Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 is available

#5504555 Posted on: 12/26/2017 03:27 PM

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"...that's, where I find out where all the bugs are..."

Says it all...minus the massive, colourful, vibrating throne they all sit on...I partially expected an entire floor filled to the brim, with people designing the internal furniture of the office, that will also be in the final game. See? This would be allowed under federal law as they are using the game to justify resigning their own offices!

Never have I seen something so utterly transparent and self-indulgent.

Money won, is twice as sweet as money earnt yet, free money is bitter, making self-indulgence in bitter-sweet pursuits, with no cherries waiting; the result...

#5504569 Posted on: 12/26/2017 04:14 PM

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exactly, why ever produce something that needs to compete in the market and be open to critique when you can sell a fairytale, religion is doing it for millennia and its a very successful business model...

also lets look at their studios from 2013 and 2016 comparison, just a quick google search

- 2013
- 2016

see the 2013 version looks like a decent startup, a bit of jury-rigged equipment here and there but overall a spacious office totally ok for an IT startup bunch, theres even a bit of splash with that bar and arcade machine, theres prolly a bit more than we can see... its what you would expect for such a project, starting on kickstarter, doing community funding, etc

then you have the extravaganza of 2016, with murals across whole compound, space doors, tv on every wall/corner, totally lavish equipment, a break room that is now a full fledged bistro with a bartender... thats nice, its hardly optimal or cost effective, but it is nice...

and i dont have anything against success, sure, do something thats successful and reap the fruit of your labor, thats fair... so far only successful thing they did is MONEY RAISING... the game has no scope of reality, its being diluted beyond reason, theres no end to it, as someone said all the initial promises could have been fulfilled with the original backing and then they could do expansions, DLC's, while having a working product on the market and starting to finance themselves but no, its just promises to eternity and "we need more money" signs...

The problem is most AAA studios have all that stuff - just search "EA Offices" or "Ubisoft Offices" and it's like a giant playground or even smaller studios like dontnod entertainment. So if you want to attract that level of developer/artist/etc you need to have all that shit as well, or they'll just go someplace else. The entire game development industry is like that - there are relatively few people that actually have good experience/knowledge and they like to be pampered with bullshit and if not you just have to pay them significantly more to get them to stay.

I also still think it's too early to call it. I know people love to say it's been in development forever, but it really hasn't. It's about 5 years, 6 if you include like CR messing around in an editor. StarCraft 2 took 7 years and is a relatively simple RTS game. Team Fortress 2 took 9 years, same thing, simple game - Diablo 3 took 11 years. People will look at those games and say "well those games restarted development and shifted in scope" but that's exactly what's happening with Star Citizen - the game started out with like a 5 million dollar budget and now its' at $160+M - obviously the scope is going to shift. Plus they had to build out multiple studios, create a workflow between the studios and contend with shipping modular updates to appease backers. None of those other games had to do that. And like, I get it - it's 100% possible that a "polished" version of SQ42/Star Citizen will never ship and the company will fold - but I think it's pretty apparent now that they are working on something. Like loobyluggs sat here two years ago and said the entire game is a scam and CR is pocketing all the money and we will never see x, y or z feature and now x, y are in the game, z is on the horizon and the SQ42 mission they showed off is kind of cool looking, packed with a bunch of detail and while unpolished is definitely further along than a lot of people here said they would ever get. And it's like, I don't know how much money they spent - how do I know they don't have $60-70M in the bank still and can fund development for another 2-3 years and get it where it needs to be?

There isn't exactly a playbook for building a crowd sourced AAA title - the company is clearly winging it to some degree and I think in that position you have to. Their deadlines are garbage, I'll agree with that and I do think feature creep is becoming more of a problem then I'd like to - but again, I don't know how much money they have or how they are allocating those resources. Like GX-X says they should be fixing these 3 year old bugs instead of shipping new modules, but most of those bugs are in code that's being completely gutted and replaced in the next couple major revisions anyway. Why would you allocate resources on fixing network code issues when the entire network stack is being replaced in 3.1? With stuff like that it's not like you can throw more people at it to make the problem go away faster. I think the network team is like 3 people? And in that video he specifically said having more people just slows them down because you have to spend like 3-6 months training each person, which is why they are building an internal API for it. The planetary system is another perfect example, it took them like 8 months IIRC to build the first star system, it took them like 2 years to finish the "star system tool" or whatever they call it and now they can build new systems in like 10 minutes. That's typically how game development works, the bulk of the development time is just getting the engine components and systems online, then you scale it out and polish it.

I don't know if they will ever finish it - but I'd like to see where it goes because right now, watching that SQ42 video, it looks way cooler than any other game currently in development. And if it takes another 2-3 years to get there in a polished state, I'm ok with that and I think it would be more than worth the journey.

That being said I haven't spent any money on the game so lol

#5504578 Posted on: 12/26/2017 04:57 PM

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#5504581 Posted on: 12/26/2017 05:19 PM

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but on the flipside EA and Ubisoft earned the right to makes their offices and work locations extravagant by, and here's the funny thing, RELEASING FULL AND COMPLETE GAMES, games that worked and were good enough that people not only bought them once but continued to buy from they they built themselves up by proving their worth, which CIG simply have not done they have gotten there based on a promise and the belief of a lot of backers that they can deliver on that promise. Sure EA and Ubi are scumbag developers now but at some point in the past they developed and released full games, without asking for a huge amount of cash upfront. End of the day the only people who can give a valid feeling on what CIG is doing with their cash are the folks that have invested in the game.

Having invested in other games in Early Access, I believe that as long as the money is being used to provide the developers with a living wage, the tools and facilities to do their job comfortably and this results in a game that appears to be developing and heading towards a set goal, then I am happy.