******Official Star Citizen / Squadron 42 Thread******

Soldato
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no mans sky is similar mate and way bigger than this game

NMS is a big, empty and repetitive game. Combat, both fps (actually tps) and ship to ship, is EXTREMELY simple and arcade(sh).

Hangar module came out in 2013-2014!!!!!! After $100 million had been taken in, including several million from AMD sponsorship for Mantle.
Ofc people complained in 2014 that in 2 years and $100 million having a hangar module is too poor.
And today with over $300 million spend and over 7 years in development is still shy of what should be with released since 2014, year after year. Now we are talking about 2022 and IF, they have money left to be completed. As it was on the last $14mn last year with $30 on salary liabilities only.

Also what other modules came out? The FPS module is shelved after been postponed three times to be released. SQ42 which was the initial idea, is now fragmented to gazillion DLCs as per current development plan.
And each DLC will cost as much as the full game.

Elite Dangerous is far bigger game with a tiny fraction of that budget. X4 with even smaller budget is better more playable game than Star Citizen SQ42 is after 7 years.

Do you remember Chris Roberts statements "all planets will be hand crafted not procedural generated"? And everyone was picking on ED and No Man's Sky for having "procedural generated planets"? Yet now SC will have procedural generated planet, none says anything.

I am software developer & analyst and after 22 years doing this job, having the experience to feel when a project isn't going to be done regardless if another $500million grow on trees.
Have seen such projects be run by companies like KPMG, burning millions to do a simple project and ending up with nothing resulting to client going bust.
Yet another company with just the good will, passion and ingenuity of a single developer did the job not in 1 but 3 deep mines without costing but it's normal salary.

Similarly we see this with SC against ED, No Man Sky and single player games like X4 and in some extent Subnautica as conceptually is similar game.
If Frontier or Egosoft had $100 mil funding to make a game, let alone $300 million, they could have done and dusted years ago with "Star Citizen".

And all is down to Chris Roberts with his renown and well recorded history of big failures.

Yet none of those games, as far as I've seen and played, are at the level SQ42 or SC aims to be. Actually no game is or planned to be. Why? Because it takes time and technology to make it, while all are concentrating on what they can get out ASAP to charge as much as possible.

Look at ArmA3, with a proper engine and proper care, it could have been BF, PUBG, Day Z, etc., "killer", but instead it just lost opportunity because Beohemia chose to ignore the tech behind it. Look how much time it took to build a "new" engine to have Day Z usable, with almost all the major assets and ideas of the game done (thanks to ArmA 2 and ArmA 3) and still lacks behind in a lot of areas compared to Dying Light. ArmA 3 is still unable to sustain 1080p@60fps on modern day systems after all these years due to poor optimization of the tech. You just need the right tech to build the the game you have envisioned and that takes time.

Do you want Freelancer 2? Sure, that could have been done in 2-3 years, maybe.
 
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Soldato
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Yet none of those games, as far as I've seen and played, are at the level SQ42 or SC aims to be. Actually no game is or planned to be. Why? Because it takes time and technology to make it, while all are concentrating on what they can get out ASAP to charge as much as possible.

Exactly! I guess it's just overall ignorance when it comes to game development and how expensive & time consuming it really is. People just don't grasp the mammoth scope of SC.

I always give the example of a pile of rubbish in The Division costing $3500. It builds perspective real quick.

The-Division-2.png
 
Soldato
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NMS is a big, empty and repetitive game. Combat, both fps (actually tps) and ship to ship, is EXTREMELY simple and arcade(sh).



Yet none of those games, as far as I've seen and played, are at the level SQ42 or SC aims to be. Actually no game is or planned to be. Why? Because it takes time and technology to make it, while all are concentrating on what they can get out ASAP to charge as much as possible.

Look at ArmA3, with a proper engine and proper care, it could have been BF, PUBG, Day Z, etc., "killer", but instead it just lost opportunity because Beohemia chose to ignore the tech behind it. Look how much time it took to build a "new" engine to have Day Z usable, with almost all the major assets and ideas of the game done (thanks to ArmA 2 and ArmA 3) and still lacks behind in a lot of areas compared to Dying Light. ArmA 3 is still unable to sustain 1080p@60fps on modern day systems after all these years due to poor optimization of the tech. You just need the right tech to build the the game you have envisioned and that takes time.

Do you want Freelancer 2? Sure, that could have been done in 2-3 years, maybe.


"are at the level SQ42 or SC aims to be." but it's not there and won't be for another 6-8 years.
By then something else will come out even better.

If people stop giving them money, then they will have no choice but to sell it on or bring out SQ42.
 
Soldato
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Similar in 6-8 years time, most likely (as in Mass Effect style), yet not the same. Red Faction: Guerilla came out 10 years ago, in 2009. No game today uses the same amount of physics for its gameplay as that one does, although current consoles are much more powerful than old gen is. And no, BF is not as complex, the physics are rather "baked in" compared to Red Faction.
 
Soldato
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"are at the level SQ42 or SC aims to be." but it's not there and won't be for another 6-8 years.
By then something else will come out even better.

If people stop giving them money, then they will have no choice but to sell it on or bring out SQ42.

It won't be sold on, this IP is Chris Roberts and he'll hold onto it for TV series and or movies. Expect it to be milked in coming decades irrespective of whether SQ42 or SC is a success. He made the mistake of selling off the Wing Commander IP previously.
 
Soldato
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This has far greater depth when you look into lore etc. They've had several writers working on it for years and honestly some of the stuff is great.

It's that sort of detail that series/books/movies that actually work can be made from, not previous sales - just look at Doom, Wing Commander etc movies we had.. one of which CR was responsible for lol
 
Man of Honour
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the mammoth scope of SC.

This here is the problem and the risk. They keep adding and adding, barely finishing anything, prolonging the release, making it less and less likely to actually release. I don’t blame them, if people are happy to keep throwing money at them then why change the model. There is no incentive to finish this, actually quite the opposite.
 
Soldato
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Exactly! I guess it's just overall ignorance when it comes to game development and how expensive & time consuming it really is. People just don't grasp the mammoth scope of SC.
I always give the example of a pile of rubbish in The Division costing $3500. It builds perspective real quick.

These are estimates from someone who was trying to promote an AI building engine for procedural generating games.
He ESTIMATED that the developer salary is $60/hr and how many hours it would take HIM to create the scene. Completely forgetting that more and more companies shift their development to low cost countries.
Nor he got any numbers from Ubisoft of the cost of the game. Which by the way was on a brand new engine.

You need to read the whole article not the headlines only.

Yet none of those games, as far as I've seen and played, are at the level SQ42 or SC aims to be. Actually no game is or planned to be. Why? Because it takes time and technology to make it, while all are concentrating on what they can get out ASAP to charge as much as possible.

Ahh always the same argument. You brush under the amount of money spent already and how many engines and APIs already CIS has changed.
Also you dismiss the fact that Elite was made with 1/60th of Star Citizen money.

You completely ignore that SQ42 is not a single game. But multiple games lasting 8 hours each, where if you want to play the full "story line" of SQ42 you have to buy them all, one after the other at their full price also.
You completely ignore that the FPS module burn a substantial amount of money (around $100 million) was delayed 3 times and now is canned forever. That was money lost not from some publisher company, like @Poneros trying to imply but from the people who spend money to buy artificial ships or back this project.
You completely ignore the fact that if Roberts wanted to have the game released, couldn't scope creep it over 7 years, while burning money at the rate of $4-6 million per month. Again not some investor money, but common folk who have made SC a religion given their reactions.

Star Citizen is doomed to fail financially and implode within the first year (at best) if ever comes out, because is a pyramid scheme. Need to comprehend that.

It has no market to expand with fresh money. Everyone interested in the game has bought into it. From normal casuals like myself having got everything from a voucher (that was a bargain), to the whales have spend tens of thousands. There is no money tree any more. All the money CIS managed to get for the project has already done so.
And if no new money come in, is bust given that CIS is running on "steam" after having just left with a year worth of expenditure for 2019 and no more money for 2020.

That's the difference between other games like ED. Because ED cost so little to make, it had market to expand and did actually sell a lot.

Roberts isn't stupid. Nobody in the game industry could give him the money to make a game after his track record. So instead of having all legal contracts from companies like MS, Ubi, EA, XYZ, decided to use crowdfunding away from normal crowdfunding channels also with his own T&C. Having change the T&C numerous times atm to his favour also.
All those who have bought the ships now legally cannot claim their money back. Because they can play with those ships to what ever space has provided. So even if he completely goes belly up tomorrow, owes you nothing. Regardless if there is no playable game there.

And then dream about big scopes of taking decades to be done, completely ignoring reality of economics and logic.
 
Soldato
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Also you dismiss the fact that Elite was made with 1/60th of Star Citizen money.

Panos you do realise these games are vastly different right? You aren't comparing like for like here unless you keep it at an artificially obtuse level of "ships, stations, planets, spaaaace" etc.

I'm all for CIG bashing in general but most of your post is straight up nonsense.

FPS module $100 million? Evidence please..
 
Soldato
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Panos you do realise these games are vastly different right? You aren't comparing like for like here unless you keep it at an artificially obtuse level of "ships, stations, planets, spaaaace" etc.

I'm all for CIG bashing in general but most of your post is straight up nonsense.

FPS module $100 million? Evidence please..

Need to find the article from December 2017. I am in Greece atm and google tries to be clever with my searching -_-

However here are the last accounts from December 2018 to back my post above that CIG "runs on steam" while having no game yet.

https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cfo-comment-2012-2017-financials
 
Soldato
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Need to find the article from December 2017. I am in Greece atm and google tries to be clever with my searching -_-

However here are the last accounts from December 2018 to back my post above that CIG "runs on steam" while having no game yet.

https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cfo-comment-2012-2017-financials

None of that adds up to anywhere near your figure of $100M for the FPS.. When they publicly announced they'd cancelled they hadn't even raised that much, it'd be around Dec 2015 before the site showed the $100M figure.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14803-Letter-From-The-Chairman

^^ cancelled end June 2015

Company behind it were Illfonic (https://www.illfonic.com/) a US based games developer with a dubious track record.

CIG announced that the FPS module was being outsourced at CitCon2014, however as they had a demo I think we can assume it had been in the works for some time. I'll be generous and say 12 months. So that gives from October 2013 to June 2015 to explain your $100M figure.


I'm not by any means saying it wasn't a bloody awful waste of money and looking at the financials if we assume that ALL of the contracted dev costs were Illfonic (which we know isn't the case) it would be at a maximum be around the $20-25M and that's including all of the expenditure for 2015 (it was cancelled first half of the year).

Still a waste of millions irrespective and not the last colossal screw up.
 
Soldato
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Panos you do realise these games are vastly different right? You aren't comparing like for like here unless you keep it at an artificially obtuse level of "ships, stations, planets, spaaaace" etc.

This is what most fail to understand, no game comes close to this, yet all the comparisons about different games which are far less complex, while also ignoring other games, less complex, that took a lot of time to be developed. Again, look at Cyberpunk.

I can't say how well they've spent the money, but I do understand that mistakes can be made, you just don't see these in public light from the likes of EA, UBI, etc., but it doesn't mean they don't happen. Of course, is not ok (I can't say that it is), and they must be more careful with finances.

PS: The engine was not changed as I think the people believed it has (as in start to work again from zero with a different one), just the name changed and I guess from where the updates come now, but at this point, they're already on their own path, with their own technology, far surpassing what others have, for a quite a while. Is not like engine X can do all the stuff they want. Same with APIs, Mantle evolved into Vulkan and only now the work has begun on that front (low level API, although I think they said the programming in the beginning was done with that in mind), so once more, is not like Mantle was up and running, 100% completed, then start from zero with Vulkan. Development just adapted to the times and options present.
 
Soldato
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No mans sky is very similar to the game. Just doesnt have a FPS shooting experience but the overal First person is much much smoother than SC.

no mans sky has LOADS more content and a very dynamic engine where you can build stuff yourself unlike in SC.

It also has tons of solar systems vs the one on this.

Like i said, they should release SC with one star system that contains 3-4 fully fledge planets you can explore and do missions and have FPS combat as nice as battlefield/COD/SQUAD and call it a day.

release new star systems/planets bit by bit
 
Caporegime
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No mans sky is very similar to the game. Just doesnt have a FPS shooting experience but the overal First person is much much smoother than SC.

no mans sky has LOADS more content and a very dynamic engine where you can build stuff yourself unlike in SC.

It also has tons of solar systems vs the one on this.

Like i said, they should release SC with one star system that contains 3-4 fully fledge planets you can explore and do missions and have FPS combat as nice as battlefield/COD/SQUAD and call it a day.

release new star systems/planets bit by bit

You're making the mistake here of assuming that because a game of a similar type they must be similar in all aspects.

From a technology and complexity point of view they could not be more different, Star Citizen is a singular giant 3D sandbox currently about 50,000,000 KM in diameter, the objects such as planets and moons are the size that they are in 3D space, the distance between them is real in 3D space.

Compare that to NMS which simply gives you the illusion of that, the celestial bodies, planets / moons are visual sprites in a sandbox, they are not real in 3D space, when you land on them what you get is a load screen disguised as an atmospheric entry effect, the surface you land on is not the same thing you saw in space, its a different level in a different sandbox.

NMS does not have full sized player ships with full interiors, currently upto 220 Meters and eventually 960 Meters like the Bengal and the really big ones about 3 or 4 KM long.

The complexity and technology behind just those two most obviously mentionable things are worlds apart from NMS and ED, its actually unique, nothing else like it exists.

And then there's the Graphics quality.

I'll let that speak for its self. PS: you see the sun rise in the second clip, that's a real star sized ball of light Millions of KM away casting light through atmospheric scattering giving it that orange hue, there is nothing faked about it.



Play this one at 4K



 
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Soldato
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No mans sky is very similar to the game. Just doesnt have a FPS shooting experience but the overal First person is much much smoother than SC.

no mans sky has LOADS more content and a very dynamic engine where you can build stuff yourself unlike in SC.

It also has tons of solar systems vs the one on this.

Like i said, they should release SC with one star system that contains 3-4 fully fledge planets you can explore and do missions and have FPS combat as nice as battlefield/COD/SQUAD and call it a day.

release new star systems/planets bit by bit

I really like NMS but be honest the interactions etc are minimal, the NPCs are awful. Somehow menus are even worse than SC (and I don't know why), ship combat is fun but tremendously basic.. but I do actually like it. It feels like a game from the 90s reskinned though. That said I play NMS rather than Elite Dangerous and have played NMS more than SC this year. Possibly because of the simpler more fun controls!

I think systems in SC will be released drip feed, when you think about it makes sense and would fit into how they have released content so far. Whether they get to 100 systems is highly debatable IMHO and I don't care if they have the servers to support a smaller number.
 
Soldato
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These are estimates from someone who was trying to promote an AI building engine for procedural generating games.
He ESTIMATED that the developer salary is $60/hr and how many hours it would take HIM to create the scene. Completely forgetting that more and more companies shift their development to low cost countries.
Nor he got any numbers from Ubisoft of the cost of the game. Which by the way was on a brand new engine.

You need to read the whole article not the headlines only.

Actually I watched the talk, and we're talking assets first of all. If you have more accurate estimates do tell, he has some other sources as well, eg
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180117/313211/The_cost_of_games.php

And even in the case of outsourcing generic assets, the home studio will still work on them for a bit so the cost-saving isn't as big as you'd think.
 
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