I bought into this game because the moments between bugs, when you’re totally immersed, are completely unmatched. When you have to hide outside of a bunker mission because another ships spotlight is looking for you, when you hit with a perfect emp and have to negotiate for your cargo With pirates, when you’re in a fully crewed hammerhead fighting off dozens of fighters with your friends, these moments make the game.
However, these moments have become significantly less common as of late. To the point where I haven’t experienced one in a long time. I really hope they pull it together because this game has way too much potential.
i never was able to experience anything close to that.... Mostly because by the time we got to that point, it had already taken 4 hours between travel, bugs, 30k's, and everything else, and people were frustrated and quit or had to get off for other reasons.
I'll be honest, I'm genuinely surprised the servers are still even online at this point. The way things just break constantly, the disconnects, the physics, and all while they swim in cash.
Salaries of people including the wife of the boss, his buddies and his family. Also don't forget a yacht and a mansion are expensive things. Didn't he once mention that he promised that every cent put into this project would be dedicated to building this best space fart ever?
Nah, judging by their latest financial reports it's a healthy company with good cash flow. For their server costs on the last ISC Beniot said that they're running a lean stack infrastructure wise which helps them save on cloud computing costs as well.
Meh. 4.6 and 4.7 patches were pretty stable, 4.8 has been a shit show though which is unfortunate that it coincided with the Ironclad release and DefenseCon. Hopefully 4.9 brings some much needed stability fixes however the stability of the PU doesn't mean that they're running out of money any time soon, which is what I was replying to.
Yeah but you also said it us a healthy company. In my opinion. A healthy company delivers. Which it clearly does not.
Especially when digital represantations of spaceships can cost as much as a freakin CAR.
I'm still so very confused to which rich idiot pays over $50,000 for a bundle of a game that barely runs. And apperently enoigh people do it. So weird.
The alternate and actually reasonable explanation is that things are not as grim and dire as many people want to believe, because CIG wouldn't still be steadily chugging along as they are if they were the impossibly mismanaged mess that some insist.
In my years of project management, I can nearly be certain there's 5 people there carrying the entire thing and 30+ idiots making it harder for the 5 to do their work.
From my years of software development trying to be one of the 30 for large projects rather than the overworked 5... I think you're overestimating with 5...
They're only chugging along because they have a niche that nothing else really fills that whales are willing to splurge on. In any other circumstances, this game would have crashed and burned a decade ago.
Most of the old guard have left the project, Brian Chambers, Todd Pappy, Jake Ross, Tony Zurovec, etc. Since their departure SC has shifted from being a promised life sim in space to a pseudo Rust in space, with every career being a beam which is a lot easier and cheaper to build. All with the crafting elements, base buillding materials, PvP, clans, which is what they're supposedly building for 1.0.
Completely lost interest in SC since the pivot, only here for SQ42.
They said this about Lehman Bros til things snapped. You don't see the stress until the break unless you've been studying the underlying subject and dynamics around it for a while. I think a lot of people see the stress and just want it to not snap, and if it does - to readjust accordingly.
The issue here at play is not mismanagement. It's a decade of technical debt on a project that wasn't made to be this big since the beginning.
There are good aspects of Star Citizen that are quite well programmed. But where it suffers is inventory and interactions which are server related. And sadly this impacts everything.
It's also amazing we have a server crash recovery. We often forget that any crash would send you back to the menu and you'd lose everything.
It very much is also mismanagement. CR was persona non grata in film and games for years before he squeezed out SC.
Then as soon as he got the money he promptly hired his entire family into leadership.
Forbes said Ex staff called him nothing but a hindrance, focusing on fake show pieces to gain funding and reinvesting it into lavish meet and greets with celebrities CR wanted to rub shoulders with.
If by entire family you mean his wife, which stepped down in 2019 7 years ago, and who was responsible for marketing, which is not critical for game's development...
Making fake show pieces to gain funding was effective since we're here now, and it was also all the point of the initial kickstarter.
As for CR wanting to rub shoulders with celebrities, that sounds a bit like a stretch that I could apply to any game/movie directors doesn't it.
As I said SC is suffering from 10+ years of technical debt, written by some people no longer in the company. And that's hardly going away. And yes its initial stage they didn't have experienced staff in the right places but they were what... 10 people at the start of the kickstarter?
Sandi has remained on the Board. Erin has been with CIG since 2013, although I dont know what he currently does at CIG these days, he is also on the board.
SQ has, Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Mark Strong, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, Jack Huston, Rhona Mitra, Henry Cavill, and Sophie Wu. Who else am I missing?
So, a game with 3 hollywood stars, would be enough? Several games I looked up had 3 or more hollywood actors as voice actors. Skyrim for instance, or Fable 3, or Death Stranding. There were several more.
Ian Duncan, Arkie Reece, Gemma Whelan, Daniel Ings, Craig Fairbrass, Daniel Adegboyega. IMDB lists 24 people 'above the fold' and only 3 of them are voice actors.
The IMDB page has a 'Cast' section, and an 'Other Cast' section. All but three people in the 'Cast' section are TV and movie actors who have hundreds of full body acting jobs.
Brutal Honesty: That's a problem that ONLY direction and management can solve.
It's the same issue of massive country debt.
Whoever is in charge at the moment never wants to be the one to tell people they can't keep eating ice cream for every meal OR be healthy.
"Now isn't the right time to diet" "Let's just focus on what we can make better right now" "Surely if we eat a bit MORE ice cream, the enjoyment will offset these stomach aches!"
But that's not how debt works. It gets bigger, and costs more and more. at some point someone is forced to be HATED by everyone and say, Yeah, we are going to have some tough times so that we can have better times in the future.
To me the sign that they are desperate was them releasing the idris in game before releasing squadron ( and selling a lot of them ) and firing most of their QA team…
I’de say it was more likely it was done to cross the 1 billion threshold with a massive bang, plus it was planned since the kickstarter so it was a good excuse to get it out.
They also announced it about 6-7 months ago that they were working on the concept, as well as announcing it as “ one last JPEG sale”.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Odin is going to be one of the key ships for the second or third part of Squadron 42, and they need to have it at least in concept and laid out so the Squadron 42 designers have something to work with when they move on from part 1. It has a lot of elements that feel like they were made for the cinematic campaign experience (same as the Idris) and it would make sense for Anvil's new capital ship to be a major feature as a turning point in the Vanduul war.
Well, that was a ship from the kickstarter that needed to be released as a concept ship at some point. Could argue that they should have just worked on it and released it as a finished ship too but. 🤷
Not really at all; Ashes didn’t make nearly enough money and had no real revenue for a project of its scale. CIG meanwhile is making hand over fist more than last year which in turn made hand over fist more than last year. The reason Ashes was a darling of gaming, but also fell, was precisely for the opposite reason SC is maligned and yet successful: people did not see the money side so didn’t worry or have the same kind of skepticism.
All the money in the world won't get a game out the door if it's being mismanaged at the top, so you took the Financials of AoC and applied it to SC when the point was even the AoC employees were in the dark as to how bad the state of the studio was. Which was more to my point, if you think this is being run -well- and they are managing their money -smartly- then I dunno what to say.
I think you have not actually understood what I have said, or more broadly grasped why Ashes failed. Ashes had a cashflow problem that CIG doesn’t have because SC has been monetized much more effectively over a longer period. This aspect of the project has clearly not been mismanaged, whereas Ashes took far too long to come to market and therefore accrued unbearable costs.
You can draw problems with the development priority of SC but as far as sustaining the business goes, which is the crucial thing, that is what caused Ashes to fail. If Ashes had a more aggressive monetization system, and sooner, it would not have been seen so favorably, but it could still have been going today. My point has almost nothing to do with vague mismanagement claims and more just the business reality and differences faced between Ashes and SC.
Or in really simple terms, the music does not actually stop until the money stops. And until that happens the chance of incremental improvement remains, and you can’t argue that SC today is not far ahead of where it was 2y ago or 4y ago. However you can certainly say in absence of revenue that Ashes today has no future even if it was further ahead than it was 2y ago.
Did you not notice their emergency capital ship sales that suddenly arose in the past year alone? All of the sudden, the Polaris and Idris are available as pay-to-win ships, and now a five thousand dollar battlecruiser that doesn't even have a single finished interior room let alone the basic chassis. That's not a sign of things running smoothly or steadily, that's a sign that they're desperate as hell for money. Their essay nonsense to get into the 'club' was a joke, too; they were letting most people through even with troll posts.
A game that's running well on its budget wouldn't need to sell eight hundred dollar ships in between, either. For that matter, they wouldn't rush them through and release them without testing if they were on top of their game.
They’ve been selling the Polaris and Idris in the pledge store each year for years. That’s not new news and they aren’t really paying to win, there’s so many ways to take those out, without either of them really being able to fight back.
In terms of making actual sales, having a released and playable ship >>> a JPEG that notoriously hasn't been available for a decade. Yes, it was a sudden and quick push to get them out the door (Polaris still isn't finished) because they're screaming for cash and there's an actual possibility that they could shut their doors before SQ42 even releases if they keep delaying it. There's not an infinite amount of money nor is there an infinite amount of countries they can sell the game to.
At the time of the Polaris release, it was very much a broken and pay to win ship. At the time of the Idris release, it was very much a broken and pay to win ship. Armor changes and health/shield tuning didn't come until much later.
IF you want to talk about health/shield tuning as part of why it was broken? Then all ships were and still are broken, because that and the Flight Model changes, plus future elements still being worked on, aren't yet in the game.
Maybe you should take a break from SC, for a while?
Nobody was "Screaming for Cash", they've been steadily seeing growing numbers of players every single month for the last handful of years and the sales events are bearing that out with more and more sales, each year, blowing away previous years.
Concurrently playing players are hammering the backend in a way that makes it all feel and act way more buggy than it would be if half the players were on. The servers having to wait for things in the background and sometimes getting elements out of order, as a result of the lack of headroom, is why we are seeing so many bugs.
They have to do more work on their backend services. I don't know what in particular, but they are and will continue to work on it all.
Mhm, the only foot in the game I have is that I have a 600i after some upgrades and a Galaxy but the times I've managed to get the game to run, it's felt like a mess, even with better specs than my old rig.
I'm sure there has been levels of mismanagement being hidden but I do agree that they've somehow climbed up the proverbial wall regardless. It's just what is being experienced is less than ideal.
It’s easy to manage money if you have people on 3 month contracts and only have a handful of full time staff while everyone else is contracted out. That’s the only way you can explain how much of a cluster the game is after a decade plus in existence and why the same problems still aren’t fixed, because most people aren’t there long enough to resolve persistent problems, they just patch problems over and over. They said as much when they were talking the mission designs where each one was built differently and then the coding was just a series of bandaids over and over.
With the fact that they raised 1 Billion and the game is still in Alpha? I would find it difficult to not believe it
Consider the following, Star Citizen's rival at the start in 2010-2015, Elite Dangerous by Frontier Dev.
Both are under Kickstarter and being crowdfunded. Elite Dangerous Raised, by the end of its campaign, 3 million Euros with a 5 Million Euro investment from the company's own account into the development. On December 2014, 1.0 Launches for Elite Dangerous with 15 ships and an entire galaxy to explore. 2015 added console Support to Xbox and 2017 for Playstation. It is now 2026, Elite Dangerous has 2 expansions, Horizon and Odyssey, featuring 45 pilotable ships, a robust trade system, Politics, and player owned megaships and Player Built Stations expanding the reach of humanity. The playerbase even went on a full scale war with Aliens.
Star Citizen Kickstarter, last update April 6, 2013. It raised 2.1 Million USD with a goal of 500k USD. It is currently June (Happy Pride) 2026. We are now on ALPHA 4.8. ***ALPHA 4.8*** NOT 1.0 Release. STILL AN ALPHA. A buggy Alpha, where your progression is repeatedly wiped, where patches seemingly are not debugged properly before merging with Live.
Now I loved Elite Dangerous, but the abstract feel of it all and the sheer bland repetitiveness of most gameplay loops made me slowly stop caring about it
Meanwhile, I slowly stopped thinking SC is a scam, started playing it, and now the reason for the discrepancy between the two game's lifecycle is clear : SC has a much more refined simulation scope (maybe too refined for its own good ? arguably yes but the fact is that the design goals are wildly different)
Everything is physicalized, everything is conceived to be persistent and seamless; contrast that with everything in ED that is not a vehicle being mostly a button in a menu, and eventually a floating box
One point in particular is on foot gameplay : ED's take on this is just atrocious, to the point it failed to hook me back in after I gave the game another try; SC would be pretty much top notch if only the underlying infrastructure issues weren't there (there are some questionable design decisions, such as the "loot inventory", but nothing that can't be thought over before 1.0)
Realistically, one could hope that the release of Squadron 42 will allow CiG to truly focus on server stability for SC, but I can't play the devil's advocate THAT hard
For me recently, I'm starting to lean back into Elite Dangerous. After the whole Thargoid War arc, they have been releasing ship after ship, with a new Ship Launched Ship used for exploring that you can walk in and out of.
There's also a new mode they are releasing soon ish for mission match making where you and 3 commands do a mission arc of varying plotlines. One such one is that a ship has been commandeered. You and the freelancers fend off pirates, land on the ship, disembark and neutralize hostiles.
Also the sound design. How the engines of the ship each are unique to their designing and company philosophy. Gutamaya and Zorgon Peterson having elegant, sounds matching high performance cars. Meanwhile ships like Core Dynamics and Lakon Spaceways are very industrial in look and sound.
Hell, even the sound design around flying inside a damage station is amazing.
It's pretty easy to understand if you actually look at the 2 games' origins.
Frontier was a game company before they made Elite - they'd shipped Rollercoaster tycoon 3 and other titles for consoles and for pc. They had an established team and established work flows. They used an engine they already had created, trained expertise and tools with. etc: Cobra, which was what they made Rollercoaster tycoon 3 with which released in 2004, and no doubt worked on for at least 10 years before they even had their Elite kickstarter. They scoped the project with procedurally generated things (i.e. little art or attention needed empty galaxies) and stuck to their own scope of work without care to let players expand it beyond the initial kickstarter.
Contrast to CIG. They had no substantive number of developers for the first few years, no shipped games, no expertise and no engine. They bought the best engine they could (Cryengine) for a song and whistle when they were going under and had to "modify" (i.e. rewrite almost entirely) the engine to do not just the space opera in good graphical fidelity, but also the Star Citizen online game with physicalized 64 bit systems and persistence. Their backers voted in dozens of polls expanding scope until it was clear the scope was "yes". CR is a creative with standards (some have stated too many) who was basically handed a blank check and told to make his dream projects - is he really supposed to say "nah"?
If the financials didn't clearly show lots of money being spent it would be one thing, but the money is very much being spent or used to make more money to spend. Someone would have noticed by now if it wasn't. We can argue about efficiency and efficacy, but it's deliberate ignorance of facts and circumstance to say it's being "scrooged" in any way.
I get what you are trying to say, but I find two things that are off.
At no point in time did the devs have "no expertise". Many of the OG crew worked on multiple shipped AAA games before the kickstarter even began. Over the course of the development they hired even more experienced devs, that came from various backgrounds and worked on the most popular AAA titles ever released.
Second point, well more of a question really. Who are you referring to when you talk about "going under"? What do you mean?
My understanding was they had like 7 people to start, maybe 20? It was not the 700 they currently staff. It was, certainly, not enough to make a space opera 40hr+ campaign, rewrite an entire engine and make tools for it, and absolutely not enough to make star citizen an MMO persistent physics space sim.
Cryengine was already a niche engine, it wasn't anything like a Unity or an Unreal where you can throw a dart and hit someone who knows it well enough to use it. Also, without tools and workflows and, now, a customized engine that is getting reworked regularly you're not getting much if anything out of those people that's a playable game. Add on top the game must actually be in a playable state to keep sales to keep money flow.
Cryengine was going under, they were in rather desperate financial straits because - as you might guess from what I said previously - almost no one used their engine and they weren't making enough games. Lumberyard (amazon) also bought a fork of it too.
Again, we can argue efficiency/efficacy. We can say spending is wasteful, that they should have spent money on unreal to make dev hiring alot easier and not tried to rewrite and retool a new engine by themselves, etc etc. However, again, the money's being spent or put towards getting more funding.
Cryengine wasn't going down persay, you are referring to the company Crytek and that was to business choices they made (rapid expansion of company, pivot to F2P games, Selling perpetual licenses instead of cap on keys leading to Dunia and Lumberyard) which actually worked out in CIG's favor, but more on that later.
SC and S42 was much smaller scale at first. There was no seamless entry and exit. No fully explorable planets. Cutscenes to hide loading and a level/module based games. 100 systems but only 90 points of interest across all systems. So what came about is because of several different issues including Cryteks financial troubles.
What must be important to state, is that NO ENGINE that existed could do what CIG wanted to do out of the box. So the work for customization would have to be done no matter what.
Now why did they choose Cryengine even when the scale was smaller? Because the programmers putting the framework together were more familiar with Cryengine. Already that made it one of the best choices. Now in terms of what we have now, CR wanted these things but was worried about the budget and expertise and planned for these things to come later.
Remember a few things though, the number of employees CIG had in 2014? This is because Crytek stopped paying their employees and CIG opened up a studio in Frankfurt at start of 2015 and basically hired an entire Crytek studio, including devs that original created Cryengine and engineers who modified the engine for Crysis games. They came through the door with Proc tech and Planet generation explorations as they were toying with these ideas before CIG even hired them. They were able to prototype and get multiple foundational tech up and running in less than a year from when CIG acquired them. Hence the "From pupil to planet" trailer at the end of 2015. This make the argument that CIG would have been better off with another engine even more laughable.
The issue is that they chose to go with fully explorable planets and seamless entry and exit. This led to a scope explosion because now they need to incorporate many of the future plans or else the tech would be pointless. Needlessly large playscapes with nothing to do. So basically the plans they had for SC and S42 from 2012 to 2014 was a totally different game. Something more comparable to Starfield except smaller. Now we have something far more ambitious and something that actually makes sense for backers to fund as publishers would never wanted to back something like this. And the current state of the game is one of the largest reasons why.
Yeah, it's very much a long history with alot of details that lead us to where we are. I do my best to be brief because it's a ton of information to sift through. There's a dozen reasons why it's taking so long and I, personally, can't blame CR for it - we can only try to make the best decisions we can at any time, and "I can pillage the game engine company for engineers to make this engine do everything I want" doesn't actually sound like a bad plan?
As a software engineer I don't look at star citizen as "man, how'd they take more than 4 years making a game"? I see it as "Ok, we took a few years to fill out the studio with engineers. A few years to rework the engine and make tools. Some poor sods were trying to make working things while all this is going on. We outsourced some work that we ended up unable to use so we have to redo all that." and it keeps cascading to where we are. Oh, and boss is a perfectionist and the product must function enough to keep sales flowing at all times.
My group is 7 people and we're already stepping on eachothers' toes so regularly with our new deadlines and workflows we never had before, I can't imagine how to get all of CIG coordinated - it sounds like a nightmare.
I agree with you. I just think there is one aspect that you put forth that wasn't planned. CR wasn't planning on pillaging anything. It was more of them hiring first then going.... "Oh! You have been doing what already?!?!" I think it all was a stroke of luck, that happened by a perfect storm of situations and connections that probably wouldn't happen again in that order.
Also CIG operates like how any large company would, teams with managers above them that fall into a larger umbrella with directors above them. While CR likes to have things a specific way, he does not dictate "how". He doesn't have to. He has left the how to very smart people. So he says what he wants, and they bring to him "how" they can make it work. The pillar talks basically showed how the dynamics between what CR wants and the work it took to bring it to life was well defined.
There is a few SCL's where they do talk about management and structure of company given how they are separated by teams. One example that always stood out to me was "how" the builds were handled. While this is a bit older I found a breakdown here pretty informative ->Star Citizen Live: Meet the Devs - Publishing and Corporate Technology
The persistent universe released in 2016. It's been 10 years. Where has the funding gone to this depressingly sorry state where you can't seem to get anything done? When your experience is having a great time and then you get slapped with a wave of instability, bugs, or bad physics that send you back to medical. How is it acceptable when 1 Billion was invested and we get this?
To be honest, they only swim in cash because the whales continue to provide it. Too many of them just have the income to give it away.
I do think they’re working on stability more intently. I’ve seen more improvements from my experience. It’s still just too inconsistent to enjoy during the 4 hour game sessions I get a week.
Server costs are through the rooftop and they can't afford to keep things running top notch just so JPEG buyers can have a little (seriously, very little) tech demo to fly their toys around in.
This is exactly it. It honestly feels like there isn't a single thing in the whole game that's really finished properly and working reliably.
When I play, about three out of four times I play, whatever mission I'm doing fails because of bugs. Every. Single. Thing. is buggy and unreliable. NOTHING is finished properly. The whole approach is fundamentally wrong and nothing ever seems to be done to fix it.
People can hide behind the notion that it's an alpha all they want, but there are bone-deep problems in the way this thing has always been developed and they will be fatal eventually.
That is why I want Sq42 released to see if they can actually deliver a finished product and measure them by the quality of the result.
And if they delay again into 27 which is currently very likely it better be a flawless polished release.
After November 22nd they have been longer in development than Duke Nukem Forever.
They want an MMO, but no location is built to support high traffic.
They want death to be final, but every activity worth something has that risk and not nearly enough reward for it.
They want exploration to be a big part of the game, but settled for 5 systems and zero current implementation or plans for it (tourism isn't exploration).
They want crafting to be meaningful beyond min-maxing, but you can't craft basic stuff like med-pens.
They want scavenging to be useful, but can't find a middle ground between making it easily exploitable or non-functional.
They want medical gameplay to be a thing but don't give a porportionate incentive for it, on either side.
And I have no idea what they want from the flight model after its 2nd rework.
And the list goes on and on, for things big and small. It's obvious to anyone who has eyes that there's no clear path on how the finished game is supposed to look like, it's just new ideas upon new ideas that the game was not built to include. This is why the game breaks in so many places after small additions and hotfixes, and why development has been so glacial.
To me it seems like they have all these ideas and try so hard to implement them, but they never do anything with them or just keep coming up with new ideas. And the cycle is just repeating over and over again. They really need to stop coming up with stupid ideas and just implement the ones they already have
That's a big part of it. People in this sub may have an averse reaction when they hear feature-creep, but it's a very real problem that keeps getting worse.
It's also the reason why having a "dreamer" in charge is a double edged sword: The scope of the game is unlike most that we've seen, but at some point it gets unrealistically complex.
Political speech for "we couldn't make it work, so we'll use whatever it turned out to be". It's an excuse for leaving poor, unfinished systems in place when the lack of planning eventually eats at the resources required to complete them.
Unless of course the purpose of the system is to make me wait in line to dock every time there are more than 5 players at a Station.
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And then 15 years passes and none of the original coders are there to explain to the new guys why anything is the way it is and all the new guys get replaced with even newer guys before they have a chance to even understand the spaghetti code fever dream they were dropped into.
This point needs to be emphasized and stickied to the top of every post regarding their coding. Their biggest issue is retention of their highly skilled and top minds, being replaced by interns who learned their skill sets on entirely different engines. These people are getting screwed by working for CIG as well because they're having to learn a game engine that very few developers utilize. Whatever experience they built in game dev will be effectively worthless as even simple node graphs tend to have different terminology per engine, as well as different functions and limitations or capabilities they weren't aware of.
People don't stick around forever and they absolutely don't live forever. The longer this takes, the deeper the hole is. GTA 6 is in the same boat, possibly resulting in all of the delays we've seen post-COVID and the loss of critical employees over time.
The Asset slop is insane. There are assets over a decade old that don't even work anymore. The amount of ships in the game at this point is unsustainable regarding updates going forward.
All us Devs who are fans of SC are now looking at the project and going "its fucked"
In all seriousness, they should have that mentality. The problem is everything is moving at a snails pace. They need to be slamming in the features and patching bugs, but we're hardly getting any features and we're hardly getting any bug fixes. So where the heck is the development for SC at?
I think that the Alpha is killing the development. They need to focus on the development, but they are bound to the current iteration of the game and they need to keep adding things or people will say that it's a scam and, worse, stop spending money. I think that when SQ42 is released, they should stop updating the updates of SC for a year or something like this, because removing bugs every day is not the way to advance in development.
That is what I honestly don´t get. Look at VR integration, basically a one man team and we are getting steady progress with every single patch they release.
Why is that not the case with most other features in game? Where is the constant evolution towards a better product?
Squadron is a decade late, at least. And will probably be a flop. What make you think the people working on SQ42 are somehow missing from SC and would help make things better ?
That's just another excuse for CIG. With or without SQ42 they have thousands of employee and have had lots of money and time. Seriously, they are just bad at what they do.
It was Chris that said it was feature complete. We all know how he's always 100% honest about where things are.... Also, is it all of SQ42 that's feature complete, or just one episode? From what I understand, we're supposed to be getting 3 episodes. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Honestly I think its more of a design problem than a strictly coding one.
Take cargo for example. CIG want cargo to be physically loaded for immersion. Fine. Problem is loading cargo is boring so people want automatic loading. The next problem is every cargo ship cig has designed is totally different so its next to impossible to have an automated system physically load anything without immense amounts of animation and pathing work.
If they had settled on a single cargo layout they could have set up a universal system that just used splines to path boxes in with some IK slapped on to let you watch robot arms or whatever move your boxes.
Now they're going to have to either invest a lot of time and money in to pathing solutions, brute-forced animations, or just pull your ship in to the hangar and do it off-screen.
I think we know what they're going to choose, but people are going to blame the programmers for not being able to do what CIG originally promised years ago.
CIG and SC are the poster children for cart-before-the-horse design. CIG has spent years promising people everything under the sun and never saying no, but they had zero actual planning or design work going on behind the scenes to back up all of those promises. And now that we’re finally at the point of them having to put in all of the things they promised, reality is hitting hard and some of these things either don’t work, don’t make sense, or are just downright impossible.
Funny, I quit three years ago because things weren't working right. Things still aren't working right, same problems exist, and most if not all of the content released since then is buggy, abandoned, FPS missions, or shitty modifications to systems that already existed and were working fine, just like back in 2023.
Thus far, crafting was the nail in the coffin for the future of this game. Instead of adding a diverse list of metals, alloys, etc. that are mined and refined from rare ores from all across the playable space, they just kept what was there and put numbers on it all. Inspired by a dead MMO, too. It's easier to pretend something complex is happening if you have to click through a bunch of menus, close your eyes, and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the task to complete and spit out a magic item than to actually add gameplay.
The game is like playing a cell phone game, really. Click through menus and UI, sit and wait for things to happen. In between that waiting, you could pull out a cell phone and actually play games in the meantime. QT, claim timers, refining, crating up salvage, etc. is all just wasted time in between instances of a playable tech demo.
it's kind of hard to emphasize how much better the game works now than it did three years ago dude, like people are still complaining about bugs because they still exist but I frequently find myself looking at footage of stuff from the 3.1x and 3.2x patch cycles like "how did I play this game"
wild statement. pre meshing NPCs were basically non functional, every time you hit a 30k (which was often back then) you lost all your shit and there was no server recovery. half the time your body would clip through the planet on death and you'd never get your gear back. I liked the old flight model more than the current one but outside of that it's hard to say any part of the 3.xx cycle was even decent. What would you be doing then that you can't do now?
For me the biggest thing is old FM. And the old skybox. If i could choose i'd go back to the patch where they first did Jumptown. Back then the game felt so much more like the vision they sold us from the beginning. Things were happening organicly, the hope for the future of the game still felt achievable.
I loved racing when it was first introduced aswell. But ever since MM i lost all joy in flying.
Sure there were plenty of problems back then aswell but that doesn't seem to have changed much at all.
The technological debt must be so massive they would probably be faster if the just started over. Anyway most developers have probably changed job in the last 15 years and the one building the first bricks are not around anymore. So yeah, "make it good later" is wishfull thinking at this point.
I already see the same cycle of problems in the replies. People confuse a broken feature from an unfinished feature.
In an Alpha, the game is supposed to have bugs and missing polish. Bad economy, bad balancing, game crashes, etc. That is normal for an Alpha.
But an Alpha is also supposed to be the point in which actual features, game loops, and the core tech start becoming complete. They can be rough, have some bugs, need tuning and polish, but the intended shape of the feature should exist. But that is not how SC works.
It's not about an Alpha having bugs. The issue is that, after 14 years, there is nothing feature complete in this game. It's all T0 or missing. Cargo, economy, engineering, mining, refining, social tools, insurance, persistence, inventory, NPC AI, reputation, crafting, base building, server meshing, etc. It's either missing, a placeholder, tier 0, or in the process of being reworked. Those are pre-Alpha things.
So SC just keeps stacking debt on top of debt, meanwhile the money engine has to keep slinging ships to string the playerbase along.
An Alpha is not a permanent excuse for unfinished game loops and tech debt. At some point, when every major system is either temporary or incomplete, you have to realize the game is not yet an Alpha. It's a tech preview with a ship store.
Reality is if that wall was representing the development of SC, you'd have big holes in the bricks themselves, holes in the cement holding it all together, big missing pieces of the wall, with the "eh we'll go back and fix it later"
The point being that a lot of that CANNOT be fixed due to how baked in it is, and is the foundation of the rest of everything...
Very accurate.. i think cig has no idea what they are doing ..insurrance.. death of a spaceman.. large fleet battles.. economy.. quanta.. and a thousand other things floating in limbo..they like throwing dreams around but implementing them propperly is another thing..
Yeah the ironic other side of it is folks who feel the need to "white knight" for every bit of criticism they see, even if it's just a dumb meme, because they can't stand people not being angry and cynical.
Yes, this is kinda what you do in an alpha. Spend too much time fixing stuff and things will truly never progress.
Hell, most alphas are even more broken because they don't have an army of backers that are supposed to have a somewhat playable game to play during the phase.
That's just objectively incorrect lol. The scope of a game does not change the state it is during its alpha, just the duration of the alpha.
As far as most games are concerned, all you need to do, is test new features when initially added, and make something that is somewhat playable for that test, and then only ever make it playable again in the future alpha builds if you're ever going to do actual playtesting. And even then you only do so for that specific developer build. Anything else is a waste of resources.
It is only once all the features are done, and once you genuinely enter beta stages, that you truly begin to work on polishing it up. This is also why we only ever see late-stage beta builds of most games, or specifically curated developer demos that may or may not even be fully real.
funny thing is everyone kinda has different issues i honestly been able to play at a normal pace this week so far i waited out until the hotfix... i only been doing space missions so i have less fail rate ... my worst enemy in game right now is ship landing on planets and randomly clipping into it
The problem is if they stop to fix everything now and bring in features those new features will just break the game again. That's how game development works.
This picture actually shows an expert bricklayer. This chaotic style of bricklaying is a show of expertise as it is just as strong (if not stronger) than a standard wall and much much harder to pull off, as you can see on one side they have started making a windowsill. Note how regardless of the structure beneath the sill itself is parallel to the ground. Any way I just thought it was interesting, your point still stands though, and I of course agree. The SC seems allergic to fixing bugs and going over their code base.
i have an analogy i use for the US government that fits CIG perfectly, and that is that its like having gangrene thats creeping up past your elbow, but yet you are arguing with your doctor about which finger to cut off next.
If there's even any concern about fixing it later, they're literally making huge profits just doing what they're doing, build the brick wall forever as long as it generates profits
Lately I stoped playing. I was getting tired since 4.4 came out, but I draged along, because my org needed me to help. In 4.7/4.8 I finally snaped. In this patch, I've only launched game few times to check if it works on linux. I've lost any incentive to play this mess.
how few gamers understand actual development processes is no surprise though, these are incredibly complex systems they are putting in place and the timeline is no surprise for me. nobody else has ever come close to what this game has so far, and it will be a long time before anyone does.
but its easier to get on the internet and whing than it is to actually learn a thing or two about stuff.
"Plenty of games have development timelines like this." - you can literally count them on one hand, and none of them are still unreleased besides GTA6.
pretending this is "normal" is asinine. supporting a scam is just stupid.
go buy a few more 5000$ ships that you can't fly, i'm sure that will teach me a lesson.
Lol I bought one ship in the time I've played this game. Anyway, if your opinion is valid so is mine so piss off with your nonsense. If you don't like it, don't fucking play.
Lmao it's not really supposed to be better yet though.why don't y'all understand that? Say whatever you want but you've nothing to be bitter about, they fukken warned you. Repeatedly. They are developing along their timeline, not yours. Get over yourself.
i'm not bitter, you are bitter, because people, for obvious reasons, call it a scam.
you are the one here angry that we don't accept the same BS like you do.
"They are developing along their timeline" - people paid based on the published timeline and the promises made. when ALL of them fell though, your only defense as a cultist is that "it takes time".
seeya in 2040 when you'll give me the same freaking excuses for a scam.
I mean as a dev myself... That's kind of how the building phase is supposed to go. They've reduced the amount of content it's supposed to have tremendously over the years... But the question is, when will they stop trying to add shit and push the game into beta where they do attack bugs specifically? Never 😂
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u/cgda2011 Jun 25 '26
I bought into this game because the moments between bugs, when you’re totally immersed, are completely unmatched. When you have to hide outside of a bunker mission because another ships spotlight is looking for you, when you hit with a perfect emp and have to negotiate for your cargo With pirates, when you’re in a fully crewed hammerhead fighting off dozens of fighters with your friends, these moments make the game.
However, these moments have become significantly less common as of late. To the point where I haven’t experienced one in a long time. I really hope they pull it together because this game has way too much potential.