Out of Pod Experience

All I see is that huge amounts of money keeps getting pumped-into it, yet there is so little to actually show for it, except a cash shop where you can give them even more of your money..

What the hell is this.

It evolved into a moneygrab.

Also for vaporware they sure have some of my favorite actors:

Gary Oldman

https://youtu.be/UTuhr_vzTEE

John Rhys-Davies

https://youtu.be/r45YI5LdqK4

Mark Hamill

https://youtu.be/5vqB5lD73dw

There is still a long way between a "not crashing every minute", and crashineg once a week. At least one year, if the game of this scale is supposedly finished. Not if they are still adding stuff, tweaking systems, mechanics, graphics, everything.

I know that people buy titans, but its at least for a game that is finished and its a ship you know is the largest, have the largest weapons and will have all of that in future because of balance aquired. But that? How you can know its the largest that will be available? What about larger ships? EVE like? Will they start selling even bigger ships for 100K $?
We are in multiple k already. It would be only 33 times that what is todays limit. 11 times larger ship and we are done. Or battlestations, star destroyers, galactic class colony ships.

Thats no moon, thats 3d model worth half a million dollars.

What about owning an asteroid or a planet?

Is future full of macrotransactions for a game that is not even finished?

I dont wish bad to that game, but its starting to look ridiculous. Or maybe its about those people, some people are riduculous.
And then gamers are crazy talking about how game company is screwing them again and again, but it is all because some people cant stand not throwing money away for stuff in alphas or zero day DLCs.

I didn't know Mark Hamill worked on Wing Commander.
I get gmail news updates, but I never paid them .
I didn't code for them yet either.

I am studying business systems for over 20 years and develop ways to record evidence of "loss of time" sources.
This is nothing new.

That is one of the only way I can protect my income against attack administered to discretdit me.
Otherwise, even the small $10k, $20k, $30k and $60k a year to $100k a month opportunities I have are wasted.
Those same entities are using those same funds which I would lose (and it's not hard to deduce) to continue to finance their own properties, etc.

They try to cover it up when not confronted and when found liable try to justify the damage with blame and other charges which is also nothing new.

As soon as I do get more funds for my projects, 100% to 400% of it will go towards security so that I can remedy the problems interfering againt my income.
I wouldn't be surprise it leads to more conflict (which they already administer to meet their ends anyways).

Although I think crowd founding is a very interesting concept because of the niche products that can come off it. I just don't have any faith in the project or the people behind it.

My guess is that development will come to a stand still and eventually be picked up by some some major company to be released in some shallow form that will never match the original scale or concepts that was proposed.

But I hope I'm wrong..

It's vapour ware.

Now entering its fifth year of development, they have yet to produce an actual alpha version of the game. The build they call an alpha is by very definition not an alpha version. CIG is becoming increasingly desperate, slashing promised features left right and centre in their attempt to be able to deliver the absolute minimum that they can't be sued for, but the project is so immensely mismanaged that they have years of work to do, and less than year to do it in.

Even the minuscule list of features they're trying to push out the door has been proven too much for them, redesigning core aspects many times over and having no coherent picture of what they're actually trying to build.

As a result, they are trying to spin a story of the game being essentially complete, reinterpreting previous promises as meaning “it will come later”, while their “alpha version” — the stage in the development that only ever uses very basic content to test gameplay, if it's done competently — has no gameplay and is shock-full of over-produced content that will be redesigned for the umpteenth time. It also has no bug reporting mechanisms (one of the most critical parts of getting those systems up and running). So by no sense of the term is it an alpha: going by what they claim is in there, it's a beta; going by what it can and can't do, it's not even a vertical slice; going by where the focus is (presentation, not mechanics), it's an over-engineered tech demo; going by the version number, it's already fully released.

It's basically Freelancer all over again, only this time, no-one is able to step in and throw the incompetent lead designer out when he — as he always does — fails to deliver on his promises.

That is empirical evidence.

Empirically, what they have released is not an alpha — it's (at best) an early tech demo. Empirically, this tech demo has some very bad design decisions built into it (almost everything in the FPS part) and some very cheap shortcuts (the “flight” part). The FPS part is particularly hilarious considering they based the whole thing on an FPS engine.

Empirically, Chris Roberts is not a very good game designer. Every game he has “made” has gone massively over-budget and over scope, requiring features to be cut — in a few cases, it's a miracle that they were released at all. He's so bad he had to be fired from his own company to get a product out, and has been riding on a series where the two most beloved entries were the ones he had the least to do with (one of which he hated because it didn't have his hackneyed writing in it). He's been out of the industry for over a decade and it shows: he keeps suggesting gameplay ideas that have long since been tested and discarded because of how bad they are; he keeps saying that stuff “hasn't been done before” or is “revolutionary” when it's been around since the '90s. In fact, some of his assertions (to say nothing of his attempts at playing his own game) make it seem like he hasn't actually been playing computer games at all since back in his programming days…

Empirically, the game is held together with gum and rubber bands, and progress is still painfully slow (just look at the pathetically thin patch notes). The physics engine is a joke (as in: it only works for producing comedy in the form of laughably broken and nonsensical interactions); show-stopping bugs are everywhere (shotgun, wtf?); development time is spent on fixing the same door week after week after week. Empirically, the game has one thing: visuals. That's because there's a fairly good, if slightly old, rendering pipeline behind it, but everything else is a mess and there simply is no worth-while gameplay in there (which is part of why it's not an actual alpha). Indeed, most of the game has seemingly not even been designed yet. There are scattered documents that describe some feature or another, but nothing that brings them all together as a coherent whole, and most of them are just there to sell the idea of a specific ship… which coincidentally is available for purchase (but not play) at the same time.


It's not an alpha, though. It lacks almost all game mechanics (which an alpha is supposed to test). It has tons of irrelevant content (which an alpha is supposed to help you decide on). It has no bug reporting or sensible patching features (which are critical to make an alpha worth-while since can't really do the iterative alpha testing without them). And no, posting on a forum is not a bug-reporting tool — it's just posting on a forum.

Vapour ware means there's lots of glossy PR and maybe even a showy demo, but no actual software. The game hasn't been released. With every official communication, more and more features are cut (sorry, “promised to be added after release”) in an increasingly desperate attempt to get the project down to size so they can actually get something — anything — out the door and not be thrown out of the industry. For the third time.

They waste their time on something that earns them a paycheck. Their involvement does not mean that anything will be released — all of them will have experienced projects where nothing came out of it in the end, because that's part of the business they're in. Chris wanting to play hollywood producer is nothing new and has hurt him pretty much every time he has tried it in the past. His inability to manage such projects is well established, at Origin, at Digital Anvil, and at Ascendant Pictures. So no, he wouldn't save that money.

They're not. They playing a tech demo. You can play P.T. too, and yet Silent Hills is still cancelled. Meanwhile, Star Citizen does not have a release date. SQ42 is slated for a '16 release, but has nothing to show for itself, and even then they've started using standard excuses to prepare people for how little content will be in it.

Oh, and as for it being a final product. Sandi thinks so. She says that a substantial portion of the game is in the (not)alpha right now. Of course, the reason they say this is so they can use that as a cause to refuse people refunds — if a substantial portion of the game is out, they can claim that people have gotten something for their money.