Star Citizen
- Thread starter _poto_
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I think it's going to be close to impossible for all the promises Chris Roberts made to be kept despite the huge budget.
However if they release something as good as the original wing commander games or descent freespace then I personally will be pretty happy. I seriously don't expect every single stretch goal to be met. That is way too ambitious and there's too much feature creep. That was only a marketing scheme to keep the money rolling in from clueless sheep fanboys in order to fund the base game without a AAA publisher.
If every stretch goal is met, then there will need to be significantly more additional funding outside of the community and significantly more development time too. It would also be the biggest and most detailed MMO in gaming history. That's really not realistic for an indie developer who is self publishing, and game devs cut features out of games all the time in order to deliver a functional and fun final product.
God I really hope this game doesn't turn into another Duke Nukem Forever.
However if they release something as good as the original wing commander games or descent freespace then I personally will be pretty happy. I seriously don't expect every single stretch goal to be met. That is way too ambitious and there's too much feature creep. That was only a marketing scheme to keep the money rolling in from clueless sheep fanboys in order to fund the base game without a AAA publisher.
If every stretch goal is met, then there will need to be significantly more additional funding outside of the community and significantly more development time too. It would also be the biggest and most detailed MMO in gaming history. That's really not realistic for an indie developer who is self publishing, and game devs cut features out of games all the time in order to deliver a functional and fun final product.
God I really hope this game doesn't turn into another Duke Nukem Forever.
I understand if you want to wait, but why half a year after release? You'll be waiting until at least the middle of 2015 if not longer. Meanwhile they'll have dogfighting out next month and I'll be playing from day 1.
Yeah, I don't think they'll be able to do everything, at least not at first. Some of the stuff they've promised they might not be able to implement until like 2016 or later. Something that far off could change a lot before then. Honestly, I'm expecting an updated Freelancer/Wing Commander with awesome graphics and better gameplay. I've heard that this project is what Chris Roberts wanted to do with Freelancer, but didn't have the bugdet, time or technology to be able to do back then.
This isn't just an small indie dev team. They've got over 100 people in house and another 100+ outsourced between various studios. They've also got CryTek writing code specifically for them. Star Citizen is using CryEngine 3, but it's going to be so heavily modded it will probably be closer to CryEngine 4 than 3, so some people have started calling it CryEngine 3.5 because of that.
They've got some good talent working there.
If you skip ahead to the 9 minute mark, you can see a little bit inside their design process.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnzvPA2ObWI]The Next Great Starship Episode 1.4 - YouTube[/ame]
I'm just amazed at the detail on the models, the insanely high poly count impresses me. I've spent a stupid amount of money on this game and am up to 4 ships now. So I guess I've officially drunk the kool-aide.
As far as funding goes. I don't think it's possible for them to run out money at this point. They're pulling in a steady $50-100k/day and this is still pre-Alpha. Once the dogfighting Alpha gets released there is going to be tons of gameplay videos, people streaming, etc... interest is going to explode and I wouldn't be surprised if the player base expanded 10x to about 4 million before they even hit the Beta. If they do run low on cash they can just milk the player base with a sale or limited time offering. This game has more people in pre-Alpha than a lot of games get through Beta. They've raised near $40mil with roughly 400k players, so at an average spend of roughly $100 per player, this game is raking it in hand over fist.
I got bored waiting for this game to come out, so I took some of the game assets and dropped them in the game engine so I could play around with them... basically just ran around the cryengine test level looking at stuff. Decided to make a short video of it.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-4PbifD_74]Star Citizen - Pirate Booty, Cutlass landed with loot - YouTube[/ame]
First time I've done any video content.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-4PbifD_74]Star Citizen - Pirate Booty, Cutlass landed with loot - YouTube[/ame]
First time I've done any video content.
For those of you complaining about no gameplay, there was a player made mod released about a week ago that lets you fly some of the ships, shoot things and make stuff explode. I've been having some fun with it.
Here's a short video of me playing the mod:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcGtt0_OuQo]Star Citizen - Pearl's Playground Hornet Flight and Shooting - YouTube[/ame]
More info and download link if you want to play it yourself:
Star Citizen Pre-Alpha Player Level Mod Pearl’s Playground | poto.me
BTW, you need to buy a game package and have the Star Citizen Hangar Module installed to be able to use this mod.
The actual dogfighting part of the game should be out in a few weeks. There's less than 5k Alpha slots left. If you want to get in on this and play with it without having to wait another year for the Beta to open, I'd recommend buying a basic game package now.
Here's a short video of me playing the mod:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcGtt0_OuQo]Star Citizen - Pearl's Playground Hornet Flight and Shooting - YouTube[/ame]
More info and download link if you want to play it yourself:
Star Citizen Pre-Alpha Player Level Mod Pearl’s Playground | poto.me
BTW, you need to buy a game package and have the Star Citizen Hangar Module installed to be able to use this mod.
The actual dogfighting part of the game should be out in a few weeks. There's less than 5k Alpha slots left. If you want to get in on this and play with it without having to wait another year for the Beta to open, I'd recommend buying a basic game package now.
They did the dogfighting reveal at PAX last night. I watched the livestream and it was a bit buggy and rough. What I would expect in an early Alpha build though. Here's some excerpts of the in-game footage from the livestream last night:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TWQFSzQyeM]Star Citizen Pax East 2014 Live - Actual Ingame Scenes 1 - YouTube[/ame]
They also let random people come up and play the game after the event last night. And they're letting people play at their booth at PAX today.
I can't wait for the Alpha to drop.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TWQFSzQyeM]Star Citizen Pax East 2014 Live - Actual Ingame Scenes 1 - YouTube[/ame]
They also let random people come up and play the game after the event last night. And they're letting people play at their booth at PAX today.
I can't wait for the Alpha to drop.
They released some more gameplay footage. Here's a shorter review of it:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eJc60ONvME]Arena Commander Analysis - Stealth, Matchmaking, EVA, and more! - YouTube[/ame]
If you want to watch the full thing it's here, with new content at the 23:13 mark, the rest is from the livestream event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE3WxpO4jW0
Be warned, the dev that's talking in that video says "actually" too fucking much.
I did like the EVA part though, even though they don't have the jetpack thruster animations in yet, it's still pretty cool to be able to leave your ship and float around.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eJc60ONvME]Arena Commander Analysis - Stealth, Matchmaking, EVA, and more! - YouTube[/ame]
If you want to watch the full thing it's here, with new content at the 23:13 mark, the rest is from the livestream event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE3WxpO4jW0
Be warned, the dev that's talking in that video says "actually" too fucking much.
I did like the EVA part though, even though they don't have the jetpack thruster animations in yet, it's still pretty cool to be able to leave your ship and float around.
After many delays the first Alpha was finally released late last night.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWD97jYEaDU]Arena Commander V0.8 Launch Trailer - YouTube[/ame]
I've been playing the singleplayer mode for the last few hours. It's visually stunning and I haven't encountered any major bugs or crashes yet. Control sensitivity is too high though, so the movement is pretty jerky. Hopefully they'll dial that back a notch in future patches.
Overall it's fun and playable right now, should get even better with time. Can't wait for them to ramp up multiplayer and get the servers stable.
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWD97jYEaDU]Arena Commander V0.8 Launch Trailer - YouTube[/ame]
I've been playing the singleplayer mode for the last few hours. It's visually stunning and I haven't encountered any major bugs or crashes yet. Control sensitivity is too high though, so the movement is pretty jerky. Hopefully they'll dial that back a notch in future patches.
Overall it's fun and playable right now, should get even better with time. Can't wait for them to ramp up multiplayer and get the servers stable.
It's all good. I spent some time fiddling with the settings and that helped a lot.
Still a bit of oversteering, but think I'm starting to get used to it.
The game runs pretty smooth, no framerate drops or slideshow. Looks like I won't even have to upgrade my GPU just yet.