Star Citizen abandons its feature roadmap entirely

@sethmode said:

Likewise, this perspective feels to me akin to saying "everything's a scam unless I personally agree with the terms." Value is relative. What's $1000? What's a dogecoin?

At what point is anything not a scam? Is paying hundreds for a meal at a restaurant a scam? Is paying thousands to go to WrestleMania a scam?

@eccentrix: It's about promise vs delivery. If you pre paid hundreds to reserve an opening night dinner at a new restaurant run by a famous chef scheduled to open in two years but ten years later the restaurant is half built and they are tearing out the ceiling to replace it and just said they have no public time table but are still taking paid reservations and anyone who has one can come in for free water...what do you call that?

@eccentrix: I mean...it feels like you're playing it pretty fast and loose with this analogy, and kind of unfairly changing the definitions of words. @bigsocrates has used several analogies that have described this mess well, but if we use your restaurant one...this is like paying $100 for a set meal and then that meal not only changing, but not arriving at all, and being told no one knows WHEN it will arrive or what it will be when it does. But you're welcome to pay more to hopefully get the new meal option, although that might change too. Or might never arrive. Who knows. Also, you've been in the restaurant for a decade. That's a scam. It doesn't really matter if the person on the receiving end finds a way to justify it.

@bigsocrates: dammit beat me by 2 minutes AND explained it better.

The game was first announced I guess in 2012. I missed the early Kickstarter but in 2013 as an anniversary present my wife bought me a $150 package which was a lot for us back then. However, the promises of this game were something I’d always wanted - an actual universe you can inhabit with no barriers between on-foot, in-ship, and even on-land vehicles.

It has promised amazing stuff and some of the things it *has* delivered on are wild - no loading to a different “physical” space when you get in and out of ships and stations. If you’re in a space station, and your buddy comes up and flies inverted next to a big window, you see each other in real time. This creates the possibility for amazing ship boardings, or hostile invasions of the (still not in the game to my knowledge) mining and production facilities. However, it also creates unbelievable headaches for the devs when they have to create a single unified physics system for ship-to-ship combat that also covers stopping at the juice bar across from the yoga studio and getting a smoothie (this is a real thing).

I was so excited that I bought in even more by working some OT and I am about $500 in. Please save your applause for the end, ha.

Now with 10 years of development, $435 million raised, and no end in sight in any capacity, it’s a pipe dream. And yes, the alpha is “playable” but it’s one glitchy, bugged-out star system with extremely limited commerce. That “juice bar” is fine but your character will frequently drop the juice and it will fall out of the game world or it will get stuck in your hand, etc.

If you’re looking for a laugh and somebody who is extremely patient with this situation, I really recommend GlitchedInOrbit’s YouTube channel. If you watch the below clip, realize that this isn’t just getting “stuck in the subway and hit by a train”, it’s that for every “respawn” she has to wake up at a med facility and WALK HER ASS BACK TO WHEREVER SHE WAS and at some point they keep saying they’ll institute item loss where your stuff just drops there.

I’ve learned my lesson on this. With a very nice PC I can barely get playable framerates at 1440p on a 30 series card with 32GB RAM on a game that started development in 2012, so I have zero hope that the single or multiplayer versions of this will ever be finished.

This game always seemed like a huge scam to me.

Remember when they were giving No Man's Sky shit for their launch like 6 years ago?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

@bigsocrates:

I'm mostly just trying to understand how people are defining 'scam'. I'll admit to not knowing much about this specific situation, but it sounds like y'all would say something's a scam if the received goods/services differ from what was offered. Like bigsocrates said, promise vs delivery. My initial post was arguing against an absolutism, and I was thinking of the definition more in terms of intention or perception of value, like whether or not the seller was deliberately deceiving the buyer or the buyer overvalued the goods/services.

I still think there's an element of that, potentially. If certain things were promised, but they were then unable to be fulfilled, it's not necessarily a scam in all cases. Over time, malicious intent probably becomes more likely than incompetence, but I think there's always a case to be made for Hanlon's Razor. If you're defining a scam solely on the discrepancy, though, the intentions don't matter at all.

@eccentrix: I mean after so long the difference between malice and stupidity is largely irrelevant.

Though for what it's worth I don't think this is just incompetence. Everyone on this team has to be able to see that this project is spiraling and out of control. There's no clean way out of it and what they have chosen instead is business as usual but less transparency so maybe they don't get noticed as often when they fail to deliver.

@efesell: Yeah i feel like this project started out genuine, headed by a very ambitious developer. Soon enough, the budget they were able to amass was of such a high caliber that all the constraints they had set for the kickstarter could pretty much be thrown aside and they could focus on having the project be everything that Roberts could think of. Suddenly it can be Eve, it can be Elite it can be Mass Effect and it can be Halo all in one. All it costs is a big team and... time :)

So they took their time. They took a lot of time to make this all. But i think at some point they realized that they could either put some constraints back on the project and dissapoint people that were looking forwards to those ideas (+ dissapoint Roberts, who has this once in a lifetime budget to make this his magnus opus that does everything you could ask a game to be) or keep chugging along at it and keep adding content to it no matter what the external stakeholders might think is reasonable for a game. A significant portion of the outside world at this point is pissed off at them no matter what choice they make, because the userbase seems split between these two thoughts too. So they decide to keep their head down and keep working on the game with no limits to it's scope. There will never be a 'next time' for Roberts and this kind of budget, so he's not willing to compromise based on what is deemed a reasonable time for a game to be in development.

At least that's what i hope. Because the cynical alternative is that they know that once they put this game together and release it, people might come to terms with what the actual game is and what it is not and stop believing / putting money towards what Star Citizen could become in their wildest dreams. If this thing was released in 2015, the moneyfaucet might've ran out a while ago already.

In some way, the longer this game is in development, the more new technologies and graphics will be feasible to implement. In theory at least, i doubt they can make new models for everything every few years.

In 2012, VR support was not really a thing. But because it has been in development for so long, suddenly VR support is a logical inclusion. So the longer they keep this thing in development, the bigger and better and more elaborate it can grow. I suspect that's a major reason why there's a group of fans that fully supports that this game is still in development. In a way it reminds me of the RE4 HD project, where i spent near a decade waiting to play RE4 because i just wanted my first playthrough to be of the highest quality possible, so i didn't mind waiting a bit longer.. and a bit longer.. and a few more years :D

Or maybe they would have evolved it and everybody would have come to terms with what is possible and constantly improving those possibilities, and you could have had a ton of fun. That's the definition of living service game. That's why Rainbow Six Siege and Warframe and Elite Dangerous and a bunch of other games have evolved and become full fledged successful properties. (Look at No Clip's documentary of what Square Enix had to do to save FF XIV, for example.)

There is a lot to be said about noble artistic failure, about striving for perfection -- but, remember, we're talking about FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. That's a lot of artistic failure if they never ship anything remotely complete. And there's an engineering phrase that crosses disciplines -- "Perfect is the opposite of done."

Somebody dropped a comment that the people least happy about it haven't dropped a cent, implying that they didn't have a right to say anything. Well, I'm not happy because I want to PLAY THAT GAME. I didn't invest in the Kickstarter because the description raised a whole bunch of red flags in my brain, but, I certainly didn't wish failure on CIG. I still don't. I want to go out, and buy Squadron 42, and relive some of the fun I had in my teen years playing Wing Commander and Wing Commander II. At this point, I'd be happy with some weird mashup between Wing Commander, Privateer, and Armada. But I just want something.

Now, if you dropped $5K on this game and you're happy with aspirational goals as your main result for that cash, God bless. I said before, everybody decides what their time and money is worth. God knows, I've dropped a ton of cash over the years on buying what are, in the end, PNGs and their associated special effects.

But from my perspective, as both a gamer and somebody who has a software development background (thought not in the gaming field), CIG's goals were too lofty, their understanding of how hard it is to do software development was too naive, their project management / software engineering kung-fu is weak, and, if they do end up shipping anything, I think it'll be some Duke Nuke'em Forever type of thing where they decide they need to ship something to try and ward off the inevitable class action lawsuit - because, even if there are bunch of people who are happy, there are also a bunch of people who aren't happy, and all it takes is one or two to find a lawyer willing to "champion the cause."

@turtlefish: At least one guy has sued. I have no idea how the suit went.

I agree with a lot of sentiments here. I think Chris Roberts 100% believes he will deliver the game to end all sci-fi games. I also think that with him at the helm it won’t happen.

They’ve burned through a budget that is probably only eclipsed by Halo Infinite (if wikipedia is accurate, anyway) and have little to show for it.

I think there are probably people there who are extremely frustrated by administrative decisions that hamper development of the game and wish they could get a finished product out.

If not Star Citizen, other games are starting to get close to this. I don’t like the combat in Elite much but their world has gone from boring with nothing to do all the way to totally alive with full VR support. But then they added on-foot combat which I have found to range from obtuse to buggy while remaining frustrating.

The dream will stay alive and I hope the budget *they* have managed to vacuum up will inspire a dev/publisher team to make this dream happen someday.

Elite is, for me, the other cautionary tale in Kickstarter. I backed Elite, but around the time they were about to go into early access, they advised that in order to get a game out, they had to abandon the single player offline component. Which was a major bummer for me, because I had zero desire to play Elite with other people.

I don’t blame them their choice - given their team size and budget, they had to do what they had to do to get the game out. And while it’s not for everybody, they’ve got something that works, and you know it’s working because you’re getting great emergent gameplay things like the Fuel Rats, for example.

But it’s not the game they originally promised and so, I now have little interest in it right now. It‘s a reminder that, unless the kickstarter (or other crowd funding platform) is effectively a preorder, you’re dealing with a project in progress, and that means changes and adjustments - sometimes radical ones.

But I do wonder once in a while about the alternate timeline where CIG admitted they were in over their head and released something like the 2014 Elite, and then spent the next 8 years polishing, developing and listening to feedback. It still wouldn’t have the single player component I want, but I bet a lot of people would be having a lot more fun right now - either by having something way more playable, or by watching the train wreck happen in public.

@turtlefish: Not sure if you are aware, but Elite has a single player mode, but the trading/economy/factions is still tied to online. You can still chat with other people online, but you will never see or interact with another person. So if your problem was just seeing other people, you can easily avoid that.

@turtlefish: "and then spent the next 8 years polishing, developing and listening to feedback."

I think the problem with that is there are core architectural limitations that prevent bolting on new features over time. Elite Dangerous can only end up being a series of different games stitched together because the tech can't integrate a first-person component, space travel component, and terrestrial flight and driving component without a lot of sleight of hand to hide the seams.

This is an example that I actually see as a 'win' for consumers -- we get to have it both ways. Elite Dangerous gives us the product of an ad hoc development model, with all the benefits and limitations that go along with that. Star Citizen gives the other. There are basic things that SC can do today that ED will never be able to do, and in contrast, ED's more conservative and compartmentalized modules allow them to fine tune features and hit their roadmap targets. Had SC taken Frontier's approach you'd have a game just like ED where you never really feel like you're playing in a contiguous game environment.

CIG have a long history of poorly communicated decisions. All they were attempting to do was to focus the roadmap on active work on various tasks in the project and instead made a passive aggressive swipe at "noisy community backers" who complained when deliverables were taken off or delayed.

There doesn't seem to be any slowing down of their development (evidenced by the fact they are expanding to a 1000 staff studio in the UK and a brand new location in Frankfurt), however, they are most definitely putting a LOT of attention and resources onto Squadron 42 - to the point where Chris Roberts and other staff are moving to the UK to be more directly involved - meaning that a lot of major work on the MMO side will slow until it is done. There is also a networking thorn in their side known as Server Meshing which enables more players to be in the same vicinity together and this feature has taken a lot longer than they anticipated.

To call the project a scam is lazy and inaccurate, however the way the project is being managed especially being split between two different projects is very disorganised and often gets caught up in whatever marketing decides needs to be shoveled into backers hands.

Star Citizen is not a scam, it's a series of increasingly unrealistic design goals and project roadmaps that culminate in a game that will never be finished, funded by a fandom of people that are misled about the reality of the situation.

CIG isn't conmen or thieves, they're just dishonest at worst, or incompetent at best; promising things that cannot and will not ever be deliverable in a reasonable timeframe.

Star Citizen is a real video game, it is just never going to reach even a feature-complete 'alpha' state before the funding--such as it is--falls through. It probably gets bought out, redeveloped into something shippable, and sold as some sort of Duke Nukem Forever-level curiosity after another decade of missed milestones and forgotten promises, as its veteran developers sail into retirement age.

All of which, of course, makes it the Emperor's New Game.

Yep, sometimes I wonder if CR needs to be bought out by Microsoft AGAIN just to make it sink in.

One thing I've been curious about for a while but haven't seen anyone really talk about: how sure are we that the amount of money they claim to have raised through crowdfunding is accurate? The thing that gets me is that this was effectively a dead genre in the decade preceding Kickstarter. There weren't tens of millions of dollars to be made in the entire genre of space sims--if there were, this genre would not have spent a decade languishing in obscurity. And now this project is approaching half a billion dollars, almost entirely in crowdfunding? Something just doesn't add up here.

But here's the problem I have here. They're not unaware of this, they can't be. Nobody knows how fucked up a project is better than the people working on it.

When you reach this point and choose to keep going anyway, that's a scam. It doesn't matter if at some point in time they really wanted to make the game. It makes them better than those crpyto MMO assholes but at the end of the day they still pivoted to grifting.

@rorie:

Feature roadmap will not be abandoned. Release View got shrinked to show only next patch instead of few patches forward. It has always showed features as "Tentative" so the lists has changed depending on blockers etc. Release View has been interesting to follow but pretty useless in practice. After they added Progress Tracker to Roadmap end of 2020 we have had much more detailed view of the development.

Last September Rich Tyrer talked about to change the focus on making features first to SQ42 before integrating to PU, so that change has been known for a while.

We have quite many sources to follow the development:

• testing alpha versions
• weekly roundup
• weekly shows [ISC (+sprint reports) and SCL]
• weekly lore update
• monthly SC / SQ42 reports
• monthly Jump Point
• roadmap (release view tracker and progress view tracker)
• SC chat and forums
• outside sources like interviews, reddit, twitter, etc.

Nah, it's not the people -- I wanted the fully offline mode so I could take things at my own pace, or I could tweak it and putz around with the game systems if I wanted to. If there's an online component, I can't just go "screw it I want to see endgame content" and give myself a bazillion credits. I can't go "Crap, I really screwed up here" and pull an earlier save and wipe out a few months of bad decisions.

Also, offline, if I disappear for six months and come back, everything is exactly where I left it. With the living service side of Elite Dangerous, I could leave for six months, come back, and discover my entire stash of McGuffins is now completely worthless.

I know there are games out there like that (fully offline mode), but, with a product coming from a team with Elite Dangerous' pedigree, I was hoping for things that you can get with a larger team - more original and variable content, more QC polish, etc. And there's the nostalgia factor too - I had Elite II for the Apple II, and would have really liked to have explored a modern take on it.

@efesell said:

I've worked on more than one project where everybody in the trenches knew it was going to hell in a handcart, but upper management thought everything was fine, or was paralyzed by indecision to maintaining course, or decided that they were going to paper everything over until the stock options vested and then would bail.

And hell, depending on how subdivided the internal team is, maybe people on the team don't know. I've been a part of shows where you've got your part down and your rehearsals go fine -- then you do the full Q2Q and/or full rehearsal and you realize "holy crap, the music guys still don't know the music" or "holy crap, the people on stage still don't know the blocking!"

That's the thing, until/unless somebody writes the tell all book on it, we'll never know the whole story.

Well, that's where original design intent comes in. Elite Dangerous has the "bolted on" problem because, from the start, the scope was a starship game. Only after Elite became as popular as it did, and they discussed other ideas and saw what other people were promising (including from Star Citizen), they decided "Hey, that might be cool to have."

Star Citizen, from the start, was supposed to be the uber game. They knew going in that they would need seamless loads between different modules / scales. So, maybe then the analogy is No Man's Sky -- early access is some barebones thing, and then you hang more meat off the bones over time. Except, since they had a team of dozens and a budget of tens of millions (as opposed to something like 5 people and whatever the residuals were off Joe Danger), they had the resources to make something with a lot more stuff on it upon early access release, and a much faster development cadence.

Or to put it in context of projects I've worked on -- If I'm told to build a website that is a brochure site, and then somebody says two years after launch "Oh, BTW, we now want the website to have consumer profiles and be multilingual", you're going to get seams, no matter what my team or I do. But, if at the start, I'm told that "you're building a website that is a brochure site, but, two years from now, we'll want consumer profiles and to be multilingual", I can at least make allowances for those. There will still probably be seams because, no matter how well you design the skeleton, implementing within the moment always works better than down the road (unless you have really strict software engineering standards, the type of thing that NASA tries to enforce), but you can make it really tight that you have to look really close to see where the seams are.

In other words, there's nothing inherent to SC's game design that predisposes it to any sort of development model. All of SC's aspirational goals were on the game design side, not technology or software engineering side. IMHO, a well run SC project would have had way more to show at this point - and it would have made more sense to show it because, if people think raising several hundred million for what they've shown is crazy, how much money could CIG raise if they dropped a beta for Squadron 42 that was as feature complete as No Man's Sky was in 2016?

This shit was over the moment they 1) gave people the option to pay them thousands of dollars for a space ship in a video game that didn't exist yet, 2) a bunch of marks actually payed them hundreds to thousands of dollars for a ship in a video game that didn't exist yet and 3) some weirdos started a Star Citizen lore podcast for a video game that didn't exist yet.

@alexw00d: If I recall correctly, I spend around 250$ on it and all I've gotten out of it is 20 minutes running around a hangar.

Oof. You could probably have an afternoon in an actual plane for that money.

Just to put into perspective. Duke Nukem Forever came out in 2011. One year AFTER they started pre production on Star Citizen

And No Man Sky came out in 2016 broken and empty and they still managed to release ton of update that made it pretty much what they promised in half the time they have been developing Star Citizen.

Let that sink in.