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Comment by bm3719 | Hacker News Reader

After getting my refund, I've been watching the SC narrative unfold from the sidelines with interest. There's enough things that've gone awry in this project to write a book about (and I guess if you were to collect all of Derek Smart's writings, that's what you'd have).

For me, the main deal breakers and why I got out were that I felt substantively bait-and-switched when you compare the current "game" to what was originally promised, and a complete lack of any confidence whatsoever in this game actually coming out. The latter is mainly due to things like this, where core technologies are forever iterated on at a fundamental level even this far (5 years) into development.

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They were already using CryEngine, and Lumberyard is based on CryEngine (I assume the changes are mostly licensing rather than technical), so I doubt this was actually hard at all. In fact if you'd read the article:

> Because we share a common technical vision, it has been a very smooth and easy transition to Lumberyard. In fact, we are excited to announce that our upcoming 2.6 Alpha release for Star Citizen is running on Lumberyard and AWS.

All the bait & switch over-promising, over-ambitious probably-never-finished criticisms are true, but it's silly to say that this is one of those Duke Nukem Forever style start from scratch again mistakes.

>> compare the current "game" to what was originally promised

That's a real issue with crowdfunding. More often than not, the devs truly have no idea what the final game will look like. Much of the early funding goes into what are essentially extended market research projects. Alphas are released, feedback taken, and changes made. Everyone expects that devs have some final version of "done" in their heads, but the truth is that such pictures constantly change in response to user/market feedback.

There are only a handful of indi games that ever developed towards a finite picture (Prison Architect). Most bounce around trying to please all the fans until some financial tipping point causes them to slap "1.0" on the latest build and push it out the door (KSP). That crowdfunding and traditional funding result in very different game development should be no surprise to anyone. StarCitizen will release when they need to release. Until then the cycle of feedback and iteration will continue.

KSP was steam early access rather than crowdfunded per se, and was one of the early successes of steam's "early access", the funding made it into a very complete game and had regular updates and progress throughout the early access stages and didn't re-invent itself.

It wasn't only on steam. They also sold through their own store. I certainly didn't buy through steam. Whether the game is complete or not depends on when you got in on the process. What it does have is the layered and rather disconnected set of features that are typical of game development in response to market feedback rather than cohesive vision. It's a good game, but does show the telltales.

What about Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity and quite a few other crowdfunded games that were released and are good?

I wasnt talking about good or bad. Thats a different issue than the process of their development. SC might or might not be good. Either way, its development follows a known pattern and the lack of set goals is part of that pattern.

Except you equated that pattern with crowdfunding which is rather untrue. Several examples were provided of successful games which delivered exactly what they set out to do more or less.

This gets to the root of my problems with the game's development history.

The switch to Lumberyard makes a lot of sense. It's basically Cryengine. With Crytek shutting down, I'd want to switch to a still maintained but pretty much the same engine too.

When Star Citizen was originally announced on Kickstarter I was hyped as hell that Freelancer was going to get a spiritual successor. But I held off because it felt like they were already promising a really big scope at the time of the Kickstarter. Like the size of several games.

Destiny also had a huge vision, but even with an experienced studio and fewer promises, they still had issues delivering on the hype they marketed until many DLC's later.

The vision for the game still felt achievable until they added the FPS elements, at which point I more or less wrote off that the game would ever come out as a fully realized vision. It's just too goddamn big.

Crytek shut down? That's not what they said in the recent press release at all. They closed several studios in order to focus more on their core which is CryEngine.

Yeah you're right, they closed five studios, not a total shutdown.

Derek Smart has basically put himself back in the public consciousness on his Star Citizen ranting alone. It's hard to take him entirely seriously, because of how solely reliant on CIG for attention he presently is, and it seems like he's never gotten along with Chris Roberts either. He's fun to read for an alternative perspective, I suppose.

I feel like with 2.6 we're finally starting to see the vision, this is kinda the sort of experience I want to have in my space games. Being able to have spaceships and first person combat in one game is a big part of why I got so excited about EVE Online's "Walking in Stations" and the release of DUST 514. Unfortunately, while CCP doesn't receive the same stress for overpromising and underdelivering (even though they do, regularly), they failed to accomplish that vision.

We know, pretty much 100%, that Star Citizen is going to disappoint a lot of people. The number of promises they've made are ridiculous, and it's impossible to live up to that.

But what Alpha 2.6 delivers on it's own (yes, apparently running Lumberyard), I'd argue raises the bar for what a space simulation game should be capable of. I've never seen a game that even comes close to accomplishing the fidelity of Star Citizen, in a generalized way that isn't dependent on pre-rendered cinematics or triggered events.

Yeah, people complaining or nitpicking clearly haven't played the alpha yet. It is going according to plan. I am an original KS backer from November of 2012, and have since dumped a couple thousand into development, and I'm happy with the way things are going. I, as then, trust Chris Roberts to make his magnum opus, and I know I'll enjoy playing it.

While I'm sensitive to people who gave money to this project, I have to ask:

If Chris Roberts, with his name and reputation in the games industry, were still capable of making quality games, wouldn't he have been able to find a publisher to fund Star Citizen instead of having to beg thousands of his fans?

My attitude towards crowdfunding is to never contribute. If the product's successful, I can just buy it off-the-shelf when it's finished. (Like the new Elite, for example.) If it fails, I'm not out anything. (Sure, there's a small chance I might miss out on some Kickstarter exclusive deal, but I'd rather miss out on that then have an Ouya collecting dust in my living room.)

I could believe that a talented game designer was capable of getting money from publishers, but not for the game the actually want to make (at least without substantial compromise).

And the downside of sitting out on crowdfunding is the reduced chance that something you like will get funded/made. Whether that matters to you depends on how excited you are by a project, and how likely you think it is to produce something matching your expectations.

In the field of video games, there's already far more good games than I can play in a lifetime. I'm willing to let someone else do the vetting in my stead.

EDIT: to respond to your first sentence, I get your point, but it seems like that particular market has been severely under-served recently (as demonstrated by, well, Star Citizen's funding campaign for example). It shouldn't be a hard-sell to a publisher to make a game for a market that's been badly under-served for a decade or so.

And it's not like Chris Roberts is a game design savant who isn't capable of doing the wheeling and dealing-- the cast he got for Wing Commander 3 demonstrates he can deal.

I find it hard to believe if he had taken his pitch to, for example, EA, that they'd just brush him off unless they had good reason. I think now what we're seeing with Star Citizen development is the reason.

He could have rushed out an uninspiring space simulation game and made a lot of money. Star Citizen is an attempt to raise the bar and advance the state of the art. This alternative development methodology is a part of that.

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