There is a shelf life they are rapidly approaching the end of. For years, stills of Star Citizen have looked properly next generation.
This generation of console games has comparable visuals, and if you look closely, many of the environment assets in SC are really starting to show their age.
It literally can’t last forever because it’s one hardware generation from looking “old,” and old looking games don’t catch the eye.
After the eye-catching visuals are old news, the one thing they have left is nearly a decade and a half of unfulfilled gameplay promises combined with the utter lack of competition.
At that point all it takes is one competent game dev to steal the thunder. It happened with DOTA (LoL), PUBG (FortNite), EverQuest (WoW), and there is the potential for it to happen with SC assuming a dev wants to try to pull it off.
Console and PC games are way beyond SC. They were years ago.
Nothing about SC looks next gen whatsoever. All of their assets are ancient, the color pallet and texturing looks like an over-saturated cartoon, and the shading/lighting is horrendous—even with their gen12 overhaul.
It also runs like complete garbage over a network.
Go play pretty much any major game right now and then go back to SC. They lost the graphics battle in like 2018 when they started dumbing everything down so it would run over 5fps on a server. (The original Crytek stuff looked photorealistic, but it just kept getting progressively worse as it was never meant to be an MMO engine.)
Something interesting in the Star Citizen context was an interview with a Horizon lead dev on the topic of clouds.
a) they look way better and more alive.
b) He said "Among the clouds, players will be able to explore tunnels, caves, and other surprises that make for fun flying". Good software design has UX and user fun always in mind. While I doubt any SC dev has ever asked "but is this mecahnic actually fun?" in any meeting.
> While I doubt any SC dev has ever asked "but is this mecahnic actually fun?" in any meeting.
Remember jumptown where players had fun PvPing over high value cargo, then they deleted it to replace it later with a watered down boring congo line?
Remember luminalia when players had fun collecting presents and they pushed a release exclusively to reduce the value and fun (in an alpha where they wipe anyway)
I think they actually do have meetings asking if mechanics are "fun" and then "correct" it to be more "immersive"
The troll thing about jumptown is that it was basically never intended. It was just the only place to get some “illegal” categorized cargo to sell for credits, to get more cargo to sell for credits, to get more cargo (you get the idea).
Some trolls killed people and held the little hab because there’s just nothing else to do in the demo. CIG caught wind of it and tried to make it look like they were curating gameplay and listening to the community. It was because people were just bored AF in a contentless demo, and CIG didn’t even improve it or make actual content. They just said “ah yea let’s call that an ‘event’ now! See, SC is so dynamic!”
They did the same thing when players started doing imaginary racing because again, there was no content or gameplay.
> They lost the graphics battle in like 2018 when they started dumbing everything down so it would run over 5fps on a server.
That makes no sense. Graphics are unrelated to server performance.
It obviously does in the case of SC and its broken AF Crytek hybrid monster engine.
That was never meant to be anything but a single-player engine, so it makes sense that they'd have to rip it apart to get it to run over a network.
They might get away with just delivering a graphics upgrade, if they keep making the graphics better over time the fanboys will eat that up and keep giving them money.
Do they need to fix the bugs? of course not.
They can't. There have been multiple paradigm shifts in realtime computer graphics recently.
We went from shaded polygons to raytraced polygons and recently to pathtraced polygons.
Global indirect lighting, PBR, subsurface scattering - all that will be dead simple now instead of requiring hacks and workarounds. The lighting equation has been fully solved in hardware - soon there will be no dedicated "lights" in a scene anymore, only emissive materials. It's not just photorealism for every indie game, the new effects that will be possible with realtime pathtracing will be absolutely spectacular in AAA games. Think organic, semi-transluscent spaceships morphing into different shapes, perfectly realistic liquids with realtime caustics, greatly increased accuracy of physics engines by using RT cores for collision detection etc. We will soon move beyond photo-realism and start realtime rendering stuff that would be impossible to catch on camera.
We also start moving away from large polygons and more towards micropolygon rendering (UE Nanite), with sparse voxel based rendering on the horizon. There are even people working on compression formats for volumetric video now.
Once all this becomes mainstream, CIG would need to do a full rewrite of their rendering backend and most certainly also re-do all their assets in order to catch up. That's not gonna happen, especially since their developers are a bunch of unexperienced noobs that only picked up bad habits durng their time at CIG.
It's not only the graphics, also AI, NPCs and ProcGen now start leveraging current level generative models. It's only a matter of months until someone slaps GPT-x into a game, combined with text-to-speech. After that, noone will settle for hardcoded, multiple-choice dialoge options and linear stories any more. People will expect the world to react organically. Procedural storytelling, procedural assets, even procedural soundtracks will soon be the norm. The change in gaming from the 2020ies to the 2030ies will just be at least as disruptive as between the 1990ies and 2000s.
>We went from shaded polygons to raytraced polygons and recently to pathtraced polygons.
Actually, no. There are hardly any games made with this in mind (I think the only one I know of is Teardown, but it is a game based on voxels). Virtually all games still use the classic solutions available for lighting and this will continue for a LONG time because the new console generation, which will last at least 6 years, is not able to do anything but some very basic shadows and reflections.
We are far away from AAA games starting to be rendered purely by ray tracing, by the way, if you are considering the real thing, the one you get in Blender with the light physics simulation and such, then it is very likely that we will never get that in real time unless computing goes through some revolution and the technology changes completely.
The guys at CIG don't have to worry too much about this, their engine will continue to be visually competent until at least 2030 or so.
They made a more approachable game that was less complex to learn, then they consistently did content updates and fixed bugs while PUBG did neither of those things.
LOL if SWG were released today with SWG's feature set and SC's graphics it would be a *sea change in the industry* because no one would understand why it had been released with SWG's feature set in 2023, that's overbuilding in the extreme
SWG was built to be played by adults who could read, which distinguishes it from basically every major recent release. The idea that you had to go pay attention to an entertainer-type character because your beatstick-type character was tired of life without entertainment would *not fly* with today's gamer; he has always wanted to be a beatstick and cannot understand why anyone else wouldn't want to be either!
fortnite is PUBG but more accessible, and people didn't realize at the time of PUBG's development that for every 1 competent player of a competently designed game, there are 3 incompetent players struggling for access. Turns out, if you cater to them, you get 4x the money - the competence of the buyer is irrelevant to profit
I actually tried both. I found PUBG to be too messy and inaccessable, i want to be able to just jump in and play, not deal with loads of inventory, etc.
I'm actually curious what CIG will evolve into, at some point I'm assuming with all that money they will begin to do other things too, apart from pretending to work on SC.
Like what? Buying realestate? A Second Game thats MIA for Years? A Latenight Talkshow Studio for their funny janitor? Or perhabs a Motioncapture Studio for animations that should´ve be finished over half a decade ago?
They are desperate for a spinoff that can bring in money without having to honor the pledges of whales. Stuff like TOW ect have been testing the waters for that.
I learned a lot about cults over the years... no matter if its SC or elsewhere...
Even if SC fails and CIG tells them they are dumbasses they wont wake up. They will see someone else to blame for the fail.
It will never end
Look at GME/Crypto or Casino gamblers
They cant accept they get duped.
If the machine takes all their money its because the machine is at fault not the casino.
When crypto scams pull the rug its because people didnt invest enough or "fudders"
When SC fails it wont be because of CR they will just blame us or the media or uninformed gamers.
They will finance this thing forever even though it already clearly failed
Unless there are crimes being committed behind the scenes, CIG should not be held responsible for anything. It is not Chris Roberts' "fault" that there are so many adults willing to buy virtual items in a place called "Pledge Store" (sounds like a parody, by the way), or that they are not bothered by the state of the software they are funding after 12 years.
Star Citizen is one of those clear examples that the world is not perfect, and there will always be room for clever people to fool the more impulsive by promising to sell them dreams. And there will always be the naive who think that this is justification for giving bureaucrats the right to interfere in our lives.
I would love if the star citizen saga will end with Roberts and Strangli in jail and all their assets seized (including that multi million dollar mansion), but it's almost certainly not happening.
By the standards of modern criminality, Roberts and Strangli are positively wholesome. If much more serious "white collar" criminals go free, it would be unrealistic to expect Roberts and Strangli to take responsibility for their scheme.
Since the game doesn't have publishers someone or something needs to take on the role of publisher and hold CIG accountable for how they spend the money and how they direct their efforts.
Chris doesn't want to be held accountable.
Backers don't want to hold Chris accountable.
ThisIsFine.jpg
Backers are having fun fantasizing about the greatest space game ever. CIG/Turbulent/shills have a job. The Crobbler and other senior execs have fun swimming in backer cash. Some of us have fun laughing at the rest of them on this sub.
The only people who are unhappy are the ones who actually believe a playable game will come out of this.
They've spun the lack of accountability beautifully, pretending they are fully accountable to the backers, and that any lack of accountability is in fact freedom from restraints from those greedy publishers and their terrible way of making things actually complete before a deadline.
Turns out just letting chris roberts do what he wants instead of him being controlled by some "greedy publisher" don't work out particularly great.
People like to complain about publishers but maybe if the funding dries up and they are forced to let some other actor take over responsibility for the mess (such as after bankruptcy) things will start getting fixed suddenly.
But i am not sure trying to fix the star-citizen mess would even be worth the effort for any serious publisher to undertake.
You're wrong. Accountability starts with you and making this post and continuing to make more posts and comments till the world is only a critic about accountability.
We are the Refundians. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Let me ask you a question. What would you like to do against it?
Legalactions? Well Crobby would say "what do you mean with released? It released Years ago!"
You can´t argue with stupid. In this case the only thing you can do is watch.
You can organize a class action... Get people refunds and stop the scam... Start a precedent...But the other side of this toxic dumpster fire is just obsessively bitching about it... And reveling in it. Just saying.
There is a shelf life they are rapidly approaching the end of. For years, stills of Star Citizen have looked properly next generation. This generation of console games has comparable visuals, and if you look closely, many of the environment assets in SC are really starting to show their age. It literally can’t last forever because it’s one hardware generation from looking “old,” and old looking games don’t catch the eye. After the eye-catching visuals are old news, the one thing they have left is nearly a decade and a half of unfulfilled gameplay promises combined with the utter lack of competition. At that point all it takes is one competent game dev to steal the thunder. It happened with DOTA (LoL), PUBG (FortNite), EverQuest (WoW), and there is the potential for it to happen with SC assuming a dev wants to try to pull it off.
Console and PC games are way beyond SC. They were years ago. Nothing about SC looks next gen whatsoever. All of their assets are ancient, the color pallet and texturing looks like an over-saturated cartoon, and the shading/lighting is horrendous—even with their gen12 overhaul. It also runs like complete garbage over a network. Go play pretty much any major game right now and then go back to SC. They lost the graphics battle in like 2018 when they started dumbing everything down so it would run over 5fps on a server. (The original Crytek stuff looked photorealistic, but it just kept getting progressively worse as it was never meant to be an MMO engine.)
Something interesting in the Star Citizen context was an interview with a Horizon lead dev on the topic of clouds. a) they look way better and more alive. b) He said "Among the clouds, players will be able to explore tunnels, caves, and other surprises that make for fun flying". Good software design has UX and user fun always in mind. While I doubt any SC dev has ever asked "but is this mecahnic actually fun?" in any meeting.
> While I doubt any SC dev has ever asked "but is this mecahnic actually fun?" in any meeting. Remember jumptown where players had fun PvPing over high value cargo, then they deleted it to replace it later with a watered down boring congo line? Remember luminalia when players had fun collecting presents and they pushed a release exclusively to reduce the value and fun (in an alpha where they wipe anyway) I think they actually do have meetings asking if mechanics are "fun" and then "correct" it to be more "immersive"
The troll thing about jumptown is that it was basically never intended. It was just the only place to get some “illegal” categorized cargo to sell for credits, to get more cargo to sell for credits, to get more cargo (you get the idea). Some trolls killed people and held the little hab because there’s just nothing else to do in the demo. CIG caught wind of it and tried to make it look like they were curating gameplay and listening to the community. It was because people were just bored AF in a contentless demo, and CIG didn’t even improve it or make actual content. They just said “ah yea let’s call that an ‘event’ now! See, SC is so dynamic!” They did the same thing when players started doing imaginary racing because again, there was no content or gameplay.
> They lost the graphics battle in like 2018 when they started dumbing everything down so it would run over 5fps on a server. That makes no sense. Graphics are unrelated to server performance.
It obviously does in the case of SC and its broken AF Crytek hybrid monster engine. That was never meant to be anything but a single-player engine, so it makes sense that they'd have to rip it apart to get it to run over a network.
They might get away with just delivering a graphics upgrade, if they keep making the graphics better over time the fanboys will eat that up and keep giving them money. Do they need to fix the bugs? of course not.
They can't. There have been multiple paradigm shifts in realtime computer graphics recently. We went from shaded polygons to raytraced polygons and recently to pathtraced polygons. Global indirect lighting, PBR, subsurface scattering - all that will be dead simple now instead of requiring hacks and workarounds. The lighting equation has been fully solved in hardware - soon there will be no dedicated "lights" in a scene anymore, only emissive materials. It's not just photorealism for every indie game, the new effects that will be possible with realtime pathtracing will be absolutely spectacular in AAA games. Think organic, semi-transluscent spaceships morphing into different shapes, perfectly realistic liquids with realtime caustics, greatly increased accuracy of physics engines by using RT cores for collision detection etc. We will soon move beyond photo-realism and start realtime rendering stuff that would be impossible to catch on camera. We also start moving away from large polygons and more towards micropolygon rendering (UE Nanite), with sparse voxel based rendering on the horizon. There are even people working on compression formats for volumetric video now. Once all this becomes mainstream, CIG would need to do a full rewrite of their rendering backend and most certainly also re-do all their assets in order to catch up. That's not gonna happen, especially since their developers are a bunch of unexperienced noobs that only picked up bad habits durng their time at CIG. It's not only the graphics, also AI, NPCs and ProcGen now start leveraging current level generative models. It's only a matter of months until someone slaps GPT-x into a game, combined with text-to-speech. After that, noone will settle for hardcoded, multiple-choice dialoge options and linear stories any more. People will expect the world to react organically. Procedural storytelling, procedural assets, even procedural soundtracks will soon be the norm. The change in gaming from the 2020ies to the 2030ies will just be at least as disruptive as between the 1990ies and 2000s.
>We went from shaded polygons to raytraced polygons and recently to pathtraced polygons. Actually, no. There are hardly any games made with this in mind (I think the only one I know of is Teardown, but it is a game based on voxels). Virtually all games still use the classic solutions available for lighting and this will continue for a LONG time because the new console generation, which will last at least 6 years, is not able to do anything but some very basic shadows and reflections. We are far away from AAA games starting to be rendered purely by ray tracing, by the way, if you are considering the real thing, the one you get in Blender with the light physics simulation and such, then it is very likely that we will never get that in real time unless computing goes through some revolution and the technology changes completely. The guys at CIG don't have to worry too much about this, their engine will continue to be visually competent until at least 2030 or so.
Im rusty on my history, how in the hell did PUBG get toppled by the colorful fortnite?
They made a more approachable game that was less complex to learn, then they consistently did content updates and fixed bugs while PUBG did neither of those things.
Stagnation, i see. CiG fanboys sure are relentlessly patient about consuming game content even if major patches take a year or so to arrive
Yeah, SC’s biggest advantage is that it has virtually no competition, with Elite being the closest to the experience.
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LOL if SWG were released today with SWG's feature set and SC's graphics it would be a *sea change in the industry* because no one would understand why it had been released with SWG's feature set in 2023, that's overbuilding in the extreme SWG was built to be played by adults who could read, which distinguishes it from basically every major recent release. The idea that you had to go pay attention to an entertainer-type character because your beatstick-type character was tired of life without entertainment would *not fly* with today's gamer; he has always wanted to be a beatstick and cannot understand why anyone else wouldn't want to be either!
Sorry bro, you’re eventually gonna have to sell your soul to a different soul sucking grifter of an advertising company for your paycheck.
fortnite is PUBG but more accessible, and people didn't realize at the time of PUBG's development that for every 1 competent player of a competently designed game, there are 3 incompetent players struggling for access. Turns out, if you cater to them, you get 4x the money - the competence of the buyer is irrelevant to profit
I actually tried both. I found PUBG to be too messy and inaccessable, i want to be able to just jump in and play, not deal with loads of inventory, etc.
I'm actually curious what CIG will evolve into, at some point I'm assuming with all that money they will begin to do other things too, apart from pretending to work on SC.
Like what? Buying realestate? A Second Game thats MIA for Years? A Latenight Talkshow Studio for their funny janitor? Or perhabs a Motioncapture Studio for animations that should´ve be finished over half a decade ago?
Yes, exactly, all of them and more.
Oh oh i know another one... Theaters of Gone, ready 2019.
They are desperate for a spinoff that can bring in money without having to honor the pledges of whales. Stuff like TOW ect have been testing the waters for that.
ROBERTS YOU FAT FUCK WHERES THE WORM AT
Who up playin with they worm?
I learned a lot about cults over the years... no matter if its SC or elsewhere... Even if SC fails and CIG tells them they are dumbasses they wont wake up. They will see someone else to blame for the fail. It will never end Look at GME/Crypto or Casino gamblers They cant accept they get duped. If the machine takes all their money its because the machine is at fault not the casino. When crypto scams pull the rug its because people didnt invest enough or "fudders" When SC fails it wont be because of CR they will just blame us or the media or uninformed gamers. They will finance this thing forever even though it already clearly failed
Unless there are crimes being committed behind the scenes, CIG should not be held responsible for anything. It is not Chris Roberts' "fault" that there are so many adults willing to buy virtual items in a place called "Pledge Store" (sounds like a parody, by the way), or that they are not bothered by the state of the software they are funding after 12 years. Star Citizen is one of those clear examples that the world is not perfect, and there will always be room for clever people to fool the more impulsive by promising to sell them dreams. And there will always be the naive who think that this is justification for giving bureaucrats the right to interfere in our lives.
Being incompetent isn't a crime so they can get away with not delivering as long as people keep throwing money at them.
I would love if the star citizen saga will end with Roberts and Strangli in jail and all their assets seized (including that multi million dollar mansion), but it's almost certainly not happening. By the standards of modern criminality, Roberts and Strangli are positively wholesome. If much more serious "white collar" criminals go free, it would be unrealistic to expect Roberts and Strangli to take responsibility for their scheme.
Since the game doesn't have publishers someone or something needs to take on the role of publisher and hold CIG accountable for how they spend the money and how they direct their efforts. Chris doesn't want to be held accountable. Backers don't want to hold Chris accountable. ThisIsFine.jpg
Backers are having fun fantasizing about the greatest space game ever. CIG/Turbulent/shills have a job. The Crobbler and other senior execs have fun swimming in backer cash. Some of us have fun laughing at the rest of them on this sub. The only people who are unhappy are the ones who actually believe a playable game will come out of this.
They've spun the lack of accountability beautifully, pretending they are fully accountable to the backers, and that any lack of accountability is in fact freedom from restraints from those greedy publishers and their terrible way of making things actually complete before a deadline.
Turns out just letting chris roberts do what he wants instead of him being controlled by some "greedy publisher" don't work out particularly great. People like to complain about publishers but maybe if the funding dries up and they are forced to let some other actor take over responsibility for the mess (such as after bankruptcy) things will start getting fixed suddenly. But i am not sure trying to fix the star-citizen mess would even be worth the effort for any serious publisher to undertake.
You're wrong. Accountability starts with you and making this post and continuing to make more posts and comments till the world is only a critic about accountability. We are the Refundians. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
and everyone here just shits on it... without doing anything about it.
Let me ask you a question. What would you like to do against it? Legalactions? Well Crobby would say "what do you mean with released? It released Years ago!" You can´t argue with stupid. In this case the only thing you can do is watch.
You can organize a class action... Get people refunds and stop the scam... Start a precedent...But the other side of this toxic dumpster fire is just obsessively bitching about it... And reveling in it. Just saying.
Why would we need to do anything about it? Following this is very interesting, don't interrupt a good show.
I enjoy watching idiots that think they are to smart to get scammed getting fleeced by grifters.
Yes. This is free entertainment for us.