Star Citizen sells the Legatus pack: $27,000 with $1,000 paywall to see the page
86 replies, posted
Also the "how has this taken so long with so much money thrown at it" question is really stupid. You could have 6 billion dollars, you wouldn't be able to develop a game like this as fast as people seem to think. It's clear that CIG underestimated the scope of the project at every point but having more money than God wouldn't have made it happen any faster - plus businesses have constant running costs and money in the bank disappears faster than you think.
RE ship insurance/piracy, the tl;dr is that insurance doesn't magically suck a ship back to the owner, it orders a replacement if it's lost/stolen/destroyed. The old one will be left out in the wilds, and at the moment despawns if the owner logs out, just to avoid the piles of drifting wrecks that would come with a lot of tester-level respawns and disconnects.
Eventually it's likely that salvage ships would sell missions where they tell you where a wreck is supposed to be so you can go chew it up for profits, or in the case of theft, bounty hunters could be sent after the ship to retrieve it and/or the thief.
On the piracy side, I've been working with a large group of active player pirate hopefuls to sum up a lot of the piracy needs and wants to sort out what may be fair in the future, given the current iteration is basically GTA's wanted ratings for any kind of negative actions. There's a lot that should be punished, should attract different attention (bounties vs kill-on-sight marking vs reputation hits with certain groups, etc), but also a lot that should be enabled. There's been wishy talk from CR before about being able to 'file off the VIN numbers and buy lesser "insurance" for stolen ships", and that's still a goal the devs want to uphold, but it should be understood this is likely going to be like carrying a fake driver's licence and riding with expired/stolen licence plates. It's going to keep you going in areas where people don't pay much attention, but if a highway patrol car ends up behind you and runs your plates they're going to be mad
if it does get implemented this way then that'd be dope as fuck. i hope they put some love into the criminal aspects of the game, space pirates own.
I'm just waiting for it to stop running like god damn ass. And to actually be fun, I want to space truck. I can't do that when I have no fucking clue what the hell I'm doin' nor where the fuck I am.
I was (and still somewhat am) pretty hype for Star Citizen, but shit like this is pretty disappointing.
I'm more worried that this will turn into MTX once launches if it ever does.
I don't see anything wrong with this. If this sort of thing were actually affordable to most people, it would be like an atomic bomb to the economy.
I missed this from the first page so excuse the late and lengthy reply. Have you seen what's in the current public alpha release and do you understand the considerable technical achievements necessary to make CryEngine do them? Here are some of the highlights:
Rewriting CryEngine to handle maps up to 8 billion km a side instead of 4km a side (current playable area limited to around 1mil x 1mil x 200k km around a gas giant for gameplay reasons)
Rewriting the engine to handle local physics grids (aka rotating local frames of reference -- you can be standing on your ship and roll it and gravity stays 'down' for you regardless of the outside world)
Rewriting the engine to handle spherical procedural terrain generation of arbitrary size with atmosphere; game design calls for 1:1 Earth-size for the largest gas supergiants, because planets will be scaled around 1:6 to 1:10 for gameplay reasons (there's such thing as too much surface area)
Making transitions between areas seamless by hacking the CryEngine level-loading routine into loading an empty map that is actually a streaming object container that loads whatever it needs on-demand; this feature is called the MegaMap and it functions essentially like the ST:TNG holodeck, being a blank template that gets filled in by arbitrary environments assembled from collections of assets; initial loading time from the main menu is also reduced by the MegaMap
Realtime volumetric holographic projection using live in-world assets; this is currently only used in the live alpha for displaying the hangar ATC NPC at landing locations, but it renders their actual character and triggers actual animations, and if a player happened to manage to glitch into that room they'd be visible in the background. This seems unimpressive because it's basically doing the Breen videoscreen dialogues trick of remote projection from HL2, but the feature is capable of so much more, as demoed in the Squadron 42 vertical slice last year
The Item 2.0 system which essentially turns ships and ground vehicles into collections of miniature state machines supplied with energy and heat-dissipation pipes, granularizing functionality into individual components with their own characteristics and independent damage states (your wing got blown off and with it some of your cooling elements; now you're overheating easier and faster, oops). Player characters and their equipment also make use of these systems in slightly different ways.
Combat flight AI is in and is slated to be improved with better and more varied behaviours in the upcoming Q2 patch and on an ongoing basis; initial support for on-foot AI is scheduled to come in the same patch with refinements in future patches.
Now, the obvious response is to point out how I'm not touting tons of gameplay-related features, and that's fair, because currently the game's in a basic state on that front. Much of the work in the past several years has been focused primarily on the engine and in refining internal processes and tools in order to support the ambitious goals, rather than cramming through basic gameplay loops for major career types and coming back to them later. Everything I've put in bullet points above is either deep engine voodoo or is extending the game engine to support core, sub-gameplay features.
3.0 marked a turning point where those core features were largely in place, if maybe in need of optimization and refinement, and when the focus began turning to career gameplay and features supporting career gameplay. Basic cargo, object-retrieval, and piracy (go kill the guy doing object retrieval!) missions are implemented with procedurally-generated locations to various degrees (wreckages are pre-populated and chosen at random, but some missions have objectives in procedurally arbitrary locations).
It remains to be seen if CIG will manage to hold up their intended schedule and deliver the intended features on time, but the roadmap looking at the next year is largely full of career gameplay, ships to support career gameplay, and features that are prerequirements for some types of career gameplay (for example the gas cloud tech as a precursor to gas harvesting gameplay). I'm not sure they'll deliver their promises on anything resembling the timeline they've presented for themselves, and the page has a disclaimer that says stuff will slide if it's not going to be finished in time to go into the build (it also disclaims that not everything they're doing is tracked publicly on the roadmap), but they're at least talking gameplay features instead of rearchitecting huge chunks of the game engine a second time over.
@Deathtrooper I'm also addressing this above to your post about how they should say "enough is enough", too. They kind of have, as they're moving from big engine overhauls to developing gameplay variety. The big hump has been crossed, more or less, and now it's a bunch of smaller humps and the ever-present hell of performance optimization.
It's not that far ahead of GTAV's development budget when you take inflation into account.
But what's also important to keep in mind is that when the game enters beta and the economy goes live, ship sales will stop and they'll be relying on game purchases and things like optional monthly subscriptions (in much the same way that there are currently optional monthly subscriptions to cover the community team's costs so they don't draw from the gamedev budget; the only in-game benefits are cosmetics) to fund continued development and running costs (servers/etc.).
The vision is for the game to run for 10+ years online after launch if possible, and any money not used up in the alpha phase of development gets pushed forward to secure the future of the game as they transition to the live economy model in beta. They'd be crazy to turn down free money that they can use to make their future more stable.
It's like how everyone freaked out about Destiny 2's $500 million budget, but that number included an intended ten-year content support lifespan because D2 was supposed to last a long time.
Oh, and I had an entire post about that "tracker" and how it's objectively terrible but the forum ate my post. In short, that tracker's run by SC-hating Something Awful goons and it's a total mess. The difficulty setting in Squadron 42 is counted as a major production goal separate from delivering the game itself. Procedural planets are treated on the same level of importance as modeling a space plant and giving it to backers who paid in before $whatever million dollars as a stretch goal. It's even self-contradictory, as it states procedural planets aren't implemented/working but then counts as delivered features that explicitly require procedural planets. It's just terrible and it's deceptive by design.
Every time I see someone state that Star Citizen is only "17% finished" with a link to that page, I laugh, because it's so warped to make SC look as bad as possible.
This at the bottom is a link directly to the SC subforum on SA
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2304/8ebd4715-ebac-4c80-8764-187ceed262b2/image.png
So, neutral?
You should trust them to be as neutral as you trust me to be neutral on this topic. Which is to say only to humour us because maybe something entertaining will result. I'm not saying that all criticism of SC is invalid or something, but I'd suggest better sources. I try and remain as objective as I can be but I am clearly biased, just not to the extremes both sides have plenty of.
At the moment. The insurance system as it stands is a placeholder because the full developed idea doesn't make sense to apply when the game is still largely session-based while they get the single server performance up to speed before they start meshing them together and can afford to go regional/globally persistent.
That full design is that ship insurance will replace your ship and it will need to come out of the persistent economy; if one doesn't exist for replacement, it has to be built from in-game resources and industrial nodes and then delivered. On small ships, this is ezpz, but capital ships are likely to be in low supply all the time, so someone who threw down the big bucks has to wait multiple real days for a replacement. The stolen ship persists in the pirate's inventory until it's destroyed, and it is uninsurable so once it's gone it's gone. Designers are debating on how to handle "filing off the numbers" for a considerable cost (roughly equal to the cost of the base ship itself, if not more, reducing the opportunity for abuse) to forge a ship's identity and make it insurable. There's also been discussion of using hacking tools to 'steal' a ship's identity and clone it to temporarily fool systems into believing you're legit - the key word is temporarily, where you have enough time to slip past orbital scans to land and drop your hot cargo, but your pirate ass is probably going to be chased back out of the atmosphere on the return trip. None of this makes sense in the current game.
A lot of what's causing it to run like ass right now is the server doesn't know not to send you a billion updates about shit your client doesn't need to care about. The bottleneck is on the CPU; most players' PCs are capable of running the PU at decent to great performance until the network traffic gets involved. In short, if someone 700,000km away blows up an AI ship, your client tracks the debris even though you can't see it. And that's dumb, and it's an artifact of CryEngine's specialization of small-scale environments that needs to be root canaled out. And, it is, with one small part of the fix scheduled for 3.2 (a month from now if they're on time) and a huge amount of the fix (everything in the core tech section related to Object Containers) in 3.3 for Q3.
Refining gameplay and making it more approachable and fun is an ongoing process, so hopefully there'll be significant movement in this year's patches as they intend (on the roadmap).
I bought in at $30 last month and I am of the mind that I will test the game each release to see if the major FPS issues are resolved.
I'm just holding out to play because all the good things they have done are not playable with the FPS issues. The game is not enjoyable at 15-20 FPS.
I don't know if they can refine/make the game more approachable considering their goals. I feel like it'd be on the same level as trying to make Eve Online approachable. If they succeed holy shit, if they don't its not that big of a deal. I'll figure it out.
As I mentioned at the bottom of that rather large post of mine, the roadmap has some significant performance enhancements expected in the next two releases. The big performance problem isn't your GPU or anything, it's your client being updated with tons of shit it shouldn't care about, all the time, and it's a relic of CryEngine that needs to be wholesale replaced with a new solution; a large part of that solution is currently slated for 3.3.
The roadmap is not an ironclad promise so expect stuff to slide (in order to not hold back release), which could include some or all of the 3.3 performance tweaks.
I don't know if it's still the plan, but the devs had discussed different ways of starting your character in the PU when everything goes live. The SQ42 single-player campaign is to be set up to transfer your character into the PU after completion, and you basically retire from military service and become a civvie, insert brief loading screen and tada you're online. There're to be a few variants (for example you mutiny and steal a military-geared fighter and fuck off, and you enter the PU a wanted criminal owning only the ship you stole), but they also consider if you don't play SQ42 first.
If you elect to start directly into the PU, the game will offer to give you a series of tutorials on the different general aspects (I'm speculating but things like taking off/landing, flying, dogfighting, scanning/targeting, fuel, missions, cargo, etc.) of the game. If you agree to take the tutorials (and complete them, obvs), you enter the game with basic proficiency and a fairly trivial credit debt to the empire that must be repaid in one real calendar year or else you're wanted for your outstanding debt. If you decline the tutorials, you go straight into the game with no debt but you're on your own. (I assume you'd be able to go back and take the tutorials if you accidentally clicked no or if after an hour you realized you were over your head).
The new player experience is something they're very keen on providing, but while the game's in alpha and they're still assembling the gameplay itself, it's a bit hard to make it also highly approachable and accessible. It's no excuse for them not trying, but it's also why you're not going to have a nice seamless polished experience. There actually used to be a slick as shit Arena Commander tutorial that walked you through the basics of taking off and dogfighting. Then in the next few major patches over the next five months, updates to dogfighting, ship flight/weapons, and the engine totally broke the tutorial and made it uncompletable, so they patched it out.
$29,700
If Australia charges VAT, that's where that discrepancy is coming from.
Star Citizen is clearly what happens when a man has the time, money and industry prestige to actually try and make his dream game.
Emphasis on try, I'm sure everyone here has their idea of their dream game. Just whip open notepad a sec and write down the core list of features for said dream game... how many of those need extra features to stop them from being bland? How many of those depend on unique systems?
Now how do you tie all those systems together into a coheasive world that doesn't feel like 12 different programs hastilly slapped together?
Done typing yet? Now just take stock of how long it'll take to get all that done...
Now here's the thing, I think that Chris Roberts probably has the drive (and certainly the money) to try and see this project through to the end, this isn't some kid with big ambitions, its an industry veteran specialsing in this exact genre... with big ambitions.
I think the worst thing that's going to happen to SC is a Dose of Duke Nukem Forever syndrome, perhaps not as bad as DNF but I do get the feeling that people who have bought into and spent HOURS on it now will not be enthusiastic when the game actually drops. The hype the generate during development will outshine any possible game that could ever be produced and while SC will be a finished product and porbably be a good one but I get the feeling what many people expect and what they actually play will differ.
Having been stung by the same feeling on one too many Early Access games I have resolved to avoid as much Star Citizen material as I can till it actually releases, on paper SC would be a game I could easily sink hours upon hours into, but I said the same of Planetary Annhilation, Eternal Crusade and other games.
The only Star Citizen stuff I ever watch is the Bugsmashers segment becuase its programming stuff is interesting to me, otherwise I'm staying away from the hype and away from any expectations. I highly adivse that anyone who might be interested in SC to do the same.
I wish I got 15fps, I get like 7 at best. I want to test every build to hell and back, but this right now is impossible.
But yeah, I get why this pack exist, people with more money than sense asked for it. But I kinda wish they said no to them.
I'm sorry, what? This is factually incorrect and has never been true unless they were undergoing technical difficulties for brief periods.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/2304/5b83e53f-b955-4389-a079-1676e05ce99c/image.png
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
I really think you are less informed than you believe yourself to be. You are certainly welcome to be skeptical, but you're repeating easily-disproven falsehoods in your quest to warn people of the great danger of Chris Roberts.
The problem is - no one is there to limit the creativity of Chris Roberts. That's great, he is a very talented man in space sim genre... but again, there is no one to limit his creativity, no one to tell him "Okay, dude, that's impossible, and this feature is gonna take too long".
When visionaries are creating something without any stops, it usually ends in disaster. Daikatana, Prequels, Duke Nukem Forever...
Except that's considered to be one of the unofficial duties of his brother, Erin Roberts, who is a successful game producer in his own right and can tell him no. When Erin was brought in to manage the new (at the time) UK studio, and then took on global production roles, there were definite improvments such as efficiency reorganization and some shuffling of development priorities.
Saying there is no discipline in Star Citizen's development is objectively wrong. They've certainly fucked up in the past and CR's vision is incredibly ambitious, but when something just isn't feasible, he gets told no. However, Chris knows there are solutions for almost everything he wants, so "it's too hard" is not a justification for not doing something. 3.0 is a major milestone that set the foundation for the game engine and they're now beginning to build out career gameplay on top of that foundation.
Star Citizen is basically Chris Roberts' last major project before he retires and it's the culmination of his career and his lifelong goals in game development. He has always dreamed of making Star Citizen, but the technology needed didn't exist, and so he had to settle for tiny portions of that dream, beginning with Wing Command and then into the Freelancer era.
Chris Roberts has limits for what SC should be; they're just far more ambitious than the naysayers who're telling him to hurry up and release already think think he should be allowed to be.
Its kind of weird how so many people talk about the game without ever mentioning the space combat or what it's like. It's a high point of the game for me, it's unique compared to any of chris roberts previous games and the combination of elements is even unique among space sims in general. The only other modern game that is remotely similar is infinity:battlescape and it's still very WIP with no public access yet. There are a few older games and mods but nobody plays them too.
Here is some footage i took from the tournament half a patch ago. I guess it can be kinda hard to tell how people are moving in this game if you're just seeing a cockpit view, but the amount of omnidirectional movement you need to master at a high level is absolutely enthralling even if individual patches have kinda lame metagames.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDWSNAMMRkM
How about we don't de-rail this thread into another star citizen advertisement and instead talk about how the developers are more concerned about constantly crowd funding instead of actually trying to finish the game.
People already went over this in this thread unless you have some new material to show the star citizen salesman.
Is this a social experiment at this point? Can we test to see if backers will simply throw their money into a giant hole in the ground?
I'm not sure how pointing out misinformation is advertisement but OK.
I mean, honestly, I wouldn't advise anyone who wouldn't be satisfied with what's currently in the alpha to buy it, unless they want to support development further. If anything, to wait and see is probably the smartest move.
I think it's kinda beautiful.
I certainly wouldn't spend even over 60 quid for a brand new finished game, I tend to wait until prices drop but it's great to see people who have expendable cash pouring it into developers who really care about their games and want to stay away from companies who will squeeze them to releasing a half finished product. It shows it can be done, now we just have to see if they can fulfill their end of the bargain.
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