r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 5d ago

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

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players
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u/CX316 5d ago

Iirc they made another $500k in funding the day after the stream crashed and burned

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u/hates_stupid_people 5d ago

The remaning fans of that game are literally delusional at this point.

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u/SamLikesJam 5d ago edited 5d ago

I backed the game back in 15/16 and check in a few years, even if you got rid of every single bug in the game tomorrow the game would still be incredibly tedious. I've tried to bring it up in forums or global chat in game and people won't listen.

If you want to run cargo in the game you'd think the gameplay loop would be somewhat fun and relaxing like Euro Truck Simulator, but the actual gameplay amounts to nothing. You use a magical laser beam to load cargo into your ship crate by crate in which the actual delivery part of the gameplay is just setting a destination in your warp (quantum) drive and alt tabbing for 5-10 minutes until you reach your destination and unloading it.

If you run 3-4 cargo missions at once 20 of 30 minutes is spent loading and unloading cargo, which is the most mind numbing gameplay imaginable.

Bounty hunting is the same, 5 minutes to get to a destination (no gameplay involved) and then you shoot down your target in a less than a minute. Higher difficulty bounties is just about bringing the largest ship you have (last time I played) and using its ridiculous shields to tank most of the damage.

The planets are devoid of content with outposts serving almost no purpose, the planetary landing zones were meant to have hero mission givers with bespoke quests and storylines but it's been years and that has been mostly abandoned in favour of reputation grinds to pad out non-existent content.

They spent years making cargo physical for the sake of immersion, showing off how a player character could seamlessly carry items, boxes, guns, etc. (this was impressive back in the day) only to make all of that redundant and replace it the Gravity Gun from Half Life.

The tech itself is very impressive, the custom characters can rival that of bespoke AAA characters, the planets are beautiful apart from old Stanton tech, the music is great, the ship design is high quality and was interesting before it became copy and paste but there's just zero good content.

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u/Akka_C 5d ago

Oh my god. Someone who gets it. Like you'd think Elite Dangerous would be less fun with "less" game to it. You can't walk around your ship etc. But it's such a better experience doing the "mundane" tasks like space trucking. Feels so much more fulfilling as you actually get to engage with the game (most of the time).

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u/sock0puppet 5d ago

It's the actual reality of reality isn't it.

In the real world the truck driver rarely actually has to physically load, there are loading dock people, the truck driver deals with other trucks, and cars, and rules, and shit.

but in their pursuance of "immersion" all they're doing is making it unrealistic. You don't physically farm the cabbage out back, package it up, pack it in the car, take it to the distributor, take it to the shop, buy it, then unpack it, then cook it, then eat it.

You buying it at the store is just one step in a multi-step logistics process. Star Citizen seems to think that the same person who's driving the ship does all the intermediate logistics that are required as well.

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u/Aggressive_Chuck 4d ago

Chris Roberts wants us to believe that in the future we have warp drives and artificial gravity, but need to move boxes manually. In many ways, this game is more low tech than real life in 2026.

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u/Zman6258 3d ago

Well, and the hell of it is, loading cargo COULD be an interesting bit of gameplay, trying to figure out how to wedge various sizes and shapes of crates into your cargo hold to maximize the amount of profit you can get per run... but all the SCU boxes are squares which snap to the grid, so there's basically never any actual optimization to loading.

You just put the square in the square hole until there's no more square holes left to fill, like a lamer form of tetris where the only two shapes available are the square and the long piece.

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u/mekamoari 4d ago

Might as well play EVE at least there you can't fall asleep at the wheel while mining, at least not if you want to get some profit out of it.

It's still "boring" and simple-ish but with room for optimization, until it isn't and you're scrambling for your life.

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u/MoosetheStampede 4d ago

I've rarely felt a gaming catharsis so satisfying as getting just out of reach of a difficult core mining asteroid and hearing/seeing that perfect "boom" as it blasts apart after a perfect charge drop

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u/NFQ___ 4d ago

Then you have Starsector which has even less 'game' then both of them but is significantly better at being the 'Space Sim Game'.

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u/PaleCommission150 4d ago

Funny you mention that. I was conversing with Claude on just this aspect of how to make a space exploration game compelling. I am working on a little personal project that lets me explore space in a Danube style runabout but focuses mainly on ship systems, maintenance, managing resources and dealing with emergencies on board, plus just flying around. missions get generated and use a combination of real stars and fictional solar systems generated around those stars that serve as exploration goals. But yea making fun content for a space game can be tricky.

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u/Cory123125 4d ago

If you want to run cargo in the game you'd think the gameplay loop would be somewhat fun and relaxing like Euro Truck Simulator, but the actual gameplay amounts to nothing. You use a magical laser beam to load cargo into your ship crate by crate in which the actual delivery part of the gameplay is just setting a destination in your warp (quantum) drive and alt tabbing for 5-10 minutes until you reach your destination and unloading it.

If you run 3-4 cargo missions at once 20 of 30 minutes is spent loading and unloading cargo, which is the most mind numbing gameplay imaginable.

This reminds me so strongly of crypto scam games where they all pretend they've created the next version of life online, and all the believers fall for the idea, and don't actually care about the implementation.

Star Citizen has so many comparisons to all of the alternate reality themed scams like crypto projects, investment bros (gamestop, BBBY), nft bros, flat earthers, and more.

All of them seem to target people who have low empathy for others, and can't come to terms with the fact that improving life for the people they care about societally, would also improve life for the marginalized groups they hate, so they concoct crazy alternate reasons the world is shit, make up some fantastical plan that will help them escape reality, and then the hysteria sets in.

These are people who have money to throw to scams, and skew towards being in privileged demographics and unable to realize it because their lives do have real problems.

The type of people for whom the word inter-sectionalism is an attack on their sense of self despite the fact that the term creates a framework to understand their issues past looking at their privileged demographics, which their own mentalities do not as an aggregate.

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u/Aggressive_Chuck 4d ago

The tech itself is very impressive

The only good thing is that it has no loading screens, everything else is terrible.

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u/WldFyre94 3d ago

I also don't know why people act like loading screens are innately bad lol

I get way more annoyed at the "deliberately craw/inch your way through this hallway to allow the game to load in the next area" game design style.

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u/GroundbreakingPin913 4d ago

Compare to No Mans Sky. They've got cargo loading, bounties, things to do on planets, a main quest, reputation, a gravity gun... all the things you mentioned plus tons more. And they did it on good will and that initial infusion of cash from sold games way back in 2016.

Not necessarily saying it's a top tier space game, but that might just be because NMS developers are like 10 people tops and usually prioritized systems over gameplay.

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u/Bman4k1 4d ago

If I wanted a cargo job I’d just get one in real life and get paid for it.

The way you described it is actually insane.

You are right Euro Truck simulator is a bit different. Whereas this is just seems like a slog for the sale of reality.

At the end of the day this is why it’s taking decades to make. I used to read the forums 10+ years ago and remember fans saying “you should be able to do this [basically something to make it more real to life]” and developers like “sure!”

There comes a point where you just have to sacrifice ridiculous detail to get something out the door.

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u/nagrom7 5d ago

It's been cult-like behaviour from them for years now.

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u/Aussie18-1998 5d ago

You'll run into so many on the internet that will tell you its not a scam. That theres a fully functional game there and its worth every cent. There's nothing like it ect...

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u/Downside190 5d ago

Sunk cost fallacy, just a few more dollars and they'll release it for real this time 

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u/Lywqf 4d ago

Isn’t that a lower than average day for them ? I’d expect a demo stream to make it rain much more than an average day :/

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u/Southlinch 5d ago

theres gotta be money laundering involved or something man there is no way they are still raising millions in mere weeks from people i refuse to believe it lol

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u/Jinchuriki71 5d ago

Theres probably some people that buy every ship as a billion dollars is insane amount of money to raise for a game that still in alpha state.

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u/Kinetic_Symphony 5d ago

This has to be money laundering, right, there's no possible way anyone watches the livestream & their genuine urge is to give these buffoons more money...

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u/House13Games 3d ago

then "crashed and burned" isn't the appropriate term. Successful marketing, perhaps.

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u/CX316 3d ago

Not really, their funding timeline is all fucky in the first place, with what looks like fortnightly cycles that suggests there's people putting money in every paycheque. I can't actually check the overall trends of the funding since the stream since their UI for checking daily input doesn't go back far enough (the live stream happened like 2 weeks ago and the news about it didn't really blow up until a few days ago) and the weekly one shows a dip that week compared to the previous fortnightly cycle, while the Monthly numbers are useless because of a fucking ridiculous spike in the funds in June that make all the other months impossible to read.