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Star Citizen Made a $27,000 DLC Bundle Exclusively for the $1,000+ Concierge Community
Flabberghasted is probably the proper word to use? There now is a $27,000 DLC bundle only available to premium Concierge backers of Star Citizen. I'll repeat that again, $27,000 (!)
So what is the deal with this premium-priced bundle? Titled the Legatus Pack - likely drawing the name from the similarly-titled high ranking Roman military rank. Documented by publication MMO Pulse in the images below, the pack includes nearly every ship you can get in the game. A grand total of 117. On top of that, the Legatus Pack also includes an additional 163 extra items and skins. The noteworthy party about the bundle is that it’s only available to Concierge members of the Star Citizen community. In other words, people who have spent more than $1,000 supporting the game.
Star Citizen gets a lot of flack for their crowd-funding initiatives as they work towards a full release. In late March, the game passed the 2M registered user mark. Meanwhile, the game picked passed the $184M crowdfunding mark within the month.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.1.0 Goes Live - 04/03/2018 07:57 AM
Cloud Imperium Games has announced that Star Citizen’s Alpha Patch 3.1.0 is now available for testing. Some of the new features include a character creator, which allows players to customiz...
Star Citizen - How Ships are Made Video - 01/22/2018 09:32 AM
Cloud Imperium Games released a new video of its upcoming space simulator Star Citizen. The video showcases the process of creating ships, also introducing the teams and developers responsible for the...
Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 is available - 12/23/2017 10:23 AM
Some news for Star Citizen backers as Alpha 3.0 is currently available on the Public Test Server to everyone. This basically means that everyone who has backed up this project will be able to test ...
Crytek sues Star Citizen studios CryEngine - 12/14/2017 12:04 PM
CryEngine makes Crytek is suing the team behind Star Citizen for breach of contract. This lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in California, has the potential to disrupt development of a game that i...
New Star Citizen Video Shows Very nice Graphics - 05/15/2017 08:00 AM
Chris Roberts’ Cloud Imperium Games released a brand new video of Star Citizen. The video showcases several improvements that the development teams have been implementing in the game, includ...
Denial
Senior Member
Posts: 14013
Joined: 2004-05-16
Senior Member
Posts: 14013
Joined: 2004-05-16
#5551315 Posted on: 05/29/2018 04:54 PM
It's simultaneously more playable and less playable than people make it out to be.
One of the things that annoys me so much about this game is that it seems no one can discuss it without either side becoming so polarized. On one hand you have people that haven't followed the development progress of the game at all, they completely make things up and conclude that the game a giant scam. On the other you have people that have sunk so much money into it that they will defend it until death despite it's obvious flaws.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. The game's production has issues - it's missed multiple deadlines, the feature creep is a massive problem and the optics of their financial model is terrible. That being said multiple people that love to comment on this game clearly have no fundamental understanding of designing a game, much less the issues involved in designing one that's crowd funded. A couple examples in the last two threads:
The tech demos have been connected in a semi-persistent universe for over a year now. You can spawn up, create a character, summon a number of fully designed/workable ships with different roles, fly to dozens of areas both in space and on planets - most of which are fully detailed with NPCs/trade hubs/multiple shops/working economies/working communications for landing/refueling/etc. You can pvp/pve combat both in space and on the ground. There are quests. You can trade for in game currency. I would hardly call the current experience "alpha tech demos that aren't connected".. it's more like "an alpha game that needs polish and content"
Another:
I keep seeing people talk about rewrites both to game systems and the engine itself. For clarification they changed engines one time, from Unreal to CryEngine way back when they started production. The swap from CryEngine to Lumberyard was essentially a name change. It's the same engine, Amazon repackaged and rebranded it. That's it. As for the system changes, this is where the design/crowd funding problem comes in. They started with a $5M or whatever budget - people wanted to see progress so they gave them progress. They did this by manually piecing together items that at some point would need to be redone for scalability. The best example of this is the solar system. The initial system took them weeks to setup the planet distances, lock the planets to correct orientations, setup the varying locations that orbit the planets etc. After the set the initial solar system up, that team went on to spend the next two years creating a tool that allowed them to "spawn" entire solar systems complete with orbital mechanics, parameters for the type of systems, etc. Now they can spawn a completely configurable system in 10 minutes. Networking is the same - they used the original crytek networking code to get the game running so people could play it - now they are completely rewriting it with object container streaming, serialized variables, and occlusion culling in order to achieve the level of performance they need for scalability. No other dev studio has to do this - right from the start of production they setup these systems the way they will be when it's final, SC has to ship modular updates to appease people who backed the game though, this slows development considerably. And this same logic applies to a bunch of other portions of the game, the ship production pipeline, subsumption - the system they use to govern NPC behavior, etc. It all had to be completed then redone for scalability long term. Couple that with periodic polish to the patches themselves and yeah, delays. Delays lead to more backing money and more community requests, which in this case leads to feature creep.. which is definitely a problem.
That's not to mention that they built out an entire production pipeline across multiple studios around the world while building the game. When Ubisoft does this they have a framework already in place - when CIG did it they needed to build that framework, build out the studios, bring them all up to speed, etc. That process alone takes time and money, time and money that other studios already sunk in previous projects.
There are countless other things too - like when they first showed the planet tech, so many people here on Guru3D including names in this very thread posted stuff like "they'll never get this working in the game" and yet it's here now and actually is surprisingly polished/well designed. On the flipside you get people defending it as if there is no problem with the 6+ year development time and countless schedule misses. 3.0 got delayed like two years... like how do you miss schedule something by 35% of the entire project timeline?
So Idk, I'd like to see where the game goes despite the issues because it's clear they are building something ambitious for those that followed/played it. Whether or not it will ever be 'finished' is another story. I'm just kind of just getting sick of all the bullshit around the game though, most of which is just completely made up by people with not only no skin in the game, but no knowledge at all game development especially in regard to this specific game. Also getting tired of the rabid defenders - the game has issues, issues that have to be corrected. $27,000 option is fine but the optics given previous history is obvious going to be glaring to the overall gaming community - I guess it doesn't concern them much.
All that being said, I'm well aware SC is not complete, but I doubt it's as far from playable as people make it out to be.
It's simultaneously more playable and less playable than people make it out to be.
One of the things that annoys me so much about this game is that it seems no one can discuss it without either side becoming so polarized. On one hand you have people that haven't followed the development progress of the game at all, they completely make things up and conclude that the game a giant scam. On the other you have people that have sunk so much money into it that they will defend it until death despite it's obvious flaws.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. The game's production has issues - it's missed multiple deadlines, the feature creep is a massive problem and the optics of their financial model is terrible. That being said multiple people that love to comment on this game clearly have no fundamental understanding of designing a game, much less the issues involved in designing one that's crowd funded. A couple examples in the last two threads:
All they managed to pull out are some alpha tech demos that aren't even connected..
The tech demos have been connected in a semi-persistent universe for over a year now. You can spawn up, create a character, summon a number of fully designed/workable ships with different roles, fly to dozens of areas both in space and on planets - most of which are fully detailed with NPCs/trade hubs/multiple shops/working economies/working communications for landing/refueling/etc. You can pvp/pve combat both in space and on the ground. There are quests. You can trade for in game currency. I would hardly call the current experience "alpha tech demos that aren't connected".. it's more like "an alpha game that needs polish and content"
Another:
So they just outdating the engine and technology by postponing release date and rewriting game again and again and again and again.
I keep seeing people talk about rewrites both to game systems and the engine itself. For clarification they changed engines one time, from Unreal to CryEngine way back when they started production. The swap from CryEngine to Lumberyard was essentially a name change. It's the same engine, Amazon repackaged and rebranded it. That's it. As for the system changes, this is where the design/crowd funding problem comes in. They started with a $5M or whatever budget - people wanted to see progress so they gave them progress. They did this by manually piecing together items that at some point would need to be redone for scalability. The best example of this is the solar system. The initial system took them weeks to setup the planet distances, lock the planets to correct orientations, setup the varying locations that orbit the planets etc. After the set the initial solar system up, that team went on to spend the next two years creating a tool that allowed them to "spawn" entire solar systems complete with orbital mechanics, parameters for the type of systems, etc. Now they can spawn a completely configurable system in 10 minutes. Networking is the same - they used the original crytek networking code to get the game running so people could play it - now they are completely rewriting it with object container streaming, serialized variables, and occlusion culling in order to achieve the level of performance they need for scalability. No other dev studio has to do this - right from the start of production they setup these systems the way they will be when it's final, SC has to ship modular updates to appease people who backed the game though, this slows development considerably. And this same logic applies to a bunch of other portions of the game, the ship production pipeline, subsumption - the system they use to govern NPC behavior, etc. It all had to be completed then redone for scalability long term. Couple that with periodic polish to the patches themselves and yeah, delays. Delays lead to more backing money and more community requests, which in this case leads to feature creep.. which is definitely a problem.
That's not to mention that they built out an entire production pipeline across multiple studios around the world while building the game. When Ubisoft does this they have a framework already in place - when CIG did it they needed to build that framework, build out the studios, bring them all up to speed, etc. That process alone takes time and money, time and money that other studios already sunk in previous projects.
There are countless other things too - like when they first showed the planet tech, so many people here on Guru3D including names in this very thread posted stuff like "they'll never get this working in the game" and yet it's here now and actually is surprisingly polished/well designed. On the flipside you get people defending it as if there is no problem with the 6+ year development time and countless schedule misses. 3.0 got delayed like two years... like how do you miss schedule something by 35% of the entire project timeline?
So Idk, I'd like to see where the game goes despite the issues because it's clear they are building something ambitious for those that followed/played it. Whether or not it will ever be 'finished' is another story. I'm just kind of just getting sick of all the bullshit around the game though, most of which is just completely made up by people with not only no skin in the game, but no knowledge at all game development especially in regard to this specific game. Also getting tired of the rabid defenders - the game has issues, issues that have to be corrected. $27,000 option is fine but the optics given previous history is obvious going to be glaring to the overall gaming community - I guess it doesn't concern them much.
metagamer
Senior Member
Posts: 2388
Joined: 2018-04-10
Senior Member
Posts: 2388
Joined: 2018-04-10
#5551319 Posted on: 05/29/2018 05:02 PM
You're contradicting yourself. One minute you're saying that you'll have to spend $200 for an EA game and still have a lot missing. On the other hand you're also claiming that spending $60 will allow you to enjoy SC to it's fullest. Really? As much as the $27,000 guy?
My point wasn't who sold it. My point was people have no problem spending that kind of money but its not required to enjoy the game at its fullest.
You're contradicting yourself. One minute you're saying that you'll have to spend $200 for an EA game and still have a lot missing. On the other hand you're also claiming that spending $60 will allow you to enjoy SC to it's fullest. Really? As much as the $27,000 guy?
Denial
Senior Member
Posts: 14013
Joined: 2004-05-16
Senior Member
Posts: 14013
Joined: 2004-05-16
#5551321 Posted on: 05/29/2018 05:04 PM
You'll be able to earn all the ships with in game currency at some point. Now that itself is obviously an issue but I don't see how it's any different than a game like Eve, where ships also cost thousands of real life dollars if you want them immediately.
But of course you're wrong here. You will not be able to enjoy the game to it's fullest if you spend $60 and the other guys spends $27,000.
You'll be able to earn all the ships with in game currency at some point. Now that itself is obviously an issue but I don't see how it's any different than a game like Eve, where ships also cost thousands of real life dollars if you want them immediately.
metagamer
Senior Member
Posts: 2388
Joined: 2018-04-10
Senior Member
Posts: 2388
Joined: 2018-04-10
#5551322 Posted on: 05/29/2018 05:07 PM
How long will that take? Just a rough guess? 10,000 hours? More? Also, can you not unlock everything in EA games just by playing the game?
You'll be able to earn all the ships with in game currency at some point. Now that itself is obviously an issue but I don't see how it's any different than a game like Eve, where ships also cost thousands of real life dollars if you want them immediately.
How long will that take? Just a rough guess? 10,000 hours? More? Also, can you not unlock everything in EA games just by playing the game?
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My point wasn't who sold it. My point was people have no problem spending that kind of money but its not required to enjoy the game at its fullest.