With my usual metric of game enjoyment - hours of interesting playtime divided by price in $ - Star Citizen actually does rather well, for a $45 entry it’s definitely generated way more hours of actual fun with friends than most $60+ games we’ve bought.
It’s definitely also generated lots of frustrating hours, but that’s rang true for said $60+ games as well. I really wish there were more other games which do some of what it attempts.
ED was fun, but me and every one of my friends who’re into space stuff have all individually burnt out on that game due to the frankly insulting level of grind.
NMS turns out to simply not be the gameplay we’re after, so I have even less playtime in that than ED.
So far, Space Engineers and Avorion have been doing the best in that regard, still hosting a 24/7 Avorion galaxy for us in fact.
X4 has been collecting plenty of hours of playtime for me as well, but it’s lack of any kind of meaningful multiplayer with friends does lessen the enjoyment somewhat.
Space Engineers has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s definitely a nice sandbox-style game, just unfortunately a bit lacking in PvE content without mods.
Avorion on the other hand is much easier to get started with, but it’s also quite shallow in regards to story and such. The galaxy it generates can definitely be interesting though, it has a remarkably robust system for reputation, organizations, etc - and it applies between NPC factions as well.
I can personally also recommend Stationeers if you’re a fan of physics (in this case temperature/pressure/gas instead of movement) sandboxes, it has an even steeper learning curve than Space Engineers though, but it can also be loads of fun.
This was such a hopeful game at one point. The re-emerging of the space sim genre in a way that would be more approachable than EVE or the X series. It’s kind of sad to see it go the way it has; on the one hand there are hints of what could be a great product and on the other most likely through fault of poor management and prioritising revenue raising, it will probably never be fully completed.
I’m still interested in seeing where Star Citizen goes but I think it’s already a far cry from the product that was pitched in the original Kickstarter.
It will never be even half completed. The list of features they'd promised for "release" versus what they are on track to complete in the next several years is astounding.
They don't even have the foundations set for 75% of the features to be done. After 12 years.
I bought the game in 2013, refunded it in 2017. When i bought the game was because i wanted a spacesim and star citizen was basically my perfect game. I expected the game to be out by late 2016 or 2017, at least the singleplayer story.
Even now, i am still hopeful. I refunded because at that point they didnt need my money and it was ridiculous how the game was still nowhere near release. Also the game run like shit and the fun factor was too low, it was too much of a simulator.
I dont think it is a complete scam. It is obvious there has been an insane amount of effort gone into this game. Maybe part of the funds have been abused but they have been developing this game for over 10 years with 500+ devs and that is really expensive.
Idiot here. Put in 40€. Skeptical before I put in the money. But I liked the vision and had some friends that liked the game. Played for maybe 40 hours. Had a lot of fun with it. And a bit less fun when it crashed right in a mission. That was 3 years ago. Haven’t touched it since. Maybe I’ll get into it again to check it out. But no hopes for it being completed
The first (and last) time I put in money was in the crowdfunding days. In fact, I did it so early they weren’t even using Kickstarter for funding.
Even though the current alpha is very buggy, I also more than got my money’s worth over the many, many years. I really would like to see the game get finished. But, what’s already there is really impressive.
The game has missed every possible deadline, and there’s every chance it will never be finished. But, the one comforting fact is that it’s missing the deadlines because they’re being too ambitious. Like, they redid the game engine to use 64 bit precision instead of 32 bit because they want it to be possible to drop a wrench at some random spot on the surface of a planet, and have another player fly across the solar system, go to the right spot, and see a wrench sitting there.
I wouldn’t put any more money in today, but I’m still glad I helped fund the game, and because I’ve been able to keep from adding more money, I actually consider my money well spent.
I bought it for a short time. They have a 30 day policy.
I returned it within the week. Its just way too buggy. I dont even care about the pay to play ships, whatever.
But the bugs with missions was awful. The NPC/AI fighting is nonexistant. The flight characteristics were better with n64’s star fox 64. Its just not even close to being there.
Im a sucker for space games. If i want a flight sim ill play elite. If i want a space legs discovery game, ill play starfield. If i want to get stoned and look at weird animals with small heads and cool colors, ill fire up no mans sky.
Squadron 42 has been the primary development focus, star citizen is just the playground made by a few devs with left over sq42 modules - until sq42 launches then star citizen will be the main development focus. Until then, star citizen is just a fundraising platform, I thought this was obvious
I bought the cheapest version a few years ago. Turns out that the game was a tech demo, but a very glorious tech demo. Flying near the cities, to the atmosphere, in space, all were very beautifully done.
As a game, pretty much a failure though. As a money vacuum, pretty good.
I think it was a positive experience as a whole, though. Never experienced anything similar since or before.
Anybody still putting money into this is a sucker. For 50mil they should have had some game out and ready
Fuck, the entire time SC was worked on we had Elite Dangerous get funded, released expanded and crash and burned. No man’s sky launched from being “Sean Lied People Died” to the biggest redemption story in gaming and Starfield went from a twinkle in Todd Howards eye to complete. Two Everspace games. Rebel Galaxy 1&2. X4!! Fuck me.
What happened to Elite Dangerous? I used to play quite a bit before I had to move and ended up on horrible internet. I've finally got good internet but haven't gotten back into it yet.
Last I played, the arc was humans attempted firing a weapon targeting Thargoids and it failed. Thargoids got mad and attacked human systems in the bubble.
There was also some unhappiness around their spacelegs expansion and the subsequent end of development for console versions. I stopped playing since then not because of any problems but because I got into other games.
I was on Xbox (where my friends were). Once Odyssey flopped they cancelled any new updates to the console versions and after a couple of years haven’t No Man Sky’d Odyssey yet.
It’s my point of view that they created so much friction in the gameplay loop that players generally prefer logging to get their materials or whatever they need, and FDev’s policy is “sure, whatever,” because then they don’t have to improve the gameplay.
Wow… I played just long enough to buy a Dolphin, never got out of the first few systems, it was before Beyond’s release and I found the loop to be boring after about 15h…
One thing the others didn’t mention: They released a multilayer expansion, if you try to play in co-op the game crashes, they announced they wouldn’t fix the issue so they basically wasted resources on developing a game mode that doesn’t work and still made it a selling point.
Exactly. Star Citizen has been in development so long that not only have other developers already had the chance to jump in ahead of them, the genre's brimming with games now!
They had such an advantage going into this, how do you fuck up a golden ticket so badly??
They’ve made $600M. How is that fucking up a golden ticket? They’ve all been getting paid well for years. The people who spent money are the ones who don’t have a finished game. That probably doesn’t matter to the people who’ve paid off a large chunk of their mortgages in the meantime.
Sure, they've got money from all the good will they're soaking up, but at some point that good will and money will dry up...
If/when they finally do release a game, it's now got to not just compare to a whole full genre of games, it's got to be better than them in order to get that good will back.
Who cares about good will? If they release and people get pissed at the finished product then “shutter” the studio, take everyone to a “new” studio and work on another game with the experience and cash you got from SC
Since backing SC I’ve met my wife, got married and had three children. Two of which are already going to school. It’s crazy how much you can accomplish in 13 years. I wonder if the game will be done before my oldest turns 18.
The difference is that Dwarf Fortress only released on Steam because they had financial worries due to some health scares. They decided to release it on steam and charge for it but they wanted to deliver a major overhaul of the UI to justify selling it, even though people wanted to pay them for years.
DF has been in development for 20 years but it’s essentially a full game that they’ve been making better. Yeah it’s buggy (they simulate so goddamn much of course it’ll have bugs), but it’s at least a full experience that you can replay many times and never have the same experience.
Star Citizen does not deliver a full game, it’s just a glorified tech demo. It’s cool tech, but it’s not worth playing in my opinion.
Dwarf fortress was released and being distributed and successful before steam existed, the recent release was to attain more financial security as the devs age and have to deal with medical bills related to aging, failing bodies
The Matrix Awakens ran on the console presented by Nintendo with “graphics comparable to current generation consoles from Sony and Microsoft” , citing that medium. The demo included “advanced” ray tracing and used Nvidia’s artificial intelligence upscaling technology, the well-known DLSS .
So Nintendo didn't share specs. And they saw a handheld Unreal 5 demo that they thought looked as good as ps5/xbsx. But it was also running DLSS so it might have running at significantly lower resolutions.
But on a handheld screen that's harder to tell. And Nintendo are masters of making games running at low resolutions and levels of detail look like they are a lot better. So there's zero chance it's actually as capable as a PS5 but there is a decent chance they can run Nintendo games that would appear to be. So maybe TOTK at 4k@60 with higher resolution textures? Honestly that'd be plenty.
Which stinks for broke boys like me but is understandable…esp since we can’t get rid of capitalistic greed in so many other industries where it’d help to be able to afford shiz like this again…
The top comment is a meme, but the free trial indeed is not time limited. It’s kind of like a “free to play” version of the game.
Most of the limitations are purely social - can’t send friend requests, party invites, or trades and similar. (There’s a full list somewhere) But, you’re still on the same servers, you can still use matchmaking, party finder, and paid accounts can send friend request and party invite to you.
What is there is going to be basically 100% of the story, side quests, and raids up to the level limit. And it will all be completable through the various matchmaking systems or NPC parties (where applicable).
It’s just a mild bit harder than the regular game (since, as an MMO, it is a social game) - and much of the issues you can “solve” if you know someone that has a paid copy, or make friends in game. For the party invite specifically, I know I’ve seen requests go by occasionally for adding two free trials to a party - which the paid account can make and doesn’t have to stay. In my free company (guild) there’s a few random free trial players we’ve “adopted” and have in the chat linkshell, but who can’t accept invite fully.
Source: I’ve played on both free trial to level 50 and paid to level 90.
Oh I know…part of what’s not in that comment is I have played it on free but ended up paying until I couldn’t bc life sucks. Was on the second expansion too but yea life has been weird…
You know what.. just fuck Google. Stadia was the last straw for me. I have been their biggest fanboy for 15 years and they are a company without a direction. The last piece I have to untangle is my email.
CitizenCON this year in a few weeks is going to be very, very interesting. It may go down like DashCon and have a “free 30 minutes in the ball pit” level of downfall.
Or the aging gamedads that sunk so much into the grift already will keep it afloat a little longer. We’ll see.
There was an exclusive big-spenders-only fancy le steak meme dinner that the grifting corporation put on (as a means to offer then another exclusive internet spaceship sale for another internet spaceship that is still not playable now) and I was hard pressed to see anyone there that wasn’t at least in their 40s, it was white as mayonnaise, entirely male unless I lost someone in the mayo, and there was even a cringelord wearing a top hat and monocle prop to match the cringe prop in the game that is given to big spenders.
I bring it up because the game dads in the ball pit will have to contend with that sad image to stand out.
You beat me to it; there were other pictures from different angles, including selfies from the gamedads, but I’m having a hard time finding them now; the bookmark is now a dead link. sadness
You can bounty hunt, mine, trade, race, pvp or explore in a ship, in a ground vehicle or on foot. You can buy most ships and vehicles in game, the exceptions being the most recent ships and some capital ships.
There are also pvp events and the occasional pve event, but I prefer the player driven events like the daymar races.
I guess new locations, some more ships and a bunch of server tech like functional server meshing are what we’re waiting on.
Baldurs Gate 3 is a masterpiece, GOTY for me so far, but every other game this year I would rank below Star Citizen for me personally. Starfield especially just makes me wish I was playing Star Citizen.
You gotta lay off the copium, dude… 600M and 12 years without a release anywhere in sight?? That’s just unforgivable. If anyone else did this, they’d be torn apart for it.
Oh noes, 45 bucks is such a horrible gamble!!! What shall I do????
I've more than enough hours already in game to make the amount I spent (including all I've gifted over the Years) considerably less than If I'd gone to one movie a week for each hour I've played.
Once you get a job you'll be able to afford 45 bucks and stop coping yourself. I'm just sick of reading posts from people that saw some whine on youtube lie about the game.
> The highest budget ever for a video game
> 12 years of development
> Crowdfunding
> Microtransactions
> Still not enough money
> Still not complete
To you, I, by seeing that something is clearly wrong with this picture, am the one who is coping while you, who is vehemently denying what is right in front of you, is not?
Most ambitious massive multiplayer game ever and all businesses that remain open must continue to take in money. Perhaps a business class or two would help with the concepts involved.
It seems like nobody’s saying “damn I loved skyrim but hate this”. If you’re into that bethesda rpg “width of an ocean depth of a puddle” stuff it seems pretty alright.
I’ve been playing a lot of starfield and to me it’s fallout in space with some improvements (although still some classic fallout jank). Like there’s grappling which is great, but when you put stuff on shelves you’ll come back to them being half in the ground. I’ve got no complaints (aside from always wishing I could coop with my partner) because that’s what I was ready for. Honestly the least buggy Bethesda game I’ve played so far. I had one quest that I struggled with because of NPC pathing, but nothing game breaking so far. It’s not No Man’s Sky planet exploration. It’s not a space sim. It’s a dialogue heavy loot n shoot.
Cloud Imperium is not a tiny company. I believe it has about 1000 employees at this point, which means that the 600m has mostly gone to keeping the company going.
Chis Roberts is burning the cash rather than pocketing it. He loves his feature creep, and which forces devs to redo work. They've thrown most of the game out and coded it from almost scratch twice?
Every single Chris Roberts project has been like this. Development hell with new shit being added and no deadline in sight.
If you say so. And of course all any have to do is go on youtube or twitch to prove that isn't an accurate report of the state. But as long as it makes you feel better to say that.
You must have rock bottom standards to not expect the most expensive game ever made to at the very least be feature complete after 12 years. And we are talking about a very healthy first here, development costs are more than twice as much as second place and growing every day.
I don't see a reason why the most expensive game ever should have to be feature complete after 12 years.
But if this particular most expensive game ever was originally announced to be released in 2014, then postponed last minute a couple of times and subsequently split up into two games to allow an earlier release of parts of it...
There's plenty of multiplayer live service games that show how it should be done. Yeah sure, add microtransactions and content updates and whatever else but make sure that bare minimum standards are met with regards to the game itself. When I click "Play" in Apex Legends, I don't clip through the floor and explode because it's a feature complete game. Still live service, still getting improved every day, but feature complete. The base game actually working is not optional like in Star Citizen.
I played it this year, and it is totally shit, the features that are already in games don’t work. Even comparing with other space games like elite dangerous that are way cheaper and already have a decent and less buggy gameplay loop
I played enough to see an empty city that adds literally nothing to anything, with every single NPC standing still on a chair. I played enough to crash two times interacting with shit to just restart ON MY FUCKING ROOM, why there is a server if it is unable to keep your quest state is beyond my intelligence.
Furthermore, I played enough to see corpses around the abandoned world, adding nothing but noise to my immersion, dumber quests, simpler ship controllers and simpler planetary bases than Elite Dangerous. Also, maybe I didn’t have played enough, but I had no SC player providing me with a decent endgame gameplay loop like ED, I don’t know how a game this old and this expensive can have less endgame than an actual indie game.
Literally the one thing that it is better in SC than ED is the ability to move inside your ship, that is dope but is not worth the cheapest ship or worse, your time. And I’m writing this comments to other ppl, not you Tigris, you are beyond any rational discussion, you probably have spent too much on this game to admit to yourself it is crap. If you truly believe that the game is good you would just talk about what we are missing and not white knighting and gaslighting anyone that disagrees with you.
simpler ship controllers and simpler planetary bases than Elite Dangerous
There’s plenty to criticise but this is just wrong. I’m really into space and flight sims and Elite Dangerous doesn’t hold a candle to Star Citizens flight model.
Care to explain how the WW2 plane flight model of Elite Dangerous is less arcady than the newtonian flight model used in Star Citizen or do you just not understand physics?
Can you explain a little? For me, it was just an arcade game, I felt that a have so less control layers that I have in ED that I cannot get what you mean.
Elite Dangerous has a flight model where your ship behaves like it’s in atmosphere. You even have a throttle/speed “zone” where your ship handles best.
In essence this flight model is a very basic imitation a WW2 era plane, where due to the complex relationship between control surfaces and air speed they had ideal speeds for manoeuvring.
Elite Dangerous doesn’t model any of this using physics it’s all just fixed values and of course there’s no (or negligible) atmosphere in space.
Ever watch The Expanse where they’re going one direction full speed then they flip and burn the other direction? That’s realistic physics even if the engines being used are hand-wavy future tech.
You can do that in Star Citizen, though new players often miss that, as there are a actually two flight models.
The basic flight model is called coupled mode, where your direction of travel is “coupled” to your direction of forward momentum and has “drag” which is your ship slowing itself when you’re not using thrust, due to the chosen mode. This gives you a feeling of atmospheric control similar to Elite Dangerous.
The second mode is called uncoupled and is complete 6 degrees of freedom and your ship will maintain all momentum (it doesn’t slow down when you’re off throttle) allowing manoeuvres like the flip and burn mentioned above. This is very close to how things actually work in space though not perfect.
Oh and because atmospheric flight actually is modelled in Star Citizen, you can’t treat a dog fight in a planets atmosphere the same as a dog fight in space!
Well yeah, it is finished. It has reached state where people can say “yes, this is finished” unlike star citizen. And there’s a fundamental difference between a store and a game that at some point reaches the finished state, again, unlike star citizen.
How come baldur’s gate 3 didn’t need 10 years and 600 million fan funding to reach a release?
I supported it but, I stopped playing, not enough to do. Graphics are insane but, little to no actual content aside from ships that you need to pay real money for. The constant dB resets prevent me from ever really grinding the game, what’s the point of it will just reset next major update. I personally think the game is going to flop due to this.
I don't think it's possible for the game to flop anymore if we're going off money made. In terms of them making money after they fully "release", well... I don't know if it will ever actually "release".
You purchase the base game which comes with a starter ship. In the game, you can do missions or do cargo trading to earn in-game money which you can use to buy ships.
You can absolutely use real world cash to purchase additional ships, which funds the development of the game. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Almost all the ships can be purchased with in-game currency.
The main plus point for purchasing ships with real money is they are acvound bound and will stay with you after a database reset.
Well, not all the gameplay loops have been fully fleshed out yet which is why it is still in the alpha stage. Database resets happen as festures are added.
I don’t know if i will go so far as to say they are incentivised to keep it in alpha.
Same for me. Although I really enjoy just low flying on the planets and enjoy the scenery but what made me quit is the insane amount of bugs. Sometimes it’s nigh impossible to even get from the down area to the ship it out of the hangar. Once it’s running, it’s incredible but the lack of reliability is just to frustrating.
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