I aways wanted to play this AMAZING GAME. But it seems that they CANNOT deliver something. This is really weird.
Is this game playable?
More details. So Roberts initially funded a visual demo, which was made in cry-engine. He hired a bunch of 3d-artists to make cool models. Using this visual-demo he got a shittonne of crowdfunding in 2012. It was at this point that he should have dumped the demo and hired an amazing lead-dev who would figure out how they would build this game for real. Instead Roberts kept this cryengine visual demo, and hired a tonne of people who started haphazardly adding more stuff on top of the demo. So, it was really at that point the project became doomed, its been walking dead for ten years.
If you have 5 or so hours to kill, there's actually a great video series about the game called Sunk Cost Galaxy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...
Otherwise you're just a pitchman trying to sell/hype an idea. And ideas as we know are easy.
Doomed is also strong language — the company has clearly grown significantly and crowdfunding is clearly working to sustain it financially until they release the single player game. The alpha is bigger and better performing than ever. It’s not exactly dying :)
Certainly, I won’t disagree that the project has suffered from severe management, planning, and communication issues over the years. I chalk that partly up to CIG being a new company without established processes working in a unique environment (it’s rare for a big MMO to have to support a live environment while gamedev isn’t close to complete), and partly up to massive scope creep.
Anyways, I’ve easily gotten my $45 back in enjoyment of the alpha, so I’m not salty about it.
If they focused on improving the game's initial loading times, cutting down on a hate inducing amount of lag, and making the elevators actually render reliably for everyone at any time, instead of bullshit like focusing on making bed sheets have realistic physics, then alright.
Until then, it's a barely playable piece of shit of a digital paper weight. It boils my blood just thinking about how shitty the experience they provide is.
Forget the name of the location, but when I tried playing again about a month or two ago, I tried moving from the wake up point to the elevator to head out to the lobby. The elevator never rendered and it's the only way out. This has been going on since first playing it some years ago, and it requires reloading the game which takes ~10-15 minutes.
When the game works and you're not experiencing lag, it's fun, but yeah it's still essentially a digital paper weight unless you have a rtx 20 or 30 series and a gigabit connection...
Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable, one of their recent dev goals was making bed sheets have more realistic physics... this kind of shit is a joke.
I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.
I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").
There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.
The minute details don't bother me much, just that they're focused on so many of these (at times ridiculous) details, yet in my case and others, the elevator doesn't even appear.
At the least they should focus on making a playable/accessible game, then drill down
Do be cognizant though, this is one of the reasons why the game is taking so long to make. They have a split focus on getting the game done off in another build, whilst maintaining the playable alpha that hasn't got all the game systems they've built connected to it. Most games don't have a requirement to be a fully playable game during development. If something isn't working in a dev build, you just say "Hey, don't go there, it's broken in this build." But with the alpha, everyone expects a working game even though the whole codebase is constantly in flux.
Apparently there is a way to actually find a ship to fly in, but they sure made it difficult to find out how to fly it.
Ngl, it was enjoyable when it worked, but I'm also the type who likes to aimlessly explore. Found myself heading to a random space station and then to a random planet and that was fun enough for me... until I got booted after walking around the planet for a few moments. Didn't know you have to rest at a location to have it count as a checkpoint, and upon reloading the game ended up starting back where I first spawned in the beginning of the game... only to find no elevator yet again...
Heads up though, when you get to a lobby there's usually a location nearby with screen panels or kiosks, and they usually have a yellow UI (forget if the UI is visible prior to interacting with the screen). You can use those to call your ship to a hangar
Of course, since they are constantly moving the goalposts and making the scope of that game bigger, they will never actually deliver everything they promised.
What changes if they release a game? The reviews will inevitably not live up to inflated expectations.
And the other change would be that they'd have to start giving a relatively predatory cut to Steam. Compared to their payment processor or crowdfunding platform fees now.
Star Citizen is a "pre-product" pure play.
They were idiots to promise anything deliverable within 5 years, but I am not surprised at how long it is taking. Big games are hard, big companies are slow.