this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Over 10 Years After It Was Announced, Star Citizen’s Single-Player Squadron 42 Is ‘Feature Complete’ - IGN::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games has said Squadron 42, the single-player portion of its controversial space sim, is finally “feature complete”, over a decade after it was announced.

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[–] [email protected] 140 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Once I can buy it, and download it, then install it, then open it, configure my settings, create my characters, and start the campaign, then, and ONLY THEN will I believe it.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm still not sure I would believe it at that point.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

Better wait for the credits. Just to be safe.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

You got to at least complete the two missions going through the elevators twice each. Then its legit.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is the best take on here. There's no more "just trust me bro" tolerance anymore, too many things have just turned into vaporware over the years and now until I physically see it, it doesn't exist

[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very excite. Now they can start working on star citizen

[–] northendtrooper 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Key part is that its not to start working on SC but the gate keeping of tech from sq42 to SC is open. What was showcased this weekend will start to be ported into SC.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, all the devs moving over and dedicating time to integrating already built modules with the game. Big cums

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This game has taken so long that it's either money laundering, the devs are just incompetent, or they suffer from the inability to edit themselves down

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Star Citizen has literally the highest budget of any game in history, by a factor of 2x. The second biggest one is Cyberpunk, which also has been in development since 2013. Gamedev has just spiraled a bit out of control and takes ridiculous amounts of time these days.

The only reason you see yearly releases of some other games is because they have multiple teams working in parallel and are just updating an already existing game engine. Doing stuff from scratch is a whole different thing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Mostly agree with you here but I do have a minor correction. Cyberpunk was announced in 2013 but it didn't actually start development until sometime in 2016 after cdpr release The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine DLC.

Meaning cyberpunk only took roughly 4-5 years of development time before being released. Though it arguably needed much more time than that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gamedev has just spiraled a bit out of control and takes ridiculous amounts of time these days.

Yes but also does an enormous amount of waste at the moment. Sorry it now takes years to make a good game but it doesn't take a decade. Unless you're seriously doing something wrong or it's an entirely simulated universe with sepient life and everything.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

but it doesn’t take a decade.

GTA2 to GTA3, two years. GTAIV to GTAV, five years, GTAV to GTAVI 10 years and still waiting. See a pattern?

When you want to accurately simulate and animate every doorknob in the game it just takes a hell of a lot longer than putting a few pixel on a texture and calling it a day. And yes, there is in argument to be made that that level of detail doesn't actually add to the gaming experience in a meaningful way, but that's something a whole lot of AAA games struggle with and why we are seeing so many sequels and so little new things. StarCitizen just happens to be a new thing developed from scratch, including the studio itself.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The time between games is not the development time.

GTA III was only in development for one year. It wasn't in development for 2 years. Same with GTA IV. Rockstar do other things between releasing GTA games. In between developing GTA V and GTA VI Rockstar made two Red Dead Redemption games plus DLC for GTA V, you don't think they were working on GTA VI at the same time do you?

Also they did an engine update in there as well so they couldn't have been working on GTA VI until that was done. The absolute earliest date for the beginning development of VI is 5 - 6 years ago, and that's not to say that was the start date.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm sure there have been mistakes, but calling them incompetent is a bit of a stretch. Yes, it's an absolutely eye watering amount of time and money, but they are trying to make an online universe with a high level of detail in which you can move between planets and all kinds of environments completely seamlessly. If they weren't trying to make something with such a high level of difficulty, then I suspect they would have released a finished product by now, but they are making stuff nobody has made before, at least not at this scale.

Perhaps inability to scale things back is a bit of a problem, but I think Chris Roberts realises he's not likely to get a chance to get a basically unlimited amount of money (in game dev terms) to make the ultimate dream game he and many other people always wanted, so I'd imagine that's the reason they are just going all out.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It's not money laundering. It's crowdfunding as a primary business model. The point isn't to finish the game, but to keep baiting people with carrots-on-sticks until they get sick of the grift and the money dries up.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Infinite feature creep

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The devs are not incompetent. Management is.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They got the same vibe going on as the 7 days to die devs.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People said that this place ”wasn't like Reddit”.

But now I'm being gaslit by angry Star Citizen fans.

How do you explain that, huh?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They are like vermin: everywhere and hard to get rid of.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Will this be Duke Nukem Forever-Space Edition?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only if they make a full release next year. Otherwise, they'll set a new record for slowest development cycle, assuming they finally release it. You can't forget that Duke Nukem only actually got the medal because they actually released it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DNF had a 14 year dev cycle and this has already been exceeded by Beyond Good and Evil 2 at 22 years. So no, Star Citizen S42 isn't going to win that award.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

idontbelieveyou.gif

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've heard this will be part of a genre Mashup, and it'll come with a copy of Winds of Winter!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll take the third book of Kingkiller Chronicles over that please.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fucking please.

I discovered Rothfuss like a week after NotW released.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Now another 10 years of "polish"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I’ll buy it (the premise, not necessarily the game) when I can actually buy the complete product.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So they're going to release the game now, right?

Right?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Anakin/Padmé meme

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Still waiting to play it...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I held the line...at the starting line.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe if they didn't spend a ton of their budget hiring random big name actors to be in a video game, they could have been done much sooner.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

it's such a wild example of feature creep, and yet it's not quite the wildest example of Star Citizen's feature creep. When Roberts' funding exceeded his wildest dreams, he should've changed nothing from his original pitch and simply delivered that. For reference:

Original funding goal: $2 million US

Funding by end of Kickstarter campaign: well over $6 million US

If they finished the project with a $4 million surplus, great! They'd have ample budget for post-launch support, and maybe even for some free post-launch content updates to improve goodwill. If that'd gone as planned, the dude'd be sitting on a whole new generation of goodwill.

Oh, and we'd have a game like this:

Pick up jobs as a smuggler, pirate, merchant, bounty hunter, or enlist as a pilot, protecting the borders from outside threats.

A huge universe to explore, trade and adventure in

Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want

Actions of the players impact the universe and become part of its history and lore

Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions

If caught alone in an online ambush, send a distress broadcast to your friends and if they’re nearby they can jump in-system to save your bacon.

You wanted proper Newtonian mechanics. You got it! Spaceships adjust their trajectory and orientation just like the real thing.

10X the detail of current AAA games (as measured in polygons)

Range of scale never seen before in a game - ships from 27m to 1km scale, all at same level of detail

Support for Joystick, Gamepad, Mouse, Keyboard, as well as HOTAS, flight chair, rudder petals, and VR

the cardinal rule regarding “in-game purchases” is: Players who spend money purchasing in-game credits will have no advantage over players who spend time!

Instead they immediately pivoted to a pay-for-ships funding model and let the scope grow to seemingly every one of Roberts' wildest whims

The tech demo is cool. Realization of no-loading-screen transitions from surface -> atmosphere -> orbit -> microgravity -> docking with another ship is wild. Being able to watch your pilot and gunner do a space battle from out the window, while you go walking about the ship is wild. But having it be only a tech demo for this long is so disappointing, and having the focus pivot from singleplayer-with-online to online-with-singleplayer are significant disappointments.

funding timeline: https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Crowdfunding_campaign

original pitch/campaign: https://web.archive.org/web/20121015042706/http://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Coming soon

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