Star Citizen is a scam plain and simple. It’s “stolen” thousands of dollars (probably more) at this point and has nothing to show for it but a very pretty buggy mess.
I wanted Star Citizen to work out so badly. In 2012(ish? I don’t remember exactly) when I first heard of the game I backed it because a space game where you weren’t just your ship but could move around and board other ships sounded like my perfect space game. Now it looks like Starfield may fill that want perfectly. Who knows though maybe one day in the future Star Citizen will actually release.
I’ve been playing Star Citizen pretty regularly for years, and still do. While it’s not progressing as quickly as I want it to, it’s definitely progressing… and so long as their current funding model keeps the game evolving, I’m happy with that.
The thing that concerns me about Starfield right now is how little they’ve shown of flight mechanics. I’m starting to get the feeling that space flight is going to be a half-baked afterthought and atmospheric flight might not be a thing at all. We’ll know soon enough, but I am still not going to let myself expect anything more than “Fallout/Elder Scrolls in Space”. All the on-foot gameplay looks great, but I also want to fly around the universe and planets on my own, discover neat things in space, have satisfying space and atmospheric controls/physics, land anywhere, etc.
This game is a scam at this point. Half a billion dollars and all people have gotten is a glorified tech demo. Yet they continue to sell ships for hundreds of dollars a pop.
I used to be a believer, one of my worst purchases ever.
I was so excited 10 years ago for star citizen. I played eve online and was in a corporation there with my best friends at the time, I couldn’t wait until the day we’d all be standing together on the bridge of a ship and actually fly together for a change.
It’s just been a downhill disappointment since then, with CR seeming more of a scam artist with every lie he’d make over the years and SC getting further away from that initial dream. I tried it a year or two ago and it’s barely functioning, and even less of a game. I thought that by 2020 we’d have at least SQ42 for sure, but not it looks like they can’t complete even that.
And the community still eats it up and defends the project vehemently. I’ve never seen such a fanatical fanbase that can’t see what’s in front of their eyes. And I’m still not even angry about it… just sad and disappointed.
Absolutely no way Star Citizen isn’t a massive scam. I mean, people can be incompetent, but
over $580 million
…seems like it has to be some kind of upper limit of incompetence?
To have spent that much money and yet not have anything really resembling a game, just a glorified tech demo, is pretty sad.
What do you mean, just a glorified tech demo? I thought it’s almost done??
I think you’re thinking of Starfield, because Star Citizen is nowhere near done. They only have one solar system, with only a few people per instance, terrible optimization, only a fraction of the planned features, etcetera. It’s very immersive (aside from all the glitches and low FPS) but there’s not much actual content.
I dunno, seems incredibly competent to me.
It’s subject to absurd feature creep and overambition, in addition to regular ol incompetence.
The design goals for Star Citizen are kinda absurd. It’s like how the No Man’s Sky devs claimed at one point they’d individually simulate air molecules and a unique periodic table, except the difference is that NMS axed that (or more accurately, were never actually doing it) instead of spending the next decade trying to make it work.
At the same time, it helps that their supporters have essentially given them a financial incentive to keep adding feature creep instead of releasing, because if they release a game they can’t keep asking for more donations for increasingly lofty goals.
This game is going to be No Man’s Sky 2.0. I’m calling it now. Watching that whole demo the other day, all I could think of was, yep, no man’s sky of 2023.
No disrespect to No Man’s Sky, because they got that game pretty much sorted. Not sure Bethesda will ever throw that much resources, especially with this news, at Star Citizen. I’ll be waiting for the first Steam Sale, and only if they have it mostly sorted by that point. Their track record isn’t awesome, in that regard.
You’re definitely thinking of Starfield, which is the new Bethesda game. Star Citizen won’t be No Man’s Sky 2.0, because Star Citizen is never going to come out.
It’s a different kind of beast.
NMS released. They put it in a box and said “This is the finished game”. It was then torn to shreds and the long road of updates was a redemption story for an already released product.
Star Citizen will NEVER be done. It will always exist in some weird development alpha-beta limbo. It’s never going to go on Steam or shelves as a finished product. This allows the developers cover to always say the game is in development as a shield against any and all criticism. From their perspective it’s kind of perfect. Fans throw money at it endlessly and the development never really needs to reach a coherent state of being finished. Why would they ever want to actually release a finished game?
You really think nobody legitimate would have blown a whistle on a project like this years ago? Yet the only opposition claiming to be of that sort of whistleblower, turned out to be an incompetent and even more scammy failed game developer than said slanderer claimed Star Citizen was, and said slanderer never actually worked for the developers of Star Citizen.
A glorified tech demo? Maybe. Admittedly 2022 didn’t look like a good year for the developers, but progress was and is being made on the game, with the main issue being that at the rate they’re going, they’ll still be developing the game’s “100 star systems” in 2033. That being said, World of Warcraft was in development - in a sense - for 20 years and is only now being made irrelevant.
You also have to understand that the first 3-4 years, they had to deal with the feature creep by both hiring tons of employees and upscaling drastically, and also by saying what should be said; enough was enough, even if funding continued to accumulate it couldn’t continue to promise anything and everything. The last checkpoint for new “guaranteed” features was in 2014. Then there’s the effect that COVID-19 had on development.
Is it perfect? Far from it. Is it a scam or a failure? Also far from it. If you want scams, take a look at “Star Atlas” and how it just added NFTs to the Star Citizen funding model and jacked up the price, while not even ever leading to any progress after 4 years and yet continuing to put out trailers and marketing material.
Keep in mind that from the trailer to the AMD “Mustang Omega” deal, all marketing for Star Citizen was word of mouth, and the AMD deal did not become a habit for it, while Star Atlas is nothing but enticing marketing material.
I get the urge to point a finger, but Star Citizen has been criticized by people who haven’t actually done any research for 7+ years now, and yet something like Line of Defence, Star Atlas, or even Voidspace are only uncriticized because they scammed away less money than has been legitimately put into Star Citizen to date.
If you want something to complain about, how about the sheer time investment that has gone into Star Citizen? At this rate, the Metaverse (VRChat, Neos VR, Decentraland, etc.) could displace Star Citizen’s appeal within the next 5 years.
EDIT: Even worse, Star Atlas is not providing even the most basic proposals for real gameplay. 1 year into its development, Star Citizen’s developers were proposing basic gameplay documents and lore. 1 year into Star Atlas’ development, the proposals were “trade currency X for currency Y and then trade Y for Z” like a few other NFT crowdfunded game scams.
To compare Star Atlas to something other than Star Citizen for perspective, look at the difference between Star Atlas and Decentraland; The former is focusing on the appearance of being fun and using doublespeak to hide that its all about the NFT speculation. The latter isn’t intending to rip you off (at least, not visibly so, I checked and people do not have good things to say about Decentraland) and STILL ends up failing because it actually is incompetantly-programmed, has no userbase and charges too much just to register a username. NFTs in gaming or the metaverse might have a future (see Viverse, for example), but not if greed continues to play a role in things. $100 of real money worth of cryptocurrency to register a username is not conducive to a metaverse economy, so why would a $500 imitation of a mashup of several Star Citizen ships be worth its price tag?
