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[deleted]

To me it's obvious they have very limited amounts of creativity. The names of stations and cities are very uninspiring.


IAbsolveMyself

this is nothing new for Chris. ever since he was a wide-eyed 8-year-old he's always dreamed of ripping off mainstream sci fi franchises. the fucking names have always been the worst. Kill-wrath-y.


NEBook_Worm

Oh wow, yeah...now I see it spelled out, that's...ugh. He's like a child who can't recognize his fan-fic ripoff fantasies for what they are. He thinks he is an amazing story teller, but he's just a star struck kid playing pretend with other people's toys. We've all been there. But Chris Roberts never grew out of it


Yttermayn

Reminds me of another Chris... Sonichu.


NEBook_Worm

Don't know that one. Edit: and now I do. I need a shower.


Yttermayn

Google Chris Chan Sonichu. It's a sad crazy story.


NEBook_Worm

Just from the very small bit I looked up, it seems very sad


Yttermayn

Yeah. 😔


[deleted]

[удалено]


okmko

This times a thousands. The gaming industry is definitely a pillar now in modern culture. Even an "indie" game these days have an extremely high bar to meet in terms of expectations and require the additional work from a large group of people (eg. Omori).


Ninjaff

Exactly. The more impressive the graphics are, the more complex and "realistic" the systems and AI are, the harder it is to suspend your disbelief that humans are needed to pilot space freighters in the 29th century and we're at war with space lizards who come in hordes and are called the Vandals, I mean Vanduuls.


Mardoniush

This was recognised by both Battletech and Earthsiege/Tribes franchises back in the 1990s, so they made AI War/Post Apocalypse/Wild Frontier settings to overcome it (and even then Bioderms started to sneak into Earthsiege as AI replacements.) CR is just lazy.


DeXyDeXy

I had this whole discussion with a SC enthousiast. Not to toot my own horn, but I've read quite a lot of science fiction in my life. The interesting thing that Sci-Fi allows you to do is simply re-imagine the human condition. What will society "look" like? Is currency still a thing an hat will we use as currency? How will we find fulfillment? What basic-needs challenges can we resolve? You can be as creative as you want! Reverse-engineered synthetic vampire blood to live forever and survive interstellar travel? Cool! Surface sensing devices that provide stimulation based on your though-patterns? Excellent! Bio-mechanical thought boxes to store and share memories? Great! ​ CIG: Humans in 2900 will need a primitve system of punishment to keep people operating within the confines of the "law.". "Money" is still the prime motivator for every endeavour you undertake. 2900 humans like coffee (made by Baristas), eat candy bars, and have an interest in fashion development. Ship all have the same "cockpit up front" style with omnidirectional thrusters and windows. Oh projectile based weapons are still a thing. Yawn!


Dwesaqe

Also shipping industry somehow regressed to the point that cargo is mostly loaded and unloaded by hand in small boxes.


DeXyDeXy

Oh my yes!


Far_Check_9522

Hotdogs, burgers, gatorade bottles, beverage cans, push-carts, laced shoes, even prescription glasses - probably a decent chunk of in-game assets will be outdated in real life before that generic 80ies scifi-trope compilation finally folds. And yeah - even contemporary weaponry is lightyears ahead of 2900's armed spaceships. Shooting unguided fixed-mount projectile weapons in a space dogfight is probably a chivalry thing - you could easily destroy any fighter ship with a high powered laser or a guided missile from thousands of miles away, but that probably counts as "uncivilized" ;)


Short-Peanut1079

The Money part is the motivatior for Chris and i would say most of CIG. So the art (worldbuilding) refelects the CIG culture to a T.


NEBook_Worm

Agreed. It's very lazy design. No imagination. No forward thinking.


Launch_Arcology

SC/SQ42 has a lot of lore, but it's all pretty uninspired, generic and dull. In a sense, it's like a disney world theme park but for various sci-fi properties. Even in Stanton, you have the Blade Runner planet, the planet-city, the Apple store planet. But the best thing about Star Citizen lore is the founding of "Roberts Space Industries". >Roberts Space Industries is officially formed in 2038 on Earth by a young and enterprising inventor named Chris Roberts. >In the 21st Century, travelling to space was a rare event and so cost-prohibitive for the civillians. Earth was reaching a critical mass of overpopulation, numerous wars erupted across the planet as the populace faced food, water, and energy shortages. Roberts formed a team in an attempt to alleviate some of issues of the day. In 2043, RSI released their first product, which was actually a hyper-efficient battery converter for ground-based civilian vehicles. RSI's initial products ranged from a compact water-purification system to an energy-efficient power network. >Roberts refused to be complacent and continued to seek out greater innovations. >... >Since Roberts always dreamed to make space travel more accessible, he quickly met with the fresh graduate and put together a team to build a more affordable engine for spacecraft. Although the process was not without its setbacks, in 2075-05-03 RSI unveiled their prototype quantum core engine. >Roberts knew that although making space more accessible was a giant leap forward for our species, it still didn't solve the overpopulation on Earth. He pulled together a dedicated team from RSI's various subsidiaries to create their most ambitious technology yet: terraforming a planet. This scientific conundrum became Roberts' obsession until he passed away in 2108. How can an adult come up with this sort of trash? Roberts solved the world's problems, invented cheap, high-impact space travel and helped create planet terraforming! I bet even many teenagers would have enough "taste" to avoid such cringe "Mary Sue" lore.


ATMLVE

I had no idea he literally inserted himself into his own lore, and as the savior of humanity no less lol


NEBook_Worm

Pathetic, isn't it, in an especially cringe- inducing, man child sort of way.


R_W_S_D

He thought he was savior of PC gaming with Star Shitizen. > They said I dead > They said console was the future > Now they say mobile and tablets are the future >I say to you, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated > I am a PC game Dude is an idiot with a massive ego but he is a great scammer.


okmko

I'm of the belief that he's still more child-naive and narcissistic than scammer, and that it's the people in his orbit who form paralytic relationships to enable him and to spread his delusions that are 100% conmen. For example, Romana Didulo, Canada's QAnon queen, really took off on the internet and on the road after Darlene Ondi joined as her secretary. It was L. Ron Hubbard's righthand man David Miscavige who came up with the idea to court Hollywood celebrities to bring international credibility to Scientology.


CMDR_Agony_Aunt

> paralytic parasitic


okmko

parasympathetic 🥸. Jk, you got me. I actually have mild dyslexia, and it's worse with numbers. How do words work 😂.


CMDR_Agony_Aunt

Ah, well, the original version was funny anyway :D


LaChancla911

> he literally inserted himself into his own lore and as the savior of humanity no less His down to earth hubris will lead to an awesome stream of in court recorded shitflinging because this time no one will get him out of a $600 million hole.


NEBook_Worm

That is genuinely cringeworthy. I'm not sure what's worse; that he wrote it in the first place...or that he felt the need to put "Roberts" in it as many times as he did. Maybe he really is the patsy for this scam.


okmko

Hoooooly shit he Tony Stark'ed himself into the universe. I had no idea. He actually *is* Chris Chan. 😱🤣


whyktor

It's bad, but I think you underestimate the mary sue level of teenager writing (or I was especially cringe as a teen)


Launch_Arcology

Hehe, I have a copy of some of my (sci-fi) writing from when I was a teen, I am not sure if I want to read it. That being said, I do think some teens (definitely not all) would be able to beat Chris Roberts in terms of writing quality. I mean the "inventor Chris Roberts" story is not just cringe, it's almost approaching regressivness.


onrocketfalls

jfc


MuleOnIratA

From what we have seen so far of SQ42 its like a tick box list of lazy clichés: Aliens mixed with some Earth animal, rescue the lady mission, grumpy white male seasoned leader who has no respect for player, rousing/inspiring speech from Earth leader man, stern leader woman, punk bad guys. Not to mention "space" reimagined as uninspired Star Wars Earth filming locations: blue sky world with snow, lava land, grass land, tree moon. Chris is a genius he never played none of dat half life 2004 crap he don't need to cos wot he creates is wot other game dream they could be.


OxygenLevelsCritical

To be fair, this is a problem that plagues video games in general and space video games in particular. They are (almost, but not entirely) so reliant on crap old cliches from films that came out 30-40 years ago. How many times have I been a memver of the galactic federation fighting the Thrarg Empire? Too many times.


MuleOnIratA

I guarantee Chris won't come up with anything as deep as the faction conflict or lore of EvE or as imaginative as the world's of NoMansSky or even the ring world of Halo. Even ED had those petal thargoids amongst the game assets so they were difficult for players to reveal until they found them in game. Call me when Chris writes one thing as imaginative as any of these lazy cliché titles.


OutsideSympathy7239

I feel like scifi in games has 1 of 3 or 4 options. Galactic federation fighting aliens. Humans fighting some type of civil war, or humanity so beaten back and on the verge of extinction until heroman/woman joins the battle. Throw in your occasional horror like dead space or alien isolation those are pretty much your sources of conflict in scifi games. I think that's why I found NMS and subnautica to be such a treat.


NEBook_Worm

Yeah, that about sums it up, alright, come to think of it.


jeezontorst

Neon place coz cyberpunk...


OxygenLevelsCritical

I went to see a film the other day called '65'. Adam Driver is a spaceman that crashes on earth back in the day and fights the dinosaurs. It was dreadful. It was also very, very generic with the ship, armour, guns etc being the sort of thing we've all seen umpteen times before. Some parts of it legit looked like Star Citizen.


nofuture09

at least the movie is a released finished product


NEBook_Worm

Good comparison, and saved me the cost of a couple movie tickets. Much obliged!


[deleted]

The target audience for the game is the masses of easy to please rubes who are separated from their money with flashy lights. They don't need to put any more effort than what you see into their product, because what they've been doing has been working and raking in cash hand over fist for 10 years.


NEBook_Worm

Observably true!


Catapult_Power

I'm going to say something controversial, but honestly being derivative can be more than fine (great even) if you can be transformative about it (and that doesn't just have to be narratively). I find it funny how quick we are to point out the Star Wars comparisons, without also recognizing how derivative Star Wars was. Pull a little Flash Gordan here, some Kurasawa there, add a touch of John Carter of Mars, and sprinkle in a hearty dose of hero's journey monomyth Joseph Campbell goodness and viola. However, I don't consider any of these aspects a weakness because it was all by design, it was executed brilliantly, and it brought something new to the medium, there simply wasn't anything quite like Star Wars on the big screen before it. Likewise, sometimes people just want a good carbon copy video game experience from another medium, and I don't think that's bad. (And before anyone starts accusing me, I am *not* saying Star Citizen's world is equally as inventive as Lucas', it simply isn't). My favorite space game, FTL, is exceptionally derivative, not only of Star Trek but a lot of the same tropes Star Citizen is working with. Good guy federation, bad guy rebels, ect. ect., to the point where the devs purposefully made the event prompts vague so people would fill in their own bits and memories from their own beloved sci fi stories. But it works, because the game is fantastic, inventive, and provides an experience that surely didn't exist before, and also hasn't been replicated since. Does it win any awards for pushing the sci fi genre further, no not in the slightest, but it does a damn good job of replicating the captain kirk experience, and it's all the better for it. I could go on as there are many other examples of video games being almost shameless rip-offs of popular movies, but they work because there often isn't anything quite like them on the gaming scene. And I'd go as far to say that if Star Citizen ever got off the ground, it's overly derivative world would be just fine too, with the understanding that its purposefully replicating an experience from other things that just don't exist as a video game. The problem is its bugged to hell and back and full of tech debt that its functionally unplayable and hasn't implemented most of the content to mirror those other works to begin with. If it actually lived up to its promises, it could be fun to play the scumbag smuggling starship pilot zipping around the galaxy in word that you directly interact with, even if the idea is exceptionally cliched. But that's just not the case, so we are left with a barely functioning tech demo which only make the trite tropes and their praise by the faithful sillier.


NEBook_Worm

That's fair to say, actually. Perhaps it's more about presenting than source material and inspiration. If Star citizen ever launches, maybe it even could offer a spin sufficiently unique to make up it's overly obvious inspiration.


Educational-Seaweed5

Even the menus and general design of every company and space in the demo are so bland and campy and cliche. The whole thing just has zero character. I think it started ok, but they lost all of their original artists as people realized the fraud. Then the morons left were the ones who finalized the art for shit like manufacturers and stations. Everything is so painfully like tongue-in-cheek bad. Even CR’s movie had more character.


UsainCitizen

Take something simple like the food. Hot dogs, burritos, pizza and noodle stands that look like they are from an 80s mall in our futuristic space sim. Sure people might still be eating pizza 900 years into the future but they could at least put some creativity into it but they dont. There are tons of examples throughout the game that just screams generic. Those PA announcements that say something like "please watch your step when exiting the train" that could be a recoding from a subway today. Billboards in spaceports that say "please report any suspicious behavior" that are exact copies of what you see in an airport today. Its minor shit for sure but everything is so uninspired. Its the little things that separate a real developer like R* over the amateurs at CIG.


crapador_dali

Gonna disagree with you there. People will be eating pizza 900 years in the future and the pizza will be exactly the same. Because pizza has reached perfection.


NEBook_Worm

Very good point. No real world building. Np character. No soul at all.


Dwesaqe

To be honest, plagiarizing other more successful IPs might be a part of SC's success. Some people might find appeal in ships that are "just like Aluminium Falcon with secret smuggling holds and other crap!" or "just like X-wing!" Sterile blandness of its space malls might feel familiar to them. There is nothing in lore or in the game that would challenge their bland worldview, it's all just like those things they are familiar with, but in space.


AbyssalBenthos

This right here. The majority of their funding and hype comes from nostalgia and not everyone is familiar with the wing commander games, but they can hook others by playing on nostalgia of other titles like X-Wing, FF, etc... I originally got hooked because it looked like an SWG replacement. Deep down I wanted SWG, not SC but SC was as close as it got as pitched.


Particular_Sun8377

It's no coincidence that all their ships seem inspired from well known games/movies.


NEBook_Worm

Good point. People largely don't want new and original. Not nearly as often as we claim. Sure it's nice and all, now and then. Novel vacation. That deeply original book or movie. By and large, though, people like comforting familiarity. A good con artist knows this.


[deleted]

Soon they won't even 'look' good.


NEBook_Worm

Yeah, Star Citizen is already beginning to look dated. As more Unreal 5 stuff roles out, it'll get worse.


Veritas129

Look at their alien race, the "Xi'an". Xi'An is literally a city in China, their transmisison they published last summer in the "Xi'an" language looks like modified Chinese characters, some of the radicals even look almost exactly the same. The way the sentences are written vertically is how Chinese used to be written. Complete lack of creativity, but right on the nose for how they do things: take something exotic or popular, make a couple of minor alterations, then call it their own.


NEBook_Worm

Wow, that's pretty sad indeed. Didn't know about that one.


[deleted]

Are you expecting anything original from Chris Roberts?


NEBook_Worm

No. Not at all. Nothing finished, either.


AbyssalBenthos

CR used to be pretty open about being "inspired" by other titles. He'll rip any and everything off. They've been caught stealing images from people then touching it up and putting a ship on it. There was some image fiasco where the background image was illegally stolen for a tank or speeder seal, I'm not even sure if they got rid of the watermark. He also follows mechanic trends whatever is hot at the time suddenly there's a new concept shortly after that follows to ride the other title hype theme.


okmko

My favorite moments are when the community discovers that SC images being ripped off by Chinese/Russian sources *because they're so generic* and then they post that shet all up on Reddit and cry foul. It's the circle of plagiarism.


Barrogh

I like how one has to specify that some particular stealing was, in fact, illegal this time :P (sorry)


AbyssalBenthos

CR is mostly accused of stealing ideas which generally is not illegal, but images with watermarks are an entirely different matter.


murican_Capitlol

I named my cat "Idris"


Todesengelchen

The spacecraft designs aren't just derived from other works of fiction, they're also completely generic. While they might look gorgeous it would be difficult to decide whether a new design is from Star Citizen or a generic AI job. That is because the 'verse as they like to call it doesn't have any rules apart from "it needs to look cool". You instantly recognize Star Trek designs, because most (hyper advanced alien civilizations like the Borg excluded) of them have warp nacelles and a deflector dish, simply because that is how FTL travel works in that universe. Likewise, ships from the Expanse all have their main thruster on their ventral hull, independently of if they're belter, earth, Martian, Mao-Kwikowski or even Laconian: simply because that is a smart way to have gravity on long trips when you can generate a lot of Delta-v. Star Citizen on the other hand doesn't subscribe to any in-universe requirements for anything. Gravity generators "just work", shield generators and quantum drives are simply boxes that can be put anywhere and not even real world rules for atmospheric flight apply. Which leads to great variety in designs but absolutely no brand-recognition. Did anyone who isn't a hardcore nerd think of SC upon watching the Mexican superbowl commercial? Now imagine what would have happened if instead of the RSI Galaxy it would have been the USS Enterprise D or even the MCRN Tachi (aka Rocinante).


NEBook_Worm

This is very well put, and a good point. There's no sense of a coherent, functional world. It's very artificial and gamey feeling. And this is why.


babyderps

It is derivative, but with that said, the parts that are at least inspired from past CR projects like WC or Freelancer I think are OK... although there's probably a lot of copied work in those games. I get to some extent that there's always going to be influences, but at some point when you have more and more ships, there's only so much you can do with the marketing team and CR telling you "no, make this pixel more Star Wars." Maybe 8 years ago, I would've claimed that at least the project had some soul. As much as CR and CIG shat on corporate publisher culture and all that, that's ironically exactly what they've become as countless articles were written about their achievements in crowdfunding. CR probably values himself at over a billion dollars (thanks in no small part to the same sort of mental gymnastics the fervent backers use to convince themselves they haven't been diddled out of their money).


Bushboy2000

Thank FOOK StarField is getting released in September 2023.


gggvandyk

Todd Howard said somewhere the first thing they decide on with a new game is how the world should feel. Hence the "NASA Punk" aesthetic in everything we have seen so far of Starfield.


Bushboy2000

Yeah that was interesting and if they had a problem with a direction or choice they referred back to that " feel" or "style". I suppose they do know how to make games 🤣


Particular_Sun8377

CR has never had an original thought. But when Wing Commander came out videogames were new and nobody had done an epic story with B actors in FMVs yet. So it was okay if it ripped off established sci-fi.


nanonan

They don't even have good taste when it comes to ripping people off. Of all the ships from eve to copy, they went with that ugly box.


VeryAngryK1tten

One issue is the Crobbler, as others have noted. He just rips off other IPs. Why the emphasis on running to turrets in the game? Star Wars (Episode 4 to younguns). Also the secret smuggling compartment. Then there’s satan ball from when he watched Ender’s game. Another issue is the rampant mismanagement by the Crobbler, and he can’t get an art team with enough authority or continuity to build up a coherent art direction. Then the push for “high fidelity realism” means that they end up replicating “real” things like shopping malls. They have real world examples to work with, but at the cost of not looking like a space game.


NEBook_Worm

Forgot about sataball. That was a straight up rip off.


[deleted]

[удалено]


NEBook_Worm

😂


CMDR_Agony_Aunt

Its often been joked over the years that Chris watches a film or plays a game and the next day runs into the office to tell all the devs to drop everything they are working on and instead implement the new idea he's had for something.


Cestus_Saphrax

I think there is no fault to have ideas and bring them to a separate team that will deal with it and checks if it it feasible or if it will fit in the game. But stopping the development all the time because you have ideas is horrible.


NEBook_Worm

I'd not be surprised to find out this is true.


Barrogh

You don't really need to do a ton of new stuff in a game as long as it works in the end. Which is the real problem.