this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game. The rest of the industry is encroaching on it, and it's ridiculous there too. Right now we're looking at a AAA industry that's taking about 5-6 years to make a game, and everyone knows that has to come back down somehow; the ones that go longer than that are Prey (2006), Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good & Evil 2, etc. Not a great track record.
Those are bad too. In different and sometimes arguably worse ways. But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU. That, of course, makes Star Citizen an easy target once again.
I saw a trailer for this game with Gary Oldman in it 8 years ago. 8 years. They cast a lot of fan favorite actors that were already, let's say, of an advanced age, and I'm betting one of them dies by the time Squadron 42 comes out. I'm looking forward to playing Squadron 42, but if it takes you 8 years from the time you had something to show for your work for that single player mode to come out (which can and should be smaller in scope than an MMO and have none of the CI/CD restrictions that a live service game has), then you can bet your ass there's something to criticize there. At the very least, project management. And it's totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn't exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.
I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there's a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it's doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective. What we can actually play and get hands on is a game that, after all this time, has some rough technical performance and plenty of bugs, paid in exchange for features that offer only diminishing returns as you expand the circle of the game's audience out further from the people looking for the strictest simulation. Starfield couldn't get 60 FPS on console, even skipping 80% of the minutiae that SC is targeting, and Red Dead Redemption II also took flak and criticism for how the game felt to play for prioritizing a lot of simulation-y things as well. Those games aren't immune to criticism either, and they were able to come from teams who had successfully built acclaimed games in the past, iterating on them.
Also, that "8 years" is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that's reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2012 with a CG trailer, but I distinctly remember a Giant Bomb interview with a CDPR designer in ~2014 ahead of the Witcher 3's launch. Of course most of CDPR wasn't working on Cyberpunk yet. Jeff Gerstmann asked what Cyberpunk was looking like at that time, and the CDPR rep just responded that it was a stack of design documents a foot high off the desk.
It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don't even know when you'll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it's priced to cash in on whales. At least it's not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.
Don't attribute to me what others have said. Plenty of other people have called this a scam, but right at the top, I said that never made sense to me. Maybe a few weeks ago, I said something right here on the fediverse that someone interpreted to be too positive about Star Citizen, and the next response was to ask me how much I paid into the game. Those people probably haven't changed their minds. I am not them. I think for myself. That is not me gaslighting you. It's me having a different opinion than someone else you spoke to.
You misunderstood what I said by diminishing returns. They're clearly important to you. The further away you get from that level of hardcore enthusiast, the more like you're going to find people who don't find those features to be important compared to a game that runs better and with fewer bugs, let alone how they affect the actual game design. No game is immune from criticism, and people can and will criticize it for all of these things and its business model. If I'm a person who paid $45 because I wanted to play Squadron 42, which at the time I believed was a game releasing in 2016, how do you expect me to not criticize them for taking 7 more years and still not having it done when it's a much smaller scope than the MMO that they're building?
Once again: I did not say this. You are arguing with me about things other people said. Argue with them.