Wow, your first post wasn’t the least bit inflammatory, that is quite a reaction…
I love not having social media accounts.
Me too.
Bottom line: In all big communities there are assholes, and Star Citizen has a very big one.
One reason why I am not particularly active in their forums is that there are so many loud people on all sides of the discussion. People attacking the game for whatever reasons, with really impolite posts, and people defending it with the same kind of impoliteness.
I am there for the game, I spent a few bucks, and I see it as money well invested. And I am patient. Others have stronger feelings about it. It is kinda sad.
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With the amount of money people have shelled out, seems natural there would be a lot of folks with some strong opinions either way.
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Absolutely understandable!
I wouldn’t spend that much money on a crowd funding project.
For me crowd funding is like this: Spend money that you can spare.
If you get something: Good. If you don’t get something: You can shrug and forget about it.
If you don’t feel that way you shouldn’t spend money on crowd funding IMO. Many people have done that anyway, and bad feelings are the result.
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I feel a bit lucky in that someone gifted me a package with the 325a and module access now just a tad over 3 years ago. Because I didn’t spend any money on it myself, my feelings have always been, it doesn’t exist till it’s out 
That planet stuff looks nice, but I just goes to show, I literally have no clue what this game is even suppose to be about anymore.
Well, basically Elite plus story and FPS, minus the huge empty universe. 
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Yeah, but it still feels way out of line IMHO.
If I had $1500 worth of skin dumped into a project with questionable transparency and relatively little to show relative to what’s been invested after a half decade of development, I’d admittedly be pretty salty, but I don’t know if I’d go as far as aggressively berating anyone questioning the game’s quality, direction, or dev team.
The nasty feedback loop between RSI’s lofty goals, a massive and fanatic community very willing to believe and then extrapolate from said goals, and RSI’s subsequent unwillingness to curb that enthusiasm (or really deny any speculation) is already starting to come back to bite them. I doubt that will get any better as time goes on and the gap between where they are and where wishful thinking says they should be.
TL;DR: This is all starting to smell a lot like the current generation’s Battlecruiser 3000AD.
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Well put, a friend linked one of the video’s where Robert demonstrated the game mocking the whole thing since it looked utterly boring and ridiculous, with bugs and all in it. That’s just bad marketing.
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I don’t know, I didn’t feel that way. I actually like how Chris Roberts doesn’t wait and only show polished stuff. It is ok for it to be rough because it is an alpha. To me that is kinda charming, it feels like I am part of somthing instead of just getting served a PR presentation. (even though I know of course it IS only a PR demo)
Still I think y’all are right, they overdid that quite a bit and I also think they definitely should have done two things by now:
- stop taking money, even though people WANT to spend money
- stop adding features, regardless of how awesome they are
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This right here. Would probably solve a lot of issues, unless of course making payroll is one of them
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It’s got to be a balancing act, as in if they are in some sort of feature creep doom spiral then they should stop, but otherwise maybe they just need to get over the hump with more money? (said everyone ever who had a delusion).
I’m in it from day 1 with my sweet $29 investment. It looks at least 51% like it might end it tears but in the interim every month or so I download 30GB, play for 20 minutes, say ‘neat’ and move on.
I do kinda agree that they should freeze taking money until at least a major point release, say Squadron 42 single player campaign. Once that is out then let people ‘donateware’ away again I guess.
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I used to be a backer and salty about the delays and continued feature creep which no doubt would cause even more delays…
I got my refund last year and ever since then I’ve been able to go back to enjoying these presentations as alpha demos of an amazing game that might someday exist… when it does I will buy it.
That planet side stuff looks amazing if they populated it with AI or PVPers, if combined with a space sim like Elite, and some base building stuff like X games it would be a truly awesome dream come true.
You can’t accuse Chris Roberts of not dreaming big, I just hope he can deliver on at least one of the game types (SP, MP, FPS) before they run out of money.
The community around this game is definitely contentious and you can’t really post an opinion about it without expecting flak from either side, as @Mudcat mentioned people have a lot invested in it so are bound to have strong feelings.
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That does seem like a healthy attitude. I’m in that boat minus ever having bought into it.
Indeed, i want this to happen. I can’t help but feel that if their current budget won’t fund this, no amount of money will.
Thinking big is just the first step to a great product. The second, more difficult and definitely most painful step is throwing ideas back overboard until you have something that can realistically be achieved in a finite time frame and a finite budget.
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Personally I lost interest years ago. Didn’t buy in be sure I was afraid this would happen (and holy it’s expensive). That being said, I look at the emails every once in a while and the game just seems so… Unwieldy and unnecessarily branched and just tons of that. It’s just not something that pulls at me anymore as more than an idle curiosity.
Yeah…same here. I paid and forgot about it…and like @Mudcat - I don’t even know what the game is about at this point. I just don’t have the time to keep up with it. What I do hope is that someday it will be released as a full working, playable game that is worth even more money. I’m sort of at that point with CAP2 as well… I don’t really want to get bits and pieces of development game and play it for a couple hours and marvel at the coolness of what IS done. I’d rather plunk down $50 and play a fully developed, ready to play game out of the box anymore. Otherwise, the shiny newness wears off…replaced instead by just incremental shiny newness.
It is why I’m pretty jazzed about Air Hauler and Air Hauler 2 - they will provide long haul gameplay (pun intended) and they are pretty much done (even though AH2 is still early access)…
Let’s not be disingenuous- try not to mis-compare it to a released product.
Try again.
Plus: since the very day Elite was pitched it was clearly stated that the FPS part is to come eventually. In a knowingly way Frontier had to process development on a iterative way. Such a huge game has to be developed that way. FPS was deemed less important that flight mechanics or a coherent universe. Calling ‘empty’ the Galaxy Elite is based in, is again disingenuous and not really honest… the Starforge tool allows them to create proper sized planets made from proper materials.
Which may again seem a pointless feat but instead shows again the far sightedness of Frontier. When the time for planets with atmosphere will come this procedural tool allow them to put vegetation and life where it naturally should be. And the astonishing results so far are really a sight to see that’s is also scientifically sound…
IMHO the point here is, if you’re doing iterative development, you need to think about still making your milestones somewhat conclusive, in that the player thinks “heck yeah this works as a game even without the FPS element that they want to do, even though when it’s finished it will be extremely nice to have”. From what i understand (and i got to admit i haven’t followed SC development and releases so far very closely) what has been released so far was a series of playable demos.
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well… it seems our opinions continue to differ about this topic, because honestly I don’t see it that way.
IMO I can compare Elite and SC quite well despite Elite being further advanced in its development schedule. That’s because in the playable alpha of SC there is content that - even if it would stay like that for release, which it probably won’t - shows how different (but similar in some things) those games are already.
I admit I haven’t followed Elite’s development as closely as SC’s, but at this point my best guess is that they pretty much shut that door to FPS, and thus to that full immersion experience Star Citizen is for me already. That playable persistent universe alpha running right now is really impressive in that regard, even though it runs rather crappy on my PC.
As for the cost: I am not sure why people always say SC is so expensive (comparing to Elite). Ok,ok, I spent 200 dollars on it. I did that because I am a long time Wing Commander fan and got sweet stuff for it. But you can experience the same thing for 30 bucks. It is completely unnecessary (and also probably dumb) to spend thousands of dollars for SC.
In the persistent universe alpha there are lots of people who are really nice and just put their big multicrew ships on the pad so you can fly around in them as a pilot or gunner, without paying any money. I have flown as a gunner shooting pirates in an asteroid field, then got out and repaired a comm satellite in FPS view, while that guy was flying around shooting some more stuff. Then he picked me up again. Going through the airlock was a WOW-Moment of the likes I haven’t experienced in a game for a long time.
In contrast: The Elite alpha was 300 dollars! That certainly put me off.
But back to Elite’s features. If they really go the FPS way they will have to rework lots of assets, which will be very time and money comsuming. OR the FPS part will be very limited, like in space and maybe a bit on stations and/or ships. X:Rebirth tried that and thought it would be easy. They were very very wrong.
The other thing is the space battles. IIRC Elite does the space flight physics somehow differently. Some people like it, some don’t, but I probably wouldn’t call it more accurate than SC. I think that’s one point where Elite is more of a space game while SC is more of a space sim. The 100,000 “real” (existing) star systems are a point I do understand though. Still probably wouldn’t call it “scientific” because almost nothing is known about those systems in real life, except the position and type of their stars.
Is Elite a great game? Yes, it has some great aspects to it it seems. Almost enough for me to buy it in fact. But its strengths are at the same time its weaknesses. My personal opinion of it still is that this huge universe feels empty and repetitive (from what I have seen in video and so on).
SC risks a lot by trying something that people call impossible, and they already did some stuff in those alphas people called impossible. It tries to be a new Privateer, which brings up something that matters for me, because I played both Privateer and the old Frontier: Elite 2. I loved Privateer, and I… I won’t say I hated Frontier, but… meh.
So in the end I think it boils down to two things:
- preference of play style. Elite players will probably not love SC, and vice versa. And that’s ok. Elite should stay Elite and not try to become like SC (FPS and all), while SC should not inflate, trying to be Elite and failing. I love the procedural stuff, but IMO they should probably not risk too much there and stay with what they can do better: Create hand-crafted, smaller stuff that feels big and immersive. The old Privateer had only around a few dozen systems, and it was great.
- if SC can’t finish their stuff as intended (or at least close) many SC fans will settle for Elite even if they would have preferred SC’s play style.
And to add to the picture memes and so on:
That’s my main point. Even if SC fails (and it might fail. Even spectacularly!) this was the right time to try I think. And that’s what draws some people in so much, me included. Space sims were pretty much dead except some small indy niche products. Then SC and E:D came. And it was good. 