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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up.

Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.

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Is there anything playable yet?

edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing,

    While Star Citizen is currently in the Alpha stage 
    of development, it is playable now. New content, 
    features, and fixes are consistently added as
    development continues, with a major patch released 
    each quarter.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now

As somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.

Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s a mess. My big issue with playing regularly is that it’s better with friends but as you add people the odds that one of you is experiencing issues at any given time approaches 100%. So you’re trying to group up, but first you fall down the stairs and die, then your friends ship spawns with its landing gear in the floor, does a few flips and explodes. When he replaces it, the engines are missing, so your other friend goes to pick him up instead. But they fly too close to the moving space station rings that are out of sync between the client and the server, and now their ship blows up too. Meanwhile you finally get you ship into space, and one of your friends respawns, falls down the stairs, and dies.

But then you also have moments like these when the game is pretty cool: https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/s7y1wk/last_night_...

I hope they finish it, and I feel like I’ve gotten my relatively small amount of money’s worth out of it. But if I were one of the people who’s bought in for thousands of dollars I’d definitely be worried.

That's cool to read.

    I hope they finish it

At that point, would it even be fun to play for folks that have messed around with it in its extremely unfinished state for so long?

I can't imagine in-house beta testers really have fun playing the games they've helped to shepherd to release once they finally ship...

I’d say both yes and no. Some aspects, like a trip to Security Post Kareah to hack off a crime stat, are definitely more amazing as a new player from that story compared to someone who’s been playing for a while. It’s a chore, half the time you have a crime stat it’s because of a bug, and if a bounty hunter gets you during this process you wake up in jail. Neat the first time, could do without it after that.

Other parts you’ve done before but still enjoy because it’s a part of the game that you like. Box delivery missions are relaxing sci-fi sightseeing to me, and that’s only going to get better as the universe expands. The places we already have in the game are pretty amazing and a lot more is planned. I’m not into truck simulator games, but put it in space and heck yeah I’ll fly boxes around.

And then the third category is stuff that we’re not playing at all yet because it keeps getting delayed. So that’ll be a new experience even if I’ve been playing Star Citizen on and off since it hit alpha. Salvaging is the running joke here, but even that is kind of an ongoing distraction from the many professions that are supposed to come after it. https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/ngke3m/salvage_soo...

For some reason SC seems to have nailed the crimes and punishment which sadly is not working as well in Elite, which in turn really needs it due to some obnoxious ganking.

It sounds like the definitions of "playable" and "alpha" really matter here.

When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software.

I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms.

From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.

Chris Roberts discovered Steam-by-another-name: it's more profitable to make hats than games.

And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.

> it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers

I admit there's a subjective aspect regarding what's worth calling out.

Personally, I judge Chris's actions to be worth calling out.

Absolutely, but with about the same fervency I use when a $2 taco sucks.

It really is an interesting phenomenon. The game has released several versions. A game that rolled out at a similar time, Elite Dangerous, declared itself released a ways back, with a drastically narrower feature set, and since then has constantly moved towards adding what Star Citizen claims to be. In theory, if both continue to develop in perpetuity, their feature set will eventually be pretty aligned, but one calls itself pre-release and one calls itself receiving updates.

I am not sure there is a lot of difference besides the certain expectation of polish.

There are parts of Star Citizen which, if released standalone, would be indistinguishable from release-grade games. Arena Commander is excellent, and plenty of full games are comparable to this sub-feature of Star Citizen, and Star Marine, the built-in FPS probably only really lacks in terms of playerbase: It's excellent and the touches in it's game mechanics are amazing.

I think your'e mistaken, In my mind its unlikely that Elite will ever get a new expansion again? The last one was not.. lets say enthusiastically received.

Also Elite is built in a way where they have a lot of parallell systems that _do not interact_. This makes the game very shallow with a few gameplay loops, but they are really more akin to mini-games with the universe as background, than real proper games. And I don't see how they could ever make the universe more realistic without having interactions that was never foreseen, and prboably cant be fixed. For example the economy is all fake, its not based (much at all) on what users do. "Powerplay" is a totally separate game system that I at first thought was connected in some way to the rest of the game, but no. You can rank up inside separate factions, and sure it does affect some things such as which ships you can buy, but its all still very shallow. A lot of things is not interchangeable using money, which in reality almost everything is. You can't transfer wealth between players etc.

The sad thing about Elite Dangerous is that its still a totally fun game with other players providing some content, but the netcode is just not made for "massive" multiplayer but instead sort of randomly caps out at a few players interacting at the same time, with no fix likely ever coming.

It's playable, but it's nowhere close to being a complete game. It seems like most of the value people get out of it at this point is fucking around with its half-broken systems.

There's some really bizarre tribalism that develops in the Kickstarter/preorder realm. I back a fair number of board games and see the same thing there.

Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.

I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.

I think thats human nature to some extent. Some people really don't like being wrong/disapointed. Especially after spending money. So narrative to make it alright.

Someone once said "I was wrong about this. I've been wrong before. I just try not to dwell on it..". I'm wrong often too.

I pre order board games. I’m looking forward to ISS vanguard and have been doing so for over a year. I wouldn’t do so with video games.

Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs. Video games are more like “wouldn’t it be cool if you could do X”? And sometimes the answer turns out to be “no” when it’s actually implemented, or the actual implementation is just way watered down from your imagination. Backing something like star citizen seems like it’s begging for disappointment.

But that’s what I enjoy these platforms for: I want to precommit some small sum of money and if lots of us do it this guy is going to take an honest shot at it.

Since it’s so little, I get no equity and I just get one unit of product. Fair deal to me.

Disappointment isn’t that they tried and it sucked. It’s only if they don’t try. But to be honest, I don’t even feel disappointed then because I usually make a satisfactory judgment as to the likelihood of success so if it fails, that’s just a failed bet. And nothing wrong with failing on a bet.

> Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs

That doesn't make them any more reliable. Check the disaster it was the crowdfunding of "HeroQuest 25 anniversary".

What happened there? From the outside I thought it was pretty smooth and successful. Delivered what was promised and only a couple months late.

I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.

Here you have a summary in English[0] and the whole story in Spanish[1]. Even years after, patrons are still waiting with little hope.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroquest/comments/ixwdog/comment/g...

[1]https://www.xataka.com/literatura-comics-y-juegos/heroquest-...

Oh bizarre. I hadn't seen that one. Appears to be a very dubious Spain-only campaign.

As far as I'm aware, the official Hasbro one went quite well: https://hasbropulse.com/products/heroquest-game-system

Well hey, I was too young to be involved in the Battlecruiser 3000 AD usenet wars of the early 90's.[0] So this is like a second chance!

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20060703160929/http://archive.ga...

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