So this Star Citizen might end up being the next Monster Game.

They apparently got crowdfunded for 100 million – no, it’s not a typo – and so the demo may not be over-promising quite as much as demos usually do.

Then again, it might still collapse under its own weight. I wonder if the people making this game were expecting this response? And how have I not heard about this before now? Weird.

9 thoughts on “So this Star Citizen might end up being the next Monster Game.”

    1. I take it all with a grain of salt. Yeah, they’ve probably not made the best use of the 100 million. Dumping wads of cash like that on a game that doesn’t really require it is just an invitation for feature creep. Weather this equates to a failed game in the end is unclear. They got the money, they don’t need more (AFAIK) and they appear to be trending toward completion. If I was an investor, I’d be upset because I wouldn’t get a return on my money, but that’s not how Kickstarter works. If all those people who chipped in still get the game and bonuses they contributed for, everyone should be happy?

  3. I’m actually very surprised you haven’t heard about SC yet.

    There’s a number of reasons fro the amount of funding it’s received. Chris Roberts is a legend in the space sim genre, having made the Wing Commander series, as well as Freelancer; the fans who grew up on WC are now middle-aged and have disposable income; Roberts is building the game HE’S always wanted to play, which is the game WE’VE always wanted to play (ie, a giant space ship sandbox game); and it’s supposed to completely push the limits of what a PC can do, rather than be limited to console abilities.

    The original plan was to raise $2-3M to prove to investors that the market was there. The original campaign raised $6.5M instead. When the ongoing funding reached $20M, he ditched the outside investors, and it’s just kept coming in.

    CIG is by far the most transparent developer ever. Multiple weekly video shows where they answer questions, give progress updates, and show off WIP aspects of the game. Devs routinely chat in the forums. Weekly and monthly status update posts.

    Complaints about SC tend to fall into a few categories: “it’s a scam”, “it can’t be done”, and “they’re mismanaging things”. Well, scams don’t generally involve hiring 300 employees worldwide plus outside contractors; the recent playable release with the 64-bit “large world” space map and multi-crew ships with their own local physics grids, plus this planetary generation demo, show that they can certainly manage the technical aspects; and they continue to demonstrate ongoing progress towards a coherent final game.

    Most of the “drama” revolves around Derek Smart, who is the single most legendary troll ever to flamewar on Usenet. He’s made repeated predictions of failure (all of which have not come to pass), threatened lawsuits (which haven’t happened), ranted about how CIG can’t do things, etc, etc.

    In summary: yes, I’m an SC fanboy, but they are genuinely pulling together the pieces for a truly groundbreaking game. Still remains to be seen if the final result will be fun, how the gameplay mechanics will work out, and how long it will take to be “done”, but we’re WAY past the point where you can just dismiss it as an impossible idea or a failure.

  4. You’ll have to wait and see, just like the rest of us.
    It could be a major success.
    It will almost certainly be a cult classic.
    It’s likely to be an ambitious failure that is brilliant in parts, but lacking in others.
    Whatever it is, it’s very unlikely to meet the expectations being placed upon it.
    .
    Smart is more credible than the above poster is willing to cede.
    .
    Think of it as a nerd cult that wants very badly to believe, and recites your prayer as a mantra. You won’t be far off.
    .
    Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see them succeed. But there’s so much wishcasting involved at this point that it’s not quite clear what success would even look like.

    1. Sure, there’s no way for it to meet everyone’s expectations. With a million backers and the amount of hype, even people with realistic expectations will have at least some of those not met.

      However, Derek Smart has absolutely no credibility. Is he a software developer? Yes. Does he have experience making space-related games? Yes. Have ANY of those games ever been meaningfully successful? NO. In fact, his games are universally regarded as bug-ridden failures that were completely over-inflated and never finished. Combine that with his 25-year history of trolling and instigating flamewars, plus his ongoing meltdowns as SC continues to put out new playable test versions and reach more funding milestones, and yeah. Derek Smart can be safely ignored.

      So here’s my perspective, as an SC fanboy, and an actual software developer myself. I predict the “Squadron 42” single-player campaign will come out by the end of the year, and that by that time we should have several playable star systems in the MMO part with some of the major game mechanics (trading, etc) in place enough to test. I think the major technical hurdles have been passed, and that while there’s still a LOT of integration and feature-building left to do, the remaining challenges are more at the game design level than the “is this even possible” level.

      Ultimately, we just have to wait and see how it turns out.

      1. Hype can be a result of excessive promises.
        .
        The excessive promises were one of the first certain indications that something was deeply wrong with Obama.
        .
        Yes, I know, his energy policies were extremely suspect. It was plausible that I was simply crazily dogmatic when it came to Thermodynamics.
        .
        It is quite possible that a reliable forecast could be made from careful analysis of all the scheduling promises.
        .
        For example, there are eight days remaining this year. I do not know what those things you said are, but it should be easy enough to prove or disprove since the time period is so short. If you are incorrect on this, you are less credible on the other.

  6. The problem I see with Star Citizen is the insane about of high hardware you have to buy to play it on anything other than low settings. Even then, I think low is beyond what my computer, which is running a Nvidia 960, can handle. But of course this has always been a problem for me going all the way back to the original Wing Commander days. I remember the stress of trying to get config.sys configured to free up just enough upper memory so I could get Wing Commander to load on my 386SX/16 with 2 whole megs of ram.

Comments are closed.