Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!

  • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Just because the product they are making is quality does not mean it isn’t a scam. The game was supposed to be released a decade ago now. They said they had the entire single player finished and ready in 2014. The things they have made are impressive, sure. But after that amount of time its looking more and more like they lied about how ready things were to get more funding, and have been doing that for a decade now.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      10 months ago

      It’s not that they lied about it being complete, it’s that they entirely changed the scope of the game around 2014ish. If I remember correctly they even had a poll asking the community if they’d rather wait for planetary landing which was originally not meant to be in the game.

      The original game was freelancer 2.0. you don’t land on a planet, you get into a cutscene and then appear in “New Atlantis” (yes I’m referring to star field, that’s not a city in SC) then as the story goes a developer made a tech demonstration they called “pupil to planet” showing the ability to continually zoom out from, you guessed it, looking at a pupil and going all the way to space with no loading screen so the had to essentially rework the game from the ground up. The story and a lot of the assets/voice work, etc was all done and “ready” for what that game would have been, but since the change they now had to rebuild a lot of the systems and make new systems for the way the game works now. That’s just squadron 42 (the single player game) star citizen the MMO has always been a bit on the “back burner” waiting for SQ42 to complete.

      Now that we’re past all that, and just this last weekend SC had a majorly important tech test that seemed to go very well, they’re putting the last foundational pieces together so they can actually complete the game.

      If anyone wants to say it took too long, I’m with you. I backed in 2014 and thought “damn, answer the call 2016? That’s a long ass time.” but to say it’s a scam? They’re the dumbest bunch of scammers in the entire history of scamming, Nigerian princes and all, if this is supposed to be a scam.

    • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I absolutely agree with this point. I think CIG’s inability to openly communicate when things go bad is a big reason for the scam allegation (that and loooooots of issues with planning, especially early on). I see it’s as a serious problem for a project that presents itself as “open development” (which it is, don’t take me wrong, but not as much as it should be).

      I think both CIG and players underestimated how long it takes to build a company, tech and two big budget games at the same time. It’s 100% on the devs to realize and communicate that, which they failed to do.

      For better or worse, S42 is officially in its final stretch. Is it really? Transfer of people towards SC seems to confirm that but we’ll see when the game finally releases. When that happens we’ll also see whether game taking this long was worth it.

        • Asafum@feddit.nl
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          10 months ago

          They didn’t, they just had a big announcement on October that SQ42 is “feature complete” and that it’s entering the polish phase which is why they moved devs back to SC. The remaining teams stay on SQ42 as so-called “strike teams” to polish and tweak tech.

          Source: I follow the development way too much, send help lol

        • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          On the contrary, the last few years were pretty much fully focused on Squadron, with SC being maintained by (almost a) skeleton crew - hence the slow updates.

          Now updates are seemingly picking up, though it’s early to say for sure since we only got one quarterly patch so far, with next one probably targeting April-May (depending how porting some of new additions goes).