[Luis Dias]

I think the reason Croberts keeps going is that he's in way too deep for a clean break and doesn't know how to get off the tiger he's created.  And, well, these idiots keep giving him money and making excuses for him every time he ****s up.

There's another argument to make regarding the "charitable defense" (Let's officialize it, call it the CD). If the point was to "get off the tiger" with some extra money, wouldn't it have been easier to just try to ship the best game they could pull off with a lot less ambition? Instead, they keep burying their heads into this dream they're selling, making their own lives miserable and stressful, all trying to pull off what Roberts is trying to achieve.

If the point was to do a con, it seems like the worst con ever imaginable. There's only stress, a gargantuan effort to build teams and finantial management to go along with it, and no exit strategy at all. I mean, they have to pay their wages and actually deliver something in the end. They can't just wave this like "Next Summer it will be Awesome" as if they're not bleeding money every single year by the dozens of millions. At one point, the **** is going to eventually hit the fan. Then what? On what hole will they be hiding in their lives forever? If Sean Murray became such a four letter name by this point, and the guy actually shipped a ****ing game on time, imagine a game never being delivered despite people having spent tens of thousands of dollars on it!

This is why I fall back on utter incompetency coupled with unstoppable ambition, without no one being able to tell the man "This is too much man". The alternative is just incredibly worse in terms of stupidity and idiocy! There are so much smarter and less stressful ways to take people's money! (Hey, I remember one, just develop what the game was supposed to be about in the first place!!!!!! PROFIT!!!!)

[Buckshee Rounds]

An interesting take on it, Luis.

If the point was to "get off the tiger" with some extra money, wouldn't it have been easier to just try to ship the best game they could pull off with a lot less ambition?

If they had wanted to get off the tiger then wouldn't it have been simpler and easier to release an MVP, however crappy, rather than "the best game they could"? I don't think that would be considered a con so much as simply admitting their own inability to deliver.

I think it's all too clear that Star Citizen is Too Big To Fail, in all likelihood they will find a way to release something eventually or at worst appeal to a publisher/investor to step in.

However, I'd be interested in knowing the legal consequences in the unlikely event they decided to call it quits. Other than the stigma, what's stopping CIG from simply calling their buggy Alpha "finished" at some arbitrary point and kicking their feet up? Kickstarter and Early Access are both in a somewhat legal grey area are they not?

On that point, what consumer rights, if any, can ****izens rely upon to ensure the game is released within some sort of reasonable (LOL) timeframe?

_{(Apologies if this has already been covered, I really cba going through 100+ pages to check.)}

[The E]

On that point, what consumer rights, if any, can ****izens rely upon to ensure the game is released within some sort of reasonable (LOL) timeframe?

None whatsoever. Kickstarter doesn't guarantee that a project will be completed, and CIG's standard EULA contains boilerplate that basically absolves them of liability should their ambition exceed their grasp.

[FrikgFeek]

I also disagree with the charitable interpretation that CIG is simply so incompetent that they keep setting and missing their own deadlines, nobody is that stupid, at this point it's just deception. I think they're setting those deadlines to please the fanbase and get more funding and missing them because they're incompetent. But the important part is that they're most likely fully aware that they'll miss almost every deadline they set.
Now I don't think their endgoal is just to make a quick buck, there are millions of better ways to do that, many of which have already been pointed out. I think Croberts is so far up his own ass that he delusionally believes it's okay to lie and deceive people for a chance to make his hypergame, he might genuinely believe that with more time and money SC might turn out fine.

[Phantom Hoover]

"Oooooh boy we're totally ****ed now we have to build that **** too".

I wouldn't be surprised if they actually operate like that. New space game comes out with some new mechanic, CIG wants to join the cool club and have all those mechanics too.
Almost exactly like Duke Nukem Forever.

They released their procedural planets demo literally the day after Elite Dangerous: Horizons came out.

[Grizzly]

Quick, tell them about the Zed Prime

[Aesaar]

They released their procedural planets demo literally the day after Elite Dangerous: Horizons came out.

 
Which was quickly followed by cries of "Checkmate, ED", because in the world of Star Citizen, teasing planetary landings is way more of an achievement than releasing planetary landings.

[666maslo666]

I kinda like how BioWare and CGI both realised planetrandombuilding ala NoMansSKy isn't as easy as they first thought.

It is easy to make a playable procedural planet demo with realistic sized planets. I know because I coded one for fun and I am a ****ty coder indeed. What is hard is to make it look like Crysis and fill it with content. Originally, CIG was only supposed to "research procedural planets" for future implementation. The research team very quickly created the basic playable technology, Chris saw it and got all giddy and turned the entire direction of the game from walled areas into procedural seamless universe. Then it turned out that actually filling such vast universe with content is hard and thus they had to reduce number of systems.

At least that is my theory.

[Mikes]

I kinda like how BioWare and CGI both realised planetrandombuilding ala NoMansSKy isn't as easy as they first thought.

It is easy to make a playable procedural planet demo with realistic sized planets. I know because I coded one for fun and I am a ****ty coder indeed. What is hard is to make it look like Crysis and fill it with content. Originally, CIG was only supposed to "research procedural planets" for future implementation. The research team very quickly created the basic playable technology, Chris saw it and got all giddy and turned the entire direction of the game from walled areas into procedural seamless universe. Then it turned out that actually filling such vast universe with content is hard and thus they had to reduce number of systems.

At least that is my theory.

They won't even fill 10 systems, probably not even one properly. So what we ll be stuck with - if the game releases at all - is randomized planets with handcrafted "hot spots" like in all other procedural games.

And that again goes directly against their promise of high quality hand crafted content from ..... uh well, long ago?


Nevermind, just one more promise they probably don't even remember anymore.

[Aesaar]

Yeah, the notion that CIG is going to be any more successful than Frontier at filling literally millions of square kilometers with interesting content is absolutely ludicrous.  And that's just one planet.

SC's planets are going to be as barren and empty as ED's.

[Det. Bullock]

Yeah, the notion that CIG is going to be any more successful than Frontier at filling literally millions of square kilometers with interesting content is absolutely ludicrous.  And that's just one planet.

SC's planets are going to be as barren and empty as ED's.

And at least ED's already come out in a playable form and the flight model and controls made some sort of sense from the beginning instead of going through countless ****ty iterations with real aircraft flightsim elements put in for *reasons*.

[Luis Dias]

Oh come on it's obvious that all these planets will have entire cities and villages and megacities, as their lore is supposed to tell us, filled with agrarian machinery, traffic jams and yatches circling around lush landscapes. I mean, it would be really stupid to give us full blown planets that are supposed to have billions of people and then not finding almost no one around, right? I mean, that would be really really stupid, so I'm pretty sure it won't happen.

[Lorric]

Do you think they could have done both? Have nearly all the systems be as they originally were going to be and have a small number as like premium systems. I'm thinking along roughly the same lines as the premium cars in Gran Turismo. Make sure you have enough content to justify those planets being there. As time goes on after release, more systems become premium systems and you don't have to break your promise.

You could also have procedural planets in all systems like in ED prior to Horizons. And potentially do things like when you want to land on that planet you get taken to an area that's like one spaceport or settlement or whatever, that you can fly around freely but is only like a level from a typical videogame.

Of course, I'm sure there will be plenty of planets which are just barren or have just an outpost or two on the surface, like the ones in ED, and those you could fly around the whole surface as well.

[Luis Dias]

There's a damned good reason why ED chose to basically do this kind of tech with moons, rather than full blown populated planets.

But I guess Roberts really wants to do this ****.




Those are nice jpegs.

Wonder if you could, rather than sell ships, sell cities.... hmmmm.... I mean, they would have to be a lil more expensive, right?

[Spoon]

Do you think they could have done both? Have nearly all the systems be as they originally were going to be and have a small number as like premium systems. I'm thinking along roughly the same lines as the premium cars in Gran Turismo. Make sure you have enough content to justify those planets being there. As time goes on after release, more systems become premium systems and you don't have to break your promise.

You could also have procedural planets in all systems like in ED prior to Horizons. And potentially do things like when you want to land on that planet you get taken to an area that's like one spaceport or settlement or whatever, that you can fly around freely but is only like a level from a typical videogame.

Of course, I'm sure there will be plenty of planets which are just barren or have just an outpost or two on the surface, like the ones in ED, and those you could fly around the whole surface as well.

Perhaps, possibly
If it was done by a different company, and it wasn't aiming for maximum fidelity.

[Colonol Dekker]

There's a damned good reason why ED chose to basically do this kind of tech with moons, rather than full blown populated planets.

But I guess Roberts really wants to do this ****.




Those are nice jpegs.

Wonder if you could, rather than sell ships, sell cities.... hmmmm.... I mean, they would have to be a lil more expensive, right?

That's four grand worth of jpeg right there.

[Grizzly]

People pay that much for a compressed image?

[Colonol Dekker]

****izens do.

[Luis Dias]

People pay that much for a compressed image?

Hey hey, let's not undersell the quality of the algorithm compression here. Top tier gamedevelopment algorithmic quality we're selling here.

[SkycladGuardian]

People pay that much for a compressed image?

They could make a limited uncompressed TIFF-Edition and double the price.