"not to purchase a game that isn't finished." (not put in as a quote) All the games EA published without needing to patch it in the first week turned into a "EA classic" a year later. Ubisoft took a dive with FailCry4. ThePerformanceEater3 made me cry because of the ignorance writen down in code... If there is a half decent game in development, some jealous guy goes to court to claim 4 Billion dollars for not thinking before drinking his Hot coffee (TERRA FACEPALM). To prevent getting sued by brain dead self declared geniuses MC-Dumb prints a warning on the lit.
[Hey! This turned into a rant, just go on then:] Well done gaming industry! Just imagine this happening with cars: Day 1: The doors are still missing, therefor you get two radios. Day 2: After seven hours at the garage, you got all doors. As a downside you can not slow down anymore Day 3: To fix the dead breaks the engine is removed Day 4: The engine is back but the seats are now made from coal chunks Day 365: It is working as it should. Guess what, the next version is available.
Star Citizen kind of had this coming. Even if nothing happens, there may be some noise around it, and people will be reminded of the game, that i believe had one of the most successful crowd funding campaigns, then it had in game transactions before even being in beta or whatever, and nothing have been known for it since. Oh yeah, remember 3-4 years ago, when we spend money for this game? What is going on with it? Oh, nothing... Let me remind you, that AMD advertised Star Citizen as one of the Mantle titles before Mantle was even released. Then Mantle was released, Microsoft released DX12, Mantle died, Star Citizen is nowhere to be seen... Like it or not, its a shitty situation (apologies for my language). People invested a lot of money in this project and basically got nothing a few years after that, and there is still not even release date? God dam, i would join in if i had payed any money on this project.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. I've got quite a bit out of my investment. I didn't buy a game, I invested money in a company that is developing a game.
I'm rather pleased with the progress I've seen, and the demos I've witnessed. I've spent the last 2 weeks digging through all the material that Derek Smart posted in his blog. Half of it is him arguing against people who are questioning his character, the other half is him speaking for an entire audience where a small percentage are behind him, and the rest are mostly ignoring him.
I also don't understand where any of the information about "What was originally promised" vs "What is currently released" comes from. The delays in development happen, they have been rather clearly explained. At least I think they are rather clear.
As for paying money and getting nothing? I'm not sure where you are pulling that from. Some games in development have a Forum, and nothing else for YEARS.
Was the game originally promised to be released in November of 2014? Yes. Is it currently out? No. Has it been communicated properly as to what is happening and why there are delays and what we can expect with a reasonable timeline? Yes.
Now I say reasonable timeline, as they refrain from giving us exact dates, because ultimately. It will get done when it's done. So far I've been rather pleased with the progress.
Arena Commander is a testing ground, as well as StarMarine. The side bonus of getting a dogfighting arena and a FPS battle arena is awesome. They are intended to be a simulation inside the real game. Which is in progress. The "Flight Training" section of AC is great in that it gives an element of that underlying military environment.
The only issue that I have with all of this, is the Rift Support. As there is some BS floating around about them dropping it. But I highly doubt they would do that.
While I agree with many of his concerns, I am not invested so it does not matter. I do however think this was an incredibly stuipid thing to do. He is not a smart man. If he thinks it was going to go.down as one of the biggest pump and dumps in kickstarter history he should have sat on his hand and made the best damn alternative for those who still want it after being burned. He did not. This is not clever.
But to me, am uninvested free outside view with out wanting confirmation bias that SC will be good or even complete, I do think what the campaign has become is undoable 100% in the teams dev cycle at this current moment. It looks like over promising.
Don't get me wrong. I will say it directly. This game is not for me and I am not even actively following it. However. Couple years ago it was everywhere. Everybody was talking about it, there was huge amount of info coming out of the walls. And now this topic reminded me it exists. All I am saying is: from my point of view as a sidewalker, all the information I am currently having about the game is this topic. Isn't it a bit to late for it.. I am not saying this guy is right, I have no idea... All I am saying is that there is just no information as it was before...
Just that the original spec of the game has been expanded so many times with each stretch goal. Then split into separate games, just to be further broken into parts of those games to pay more for something that is not physical, not useable yet and for game that does not exist yet.
The FPS module alone is alarming. They did not know how to make one so they brought in a different developer, which is fair. But why promised it if you can't make it. And the result was broken whole other game at this stage and more delays.
The time.frame for the original release is now long in the past and still the base game, the original piece that was paid for is nowhere to be seen. Which is also understandable it has been turned into something else. Something the original backers never paid for.
I understand many of them are happy to wait longer for more stuff which is the purpose of stretch gaols. That is a common thing in kickstarters. But those stretch goals did not have a limit for a long time. They continued outside the kickstarter, every time adding more and more to the workload. Every time promsing something bigger and better and eventually ending up where you have not paid for a game any more you are just bankrolling a studio to do effectively whatever they want from that point on.
There is a lot of trust and faith involved in kickstarters. You have to believe that you paid the right amount of money for what you get when that is far away and uncertain. It usually works out for the most part. But this just seems like an abuse of that trust.
There is also the problem of people who only wanted the original spec game. They don't want what ever this has become, the persistent open space with planets and fps and all the other facets of it. They now don't get that anymore. They get what it became. Which may not be what they want. This may also, but this is total speculation, have as a result of all this addition verging on spiraling out of control expansion have made the game unplayable for those who backed the original because ethe specs required for this new and tasty version are probably going to be far higher to keep up with the new expanded universe.
Those are some of the reasons.
Basically from the outside it is looking like an 80+ million dollar black hole.
Allow me to address them one at a time and shed some light on the situation.
There have been no "splits into separate games" Thus far, each of these modules are mostly Alpha type access to in game assets.
Arena Commander is the name for what is effectively an in game simulator, that allows players to get into the cockpit of their fighters and get a feel for how the game will play while in your ship.
If you watch the original Kickstarter video, he spells out what he wants to do. It's a little vague on the how, but the what was pretty clear.
Star Marine is effectively the same thing but not in the cockpit. It's more or less Alpha/Beta access to in game assets, with a little flare to give backers some structure. They are not separate games, they are testing grounds for things to come. As far as promising something that "They can't make" is a bit of a fallacy. The idea was to either hire people who could make the game in house, or hire a team of people to develop it under their own "Dev team" flag. I see nothing wrong with either situation.
This is just misinformation. There are weekly updates as to the status of the game and the progress that is being made. Star Marine was almost finished last October, until they found a huge snag in the net code and they had to re-invent the wheel. They wrote an entire understructure of net code for both the client, and the cloud infrastructure that will play host to all of the AC and SM multiplayer arenas as well as the PU.
You make some valid points here. The bit of information I want to point out, is that the Kickstarter began well after the RSI site was up and collecting pledges. That being said, Yes there is a lot of trust that goes into these types of things. To say they continued outside the Kickstarter is a bit misleading, as they started outside the Kickstarter. If they had not kept up with consistent updates as to the progress and development I would agree to a breach in that trust.
Again, see the Kickstarter Video, he clearly states the vision. Which is what backers were buying into.
Again I say refer to the Kickstarter video, it clearly stated from the beginning he wanted the Open Space, Freelancer/Privateer styled persistent MMO universe, complete with first person interaction with the environments, and a single player Wing Commander styled Military tour of duty. It also clearly stated in the Kickstarter that it was an extension of their crowd funding campaign on their site.
As far as it looking like an 80MM+ USD black hole? I can see where it would look like that. When you look at games like Crysis 3 which had a budget of 66MM USD and took 38 months to develop. MMOs like FFXIV: A realm Reborn which took 2 years from the fall of the original through a restructure of the dev team to the initial release, and an additional 2 years for other updates to bring it to it's current iteration. (They don't want us know how much that cost.) Then we can look at World of Warcraft, with an initial budget of 60-100MM and 4.5 Years in development. The initial thought during their Kickstarter era was that SC would cost minimum 20MM and 2-3 years of development. With the stretch goals, which were hit by February of 2013
I would like to go to CIG's offices and have a chat with Chris Roberts. See what he has to say, but I don't want to interrogate him. When I last spoke with him, he seemed genuine in his desire to create this game. I didn't get the impression that he's some elaborate conman.
And I see that passion come across. It just seems a lot from the initial brief. I hope it works out as if it does it will with out doubt be the greatest space based game going and I have no ill will at all, I am not invested at all.
I am a very sceptical person especially of my hobbies the main one being PC, not necessarily games all the time either, and there have been so many easily quotable and viewable let downs, lies, plain stealing and just so many companies who could not give less of a shit about their fans that I plain don't trust any game or developer at all any more until I see the game in play by an unbiased outside person across all platforms and hardware. It is one thing for me to be an idiot and waste my money but when thousands of people are practically hurling bags of cash at developers (not specific to CIG) and then get robbed it makes me feel ill. Honestly I am tied of current business as a whole across all industries. There is so little to look forward to and such little basis to trust anyone any more that when I see something like this is screams out something is wrong here.
Jaded.
And it sucks.
But there is verging on zero to change that for me.
The guy in first place for LoD's time played leaderboard has played 24 hours of it. Pretty safe to say Derek Smart is just jealous of success; he doesn't seem to be capable of his own.