Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirui | Hacker News Reader

Well at least this thing has reached v1.0 LOL

Joke aside, I want to say something controversial here: I don't think the release date/progress matters much anymore for the dev team at this day and age. At least not as matter as it used to be when the game plan was just announced. The same point is somewhat true for their backers: they are not in a hurry as well, they want to (emotionally) see Star Citizen success one day (Or they just don't care anymore).

(Assuming they're actually building a game, instead of doing something else with that money, of course)

Remember [Freelancer]? It was released back in 2003, some people are still playing the game today, and they even go as far as creating an open source version of it called [Librelancer].

[Freelancer]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)

[Librelancer]: https://github.com/Librelancer/Librelancer

The scale of Star Citizen is way larger than Freelancer, and the potential of the game is greater as well since you can do many things in the game. If one day Star Citizen releases and delivered what's promised, the game will last for a very long time. So for the fans, the wait maybe worth it.

(And hopefully it will be released before Elon Musk, NASA, ESA, CNSA or ROSCOSMOS etc give us the real-world version and make us actual 1-heart space-slaves LOL)

For the non-fans, however, the market is largely fulfilled by Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky etc.

I don't know how you can seriously mention Freelancer without mentioning that it was completely taken out of the over-promising grip of Chris Roberts. Great game, but I despise the fact that people attribute the work of those programmers who worked to actually put the thing out (when he got his golden parachute and all they got was more crunch) to that huckster.

And if you read any of the profiles of Chris Roberts or people talking about working at RSI on Star Citizen (Kotaku did a multi-part series on it years ago), you'll see an image of nothing more than a petty, micromanaging boss who does nothing but interfere in literally everything, resulting in a dysfunctional studio. This isn't surprising; any cursory glance at their roadmaps, their former promises, their history, their delays etc, clearly paints a picture of severe mismanagement, no matter how much fans excuse it.

In fact, one aspect of Freelancer that's been left to history is the fact that when Microsoft bought some equity in his studio before acquiring them entirely, some producers claimed he later used part of that money to fund his failed movie ventures instead of Freelancer, which were also later held afloat by a weird German tax fraud scheme (the mastermind of which later went to jail, which also resulted in German law changing and his whole excursion into the film industry collapsing instantly). His response to this was "it's fine, because it was general equity stake and not earmarked for Freelancer." The fact they had to wrestle Freelancer away from him is absolutely not surprising when he quite literally was dicking around on C-tier shitfilms like Wing Commander while people busted their ass.

People here are mentioning the notion of auteurs, of visionaries, etc. I disagree; that's an insult to actual creatives. Hideo Kojima is creative and has proven himself time and time again with both his repeated success and his wide array of unusual work. Everything I've seen of him indicates to me that Chris Roberts is, essentially, an overly ambitious child of a man and petty boss who was lucky Richard Garriott ever gave him a chance, and has ridden on almost nothing more than his legacy at Origin Systems, and has been desperately attempting to capture that again ever since.

I agree with most of your post.

But this part:

> Hideo Kojima is creative and has proven himself time and time again with both his repeated success and his wide array of unusual work.

...I'll disagree with. Kojima seems to be a guy who wants to actively subvert expectations which, with the release of Death Stranding, felt even more like a rebellious teenager wanting to stick it to the system above all else, and not make an actual fun and engaging game. (Not to mention that the premise and general plot have been beaten to death long ago and are well-known for most but the most juvenile of gamers.)

"Unusual work" does not equal "interesting and fun result". In fact I find most modern incarnations of "unusual" to be rebelling against the "norm" just for the sake of it.

But I in general have a beef with a lot of these Japanese "creators". They might be unusual on the background of a lot of the copy-paste Japanese (or generally Asian) works but on the global scale they are nothing special.

In fact they are a running joke in no small amount of circles: "Oh, a Kojima game? I bet now we'll have a crying raven, or a talking baby, or cows will turn out to be the superior race on Earth all along? And I bet there will be a government conspiracy even if most of humanity is already dead? And the protagonist will be just a regular guy who reluctantly saves the world?"

I kid you not, the above is almost word-for-word quote from a table discussion I had with a few other guys and girls when Death Stranding was 2-3 months away from release.

You and others might find this unconstructive and maybe even obnoxious but I'd still like to bring the perspective on you that guys like Kojima are in fact fairly predictable as well, and not in a good way.

Whoa, TIL Librelancer! I'll have to check this out. Thanks!

Interesting... Also, some day I would like to play again Starlancer (the previous game). Really cool game and the best game on the genere that I played since the Tie-Fighter and XvsTie games

> Well at least this thing has reached v1.0 LOL

But now somebody has to support and update the progress tracker indefinitely...

> The scale of Star Citizen is way larger than Freelancer

No it isn't. It's also not even clear it will ever come even close to it at this point.

I also seriously doubt that there are so many backers fuelling this space video production company. It's pretty well known that there is a significant amount of whales who carry this thing around.

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