Over 10 Years After It Was Announced, Star Citizen’s Single-Player Squadron 42 Is ‘Feature Complete’ - IGN::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has said Squadron 42, the single-player portion of its controversial space sim, is finally “feature complete”, over a decade after it was announced.
Once I can buy it, and download it, then install it, then open it, configure my settings, create my characters, and start the campaign, then, and ONLY THEN will I believe it.
I’ve heard of settling for second-best, but this one’s new.
Not trying to dig at you. If you enjoy it, awesome. I’m partly ashamed to admit I still hop into Skyrim every now and then, and it doubtless has more issues than SF.
On the topic of the thread, I backed SC in the past (goddamn I love the design of the M50) and I’m mega disappointed that they’ve handled it the way they have. Actually, one of my favorite quotes from David Mitchell kind of fits here:
Very excite. Now they can start working on star citizen
Key part is that its not to start working on SC but the gate keeping of tech from sq42 to SC is open. What was showcased this weekend will start to be ported into SC.
This game has taken so long that it’s either money laundering, the devs are just incompetent, or they suffer from the inability to edit themselves down
Star Citizen has literally the highest budget of any game in history, by a factor of 2x. The second biggest one is Cyberpunk, which also has been in development since 2013. Gamedev has just spiraled a bit out of control and takes ridiculous amounts of time these days.
The only reason you see yearly releases of some other games is because they have multiple teams working in parallel and are just updating an already existing game engine. Doing stuff from scratch is a whole different thing.
Mostly agree with you here but I do have a minor correction. Cyberpunk was announced in 2013 but it didn’t actually start development until sometime in 2016 after cdpr release The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine DLC.
Meaning cyberpunk only took roughly 4-5 years of development time before being released. Though it arguably needed much more time than that.
Gamedev has just spiraled a bit out of control and takes ridiculous amounts of time these days.
Yes but also does an enormous amount of waste at the moment. Sorry it now takes years to make a good game but it doesn’t take a decade. Unless you’re seriously doing something wrong or it’s an entirely simulated universe with sepient life and everything.
but it doesn’t take a decade.
GTA2 to GTA3, two years. GTAIV to GTAV, five years, GTAV to GTAVI 10 years and still waiting. See a pattern?
When you want to accurately simulate and animate every doorknob in the game it just takes a hell of a lot longer than putting a few pixel on a texture and calling it a day. And yes, there is in argument to be made that that level of detail doesn’t actually add to the gaming experience in a meaningful way, but that’s something a whole lot of AAA games struggle with and why we are seeing so many sequels and so little new things. StarCitizen just happens to be a new thing developed from scratch, including the studio itself.
Games have gotten more complex and so have the teams to make them.
It use to be a few developers juggling multiple rolls to entire departments that only specialise in one thing.
To get all those different professions together to build a game is really hard because of communication. The best people are the ones who can do a bit of everything but large companies don’t want that, they want specialists who do one thing.
You can program? You can also create 3D assets? Your good at audio? Well tough you have to pick one and you’ll probably never interact outside your team.
And this leads to lots of fantastic ideas and creativity being lost not to mention bugs and other issues popping up.
I’m sure there have been mistakes, but calling them incompetent is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it’s an absolutely eye watering amount of time and money, but they are trying to make an online universe with a high level of detail in which you can move between planets and all kinds of environments completely seamlessly. If they weren’t trying to make something with such a high level of difficulty, then I suspect they would have released a finished product by now, but they are making stuff nobody has made before, at least not at this scale.
Perhaps inability to scale things back is a bit of a problem, but I think Chris Roberts realises he’s not likely to get a chance to get a basically unlimited amount of money (in game dev terms) to make the ultimate dream game he and many other people always wanted, so I’d imagine that’s the reason they are just going all out.
How come other ambitious early access type projects don’t have this problem.
Beam.ng comes to mind, it’s not complete, but the pricing is reasonable, the progress is consistent and plentiful, and the product has been in a very fun engaging state for years and years.
And beam.ng is an incredibly ambitious project aiming for very high performing and accurate solid body physics simulation.
I don’t think Star citizen would get nearly the level of hate if they had a more sensical pricing scheme. $45 +$15 for the base game, ok makes sense, but then there are multiple subscription tiers, additional 1 time lifetime versions of the subscription, different shops for different subscription levels, individual ships, insurance, a mobile game like freemium/premium model (earn credits to buy real money stuff), as well as branching the single player and multiplayer experience into standalone products.
A big ambitious game is great, but no amount of tech CEO promises will make the segmented and confusing monetization scheme seem legit. The game has raised half a billion dollars. It has already made more money than 99% of games will ever make. That’s enough money to pay 300 people 120k for the 13/14 years the game has been in development. They have the ability to have a large studio that rivals (or beats) large AAA studios in talent, and they have used more time than even the most notorious studios use to develop games.
Ah yes. Promotional ships that sell for $1000s of dollars irl that are only available in limited runs that you get to keep when the game launches into stable release.
Oops, forgot to mention that some of these ships might not ever be available outside of alpha besides for those that already own them. That means new players in stable will encounter ships they’ll never be able to own.
Most of my friends that play it say it’s a fair trade since you’re paying so much for them, but it still feels largely like a scam to me. You could do so such much better for yourself with that kind of money than just owning a digital asset.
Oh and those ships? They’re not tradeable to other players afaik.
Edit: This isn’t really fine at all and is in fact a P2W mechanic inside a game you already have to pay for up front.
How is star citizens progress not consistent and plentiful? They are pretty constantly releasing new content. Single player might be behind closed doors but the multiplayer gets all of the upgraded Tech New Missions new planet development new ships. There’s a pretty steady flow of new stuff and you only need $40 to get in.
If the only thing you’re interested in is the single player then that is unfortunate but it’s not as if they’ve delivered nothing over all this time. There is a game that is playable and has a surprising amount of content that you can go play right now
It’s not money laundering. It’s crowdfunding as a primary business model. The point isn’t to finish the game, but to keep baiting people with carrots-on-sticks until they get sick of the grift and the money dries up.
I can’t imagine still thinking this after seeing that the game is actually releasing…
I was coming in here to see if the positivity actually carries over to various places as I was surprised to see all the positive YouTube comments on ign, but lemmy always seems to have a extra serving of negativity in all things… Oh well.
Don’t deprive yourself of a good time, if you have the means to play it I would absolutely check out star citizen when they have their free to play events.
Cyberpunk had 11 years of development if we consider 2.0 to be the version that should have been what we got on release day.
S42 better be dam freaking legendary and rival Cyberpunk for story, gameplay, mechanics, graphics, etc. considering it’s going to likely equal the development time.
Cyberpunk development started in 2016, so 8 years if we are counting up to now.
Wierd, the first trailer was released in 2013. They took 3 years to begin development after releasing a trailer???
EDIT:
Some more info:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/16/22234452/cyberpunk-2077-development-2016-pc-console-projekt-red
“full development” of the game — announced in 2012— didn’t begin until 2016.
The company “hit the reset button” on the game in 2016
up until 2016, he says, it was a third-person game.
You want it to rival Cyberpunk for story, gameplay, and mechanics? Yikes.
I can tell you why I care. Maybe you don’t care but I’ll tell you anyway. Because this sort of bullshit people lap up blindly and let the industry set it as a new standard. Can we milk users for in-game ships for a game that doesn’t exist for a decade? Do I want that for the future of gaming? Pay now for the upcoming necromancer in the upcoming Diablo 6 that’s been in the making for 10 years! This funding model is predatory and the game is already primed to be soaked through with Eve-level of toxicity.
You should care. It’s your gaming too.
Before reeeeeee, note that I don’t attack anyone’s enjoyment of the “game”.
I do care. I cared so much that I was a games journo for over 5 years. I love gaming. Always have always will.
I’m well over 50. My first gaming devices predate the 2600. Calling this predatory is hyperbole. People are not paying now to play later. They are paying now to play a title in development. That’s not the future of gaming. This is the present. Diabolo 6’s bs isn’t really an apt example. I can give you a much better, more relevant and apt example: Watframe. Warframe used exactly the same funding model as SC and was nowhere near complete for almost a decade - people still played it to the point that it successfully ran its own convention over multiple years. Now it’s feature complete and has dropped multiple addons and expansions. Would that have happened without audience financial participation? I don’t think so. Hell, no studios of scale or pubs believed in it and Dark Sector had to be so heavily bastardised to fit with the FPS warshooter trend to even get published. If Digital Extremes didn’t shift models to crowd funding they would have died. Cloud Imperium are making a very specific game for a very specific audience and they are smart to sell directly to that audience. That money has no negative impact on you and has a positive net effect on the industry - lots of people are being employed across different nations and lots of others are also earning money in audience participation (bloggers, influencers, convention staff etc).
This is the present for this niche audience but if it becomes a way for more games of greater variety to reach the audiences that will pay for the specific experiences they want while being able to avoid all the bs associated with seasonal trends and ridiculous short shelf lives leading to crazily overreaching copy protection and awful cycles of boom/bust hire/fire/studio closure I’m all for it.
