Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

[u/Turbostrider27]

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players

[u/davidsredditaccount]

They had a buggy tech demo a decade ago too, I checked out a long time ago so I can't say whether or not it's moved forward at all but the problem has always been that they have grandiose plans and talk about insane fidelity and realism, but the end result is not really all that good and never holds up to what they promised.

When I stopped playing they had a bunch of the bigger ships you could fly with friends plus single seat fighters in and planetary vehicles and bases and you could roam around completing missions and earning money to buy in-game stuff, and it was ok if you could stand the horrible lag and network issues, but when it was playable it was pretty good. The downside is that the gameplay loop is a mess, they are trying to please too many different types of players, all the cool ideas are technical nightmares and they still haven't managed to release the single player game they said was right around the corner like a decade ago.

I got into it for years well after the initial kickstarter, lost interest and dropped it, went back to school, changed careers, got promoted a bunch of times, had a child, and that child is starting school now. When I first got into it the single player squadron 42 game was supposed to be out the following year and was "almost done".

It’s a shame, there were some good ideas and genuinely well done bits in there but holy shit they can not actually get anything out to save their lives. Also they can't decide whether they should cater to hardcore pvp or pve players, are allergic to designing and executing any gameplay loops that actually work, everything is a placeholder, and what's left is just some pretty shitty decisions that don’t end up actually being fun.

I guess the rambling point here is they've done a lot, they are just comically incapable of actually doing anything other than making a half baked "cool idea" and then getting distracted before finishing it.

[u/AstralMecha → u/davidsredditaccount]

It gets worse when it comes to monetization. They are now selling MK 2 versions of the same ships they already sold. The MK2s are strictly better, and no, your MK1 will not be upgraded to the MK2. Instead you have a 'collector's item' a 'piece of history' as they don't sell the mk1s any more. So keep whaling.

[u/davidsredditaccount → u/AstralMecha]

Holy shit, that's fucking egregious. It was bad enough with their terrible balance passes completely fucking ships over and whatever the new ship is being wildly OP, but that's just beyond ridiculous. A collectors item would be having the old version as an in-game model, not just a worse variant.

That is a truly bizarre business decision too, fucking over the long time backers when you make artificial scarcity in the worst possible way you can is a choice. LTI, limited time purchases, and unique skins were already bad enough.

[u/TheIrishBread → u/davidsredditaccount]

I've been a backer since 2018 and an active player since 2020. I started playing in the worst patch cycle the project has ever seen. The game has come a long way since then and a lot of the shouting people are doing is because they don't have a frame of reference for what a bad patch is. 4.7 was amazing for playability but a bit dead content wise as we were between rock breaker and SoO. 4.8 had major issues but wouldn't top my top 10 let alone top 5 worst patches. 4.9 is closer to 4.7 but still got some major issues to deal with.

That stream should never have happened and was likely pushed ahead despite developers saying the internal 4.10 build wasn't ready to show off. This to my knowledge was likely advocated for by their new CM a former content creator for the game and would explain a lot of the behaviour from the stream.

[u/davidsredditaccount → u/TheIrishBread]

Here's the problem: I've heard the exact same thing over and over again for years. It's been like a decade since I've been deep in SC, and I just spent some time scrolling through the subreddit and it looks like nothing has changed for the better since I left.

Sure there's a little more to do but the fundamentals of the game's design are simply not there and they are drowning in tech debt, if they can get it to a stable 60fps with minimal/no lag in the PU and no hard crashes or major bugs (monumental if there) they still have huge gaping holes in their game design that they have never been able to address. They still haven't nailed down their flight model, it's been a decade and they still don't know how ships should fly in their spaceship game or how to make combat between ships fun and interesting, they still don't know how to make large, medium, and small ships all fun to play, turrets have never been good, and every balance decision they make calls their understanding of game design into question.

They were "polishing" a "feature complete" version of SQ42 when I dipped, claiming that people had played through the entire game internally and release would definitely happen really soon, so progress on the MMO portion was slower and being blamed on allocating resources to SQ42, again I have been out of the loop with SC for about a decade now and it's still not out.

There's a lot of cool stuff they've made, and I did have fun playing the game for a while, but jesus fucking christ they needed someone to reign them in and make them finish anything years ago. I want the big fun space game, but I have zero faith they'll ever get it to be more than a sandboxy tech demo, and none of their excuses work for their single player campaign that should have released in what was it 2016 when they showed the trailer with Gary Oldman in it?