.

> https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13266-Letter-From-The-Chairman-19-Million

AbstractNapper posted:

7 years into pre-alpha with red flags all over the place, selling virtual land and "pledges" for thousands of idiots' moneys.
Quick answer: Try researching it yourself for a few minutes.
Proper answer: Don't listen to the fudsters. It's not a scam until they actually run with the money. Buy this webcam and this SSD.

Mirificus posted:

Patrat posted:

The thing that really gets me is that this cult fanbase exists despite Chris Robert's track record.

I mean I was aware that Wing Commander games existed back in the day but they were never top of the line space sims? They were 'fairly decent' but not on par with say, X-Wing or later Tie Fighter. They were low 80s score games in the old video game magazines, not classics.

Freelancer was decent fun but again, not the best thing around even when it was freshly released. How did he ever manage to sell himself as being a Big Deal?

Edit: Kitten Tax:

Pixelate posted:

Squadron 54 is upsetting citizens...

Latest versions of Mark Hamill's "The Old Man"

Bofast posted:

How bad was the OUYA in the end? I threw in a few bucks in the Kickstarter just to see what would happened but mostly forgot about it after that.
I get that it was a complete flop, but did it sort of work at all?

Kosumo posted:

Is it just me, or is CIG actually a reasonable good publisher, generating hype, while also being a total poo poo developer? (Although they did start by contracting most of the game development out and they made a mess of that)

It's kind of funny. ( Like how long it took them to make a Delta patcher)

Dementropy posted:

https://twitter.com/giogetmoneyTV/status/1196470707640786952

Mirificus posted:

Agony Aunt posted:

Dont dox me!

Ambaire posted:

They want to have it feel realistic.

Have a few quotes from that thread I linked.




Seems like the devs are trying to create something new and not blindly copy everything that's come before.

I'm curious if anyone here has actually watched that video I linked, or if this thread is an echo chamber of negativity by now and nothing can disrupt the hivemind.

MedicineHut posted:

I do not see that one happening unless he can save face by virtue of an external unstoppable force imposed onto him that may be used as excuse, i.e. the FTC, CryTek lawsuit, Calders, serious health problems or similar externality. I.e. "I tried my best but the bad guys have won".

He has got a world record funding and no pressure from publishers. Unless the excuse is a "Force Majeure" (real or spinned) he can not leave.

Inspector Gesicht posted:

What are the odds of Roberts choosing to duck out at some point, effectively leaving the project like Dean Hall from DayZ?

Mailer posted:

Derek is their bogeyman. These forums are paywalled for an outrageous that could better be spent towards a $3k jpeg, so most of them can't read the posts here and therefore everyone assumes it's some sort of shadow organization. Derek is obviously our leader as he is the worst. We spend our time here cooking up new ways to create doubt in the minds of innocent citizens because we're all filled with burning hatred for SC for.. um, reasons. Once you've got that mindset locked down then even if you see what really goes on in here you'll still believe it's all some sort of black ops smear campaign.

Scruffpuff posted:

Even funnier is that Derek doesn't really talk about this loving game any more. Once in a blue moon a tweet or some poo poo, but you gotta understand that when someone with that kind of personality loses interest in their vendetta, then your product has some loving problems.

Inacio posted:

History Comes Inside! posted:

Depends on how long they think the scam will continue. Even if they took every single cent the tracker claims CIG were bringing in they'd be looking at a year and a half just to break even, but CIG need all of that that to keep the dream furnaces burning.

So if you cut that to say even 10% of the tracker you're suddenly looking at 15 years to recoup. No way they're that patient. They have to have been promised something big and much sooner than 15 years down the line.